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The Nation: 'Before Her Murder, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Criticism'
Secretary Clinton's role in the 2009 coup in Honduras has not received the scrutiny it so richly deserves. Instead, she wants to shift the discussion to what she fraudulently claims as Bernie Sanders' 'ties' to the Minute Men and the Koch brothers.
Meanwhile, at the debate in Miami on Wednesday night, Secretary Clinton brushed off questions about her role in the Honduran human rights disaster, as her campaign now denies any connection to the Honduran coup.
The time is up for Hillary Clinton.
Greg Grandin at The Nation:
Before her murder on March 3, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous rights and environmental activist, named Hillary Clinton, holding her responsible for legitimating the 2009 coup. “We warned that this would be very dangerous,” she said, referring to Clinton’s effort to impose elections that would consolidate the power of murderers.
In a video interview, given in Buenos Aires in 2014, Cáceres says it was Clinton who helped legitimate and institutionalize the coup. In response to a question about the exhaustion of the opposition movement (to restore democracy), Cáceres says (around 6:10): “The same Hillary Clinton, in her book Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the bad legacy of North American influence in our country. The return of Mel Zelaya to the presidency (that is, to his constitutionally elected position) was turned into a secondary concern. There were going to be elections.” Clinton, in her position as secretary of state, pressured (as her emails show) other countries to agree to sideline the demands of Cáceres and others that Zelaya be returned to power. Instead, Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But Cáceres says: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”
The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest. Cáceres called it “counterinsurgency,” carried out on behalf of “international capital”—mostly resource extractors—that has terrorized the population, murdering political activists by the high hundreds. “Every day,” Cáceres said elsewhere, “people are killed.”
Interestingly, Hillary Clinton removed the most damning sentences regarding her role in legitimating the Honduran coup from the paperback edition of Hard Choices.
According to Belén Fernández, Clinton airbrushed out of her account exactly the passage Cáceres highlights for criticism: “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future” (see Fernández’s essay in Liza Featherstone’s excellent False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton).
In a video interview, given in Buenos Aires in 2014, Cáceres says it was Clinton who helped legitimate and institutionalize the coup. In response to a question about the exhaustion of the opposition movement (to restore democracy), Cáceres says (around 6:10): “The same Hillary Clinton, in her book Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the bad legacy of North American influence in our country. The return of Mel Zelaya to the presidency (that is, to his constitutionally elected position) was turned into a secondary concern. There were going to be elections.” Clinton, in her position as secretary of state, pressured (as her emails show) other countries to agree to sideline the demands of Cáceres and others that Zelaya be returned to power. Instead, Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But Cáceres says: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”
The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest. Cáceres called it “counterinsurgency,” carried out on behalf of “international capital”—mostly resource extractors—that has terrorized the population, murdering political activists by the high hundreds. “Every day,” Cáceres said elsewhere, “people are killed.”
Interestingly, Hillary Clinton removed the most damning sentences regarding her role in legitimating the Honduran coup from the paperback edition of Hard Choices.
According to Belén Fernández, Clinton airbrushed out of her account exactly the passage Cáceres highlights for criticism: “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future” (see Fernández’s essay in Liza Featherstone’s excellent False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton).
She will be held to account for this.
112 replies
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As it stands now, I doubt it. Not during the primaries, anyway.
he's the first President to make it financially right for Agent victims (orange, pink, white, green),
Are you talking about Agent Orange?
I don't mean to be snarky - I just have no idea of what you are meaning.
####
Anyway my neighborhood saw one fourth to one third of its homes go into bankruptcy. The statistics on home ownership before the 2008 collapse were that 67 to 67% of all Americans owned their own homes - now that is at a record low of 62%.
And with Wall Street derivative-style speculation continuing on (Get a hold of The Big Short, THIS MOVIE IS AN EYE OPENER - if you wanna know what I mean) and due to the speculation, the middle class just lost another 1.2 trillion bucks.
No one I know has an iron works, and not to slur yr dad, I mean good for him if he got
a co op going, but Californians lost out big time. (Not every one owns an iron works.)
