Honduras update

The US media is reporting in its headlines that 'ousted' President Mel Zelaya rejected the latest 11-point proposal, when in fact both parties did so. Zelaya had accepted the previous 7-point proposal which was rejected by the coup regime. The 11-point proposal was an attempt to placate the coup regime by introducing bizarre provisions like ominously asking the public not to protest the upcoming election results and allowing the coup regime to successfully curtail Zelaya's presidential powers.

In what was presented as Secretary of State Clinton's first conversation with coup leader Micheletti, she told him that the pressure was on him to make a deal in what was essentially an international conference call but for the fact that we didn't hear it, as it was recounted to us by her underlings. Micheletti didn't feel much pressure. The talks have had the following, easily anticipated effects:

1. Giving the coup regime legitimacy by treating it as a partner in negotiations;
2. Buying time for the coup regime to consolidate its power. During this time they've suppressed the media and gained the recognition of the newly elected president of Panama, a friend of Micheletti's. By buying time and moving up elections, they can cripple the opposition with arbitrary arrests, disinformation, and most probably ballot fraud.

Mediator and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, after agreeing with Zelaya on the earlier 7-point plan to restore his presidency, has given up, saying the mediation should be handled by the Organization of American States. The reason for that is obvious: working for Hillary, there was no clear parameter that Zelaya's return to the presidency was essential to any agreement.

Zelaya is going to return to the country soon which will entail trying to unite himself with protestors on his behalf. The coup regime has promised to arrest him which would take the conflict to a new level.

The EU has cut off all aid, but the problem with sanctions is they presume the leaders care about the national interest. The coup leaders are afraid that if they step down, they will have to answer for their human rights violations in criminal court.

This is a case of the US covert right wing, which includes Cuban exiles and old Reagan officials, hoping they can force the issue and make Obama blink and Obama blinking. Obama's commentary on the matter has been silenced after the first days of what's nearing a one month coup. Obama has made a career out of making everyone think he's their guy, and not only does he want the corporations with links to the coup regime to like him, he wants the left and the 'world outside FoxNews' to blame Hillary and pin its hopes on him. That's why he surrounded himself with Washington establishment figures who'll do anything rather than activists who might quit in disguist over Obama's policies. There's no question Hillary has helped the coup regime create a monster that will force the president to either show decisiveness or let another Contra war in Central America happen on his watch. The US media has been tested and has proven it can toss journalistic ethics aside and cover up human rights abuses as it did in the 80s.

New on DVD

Two musical treats, neither of which I've seen..

Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene... an hour in which Fela invites you into his pad to discuss politics and the lyric, plus King Sunny Ade's juju, traditional, Afro-European, etc.

Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer.. described by Variety as "a natural for.. DVD distribution" emphasizing her performances while not covering over biographical details, with good sound quality.

Honduras update

Zelaya has reportedly accepted a deal which would grant immunity for the repression during the coup and moves up the elections a month to October. There would be power sharing which is currently vaguely defined. The deal has been reportedly rejected by representatives of the coup regime but there is news that they are reconsidering. Arias thinks he has a deal.

Honduras update

There’s talk now that Zelaya is returning to Honduras and that the US State Department is against it. After Obama said initially "we are very clear about the fact that President Zelaya is the democratically elected president," the State Department is now saying that the democratically elected president’s presence in the country he’s supposed to be governing is "not helpful," lacking in commitment to the "process" of the Arias mediation.

You can see that I have been open-minded about the mediation as I thought it would defer influence and accountability to Latin America which is unanimous in its opposition to the coup. There have been those sympathetic to Zelaya and skeptical of the US who have said the mediation is only a way to buy time for the coup regime to consolidate power. Clearly, the word "process" used here is code for "American authority," as in "this mediation was our idea and you enter the country when we tell you to." It is also clear that during the mediation there has been an attempt by the coup regime to violently eliminate dissent which has not drawn criticism from the US State Department.

