One of the first casualties of the 2009 Honduras coup was the 19-year-old son of a pastor, who was shot in the back of the head by U.S.-outfitted snipers.

On July 5 that year, Pastor Jose David Murillo, a well-known environmentalist, attended a rally in Tegucigalpa to welcome home the rightful Honduran president, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, who planned to repatriate himself. Murillo, his wife and children had come to Toncontín International Airport to meet Zelaya’s plane a week after he was deposed. When the charter plane was denied landing rights, with trucks and a grounded 737 blocking the runway, the celebration turned to protest.

Unbeknownst to Murillo, who had taught his children the value of peaceful resistance in his work against deforestation, Honduran military snipers had taken position on the airport’s roof. Watching the president’s plane return to its embarkation point, the crowd that had come to welcome him—many of whom wore crimson and carried banners that read “Bloque Popular”—began shouting and pushing toward the runway. That’s when the snipers shot live rounds and tear gas at the protesters, who were unarmed. “I stood up in front of the soldiers and cried, ‘What are you doing? Do not attack us.’ We had done nothing to provoke them,” Murillo recalled. In the chaos, he was separated from his sons, including his 19-year-old, Isis Obed Murillo, the youngest of five. An hour later, he got a call from his oldest, who said that Isis had been shot in the back of the head by snipers. Ten minutes later, he was dead. When they identified their son that evening, Murillo’s wife, Sylvia, said they “did not have any words sufficient to our grief.”

It was an eventful and tragic week for Hondurans. Zelaya had been arrested in the early morning hours the Sunday before and whisked out of the country. Like Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz 55 years prior, Zelaya was sent into exile in his pajamas. (Whispering in Zelaya’s ear at the airport, perhaps, had been the ghost of CIA agent Enno Hobbing, who told a Central American official in 1954, “You just aren’t convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.”)

The day of the coup, a referendum on reforming the Honduran constitution had been scheduled. If approved by voters, a constitutional convention, or constituyente, would have designed a more inclusive constitution. “Zelaya was trying to re-create recent constitutional conventions in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela that had approved new constitutions expanding democratic rights and the power of Indigenous people, women, small farmers, and others at the bottom,” according to Dana Frank, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Though the right-wing media in Honduras and the U.S. painted it as an attempt to win Zelaya a constitutionally banned second term, the convention wouldn’t have taken place until long after his term was up, Frank writes. In her 2018 book, “The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup,” Frank tells of being blindsided by the overthrow, especially after it was certified by the Obama administration. Frank was an activist with the labor rights nonprofit USLEAP at the time of the coup. She said that the protests organized by a coalition of groups, what she calls the “resistance,” were what most sustained her and her Honduran friends in the coup’s aftermath, and deaths like those of Isis Obed Murillo were what haunted and motivated her.

The Honduran coup turns 10 this summer, and the list of the dead grows, both inside Honduras and at the U.S. border. The world’s great democracy is debating whether children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages with no access to showers, and limited due process, rises to the definition of concentration camps. The white supremacist president lends his words for immigration (“invasion!”) to a mass shooter, and the former vice president points to his role in a failing plan to “save” Central America, alongside a long-failed plan in Colombia, as being among the reasons he should be president. Against this backdrop, Frank’s book is useful for understanding the United States’ role in the tragedy at the border and its origin in Honduras. While one accusatory finger in Frank’s pages points to the distortions of the American right, a few more point back at the previous Democratic administration for enabling the violence that helped send so many Hondurans into flight in the first place.

‘From the Outset Let Us Bring You News of Your Protagonist’

If the U.S. has Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night” among the literary depictions of its political struggles, Honduras has “Prision Verde” (“Green Prison”), by Ramon Amaya-Amador. Born in 1916 of a relationship between a priest and his secret lover, Amaya-Amador wrote his first book as a schoolteacher in Olancho Province. According to one scholar, because he “lacked the self-discipline to conform to small-town ways,” he abandoned the classroom and began working in Honduras’ banana fields in the north. When the industry stalled during the Depression and a “yellow sigatoka” blight, Amaya-Amador joined the Communist Party and launched a political magazine, Alerta. Serialized in his magazine, “Prision Verde” became Amaya-Amador’s—and, in Frank’s words, Honduras’—“most famous novel.”

Frank doesn’t dwell on the book’s importance. But scholar Janet Gold recalls the 1950 novel’s prophetic thrust. “By dramatizing the contrasting situations of local landowners who are convinced … to sell their land and one … who refuses,” Gold writes, Amaya-Amador “creates sympathy for the independent-minded character only to then reveal that government troops in league with the foreign company force him off his land.”