100,000 small time family owned dairy farms went belly up during the summer and fall of 2009 - in large part because of arch financial criminal Tim Geithner and how he did not make sure that Bankers who got bailed out used the money to bail out their community businesses. NOt a difficult thing to do - even the Republicans saw to it that banks bailed out after the Savings and Loan crisis of late 1980's were forced to bail out community businesses by making them loans. (Geithner is Obama's good buddy, and a man who claims that "Obama works for me."
We have gone from being a nation wherein 8 to 9 cents out of every dollar of profit generated inside our country goes to the Big Financial Firms to a county wherein 48 cents out of every dollar goes to the Financial Firms. Over the last five years, it has been nigh impossible for small companies just starting out to get funding, unless the owners max out their personal credit cards. (Often at interest rates close to or over 15%.)
The middle class financed the Bank Bailouts under Obama - and that has meant
that some $ 222,000 per person has gone out of Main Street's economy and over to the Big Wall Street firms. Amazons' lobbyists saw to it hat middle class publishing firms now pay MORE while Amazon has a sweetheart deal with the post Office, which is one of the reasons th e post Office is in trouble financially. (Have you noticed the PO deleviering mail from
Amazon on holidays! For cheaper rates than we small time publishers pay!)
And of course, it is a big reason why people ree not getting books shipped from anywhere but Amazon. This hurts so many people including me, and it was the Dem Majority Senate and House that did this in Spring of 2007.
Here in California the ACA is a joke, about which I wrote a cute poem, but I wasn't writing cute poems when reading my girlfriend's FB page about her relative's time in a facility.
(This week, my friend's granma went into a hospital or nursing home due to bad fall. The only therapist that the facility provided was hollering at the poor woman to stop being lazy and do some walking. The facility said she wouldn't do the "walk therapy," and so they would be sending her home. One nurse disagreed and got her into the imaging department where an MRI showed conclusive p[roof that the woman had several serious fractures to the foot in question. We are basically just warehoused inside California hospitals! This is so typical, so very typical, I am seriously thinking of hiring a hit man to off myself when I turn 72 or so.)
Anyway Bernie is going to change the situation with student loans. He will fix the situation of American's jobs going overseas. Also, he plans on re-vamping the Post Office so that we can have the P.Os' operate as banks, just as they did during the Depression.
This should end all of the jibber-jabber that Hillary was a great SOS.
The Nation:
People hold up photos of slain Honduran indigenous leader and environmentalist Berta Cáceres outside the coroner’s office in Tegucigalpa. (AP Photo / Fernando Antonio), via The Nation
There must be justice.
People hold up photos of slain Honduran indigenous leader and environmentalist Berta Cáceres outside the coroner’s office in Tegucigalpa. (AP Photo / Fernando Antonio), via The Nation
We still don’t have a clear idea of the events surrounding Cáceres’s murder. There is one witness, Gustavo Castro, a Mexican national, activist, and journalist, who was with Cáceres when gunmen burst into her bedroom. Berta died in his arms. Castro was himself shot twice, but survived by playing dead.
The Honduran government—that “unity government” Clinton is proud of—has Castro in lockdown, refusing him contact with the outside world.
Since he is the only witness to a murder that will implicate many government allies, if not the government itself, Castro’s life is clearly in danger. An international campaign to release Castro is being mounted by a number of high-profile groups, including Amnesty International and the American Jewish World Service. The organization Other Worlds worked closely with Cáceres and her Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. Here’s a link for how to take action to demand Castro’s safe passage.
The Honduran government—that “unity government” Clinton is proud of—has Castro in lockdown, refusing him contact with the outside world.
Since he is the only witness to a murder that will implicate many government allies, if not the government itself, Castro’s life is clearly in danger. An international campaign to release Castro is being mounted by a number of high-profile groups, including Amnesty International and the American Jewish World Service. The organization Other Worlds worked closely with Cáceres and her Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. Here’s a link for how to take action to demand Castro’s safe passage.
There must be justice.
Thank you for posting it here, polly7. Berta Caceres was a heroine of her people.