Nikolas Kozloff reports today that Attorney General Eric Holder represented Chiquita (formerly United Fruit Company) in 2007 when it was the first company in US history convicted for terrorist dealings. Holder negotiated the 25 million dollar settlement and prepped CEOs for the 60 Minutes interview. Chiquita has publicly criticized Zelaya’s hike in the minimum wage.

Honduras update

“The Committee of Family Members of Detained and Disappeared in Honduras published a report today detailing more than 1155 cases of Human Rights violations committed by the coup regime since June 28, 2009. Of those, there have been 4 political assassinations, 6 gravely injured, 16 threatened with death, 59 injured, 13 media outlets closed or censored, 14 journalists detained, of which the majority have been expelled forcefully from the country, and 1046 arbitrary detentions.”

But the talking point in the US papers today, at the prompting of the coup leadership, was that the popular resistence to the coup might do something violent. They have no actual violence to report, since the public is peaceful and disciplined, but they’re not going to report the 1155 human rights violations, so they’re going to go to press with ‘the public might do something violent.’

The popular resistence has blockaded the roads going into Tegucigalpa. I intended to drive down there once but I moved too slowly and had to turn north after a while, but there’s really only two main roads that intersect the capital. This in addition to the fact that all of Honduras’ neighbors have cut off trade, in accordance with the wishes of every other Latin American country.

There’s still the airport, of course, and if the military junta can restore Honduras as the shipment point for Colombian coke then the military aid freeze is pocket change. I’ll admit that’s an area where Hillary has plenty of foreign policy experience.

Honduras update

"The family of Honduran public prosecutor Jari Dixon Herrera were attacked by police on Tuesday shortly after he made statements to CNN en Español and other international media in Washington denouncing the recent military coup in Honduras. Dixon’s mother’s house, located in the town of Talanga, was first shot at repeatedly by police agents with automatic weapons. The agents then broke the door of the house down and entered the residence, beat Dixon’s mother and arrested and took away his brother."

"..more than 1,000 people (have been) arrested by the regime since the June 28 coup."

Honduras update

The coup regime has expelled all journalists not loyal to them which means there’s still some Reuters reporters there. As there are no more journalists left to kill, they have turned their attention to killing opposition leaders, with the assassinations reported this week of Roger Bados and Ramon Garcia. The coup is doing everything in the area of threats, detentions, and communications sabotage to keep all inconvenient information from getting out of the country, and Reuters has not reported any of the assassinations this month.

In fact, Reuters is changing the results of published polls to bolster the coup. A CID-Gallup poll conducted in Honduras showed the public opposing the coup 46-41. The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Reuters didn’t like that result, so they all changed the 46 opposed to 28. None of those newspapers retracted their figures. Gee, it would be a shame if people stopped reading those papers.

Eva Golinger reported yesterday that after the coup regime hired old Clinton friends Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff to lobby on their behalf, Secretary of State Clinton has approved a set of mediation demands on behalf of the coup regime including amnesty for what’s happened this month and shared governance. In the end, Obama is the Commander-in-Chief and has to be held responsible for rewarding political killings and suspensions of civil rights and constitutional democracy, as well as being held responsible for selecting a Secretary of State with a well-deserved bad reputation in the hemisphere and a foreign policy resume which was falsified from start to finish.

As Clinton’s support of the coup raises larger questions of the extent and nature of the effort to reverse the left turn of Latin American democracy by covert action, Hugo Chavez caused a stir by saying he has information that there are coups being planned in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The Guatemalan president has denied any knowledge of such a threat to his governance, but he has been the subject of what seems to be a frame-up for the murder of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg. As John Ross says:

Perhaps the most likely proscenium for a Honduras-like "golpe" remains coup-prone Guatemala where military gorillas thrive, right-wing death squads enjoy unbridled impunity, and the civil society is weak. History, in fact, points in this direction - Alvaro Colum is the first president to be elected from a left-wing party since Jacobo Arbenz who, 55 years ago, was forced to flee Guatemala in his underwear.

A pic of me (left) as Rembrandt can only mean one thing: my Amsterdam page, with some commentary on Dutch art which may be of interest on an armchair, is up. Tell Ward Churchill I had no input into my brother's costume.