The unhygienic living conditions in the camps, the dangers of working with pesticide-laden fruit, the absence of educational facilities for workers’ children, the government’s corruption and complicity in the exploitation of Honduran citizens are just a few of the injustices … [depicted] in the novel. A leader emerges … to lead a strike … and the leader is killed, but his memory lives on to inspire a glimmer of hope.

Beyond the novel’s litany of exploitation, “Prision Verde” “was uncannily prophetic,” Gold writes, “for on May 2, 1954, some 25,000 United Fruit Co. and 15,000 Standard Fruit Co. workers began a strike that lasted sixty-nine days. Workers from other sectors joined … which finally resulted in official recognition of the right of workers to unionize, the creation of an eight-hour workday, overtime compensation, and paid vacations.”

Using fears of another Hugo Chavez in Honduras, all these and other gains would be targeted after the 2009 coup.

The Waffling Obama Administration

Elected in 2006, Zelaya was moving to the left when he was ousted. He brought Honduras into regional coalitions like Petrocaribe and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), founded by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004. He was on the verge of signing over land to 300,000 small farmers to grow the country’s working-class base. These moves were beyond the pale, and he was removed because of them.

The interim government of Roberto Micheletti that followed immediately began a program of repression to consolidate and legitimize the coup. But the countercoup, in the form of massive protests, sit-ins and occupations of various offices, was immediate and widespread. A collision was coming. “The terror escalated,” Frank writes; “one by one, activists disappeared or were assassinated.” The message was clear; dissent would not be tolerated. During those first days of the coup, CNN, Radio Progresso and Cholusat SUR were shut down, the government “shut off electricity to neighborhoods where protests were particularly strong. In Olancho, where [ousted President] Zelaya came from”—as had Amaya-Amador—“the military reportedly began breaking into houses and capturing young people, forcing others to flee into the hills.”

On July 11, two weeks after the coup and six days after Isis Obed Murillo was shot, Roger Bados, local union president and anti-coup activist in San Pedro Sula, was shot to death by armed men. That same night, three men boarded a bus in Santa Bárbara, ordered opposition activist Ramon García off the bus and murdered him. A month later, police grabbed 25-year-old Irma Melissa Villanueva from a protest in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, and, according to Frank, “took her away to a remote location, where four policemen gang-raped her for hours. ‘Now, bitch, you’re gonna see what happens to you for being where you shouldn’t be,’ they told her.” She told her story three days later. For her courage, she faced a second rape, this time with her family forced to watch. We’ll “see if you report us this time,” her attackers told her.

During the autumn after the coup, Micheletti suspended four articles of the constitution, “restricting freedom of transit, banning public meetings not authorized by security forces, and barring the media from criticizing the government—[while] thirty-five hundred to four thousand people had been illegally detained for peacefully demonstrating.”

On Sept. 26, on the 36th anniversary of the use of the national stadium in Chile to house political prisoners after the U.S.-sponsored coup there, the BBC published a photograph of a Honduran stadium being used to detain more than 600 political prisoners. Wondering what she can do to assist, Frank begins by staying informed. Could the Obama administration, sworn in just five months before the coup, help? “We knew that a coup attempt had been stopped in Bolivia the year before and that in 2002 a coup in Venezuela had been reversed after two days,” she writes. “We could feel how surprisingly strong the Honduran resistance was. We knew that the Organization of American States and dozens of countries throughout Latin America and all over the world had condemned the coup ferociously and called for Zelaya’s immediate restoration.” Barack Obama, after all, was the “Yes, we can!” president. Was he cause for hope?

In fact, the administration waffled. The day of the coup, Obama spoke in general terms about respecting “the rule of law.” The day after, Frank writes, the administration was “willing to call it a coup, but by mid-week the State Department had backed off from demanding Zelaya’s immediate return. … Despite the obviously criminal and illegitimate nature of the regime … the Obama administration began treating de facto President Micheletti as Zelaya’s legitimate diplomatic equal.” Ten days after the coup, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States had persuaded both sides to negotiations in San Jose, Costa Rica,” thereby “successfully transferring power over the situation onto US-controlled terrain [sic] and away from” the Organization of American States (OAS), a majority of whose members “were adamant that Zelaya had to be returned to full powers.”

