Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is deemed by many to be a shoo-in to be next United States president.

As the U.S primary season kicks into gear, we take a look at what Clinton’s past could mean for the U.S’ neighbors in Latin America given her notorious record in the continent.

Below are some of the low points of the self-proclaimed “La Abuela” from her time as secretary of state regarding Latin America.

1. “Hard Choices” for Honduras

Democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in 2009 by the Honduran military in alliance with opposition parties. President Zelaya had organized a referendum to ask the Honduran people if they would like to begin a process toward creating a new constitution.

The coup against Zelaya was widely condemned by governments across Latin America, the European Union, the Organization of American States and other regional blocs.

However, Clinton swiftly took the bull by the horns. She admitted in her autobiography “Hard Choices,” that she used her power to stir the crisis into a favorable outcome 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.

Of course, the “free and fair” elections that Clinton envisioned included a media blackout and targeted assassinations of anti-coup leaders ahead of the polls. No international institutions monitored the elections.

2. ​Clinton Sees Latin American Leaders As "Petulant Children" in Wikileaks Cables

Cables revealed by WikiLeaks in 2011 gave the world a particular insight to the shady diplomatic workings of the U.S. government.

They also revealed Hillary Clinton's strategy for dealing with Latin America, a region steadily distancing itself from the history of U.S. domination.

“We especially value information on leaders' operating styles, demeanor, motivations, strengths and weaknesses, relationships with superiors, sensitivities,” she wrote on a cable to U.S. diplomats in Brazil.

During Clinton's term as Secretary of State, cables assessing the psychological features of Latin America became common, with diplomats reaching out to local and biased experts which would deliver second-hand interpretative analysis.

As journalist Nikolas Kozloff explained after reviewing the cables, “leaders are referred to as petulant children holding naïve ideas about the world.”

3. Labeling Venezuelan Democracy as Dictatorial

As secretary of state, Clinton vowed to improve relations with late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

During a congressional hearing in 2009, she said, “We’ve isolated him, so he’s gone elsewhere. I mean, he’s a very sociable guy. He’s going to look for friends where he can find them. And so he’s finding friends in places we’d prefer him not to find friends,” Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Both Clinton and Chavez had friendly discussions on restoring U.S.-Venezuela relations. However, in her book “Hard Choices” Clinton spoke of the late president in a different tone.

The former secretary of state wrote that Chavez was a “self-aggrandizing dictator,” despite the record number of elections Venezuela held during his tenure, all verified as free and fair by international organizations.

As Chavez noted dryly in 2010, as the secretary of state was finishing a Latin American tour, “I'm not loved by Hillary Clinton.”

4. Inaction on Paraguay’s Parliamentary Coup

In 2012, Paraguay’s elected president was ousted in what regional leaders labelled a parliamentary coup.

Regional bodies such as UNASUR and Mercosur applied political sanctions by suspending Paraguay’s membership in the organizations. Argentina responded by saying it "will not validate the coup in Paraguay."

Despite the strong action from South America, the U.S. Department of State response was tepid, echoing the way in which inaction in Honduras aided the coup-plotters.

When asked by reporters if Washington determined whether the impeachment constituted a coup, Clinton’s spokesperson Victoria Nuland said, "We have not."

5. Seeking Division Between Brazil and Venezuela

During an official visit to Brazil in 2010, Secretary of State Clinton failed in her attempt to divide the countries of South America. Clinton talked about Venezuela as a bad example, criticizing its government, despite the long-standing friendship between Brazilian President Lula Da Silva and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

“We wish Venezuela were looking more to its south and looking at Brazil and looking at Chile and other models of a successful country,” she said, praising the host in an effort to draw support.

But her strategy backfired. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin took her words and gave them a twist.

“(We agree) on one point … that Venezuela should look southwards more … that is why we have invited Venezuela to join Mercosur as a full member country,” he replied. Mercosur is the largest trading bloc in Latin America, and the United States was not keen on Venezuela joining it.

In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a review of Henry Kissinger’s latest book, “World Order,” to lay out her vision for “sustaining America’s leadership in the world.” In the midst of numerous global crises, she called for return to a foreign policy with purpose, strategy and pragmatism. She also highlighted some of these policy choices in her memoir “Hard Choices” and how they contributed to the challenges that Barack Obama’s administration now faces.