I saw Alain Sechas' installation Suspects a few years back and was mesmerized for a myriad of reasons including its utilization of Alfred Schnittke's arrangement of "Silent Night." It's hard to find a copy of this arrangement so, alas, you'll have to watch the video accessed on the quicktime link over and over...

the Honduran coup

Reading these missives on Google Reader or a similar program not only enables you to get content instantly after I don’t post for a while but also read what I post impulsively and then take down. Included in that category was a post I wrote about the Honduras coup on the day it happened. My reason for taking it down is that it characterized Obama’s response immediately and I wanted to wait a bit to see what shape it would take.

I note that the nations of the world have reacted to the Honduran coup with an unequivocal respect for democracy, human rights, freedom of the press, and international law that has necessitated their withdrawal of ambassadors, and the US response lacks this unequivocal respect for those values, but overall I also note that the Obama response is a clear break from the bipartisan policies of past presidents towards the hemisphere. Obama’s response also suggests clearly to an analyst of circumstantial evidence that his circle had no part in the coup and has sought to respond to it in a way that strengthens the role of the Organization of American States while minimizing the inevitable partisan attacks and distortions of corporate journalists that will inevitably accompany any refusal to support death squads.

The corporate media pouts about how no one wants to pay to be lied to any more and then, instead of reporting that journalists in Honduras are being killed, assaulted, threatened, and arrested, writes Op Ed pieces about how Zelaya isn’t such a good president in their view, how lame he is for being arrested in his pajamas, how he must be a failure because he didn’t land his plane, etc. These columnists establish themselves merely as the entity that replaces a free press, and therefore don’t view the journalists being assaulted as colleagues because they’re much too honest to survive where they work.

What I’m most concerned about is the integrity of the elections in Honduras in November, since Zelaya is only going to be president for a few more months and the election, if administered fairly, will inevitably be a public referendum on what has just transpired between the two major parties there. Obama’s decision to pass this problem over to Costa Rican President Oscar Arias serves this end, as Arias will be forced much more than a US politician to abide by the wishes of a unanimous group of neighbors in Central and South America, expressed through the OAS, to hold fair elections.

Hugo Chavez suggests that US officials may have been involved in the coup after initially suggesting Obama may have been involved (a view which I never shared). Without question, the fact that a lobbyist group tied to McCain held a press junket today for members of the coup government and the compliance of the media suggested that at some point the ‘old guard’ of hemispheric operatives took to the cause of the coup. The US ambassador is a holdover from the Bush administration.

There may have been some correspondence at the beginning, but the coup seems to have sprung from a quickly developing, interpersonal struggle (like the Iran conflict) that suggests it was initially home grown and not hatched by the Otto Reich set. Defenders of the coup hoped that Obama would either be pressured to adopt their position, adopt a position that they could characterize as radical, or make a political blunder that they could attack. Obama’s response minimizes all three of those scenarios.

My guess is that if the elections are administered fairly, the conservative party will pay a major price for what they’ve done.

After a campaign which frequently invoked ‘change,’ this is the most significant change of the administration. Fuel efficiency regulations and other policy initiatives have been window dressing. The reason for this is that this change involves Obama expending little or no political capital, sacrificing little, and mustering a minimum of courage, while the indication that he is not going to use his authority to obstruct progress in Honduras and, previously, in El Salvador is nonetheless historically monumental.

Update 7/9: "...the Obama Administration will cut military aid to the Honduran government... the political value of this shift in U.S. policy is enormous. Some will try to interpret the Administration’s acquiesence to popular demands (elites never admit to responding to pressure) thru the foggy lens bureaucratic process. But anyone with any political sense knows that the cutoff of military aid would not have happened without the actions-phone calls, letter writing, protests, marches and other pressures... those of us opposed to the coup, those who are helping the Obama Administration do the right thing, should take at least a brief moment to breathe in a deep appreciation of our work. Despite a media blackout, despite opposing the policies of an extremely popular president, the workings of popular hemispheric power continue. And though we should continue actions, we should should continue them in the knowledge that these actions have an impact. Yes We Will. (Roberto Lovato)"