Furthermore, “Obama and Clinton pointedly refused to ever use the phrase ‘military coup,’ which would have legally obligated the United States to stop almost all foreign aid to Honduras immediately,” Frank writes. She addresses a question that has hung in the air: Was the U.S. involvement premeditated? “We don’t yet have concrete evidence that the United States promoted the coup or approved it in advance,” Frank acknowledges. “We do know that the plane in which the Honduran military flew Zelaya out of the country stopped to refuel at Soto Cano Air Force Base, a joint US-Honduran base, and we can presume that it would not have done so without US permission.” Is that all? No. “We know that four of the six top generals who oversaw the coup were trained by the United States at the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Fort Benning, Georgia, and that it is unlikely that they would have perpetrated a coup without U.S. approval.” From The Intercept, Frank reports, we know further that “top Honduran military officials attended a party thrown by the US Embassy’s defense attaché. At nine o’clock that night, Kenneth Rodriguez, the commander of US forces in Honduras, left the party to meet with [Honduran] General Romeo Vazquez Velasquez, then returned to the festivities. The next morning, Vazquez led the coup.”

But Frank appears to miss that the Obama administration admitted to knowing about the coup in advance, claiming it did its best to discourage it. Writing in The Guardian, Mark Weisbrot wonders what that discouragement might have sounded like: “Did administration officials say, ‘You know that we will have to say that we are against such a move if you do it, because everyone else will?’ Or was it more like, ‘Don’t do it, because we will do everything in our power to reverse any such coup’? The administration’s actions since the coup indicate something more like the former, if not worse.”

Media Blockade, North and South

Like some of their U.S. counterparts, many Honduran newspapers “loved the coup,” Frank writes. “They were full of fantastic, alarmist fictions: Zelaya is a drug dealer! The Venezuelan and Nicaraguan armies are amassed at the Honduran border, ready to invade to restore him!” As the U.S. media has done with anti-leftist demonstrations in Venezuela, the Honduran media weighted small gatherings in support of the coup as significant, while ignoring protests denouncing the coup attended continuously by hundreds of thousands of Hondurans. The unabashedly false rose to levels that could almost make Fox News blush. “To its eternal shame,” Frank writes, “[the newspaper] La Prensa even ran a doctored photo of the men at the airport carrying the body of Isis Obed, the young man killed by government snipers, in which the blood streaming down from his head had been airbrushed out.”

While the interests of the elite were voiced over a spectrum of fake news forums, President Micheletti continued to preside over a regime of violent censorship. He confiscated the equipment of broadcast stations that questioned the official narrative of the coup plotters, closing down such stations as Radio Progresso or ordering them off the air, as happened with “three radio stations and television Channel 36.” The opposition called this media blockade the cerco mediatico, and Frank recalls that in the U.S., she initially “ran head-on into our own cerco mediatico.”

Although she estimates that about half of the coup opponents protesting in its aftermath had been opposed to Zelaya during his incumbency, media outlets like The Associated Press reduced the opposition to “Zelaya supporters,” or even (in the case of the AP), “die-hard supporters of ousted President Zelaya,” “implying that the opposition was merely fanatical groupies who should have politely given up long before.” That Zelaya had sought a second term was the right-wing shibboleth that U.S. media would not let die. Frank cites Newsweek for leaping into the future, writing that the magazine “even uncritically quoted Jorge Castaneda of Mexico claiming Zelaya was illegally trying to get a third term,” a nonexistent second term notwithstanding.

Indeed, the dishonesty of The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady, unmentioned by Frank, stands out. With such headlines as “Honduras Defends Its Democracy: Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton Object” and opening paragraphs that read, “It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo [Chavez] in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking,” one sees the paralytic wing of establishment media pushing a newly elected Obama—who had other projects on his to-do list—to the right, while the left was mostly silenced. On the reticence of Honduras scholars, Frank writes that “those few academics who did have knowledge of Honduras” seldom “stepped in to challenge the administration’s narrative.” Was this the result of timidity after high emotions surrounding Obama’s election, or of the slow caution with which academics work, or both?

Don’t Be Shy, Madame Secretary

With the president getting hammered by the right-wing media for its gestures toward following the law, and with little support from the already marginalized left, the administration began to stall for elections coming that fall. But given Honduras’ media blackout, its abridgement of the constitution and its war on the opposition, the outcome, Frank and other observers note, was a foregone conclusion. “Ongoing repression of basic civil liberties made a free and fair election clearly impossible,” she writes, “while the very same army that perpetrated the coup controlled the physical ballots. All international bodies—including the United Nations, the Carter Center, and the OAS, with the exception of the U.S. Republican Party and a few delegates from the Democratic Party–refused to observe the process.”

Emerging from one of two right-wing parties that dominated Honduras’ two-party system—it hardly matters which—Porfirio Pepe Lobo assumed the presidency. The signal this sent? That violence and impunity may continue. With the administration looking for an escape from the trap it found itself in, given its legal obligations to oppose the coup, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon wrote Secretary Clinton to suggest the U.S. merely wash its hands. “As we think about what to say, I would recommend that we not be shy. We should congratulate the Honduran people, we should connect today’s vote to the deep democratic vocation of the Honduran people, and we should call on the community of democratic nations (and especially those of the Americas) to recognize, respect, and respond to this accomplishment of the Honduran people.” This, for a victory that was only as legitimate as the coup that preceded it was illegal? There was nothing shy and everything shameless about it.

