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about fascist plots in Nicaragua--target of John Negroponte's Honduran-based death squads in the 1980s, or Evo Morales in Bolivia--where white separatists, funded and organized right out of the US/Bushwhack embassy, tried to secede from the national government last September, and take Bolivia's main gas and oil fields with them, beat up anybody who looked indigenous, rioted, sacked government and NGO buildings, shut down a gas pipeline and machine-gunned some 30 unarmed peasant farmers.
Naw, no Bushwhack/CIA plots in leftist Latin America! What a thought!
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"Ortega and his allies in Latin America, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, regularly say that their governments are the targets of coup plots. Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was deposed at the end of June and sent out of the country after he refused to obey court orders to reinstate the head of the military."
The president of the country "refused to obey court orders" about who he can fire and hire as "head of the military"? Imagine Obama firing Betrayus, and the Supreme Court saying, "Nope, that's a Bush appointment; can't fire him."
Something wrong with that--and anyway that's not why the military shot up the presidential palace, dragged Zelaya, the elected president, out of his bed at gunpoint and spirited him away to another country, as a prisoner, in a plane with blacked out windows, declared martial law, shut down the media and suspended all Constitutional civil rights, then rounded up over 1,000 political prisoners, killed several activists and open fired on a crowd of peaceful Zelaya supporters at the airport last week.
Nope, the charges against Zelaya have been trumped up from the beginning--bought and paid for "talking points" from John McCain's US taxpayer funded "International Republican Institute," the USAID and other rightwing "think tanks." His real "crimes" were, first of all, to raise the minimum wage, after he realized that US-dominated "free trade" was impoverishing and enslaving Honduran workers, secondly, to propose turning the US air base in Honduras into a commercial airport, third, joining ALBA--a Venezuelan organized barter trade group (by which he got cheap oil and other aid for Honduras from Venezuela)--and, fourth, proposed DISCUSSING fundamental reform in Honduras, in an advisory referendum on whether or not to form a Constituent Assembly to re-write the Constitution and put it to a vote of the people --a common practice in Latin America, and an entirely legal proposal under the current Constitution.
They. Don't. Want. Any. Kind. Of. Reform.
Zelaya was trying to bring Honduras into the modern era. They are an extremely poor, US-dominated backwater, where the privileged rich elite has neglected everything--education, health care, local infrastructure--and where the US military basically runs the country and has done so since the Reagan era, when Honduras was the "lily pad" country for launching death squads into Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
That is his "crime"--wanting independence and social progress for Honduras--not firing the head of the military, which he has (or should have) every right, as president, to do.
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