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I applaud NarcoNews for not giving up on the truth, despite the 100% lying and disinformation that fills the corpo-fascist press about Honduras.
The key points of lying and disinformation, promulgated by the U.S. State Department and the corpo-fascist media, are these (some of which are covered in this article):
1. It was the WIDELY SUPPORTED POPULAR MOVEMENT--consisting of labor union leaders, workers, community activists of every kind, human rights workers, advocates of the poor majority, small business people, teachers, students, writers, artists, religious clergy and others who proposed a national referendum on forming a constituent assembly to re-write the Honduran Constitution--a Constitution written by Reagan's henchmen, which Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica, has called "the worst Constitution in the world."
2. President Zelaya backed this proposal for a national opinion poll (no force of law, just "Do you/don't you" support this idea?).
3. President Zelaya NEVER IN ANY WAY PROPOSED LIFTING HIS TERM LIMIT. The goddamned lie that he did was repeated OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN by the corpo-fascist press. All they had to do was READ THE RESOLUTION that he proposed, on behalf of this widespread movement. They either didn't read it, and instead copied and pasted their news article content from Lanny Davis' emails (Clinton P.R. firm paid by our tax dollars, routed through Honduras, to LIE FOR the junta) or they knew damn well what it said and deliberately lied about it. In either case, it is the most egregious example of corpo-fascist 'news' monopoly disinformation since the New York Slimes promoted false evidence of WMDs in Iraq, day after day, in the leadup to the Iraq invasion.
(This Reagan-era Honduran Constitution limits the president to ONE term of office in order to enhance the power of the "School of the Americas"-trained Honduran military and the "ten families" oligarchy that runs Honduras for U.S. corporate and war profiteer interests. No president with only one term of office can gain enough political traction to oppose these powers on behalf of the poor majority. In my opinion, President Zelaya would therefore have been justified in challenging this one-term provision and seeking to change it by national referendum. But the FACT IS that he DID NOT, and he COULD NOT HAVE benefited in any way from the proposal for a constituent assembly, which, if it had been passed by the voters, would have merely prompted a national discussion on political/constitutional reform. It would have been years before constituent assemblies could even be formed, let alone before they hammered out provisions for a new constitution to submit to the voters, long after his term was up.)
(Did he THINK that maybe one day--years later, with a new Constitution--he could run again? Maybe he did. Who knows? And so, his house was shot up and his family terrorized, and he was dragged from bed, beaten up and put on a plane at gunpoint, and exiled from his country--in violation of a specific provision of the current Constitution which forbids the forced exile of Honduran citizens--because of something he may have THOUGHT?)
4. The U.S. government and the Pentagon were complicit in this violent rightwing military coup all along, never more so than with the bullshit that is going on now--a so-called "truth commission" that ignores the victims of the coup's violence. The coup may have been designed by the Bushwhacks (it occurred six months into Obama's first year in office), but it was clearly aided and abetted by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Pentagon. The U.S. ambassador in Honduras (a Bushwhack appointee) admitted knowing of the coup ahead of time and the plane carrying the kidnapped president out of the country at gunpoint stopped at the U.S. air base in Honduras for refueling!. What were those U.S. commanders DOING, while Honduran democracy was destroyed? Their alleged purpose in Honduras is interdicting drug traffic, and THEY DIDN'T NOTICE a plane with blacked windows carrying the kidnapped president stopping at their airport? Clinton then arranged infusions of millions of U.S. tax dollars to the coupsters while LYING that the U.S. disapproved of the coup. She furthermore arranged--at our expense--the election that occurred under martial law, which the rightwing coup supporters, of course, won, because many leftist activists were dead, political activity was forbidden, the opposition media had been brutally silenced, and the people of Honduras terrorized by the police and the military and by rightwing death squads. No international election monitoring group--not the Carter Center, nor the OAS nor the EU--would touch this election. They refused. So Clinton brought in foaming-at-the-mouth rightwingers, from John McCain's (U.S. taxpayer funded) "International Republican Institute" and other such operatives to "monitor" the election run by the Honduran military. This, and every other action of Clinton--including this recent phony "truth commission"--has been to CLEANSE a bloody rightwing coup, and to keep the fascist elite in control in Honduras.
5. We need to understand the REAL reasons for this coup, as well as the 100% LIES that have been promoted about it. The REAL reasons for it were be summed up by one of the coup generals, who said that, by their coup, they were "preventing communism from Venezuela reaching the United States" (--quoted in a report on the coup by the Zelaya government-in-exile). Venezuela is NOT communist. "Communism," in this case, means: decent wages, free universal medical care, free education through college, transparent elections, high voter turnouts, maximum citizen participation, eradication of poverty and illiteracy, land reform, government "of, by and for" the people, sovereign control of resources, protection of "the commons," no corporate rule, no military rule, no death squads, no dictation from Washington. Now, why would anyone want to prevent these things from "reaching the United States"? Think about it. That's a pretty bizarre statement. A Honduran general gets it into his head that he is obliged to prevent universal free medical care and transparent elections in the U.S.? How did he conceive such a notion? And WHO is he speaking for?
Zelaya had taken SMALL STEPS toward a more equitable society--for instance, raising the minimum wage (in a country rife with U.S. corporate sweatshops and Chiquita slave labor farms). He also opposed privatization of telecommunications (a particular interest of John McCain's in Honduras). The oligarchy that runs Honduras profits from low wages and private control of what should be public works. And so do U.S.-based multinational corporations. But there is much more to this Honduran general's mention of Venezuela. It is not just that Venezuela has an honestly elected, pro-people government. The destruction of Honduran democracy has to do with those things THREATENING our U.S. corporate tyrants, by their very existence--in Venezuela and in other countries where a successful leftist democracy revolution has occurred (Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador and others). And it has to do with the Pentagon's plan for "full spectrum" military capabilities throughout Latin America, but most especially in the Central America/Caribbean region including Venezuela's oil coast and its northern oil provinces, which contain the biggest oil reserves on earth (twice Saudi Arabia's). The newly reconstituted US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, the U.S. military base and naval facilities in Honduras, the U.S. military bases on the Dutch islands right off Venezuela's oil coast and the SEVEN new U.S. military bases in Colombia (adjacent to Venezuela) now surround this, the biggest oil source in the world.
"Preventing communism from Venezuela reaching the United States" means destroying democracy in Latin America and getting control of its oil, as well as keeping us in the dark about universal free medical care and other "communist" ideas. President Zelaya was a long way from proposing universal free medical care but he was heading in that direction--in the direction of REAL "of, by and for" the people government. Thus he--and the vast popular movement in Honduras that he was rightfully responding to--had to be destroyed, lest it creep up through Central America to our very shores. And the traditional U.S. launching pad for its war against the Left in Latin America--Honduras--had to be preserved. It is a strategic war asset. And guess who was advising Hillary Clinton on this matter? None other than John "death squad" Negroponte!
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