From a link in the piece:
She won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her role in fighting the dam project. AP
Honduras has the unenviable reputation as the world’s most lethal country for environmental activists, with more than 100 murdered over the last five years, including several during the last two months.
“I fear for my life,” she told the newspaper El Universo last year. “Honduras is a country of total impunity. No one cares if they kill us. It’s not that we want to be Rambo, but this is a vital fight for our ecosystem, for our home.” At the time, she lived an Arafatesque life, rarely staying in the same house for more than one night and not speaking on the phone for fear of assassination. She said she was being constantly watched by police or government agents.
Having taken on big business, landowners, developers and thereby her government which backs them, Caceres, a 40-year-old mother of four, had received many rape or death threats. But she said she would fight on and called on other campaigners to do so. Given the worldwide reaction to her murder, they surely will. Hundreds of Hondurans took to the streets after her death and supporters around the world, including recent Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio, condemned the killing.
.....
The “motive” for her killing was almost certainly the fact that she had co-founded a group called the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (COPINH), on behalf of the natives who had been in the Central American nation long before the Spanish conquistadors arrived.
More specifically and recently, she had been campaigning against wealthy plantation owners, illegal loggers and a hydroelectric project which threatened the lands and lives of the Lenca people, including what to them is a sacred river. She had kept the project stalled until her death.
“I cannot freely walk on my territory or swim in the sacred river and I am separated from my children because of the threats,” she told an interviewer [three of her four children live in exile abroad]. “I cannot live in peace, I am always thinking about being killed or kidnapped.
“But I refuse to go into exile. I am a human rights fighter and I will not give up this fight. But in the end, in this country where there is total impunity I am vulnerable. When they want to kill me, they will do it.”
.....
Last year, Caceres was one of six winners of the global Goldman Environmental Prize – often described as The Green Nobel – for her opposition to the Agua Zarca dam project in the Gualcarque river basin, which includes German, Dutch and Finnish investment. One of the other prize winners was Howard Wood of Arran in Scotland for his campaign for a community-developed marine protection area. After receiving her prize, Caceres told The Guardian: “We must undertake the struggle in all parts of the world, wherever we may be, because we have no other spare or replacement planet. We have only this one, and we have to take action.”
“I fear for my life,” she told the newspaper El Universo last year. “Honduras is a country of total impunity. No one cares if they kill us. It’s not that we want to be Rambo, but this is a vital fight for our ecosystem, for our home.” At the time, she lived an Arafatesque life, rarely staying in the same house for more than one night and not speaking on the phone for fear of assassination. She said she was being constantly watched by police or government agents.
Having taken on big business, landowners, developers and thereby her government which backs them, Caceres, a 40-year-old mother of four, had received many rape or death threats. But she said she would fight on and called on other campaigners to do so. Given the worldwide reaction to her murder, they surely will. Hundreds of Hondurans took to the streets after her death and supporters around the world, including recent Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio, condemned the killing.
.....
The “motive” for her killing was almost certainly the fact that she had co-founded a group called the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (COPINH), on behalf of the natives who had been in the Central American nation long before the Spanish conquistadors arrived.
More specifically and recently, she had been campaigning against wealthy plantation owners, illegal loggers and a hydroelectric project which threatened the lands and lives of the Lenca people, including what to them is a sacred river. She had kept the project stalled until her death.
“I cannot freely walk on my territory or swim in the sacred river and I am separated from my children because of the threats,” she told an interviewer [three of her four children live in exile abroad]. “I cannot live in peace, I am always thinking about being killed or kidnapped.
“But I refuse to go into exile. I am a human rights fighter and I will not give up this fight. But in the end, in this country where there is total impunity I am vulnerable. When they want to kill me, they will do it.”
.....
Last year, Caceres was one of six winners of the global Goldman Environmental Prize – often described as The Green Nobel – for her opposition to the Agua Zarca dam project in the Gualcarque river basin, which includes German, Dutch and Finnish investment. One of the other prize winners was Howard Wood of Arran in Scotland for his campaign for a community-developed marine protection area. After receiving her prize, Caceres told The Guardian: “We must undertake the struggle in all parts of the world, wherever we may be, because we have no other spare or replacement planet. We have only this one, and we have to take action.”