The chapter on Latin America, particularly the section on Honduras, a major source of the child migrants currently pouring into the United States, has gone largely unnoticed. In letters to Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, more than 100 members of Congress have repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in Honduras, especially since the 2009 military coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-backed post-coup government “rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries,” opening the door for further “violence and anarchy.”

The homicide rate in Honduras, already the highest in the world, increased by 50 percent from 2008 to 2011; political repression, the murder of opposition political candidates, peasant organizers and LGBT activists increased and continue to this day. Femicides skyrocketed. The violence and insecurity were exacerbated by a generalized institutional collapse. Drug-related violence has worsened amid allegations of rampant corruption in Honduras’ police and government. While the gangs are responsible for much of the violence, Honduran security forces have engaged in a wave of killings and other human rights crimes with impunity.

Despite this, however, both under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department’s response to the violence and military and police impunity has largely been silence, along with continued U.S. aid to Honduran security forces. In “Hard Choices,” Clinton describes her role in the aftermath of the coup that brought about this dire situation. Her firsthand account is significant both for the confession of an important truth and for a crucial false testimony.

First, the confession: Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office. “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico,” Clinton writes. “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.”

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Clinton’s false testimony is even more revealing. She reports that Zelaya was arrested amid “fears that he was preparing to circumvent the constitution and extend his term in office.” This is simply not true. As Clinton must know, when Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country in his pajamas on June 28, 2009, he was trying to put a consultative, nonbinding poll on the ballot to ask voters whether they wanted to have a real referendum on reforming the constitution during the scheduled election in November. It is important to note that Zelaya was not eligible to run in that election. Even if he had gotten everything he wanted, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term in office. But this did not stop the extreme right in Honduras and the United States from using false charges of tampering with the constitution to justify the coup.

Chevron Corporation had been embroiled in a legal battle over allegations that it polluted a stretch of Ecuador's rainforest with toxic waste for years before Hillary Clinton joined the State Department.

But the oil conglomerate, which stood to lose billions of dollars from the lawsuit, funneled generous donations to the Clinton Foundation and a political pet project of Hillary Clinton's while it lobbied the State Department to intervene in the case on its behalf.

Chevron executives have participated in Clinton Global Initiative events that placed them on the stage with Clinton insiders such as George Stephanopoulos.

Chevron's CEO even made a personal appeal to Hillary Clinton at a State Department dinner in 2012.

The company's chief executive "took the opportunity to express our concerns about developments in the Chevron Ecuador litigation" to Hillary Clinton at the banquet, emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show.

While a Chevron spokesperson denied a link between the donations and the environmental lawsuit, the corporation scored a major victory in the case last year when a Clinton-appointed judge in New York blocked the enforcement of a multi-billion dollar ruling against the oil company in the U.S.

May 7, 2003
"Justicia"

Residents of the Amazon city of Lago Agrio file a lawsuit against Chevron for environmental devastation to the region. Named after Texaco's former headquarters of Sour Lake (Texas), Lago Agrio had been known as Nueva Loja before Texaco's work in the Oriente region led to its rechristening. Onlookers unfurl a banner bearing the word "Justicia" outside of court when proceedings begin, and State Department human rights reports disregard the litigation for its first six years.

January 1, 2009
Madam Secretary

Six years into the Lago Agrio litigation, Chevron hits its peak lobbying expenditures at $20.8 million the same year that Hillary Clinton becomes Secretary of State. Before she took that post, the Clintons previously had "significant investments" in Chevron that they shifted to cash to avoid conflicts of interests, the Washington Post reported in 2007. A portion of Chevron's $725,000 donations to the Clinton Foundation also pre-dates her tenure.

February 25, 2009
Human Rights Report (2008)

Released roughly two months into Clinton's tenure, the annual human rights report harshly criticizes the corruption of the Ecuadorean judiciary. "While the constitution provides for an independent judiciary, in practice the judiciary was at times susceptible to outside pressure and corruption," the report states. A U.S. judge later cites an excerpt of this sentence in a portion of a ruling finding the country's judiciary unworthy of respect.

