Rerun in Honduras: Coup pretext recycled from Brazil ’64

[Downwinder]

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3893

[Peace Patriot]

1. Unfriggingbelievable! Same lies! Same "talking points'! Same scumbag US media! From 1964

Extra! September 2009

Rerun in Honduras
Coup pretext recycled from Brazil ’64

By Mark Cook

The pretext for the Honduran coup d’état is nothing new. In a remarkable replay, bogus charges that the corporate media in the U.S. and Europe have repeated endlessly without attempting to substantiate—that Honduran president Manuel Zelaya sought to amend the country’s constitution to run for another term—are virtually identical to the sham justification for the 1964 coup against Brazilian president João Goulart.

The Brazilian coup, depicted at the time as a victory for constitutional democracy, kicked off a series of extreme right-wing military coups against democratically elected governments throughout the Southern Cone of Latin America and beyond. Brazil was turned into a base for subversion of neighboring democratic governments (National Security Archive, 6/20/02); Goulart and a previous Brazilian president, Juscelino Kubitschek, both died in 1976 in incidents that have since been attributed to the multinational assassination program Operation Condor (Folha, 1/27/08; Carta Maior, 7/17/08). Given that history, the strength and unanimity of Latin American and international condemnation of the Honduran coup—despite a worldwide media disinformation campaign against Zelaya—is hardly surprising.

On March 31, 1964, the democratic government of Brazil’s Goulart, a wealthy rancher hated by big business for having dramatically raised the minimum wage, was overthrown in a coup d’état organized by ultra-rightist elements in Brazil’s military and strongly backed by the U.S. government. For decades, U.S. officials denied involvement in the coup, but in 2004 the nongovernmental National Security Archive (3/31/04) published newly declassified documents revealing President Lyndon Johnson’s personal involvement and a massive U.S. military and CIA commitment.

At the New York Times, which editorially cheered the “peaceful revolution” (4/3/64), influential columnist Arthur Krock (4/3/64) accused Goulart of seeking to “prolong by removing the constitutional ban against consecutive presidential succession.”

“What really happened,” Krock declared, in phrasing repeated almost word for word 45 years later in Honduran coverage, “was the failure of a bid for power, contrary to a fundamental principle of the Brazilian Constitution.” Newsweek (4/6/64) and Time (4/10/64) ran similar allegations, also without providing any evidence.

Evidence is just as little needed today, as corporate journalists drape baseless claims with the word “fear” (instead of “assert” or “contend”) in the apparent belief that it absolves them of any responsibility to evaluate whether there is any truth to the charge: “Critics feared intended to extend his rule past January, when he would have been required to step down,” the New York Times wrote (7/6/09) in a typical passage. Nowhere did the article or others like it attempt to evaluate whether this would even have been possible, given that Zelaya was not a candidate in the country’s November elections and would have to give up the presidency to his successor in January. In fact, Zelaya’s own vice president had resigned in order to run for the presidency.

Media depictions of Goulart as a “leftist” and ally of Castro found their echo in coverage of Honduran President Zelaya as a “leftist” (e.g, Reuters, 7/31/09) and “power- hungry protégé of U.S.-hating Venezuela President Hugo Chávez” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/19/09). Forty years after the Brazilian coup, the New York Times (6/23/04) was still running the line that “the armed forces overthrew Mr. Goulart’s government, fearing he intended to install a Cuban-style Commu-nist regime in Brazil.”

There was never the slightest evidence that Goulart intended to install a “Cuban-style Communist regime,” any more than that he was attempting to run for another term. As with Zelaya in Honduras, Goulart’s real crime was to use the minimum wage and similar measures to attempt to moderate the extremes of wealth and poverty in his country; Latin America has long suffered from the greatest income inequality in the world (U.N. Human Development Report, 2007/2008). As the National Labor Committee (6/27/07) reported, Honduras’ minimum wage was reduced in 2007, in a race to the bottom against neighboring Nicaragua, when the country joined the Washington-sponsored Central American Free Trade Agreement.

(MORE)

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3893

------------------------------

This a great article! There is more--much more! FAIR rips apart the cartoonish behavior of the Junta, whose members couldn't keep their lines straight, and kept complaining about the minimum wage, when their "talking point" was supposed to be that Zelaya is a would-be communist dictator who wanted to change the Constitution to become "president for life," and their waving around Zelaya's "resignation" letter (forged), and the New York Times promulgating all this bullshit.

And get this (which I didn't know)...

Even if Estrada’s sleight-of-hand assertion were true, Zelaya would have had a right to indictment and trial. But there are plenty of legitimate reasons to rewrite the Honduran constitution. It was written in 1982, during the thinly disguised military dictatorship of Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. Alvarez, a School of the Americas alum who worked closely with U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, set up the death squads that terrorized Honduras and made the country’s security forces indistinguishable from the country’s extreme right wing. It was in May 1983, under the current constitution, that the Honduran congress adopted the infamous Decree 33. As Gerry O’Sullivan wrote in the Humanist (3/1/94), the decree “declared anyone a ‘terrorist’ who distributed political literature, associated with foreigners, joined groups deemed subversive by the government, damaged property or destroyed documents.”

Something else I didn't know--or wasn't fully aware of. The NYT has always been a shit-rag. It didn't start with Judith Miller. They were doing the same buillshit back in 1964! And I thought it was the Bushwhacks who zapped their brains and made 'em all Bushwhack zombies.