More Spaces for Our People?

“High on the list” of Lobo’s spoils, Frank writes, was a radical revanchist economic agenda. Land was a key part of this. Another hard-won advance for Honduran citizens, the Land Reform Law dates to the decade after the 1954 strike, with the result that the years 1973 to 1977 were sometimes dubbed the “Golden Age” of land reform. In fact, 120,000 hectares of land were redistributed to campesinos during those four years. According to one scholar, “Over three decades a total of 409,000 hectares (the equivalent of 12.3% of the agricultural area of Honduras) were handed over to 60,000 peasant families (the equivalent of 13% of the rural population).” But in the post-coup atmosphere, campesinos were murdered, their homes within lands legally redistributed were burned, and thugs forced them out on one or two hours’ notice with the threat of armed violence, although the leadership hoped to overwrite this violent expropriation with a legal screen.

To speed up the theft of these lands on behalf of the market, a scheme was born that Frank calls “so far-fetched it seemed unthinkable.” Spread via a viral TED talks brainstorm, the model or charter cities proposal sought to redraw cities as outside a nation’s usual rule of law or sovereignty—think charter schools for whole urban areas—and into which others could migrate, or “vote with their feet.” The initiative would, in practice, appear to liberate markets from human, labor and civil rights protections won via historic struggles and inscribed into the Honduran constitution or reflected in other laws, such as the Land Reform Law.

The mastermind behind the proposal was Paul Romer, a New York University economist, who argued that cities in the developing world should be allowed to develop, free of regulations, under the watchful eye of an already developed, first-world economy, a Big Brother economic protectorate, if you will. (Romer would later head up the World Bank as chief economist.) On his advisory committee for model cities sat Grover Norquist, the archconservative, no-regulation mastermind behind the Tea Party, out of which Trump’s birther narrative against Obama emerged.

The curtain-raiser came in the spring of 2010, with the “Honduras is Open for Business” conference. Mexican entrepreneur Carlos Slim was slated to talk, as was former President Bill Clinton, who eventually pulled out. “Whether the event generated any actual investments was unclear, but it certainly generated a host of mocking parodies in the solidarity world up North: ‘Honduras, Open for Repression.’ ‘Honduras, Busted Open for Business.’” Frank writes.

A few weeks later, presidents Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Chavez of Venezuela announced a deal they had finalized with the Lobo regime, which allowed for Zelaya, who had been holed up in the Brazilian embassy, to return legally to his homeland. “The Cartagena Accord, as it was known, contained three key provisions: first, all criminal charges against Zelaya and his top ministers, still in exile as well, would be annulled. Second, the government of Honduras would commit itself to protecting human rights. Third—and here the plot thickens—a legal path would be made clear for the National Front of Popular Resistance to become a political party.” Also known as the FNRP, this was the coalition of labor, land reform advocates, government opposition and former establishment figures around the ousted Zelaya. Unfortunately, rank-and-file members had recently voted not to enter electoral politics, but rather to work outside the party apparatus; this third provision, then, took members very much by surprise, and threatened a rift in the coalition.

But Zelaya finally came home and Honduras was back in the OAS. When Obama appeared with Lobo in the Oval Office, the U.S. leader proclaimed, “Today begins a new chapter in the relationship between our two countries. In part because of pressure from the international community, but also because of the strong commitment to democracy and leadership by President Lobo, what we’ve been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and commitment to reconciliation that gives us great hope.” The president’s optimism would prove premature. Lobo responded by noting, “We have affirmed our democratic vocation. We have reaffirmed the road to democracy that we are on and that we will be continuing on. We will be opening even more spaces for our people to be able to express themselves.”

In fact, just a month after the accord, “even more spaces” were closing off to Hondurans, certainly to members, for instance, of the Campesino Movement of Rigores, a town in the northern Aguan Valley where peasants were being brutalized into leaving their homes. During a typical incident on June 24, Frank writes, “the Honduran police and the military destroyed almost the entire campesino community … turning a seven-room schoolhouse, three churches, a community center, and more than a hundred houses into burnt-out rubble in a single afternoon. The nearly 500 residents had an hour’s notice to pull out their belongings, then watched as their homes were torched by security forces and crushed by a bulldozer.” And because no judge was present at the site, the order was illegal.