July 28, 2009
"This is Shameless."

At a dinner event at Washington's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Secretary Clinton commends the corporate sponsors of the U.S.A. Pavilion in Shanghai. Chevron contributed $5 million to the project, which opened the next year. Encouraging the audience to see a model of the pavilion, Clinton quips: "This is shameless, I know, but that’s part of the job."

August 9, 2009
Chevron in Angola

In Angola's capital city of Luanda, Secretary Clinton remarks: "Let me especially thank Chevron for recognizing that it is important to give back to the countries where the natural resources come from.” The Oil & Gas Journal, a leading trade publication, reports the sum of Chevron's commitment at $6 million, in addition to its longstanding partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAid).

April 8, 2011
Human Rights Report (2010)

Devoting multiple paragraphs to Chevron's litigation complaints in Ecuador, this year's human rights report notes that Ecuadorean prosecutors have investigated the oil giant's lawyers for allegedly lying about an environmental remediation on government forms. While rainforest villagers have long accused Texaco of conducting a "sham" remediation, prosecutors later drop the charges.

May 24, 2012
Human Rights Report (2011)

As Clinton's tenure as Secretary draws to a close, Foggy Bottom releases the last human rights report under her watch — and the final one to mention the Chevron litigation to date. It highlights both the Lago Agrio judgment in Ecuador and the filing of Chevron's racketeering case in New York.

November 17, 2012
"Proud to Go to Bat"

In a talk on "Delivering on the Promise of Economic Statecraft," Clinton boasts: "We're proud to go to bat for the Boeings and Chevrons and General Motors and so many others." All three companies contributed hundreds of thousands to the Clinton Foundation and millions to initiatives that Hillary championed during her time at Foggy Bottom.

November 29, 2012
"Corporate Excellence"

Though Chevron receives a nomination as a finalist for the 14th annual Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence, the award ultimately goes to the Intel Corporation, another donor to the Clinton Foundation and the Pavilion. The Clinton Global Initiative also "recognized" Intel that year for a health partnership in Kenya, according to the company's press release.

State Department photo
Secretary Clinton presents the ACE award to the Intel Corporation's CEO Paul Otellini, who beat out Chevron that year for the award. Both companies are Clinton Foundation donors.

February 1, 2013
Hillary's Farewell

With Clinton's successor John Kerry taking over, Chevron's litigation stops appearing in human rights reports for Ecuador, despite significant developments in the litigation. The only human rights report released so far under the Kerry State Department ignores Chevron's racketeering trial and new accusations of judicial bribery by their opponents.

The poll found that the prospect of a Trump-Clinton matchup has a considerable number of voters saying they could vote for a third-party candidate.

Overall, 22 percent of Republican voters say they would abandon Trump for a third-party candidate.

And 36 percent of independent voters would back a third-party ticket.

This portrait comes from Tampa Bay Times interviews of more than 40 people who know and or worked for Rubio, as well as documents and more than a decade of journalistic coverage of the senator. Rubio and his staff declined to be interviewed.

The traits of Rubio's success, as they often are in politics, make up the foundations of his failings. Impatience. Ambition. Opportunism. Confidence on the campaign trail, indecision in the halls of power.

Once thought to be the most marketable Republican in a crowded field, a young Hispanic candidate who could beat Hillary Clinton and make history, Rubio seems to have few allies to call on.

DiMatteo helped Rubio after that dinner. He sums up Rubio this way: "He is extremely skilled and ambitious. He is also extremely not loyal."

In the year since, an unimaginable scenario has come to pass: Bush is out of the race and Rubio is expected to get beat — in Florida.

"He's like an orchid," veteran Republican strategist J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich said. "Attractive. But without deep roots. Without roots, it's hard to hold in a storm, and we're in a storm.

National ambition kept Rubio's eye off Florida. He failed to get involved in some key state issues while accumulating an abysmal attendance record in Washington.

Those who know Rubio and admire his political skill say they are not surprised that he made it this far in a field that once had 17 candidates. Yet they are also not surprised that this is likely to be as far as he goes, this time.