As if anyone needed reminding, her murder brought back to Honduras the dark days of the 1980s Central American guerrilla wars, in which they and their neighbours fought to rid themselves of dictators backed by the US. Many of those who died in that era were, like Caceres, from the native Lenca, the largest indigenous group in Honduras. Although she was a child at the time, she witnessed much of the horror.
Today, the wife of the facilitator of the Central American guerrilla wars of the 1980s was buried next to him.
Rest in peace, Berta Caceres.
Nephew of murdered Honduran activist Cáceres: 'The atmosphere is terrifying'
Silvio Carrillo grew up alongside Berta Cáceres, a leading campaigner for human rights. After the deaths of hundreds of campaigners in Honduras in the span of a few years, he believes his aunt was targeted for her efforts
by David Smith
The Guardian, March 9, 2016
Silvio Carrillo holds a creased black and white photo of a three-year-old girl, frowning at the camera and clutching a doll, and fights back the tears. The girl grew up to be his aunt, Berta Cáceres, a fearless human rights activist and heroine to indigenous people in Honduras. Last week, she was shot dead in her home, a day shy of her 45th birthday.
Cáceres had long complained of death threats from police, the army and landowners’ groups over her opposition to one of Central America’s biggest hydropower projects. She won the 2015 Goldman environmental prize, regarded as the world’s top award for grassroots environmental activism.
Carrillo, 43, told the Guardian he believed she had been targeted for her work. “She pissed a lot of people off … She was a major threat to the establishment.
“She was a moral leader. She was put on this grand stage and that multiplied when she won the Goldman prize. If you heard her speak, she was powerful. She was near becoming impossible to take down,” he said.
Cáceres earned admiration – and enemies – leading a decade-long fight against a project to build a dam along the Gualcarque river, which is sacred to the Lenca people and could flood large areas of ancestral lands and cut off water supplies to hundreds. A week before her death, she had spoken out against the murder of four indigenous leaders in the Lenca community.
The co-founder of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (Copinh) was shot four times by gunmen at her home in La Esperanza at around 1am on Thursday. Gustavo Castro Soto, a Mexican human rights activist, survived by playing dead after bullets grazed his cheek and left hand. The attack was internationally condemned.
Carrillo, a US citizen who lives in Oakland, California, learned the news in a dawn phone conversation with his weeping mother, who was Cáceres’ eldest sister. He said the investigation had been mishandled from the start, with officials and the media circulating wild rumours of two perpetrators, 11 perpetrators, a crime of passion, a random robbery (nothing was stolen) or a power struggle within Copinh.
CONTINUED...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/09/berta-caceres-honduras-activist-murder-nephew-silvio-carrillo-interview
"Money trumps peace." -- George W Bush, Feb. 14, 2007
Yes, my good Friend! Yes! For Democracy, we have worked, faithfully and diligently.
For the Record: Originally, President Obama backed ousted Honduran president (supporters shown in civilian clothes below).
Somehow, somewhere, someone got him to change his mind.
Dancing with Monsters: The U.S. Response to the 2009 Honduran Coup
"A coup anywhere in Latin America is a very big deal.”
By Alvaro Valle
Harvard Political Review, April 13, 2015
SNIP...
The U.S. Response
Latin American governments immediately denounced Zelaya’s ouster as a military coup. The United States was not quite as decisive in its diction, with the initial statement from the Obama administration merely calling on “all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms.” Obama did go on to denounce the coup in the following days, but Frank noted that Obama’s characterization of the government change was very important. “He very clearly failed to call it a military coup. If he had called it a military coup, the United States would have had to immediately suspend all police and military aid,” Frank explained. “Eventually some money sent was suspended, but the vast majority was not.”
Following the coup, President Obama called many times for the reinstatement of Zelaya. In contrast, Secretary of State Clinton made remarks that were far more equivocal. When asked if the United States had any plans to alter aid to the coup government, , “Much of our assistance is conditioned on the integrity of the democratic system. But if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome.” Clinton seemed to prioritize having a stable regime over preserving democratic ideals.