Nor would these “new spaces” for Honduran self-expression apply at work. In September, the Lobo administration passed the Employment Law, “breaking up full-time jobs and turning them into part-time, temporary employment ineligible for unionization or the government’s system of healthcare and pensions,” Frank writes. In October, members of Operation Xatruch, a military-police task force deployed to aid in fighting crime and resolving the land conflict, “captured, detained without charges, and tortured Walter Nelin Sabillón Yanos,” a campesino land activist. “Sabillón testified … that while … in detention … authorities beat him, repeatedly placed a hood on his head, and … applied electric shock to his hands, abdomen and mouth while interrogating him about the campesino movement,” Frank writes. One of the richest landholders, Miguel Facussé, whose private security guards exchanged police and military uniforms for plain clothes when convenient—all while torturing and killing campesinos—even appeared in a U.S. diplomatic cable, collaborating with drug cartels.

Having posed with the corrupt Lobo at the White House, the Obama administration was on the hook to make this right. But after breaking Honduras’ institutional safety nets, the administration didn’t appear to know how to fix things using the same dynamite with which it had broken them. And yet it wasn’t Obama himself, but one of his former Cabinet members (and the people of Honduras) who would pay the price.

Model City Rollout Interrupted

But first, The New York Times Magazine helped Lobo roll out his plan. In May 2012, Adam Davidson of NPR’s “Planet Money” published a profile with the immodest but honest title, “Who Wants to Buy Honduras?” As Frank points out, the article was accompanied by an “outrageous cartoon that depicted a broad, green jungle, punctuated only by a tiny city in the middle, rising amid construction cranes. A yellow plane flew over the city carrying a banner reading ‘THE NEW HONDURAS, EST 2010.’ In front, a sign poked up out of the jungle reading ‘GOOD HONDURAS,’ with an arrow pointing toward the city, and ‘BAD HONDURAS,’ with an arrow pointing off the page. A second sign read: ‘WELCOME TO THE NEW HONDURAS (DON’T WORRY, IT’S NOT REALLY HONDURAS)’.”

Featuring a short profile of Romer and his big idea, the article admitted that Romer, “who is expected to be chairman [of the area carved out of Honduras], is hoping to build a city that can accommodate 10 million people, which is 2 million more than the current population of Honduras.” Whatever euphemisms about voting with feet or other body parts, the phrase “is expected to be chairman” baldly confessed the anti-democratic tendencies behind the scheme. But Davidson adds that Romer’s “[model] city will have extremely open immigration policies to attract foreign workers from all over. It will also tactically dissuade some from coming. Singapore, Romer said, provides a good (if sometimes overzealous) model. Its strict penalties for things like not flushing a public toilet may make for late-night jokes, but they signal to potential immigrants that it is a great place if you want to work hard and play by the rules.” So before Donald Trump told these citizens that they weren’t good enough to come across the border into the U.S., the Obama administration’s allies told them they weren’t good enough for their owncountry, not within this Romer’s model city borders, at least. Not if they wanted the freedom to walk and chew gum (or not flush) at the same time.

But two days after the curtain was raised on Machiavellian neo-principalities, a deus ex machina struck, giving citizens in both lands a Hollywood-like visual for the violent mummery at play between Honduras’ elite and their U.S. clients. In the pre-dawn hours of May 15, 2012, Frank recounts, “two State Department helicopters carrying Honduran security forces and US ‘advisors’ from a DEA FAST team shot and killed four Afro-Indigenous Honduran civilians—two of them pregnant—and injured four others.” Claiming falsely that the Drug Enforcement Administration agents had participated only in an advisory role, the State Department distanced itself. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland deferred to an investigation underway by Honduran authorities. Frank calls that investigation, skewed to protect the state murders, “incompetent, corrupt and extremely limited.” To wit, the government of Honduras “used its autopsy report to insist that [one of the women killed] wasn’t in fact pregnant.” State Department staff even showed a selectively edited video to members of Congress that alleged to prove that the victims fired on the agents, telling those who hoped to analyze the video that it was classified. But five years later, a 400-page report by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the victims’ and families’ version. “DEA agents had in fact been in the helicopter yelling at the Honduran forces to ‘FIRE, FIRE,’ on the victims in the boat,” Frank writes. Video segments, in fact, “didn’t show any fire from the victims’ boat at all—but it did show shots from the other boat aimed at the victims. The Inspector General concluded that both the DEA and the State Department had misinformed and misled Congress and the public and then obstructed the subsequent investigation.”

For a while, the U.S. press actually began to pay attention, and Congress wrote memos threatening to withhold funds, which had been key to Frank’s previously fruitless campaigns. Between early 2012 into mid-2014, the Obama administration was largely on the defensive over its post-coup Honduras policy, and rightly so, as Frank and other Honduras watchers published scathing indictments of its failures; the murder rate rose (on its way to the world’s highest), women became increasingly unsafe (with Honduras eventually becoming the world’s most unsafe place for them), police corruption grew rampant, and human rights failed to improved.