In his hurry-up journey to win elections, Rubio finds himself battling a lack of a substantial record and a lack of pals in the trenches.

DiMatteo, Rubio's one-time operative, has already voted. For Trump.

Cantens, in fact, was getting in the way of Rubio's own ambition because there was no way House members would elect back-to-back speakers from Dade; the position generally rotates around the state.

Martinez said Rubio could work to take over after Bense. "If you play it right, you can be speaker," he told him.

"No, no, no, I don't want to be speaker," Rubio quickly replied.

"Twenty-four hours later," Martinez said, "he comes back and closes the door and says, 'You think I can be speaker?' "

Rubio could barely imagine life outside politics. He even called a reporter one night after hours to test his reaction to a series of political possibilities: a run for state Senate or a statewide office in 2010, a challenge to U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson in 2012 or a run for governor in 2014.

On February 28, Hillary Clinton told an audience from the pulpit of a Memphis church: ‘we need more love and kindness in America’. This was something she felt ‘from the bottom of my heart’.

These benevolent sentiments recalled the national ‘purpose’ identified by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, shortly before he flattened Iraq. It was, he said, ‘to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world’.

Clinton, of course, meant North America, specifically the United States. But other places in America are short on love and kindness, too. Consider Honduras, for example.

On June 28, 2009, the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at gunpoint by masked soldiers and forced into exile. Since the ousting, the country ‘has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss’ as the military coup ‘threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and… unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression’. In 2012, Honduras had a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 population, then the highest rate in the world. In 2006, three years before the coup, the murder rate had stood at 46.2 per 100,000.

The years since 2009 have seen ‘an explosive growth in environmentally destructive megaprojects that would displace indigenous communities. Almost 30 percent of the country’s land was earmarked for mining concessions, creating a demand for cheap energy to power future mining operations. To meet this need, the government approved hundreds of dam projects around the country, privatizing rivers, land, and uprooting communities.’ In 2015, Global Witness reported that Honduras was ‘the most dangerous country to be an environmental defender’.

Following the 2009 coup, the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union all condemned Zelaya’s removal as a military coup. A confidential US Embassy cable, later published by Wikileaks, commented:

The Embassy perspective is that there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch… There is equally no doubt from our perspective that Roberto Micheletti’s assumption of power was illegitimate.

That was behind closed doors. In public, fifteen US House Democrats urged the US regime to ‘fully acknowledge that a military coup has taken place and… follow through with the total suspension of non-humanitarian aid, as required by law’. Writing for the Common Dreams website, Alexander Main supplied some detail:

Ann-Marie Slaughter, then director of Policy Planning at the State Department, sent an email to [Secretary of State] Clinton on August 16 [2009] strongly urging her to “take bold action” and to “find that [the] coup was a ‘military coup’ under U.S. law,” a move that would have immediately triggered the suspension of all non-humanitarian U.S. assistance to Honduras.

This, Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused to do, thus implicitly recognising the military takeover. As FAIR noted, Clinton makes clear in her memoirs that she had no intention of restoring President Zelaya to power:

In the subsequent days (after the coup) I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. 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.

Ousted former president, Manuel Zelaya, said last year:

Secretary Clinton had many contacts with us. She is a very capable woman, intelligent, but she is very weak in the face of pressures from groups that hold power in the United States, the most extremist right-wing sectors of the U.S. government, known as the hawks of Washington. She bowed to those pressures. And that led U.S. policy to Honduras to be ambiguous and mistaken.

Zelaya added:

President Obama has not wanted to hear our peoples. He has turned a deaf ear on the cry of the people. First we protested in the opposition. A few months ago, they physically removed me from the Congress, the National Congress, because our party mounted a peaceful protest. The military removed us, using tear gas in the Congress. They expelled us, beating us with batons, beating us into the street. This is the government that President Obama supports, a government that is repressive, a government that violates human rights, as has been shown by the very Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. It has shown this to be the case.

Alexander Main concluded:

A careful reading of the Clinton emails and Wikileaked U.S. diplomatic cables from the beginning of her tenure, expose a Latin America policy that is often guided by efforts to isolate and remove left-wing governments in the region.

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.

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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.”

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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.