Honduras: US-backed mediation legitimizes military coup

[IndianaGreen]

Honduras: US-backed mediation legitimizes military coup

By Bill Van Auken
11 July 2009

The talks convened in the Costa Rican capital San José on Thursday with the purported aim of resolving the political crisis unleashed by the June 28 coup in neighboring Honduras, are shaping up as a farce. The apparent object of this fraudulent exercise is to legitimize the military overthrow of the elected president of Honduras and realize the aims of Washington and the predominant sections of the right-wing Honduran oligarchy.

<snip>

The coup leader has reason to exude such confidence. The entire mediation process is stacked in favor of those who overthrew Zelaya. Backed by the army, the Church and the predominant sections of the landowning and business sectors, the only thing Micheletti has to fear are the masses of Honduran working people, who have been at the center of resistance to the coup.

<snip>

The Times and the Post on Honduran “democracy”

That this is the alternative favored by the US political establishment was made clear in similar editorials that appeared this week in the Washington Post and New York Times, both characterized by political cynicism and hypocrisy.

The only problem that the Post had with the Honduran coup was that the manner of its execution “played into the hands of the faction, led by Mr. Zelaya’s mentor, Hugo Chavez, that is attempting to overthrow democratic institutions across the region.” In other words, those trying to overthrow democracy were not the Honduran officials who ordered troops to storm the presidential palace and take control of the streets, closing down radio and television stations unsympathetic to the seizure of power and firing on unarmed demonstrators. Rather it was their victims.

The Post argues that the Honduran coup leaders have little to fear from Zelaya’s return. “Even if he does not wind up in jail,” the newspaper writes, “there is little chance he could now ... succeed in changing the constitution.”

Similarly, the Times argues, “Probably the best outcome would be for the Honduran military, courts and de facto government to allow Mr. Zelaya back into Tegucigalpa for the remainder of his term, which ends in January, in exchange for his pledge to abandon all efforts to change the Constitution so he can run for a second term.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/hond-j11.shtml

[provis99]

1. the Catholic Church is backing a right-wing Latin American military dictatorship?

What a surprise.:sarcasm:

[Joe Chi Minh]

5. This would suggest otherwise. You should both apologise.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/04/honduras-coup-micheletti-catholic

[wantoutnow]

2. k and r

who are these people who unrecommend threads...I k and r....

[IndianaGreen]

3. DU tried this scheme a few years back, and it turned out to be a failure

because there were organized efforts to "unrecommend" threads just on the basis of the OP's topic.

I see this repeat experiment as another dismal failure.

[scarletwoman]

4. I'll have to read the article later, but it seems that the basic premise echoes my own take --

which is, why should the victim (Zelaya) of an illegal action (the coup) have to negotiate with the perpetrators? It's absurd on its face!

What is there to negotiate? One party is the legally elected president, the other party are the criminals who kidnapped and deposed him by force.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Miami Herald article discloses mediator Arias arranged his own 2nd term.

(This may make the nazis' fury about their claim Zelaya intended to get a second term seem a little too close for comfort!)

Mediator is at home as peacemaker
Costa Rica's president is bringing persistence, a Nobel Peace Prize and a passion for demilitarization to the task of resolving the Honduran crisis.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG
[e-mail]
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the man who is seeking to resolve the Honduran crisis in his living room, is a 67-year-old economist and lawyer by training with salt-and-pepper hair, and the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.

He is also a wealthy aristocrat -- known to many as Don Oscar -- who skillfully overcame his own nation's single-term presidential limit by championing a reinterpretation of the Costa Rican Constitution that allowed him to run and win his current, second term, which runs from 2006 to 2010.

Friends and admirers describe him as a dogged, self-confident conservative, a bit dull by some standards with a professorial air and passion for demilitarizing Central America.

Even as he agreed to mediate the crisis last week, he said Honduras' coup d'etat was an inevitable outcome -- and ''wake-up call for the hemisphere'' -- of the Latin America's bloated militaries, whose costs he estimated at $50 billion this year.

''We should recognize that such events are not random acts,'' he wrote in an opinion page article published last week in American newspapers. ``They are the result of systematic errors and missteps that many of us have been warning about for decades. They are the price we pay for one of our region's greatest follies: its reckless military spending.''

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/1138043.html