To stop the bleeding, Lobo flew to Miami to meet with senior U.S. officials, then Vice President Joe Biden flew to Mexico and Honduras. Mexico and Guatemala wanted to decriminalize cocaine, because the renewed U.S. war on drugs was not working, so Biden had this and the corruption scandal dominating headlines about the region. During his visit, Frank wrote, the administration “sought to adeptly reframe the police corruption scandal, the murder rate statistics, and alarm over human rights abuses by US-funded security forces, all within the rubric of the drug war: police killings were subsumed under a generic ‘security crisis,’ and the ‘security crisis’ was the result of drug trafficking.” The devil was not into the details.

Yes, drug trafficking was a reality, but to put it in context, it helps to recall the degree of corruption that the Obama administration tolerated and sponsored. For example, when Honduras’ supreme court banned the model cities initiative because it invalidated the Honduran constitution (arguably a worse outcome than Zelaya’s protections for poor people), the legislature, under the direction of Juan Orlando Hernandez, illegally fired and replaced four of the justices.

By 2014, when Hernandez assumed the presidency after a highly irregular election, he was in control of the courts (which he had filled with friendly justices), as well as the legislature, in which he’d played a leadership role, and the military and police, which Lobo and the post-coup regime had continuously conflated. Laws were passed shielding the government from accountability. Eighty percent of criminal cases remained in impunity. And the ties between drug traffickers and officials were growing ever more evident. The director of national police, Tiger Bonilla, was leading death squads. For the U.S. to continue working with Bonilla was a violation of the its own Leahy law. But officials made up a Catch 22-style workaround that effectively said, “Even though he was the head of police, we will work only with people in the force who aren’t him, although every single one of them,” as Bonilla told a newspaper interviewer, works for him.  The U.S. turned out to be lying about this, as it actually was working directly with Bonilla.

Corruption watchdog Sarah Chayes wrote in a report that under the post-coup regimes in Honduras, “It is no longer possible to think of corruption as just the iniquitous doings of individuals. Corruption is the operating system of sophisticated networks that link together public and private networks and out-and-out criminals—including killers.” Chayes links Honduran emergency migration to corruption enabled by the U.S., and faults U.S. support explicitly. “Urban violence and out-migration … are by-products of the corruption of the very government that enjoys US (and European Union) support to combat those ills.”

With this important caveat, Frank’s elaborately detailed tour turns to the infamous caravans, ghosts of Obama’s policy.

The Caravans

In June 2014, the website Breitbart ran a story with the headline, “Leaked Images Reveal Children Warehoused in Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed.” The article reprised a U.N. report investigating why Central American children were fleeing their countries, unsupervised by adults. The site followed that story, seemingly motivated by humanitarian concern, with a second titled “8 Reasons to Close the Border Now.” Among those reasons, it alleged “disease,” “threat of terrorism,” “safety of U.S. citizens” and “American culture is under attack.” In other words, more right-wing bullshit. A third Breitbart story came the same day: “More than Half of Central American Immigrants on Welfare.” CBS News and the Los Angeles Times followed suit and, as Frank writes, the media were soon reporting that “fifty-seven thousand undocumented, unaccompanied minors from Central America had swarmed across the border from Mexico,” with more on their way. Frank writes, “Overall, this transformation of the public conversation in the United States about Honduras was stunning, and rapid—it took only around three weeks.” She continues:

In the right-wing version, children were taking advantage of lax border enforcement to invade the country (emphasis mine), posing a national security threat. In the liberal version, gangs and drug traffickers were producing terrifying violence in Honduras, making children flee northward, where they were met with scary conditions within the US border enforcement system.

An election year, 2014 also was a turning point. Throughout the year and into summer, activists had been making modest progress in challenging U.S. funding to a country ruled by illegitimate, irregularly elected or unelected leaders who presided over a system that murdered or jailed journalists, activists and the opposition, and whose anti-corruption measures appeared toothless and designed to appease State Department sponsors without actually challenging the leadership. But now, the story shifted to border crossings, gangs and drugs.

It became a kind of obsession, the story disconnected from the United States’ actual role. Indeed, Frank herself writes about the gangs and drug traffickers. But unlike most of this newly urgent coverage of Honduras, she adds important caveats that contextualize the gangs as having a history and show the hard work that activists, many honest politicians, judges, journalists, teachers and other civil society upstanders had been trying to achieve in a society otherwise wrecked with support from the giant to the North. “But let’s be clear,” she writes, “those gangs and drug traffickers took over a broad swath of daily life in Honduras in part because the elites who ran the government permitted and even profited from it. Who was the gang, in this story? … The judiciary was [now] largely corrupt; the criminal justice system functioned to protect the crooked and the murderous. The police were deeply interwoven with the gangs and drug traffickers.”