As further evidence, Clinton wrote in her book, Hard Choices, “In the subsequent days [after the coup] … we strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot,” revealing that even as the administration publicly advocated for Zelaya’s return, Clinton was not working to ensure that it would happen.
Pastor added that Clinton had personal connections with supporters of the coup government that may have led her to soften her stance. For instance, Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s former personal lawyer and a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter, lobbied in Washington for the Honduran coup government, Honduran elites, the Business Council of Latin America, and the American companies that took issue with Zelaya’s reforms. Bennett Ratcliff, another top Democratic campaigner with close ties to the Clintons, also worked for the Honduran coup government as a lobbyist in Washington. These personal connections to advocates for the coup government raise troubling concerns that political ties influenced Clinton’s stance.
In Clinton’s defense, these personal connections were not the only political forces supporting the coup. Levitsky noted that initial opposition to the coup in the United States may have given way because “Republicans held a couple of major U.S.-Latin America appointments: the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and the Ambassador to Brazil. They held these positions hostage to a softening of U.S. policy toward the coup government.”
CONTINUED w/ links sources etc....
http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/us-honduran-coup/
Of course, it's plausible that all this just happened to favor Empire at the expense of Democracy. Then, it would be mere coincidence that today many if not most of the progressive -- socialist -- regimes in South America and Central America have been replaced by rightist regimes. Kind of reminds me of another time in history when the State Department/CIA made an end-around directives from the Oval Office.
And it stinks to high heaven.
But, it won't work.
The Nation is now caught up in "The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy".
Ousted Honduran President Fights Re-Election Ban, 18 March 2016
Former President Manuel Zelaya sits among reporters at a press conference in Honduras, March 18, 2016. | Photo: Twitter / @gerardoTteleSUR
The Nation: 'Before Her Murder, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Criticism', March 11, 2016
Another Member of Berta Caceres’ Group Assassinated in Honduras, March 15, 2016
Former President Manuel Zelaya sits among reporters at a press conference in Honduras, March 18, 2016. | Photo: Twitter / @gerardoTteleSUR
Former president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a U.S.-backed military coup in 2009, has petitioned the Central American country’s Supreme Court to overturn a ruling banning him from running for president again.
In an open letter addressed to the Constitutional Court of the Supreme Court of Justice, Zelaya called for the nullification of a decision declaring his re-election “unconstitutional.”
.....
In 2009, democratically-elected Zelaya was ousted by the Honduran military, allied with opposition parties. The coup against Zelaya was widely condemned by governments across Latin America, the European Union, the Organization of American States and other regional blocs.
The coup has come back into the spotlight recently as campaigners remember the role played by Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the illegal coup.
She admitted in her autobiography “Hard Choices,” that she used her power to shift the crisis into a favorable position for the U.S., even if it meant forgetting about democracy.
“We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot,” she admitted in her book.
Furthermore, the political vacuum created by the coup has spawned years of state violence with impunity, most recently seeing the assassination of the renowned activist Berta Caceres.
In an open letter addressed to the Constitutional Court of the Supreme Court of Justice, Zelaya called for the nullification of a decision declaring his re-election “unconstitutional.”
.....
In 2009, democratically-elected Zelaya was ousted by the Honduran military, allied with opposition parties. The coup against Zelaya was widely condemned by governments across Latin America, the European Union, the Organization of American States and other regional blocs.
The coup has come back into the spotlight recently as campaigners remember the role played by Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the illegal coup.
She admitted in her autobiography “Hard Choices,” that she used her power to shift the crisis into a favorable position for the U.S., even if it meant forgetting about democracy.
“We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot,” she admitted in her book.
Furthermore, the political vacuum created by the coup has spawned years of state violence with impunity, most recently seeing the assassination of the renowned activist Berta Caceres.
The Nation: 'Before Her Murder, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Criticism', March 11, 2016
Another Member of Berta Caceres’ Group Assassinated in Honduras, March 15, 2016