Ax Murderers for Allies

In New York Times op-ed titled “A Plan for Central America,” then-Vice President Biden—and now a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential race—helped the administration manage the destruction it had wrought, bait-and-switch-style, by promising three things: first, security (though he alludes to his role in crafting the punitive 1994 Crime Bill as a measure of his skills); second, transparency, though under the leadership the U.S. had championed in the previous six years, transparency was hampered; and third, international investment, though the chaos wrought by the rampant impunity would make it nearly impossible to attract such investments (remember how the model cities plan was boosted by the DEA’s helicopter killings?).

Since lots of money hadn’t worked, the administration threw lots more at Honduras ($1 billion newly pledged). It did so while maintaining its decision to not hamstring the money with any real accountability. It did get the Honduran leadership under Juan Orlando Hernandez to agree to some on-paper anti-corruption measures, with Transparency International’s logo sealing them. But by now it was clear to all but the highest investors that the worse things got on the ground, the more money the U.S. sent.

In its execution, much of the new campaign to pacify Honduras reduced itself to scaring children with billboards promising death if they left the chaos there—where death also lurked—and hired a coyote to pursue life in the North (according to Suketu Mehta, author of “This Land Is  Our Land,” eight in 10 Central American women who migrate to the North are raped en route). But a marketing campaign against something worse is not a viable plan to stabilize institutions that U.S. intervention spent 10 years helping corrupt. That’s become the American promise to oppressed peoples: However bad things may get, we can always cloak reality under the guise of a targeted ad campaign that rewrites them to our current needs.

While the funding ballooned, the failure of the rule of law in Honduras got so bad that when Frank happened to see then-Secretary of State John Kerry in a Washington, D.C., restaurant in 2016, she introduced herself and said she was working on Honduras policy. “How are we doing down there?” Kerry asked. “We’re supporting the axe murderers,” she told him and walked off.

The Murder of Berta Cáceres

The altar carved into the rock at La Gruta in La Esperanza was offered for the shelter these caves provided to Hondurans hiding from their enemies. In the courtyard beneath is also where Berta Cáceres, unable to escape hers, was given a final mass before being buried in this coldest of Honduran cities.

Cáceres grew up during the ongoing dirty wars and disappearances in Central America that were largely funded by the United States. In Guatemala, an estimated 200,000 people, mostly indigenous, were killed. In El Salvador, U.S.-fanned counterinsurgency operations contributed to an estimated 70,000 killed between 1980 and 1992. Cáceres’ mother, Austra Bertha Flores, a midwife, sheltered and cared for these refugees. Later serving as mayor, Austra Bertha taught her children the importance of solidarity in defense of the disenfranchised.

In 1993, Cáceres founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras; its mission was to better the lives of indigenous Lenca people in the face of illegal logging and regional territorial disputes.

Cáceres’ work against the Agua Zarca dam began in solidarity with the people of Rio Blanco, who told her that construction equipment had appeared, with silence surrounding the question of what it was for. At the time, dams were being planned all over Honduras as a means of amping up the country’s electrical power capacity to fuel a patchwork of new mines. A joint project of Desarollos Energeticos, S.A., (DESA) and Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, the Agua Zarca dam targeted the Gualcarque River, a waterway protected by indigenous rights accords because it is culturally and environmentally crucial to the Lenca.

Using a variety of means to maintain constant pressure—petitions, court actions, international appeals to the rule of law and the rights of the indigenous, plus road blockades denying access to the dam site—the protesters were tireless, and the Chinese investors finally withdrew. Death threats followed. In order to protect Cáceres and honor her important work, she was given a battery of high-level meetings (with the pope, for instance) and such awards as the 2015 Goldman prize, which “honors grassroots environmental heroes”—in Cáceres’ case for “a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam,” and which also resulted in a celebration at then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office. But these efforts would prove futile; Cáceres’ last days could only have been a terrifying countdown.

Before her death, Cáceres witnessed colleagues like Rio Blanco community leader Tomas García shot and killed while protesting. Other activists were attacked by machete, discredited, arrested arbitrarily and tortured. A February 2016 attempt on Cáceres’ life was aborted at the last minute but played into suspense over an outcome few could have doubted. A month later, Mexican environmentalist Gustavo Castro visited Cáceres to use her internet access while on a trip to the region. When he learned she was living alone and unprotected, he insisted on staying over. That night, in the pre-dawn hours of March 3—a day before her 45th birthday—assassins entered her house and shot Cáceres and Castro. Having surprised the assassins, whose surveillance had assured that she lived alone, Castro survived the shooting by playing dead. When they left, a fatally wounded Cáceres died in Castro’s arms as they awaited medical assistance.

Authorities initially tried to pin the murder on Castro, launching a whisper campaign suggesting a crime of passion. They detained him as a suspect rather than a victim, illegally suspending his lawyer, and his own government was blocked from protecting his rights. But culpability inevitably pointed back to the military and privatized security teams associated with DESA, members of which had been trained in the United States at Fort Benning, Ga., the former School of the Americas.

In the weeks between La Esperanza’s annual artisans festival and its Holy Week, Cáceres’ final mass took place on the steps beneath La Gruta, dedicated to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. The environmentalist’s casket was surrounded by thousands of grief-stricken supporters, many of whom vowed to continue her work, and the first of the ubiquitous photographs of her joyous face were held up by the crowd.

The DESA-tied suspects were eventually convicted. While gratified that there was some closure, her family, speaking through Cáceres’ oldest daughter, Olivia, believed that the verdict represented only partial justice. The Honduran leadership, funded by the United States, should be held accountable too, if not the U.S. itself, she argued. And in a strange way, this would come to pass.

Cáceres’ Voice and the Presidency

By certifying a coup eight years before, Frank argues compellingly, the Obama administration was now stuck with and responsible for the highly corrupt President Hernandez, who presided over the world’s highest per-capita murder rate and the most dangerous country for women. For Democrats, the outcome would turn to a more direct form of fiasco, though one that was far less publicized than that other one, in Iraq. While it would do nothing like propel the presidency of Barack Obama to the shoe-throwing, single-percentage-polling levels of infamy that Iraq offered to President George W. Bush, the Honduras nightmare, as Frank suggests in her title, would nevertheless play into the embarrassing defeat of Obama’s coronated successor. Throughout the spring of 2016, while Clinton was enjoying her superdelegate-, DNC- and media-inflated lead over the newcomer and bankruptcy artist Donald J. Trump, the ghost of Cáceres joined the chorus of progressive and populist murmurings, and whispered directly into the electorate’s ears.

Stories of Clinton’s improper handling of emails and her well-paid Wall Street speeches multiplied and echoed throughout the media. Much of the criticism was overstated. Yet the most haunting voice inveighing against Clinton’s expected succession, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father—forceful and dreamlike—was that of Cáceres. In a 2014 interview that resurfaced after the assassination, Cáceres responds to the justification of Clinton’s Honduras policies in her memoir, “Hard Choices”: “We’re coming out of a coup that we can’t put behind us. We can’t reverse it. It just kept going. And after, there was the issue of the elections. The same Hillary Clinton, in her book, ‘Hard Choices,’ practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling [note the word choice] of North Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here, she, Clinton, recognized that they didn’t permit Mel Zelaya’s return to the presidency. There were going to be elections. And the international community—officials, the government, the grand majority—accepted this, even though we warned this was going to be very dangerous and that it would permit a barbarity, not only in Honduras but in the rest of the continent. And we’ve been witnesses to this.”

The voice of the murdered environmentalist gave fodder to Clinton’s opponents that lasted from just after Cáceres’ death in March until at least late summer. Headlines in such mainstream and progressive media outlets as The Nation, The Washington Post, Democracy Now! and The Guardian assailed the administration, singling Candidate Clinton out in particular, for U.S. policy in Honduras. Throughout the period when Clinton was solidifying her primary victory against the dovish democratic socialist to her left and heading into the general election, headlines asked, “Did Hillary Clinton stand by as Honduras coup ushered in era of violence?” Another read, “Hillary Clinton needs to answer for her actions in Honduras and Haiti.”

This despite the fact that she had long before handed over the State Department to another robbed Democrat, John Kerry, and the Latin America dossier had been largely given over to the proudly tough-on-crime, gaffe-master Vice President Biden. It’s astounding to read of now- presidential candidate Biden’s touting of his Central America plan alongside his touting of his plan for Colombia, the latter widely seen by commentators of the left, right and center as little more than a cocaine-multiplying boondoggle.

As the 2020 presidential election approaches, Frank’s dizzyingly detailed book should serve as a reminder that, to the ordinary voter, the political center was no longer merely a place of consensus but the site of a particular kind of consensus: where not even the world’s highest murder rate could be worse than a “socalist” who wanted to give away free health care; where archconservatives like Grover Norquist could find common ground with their center-left counterparts in a tax shelter that need not move offshore. Though the ordinary voter had rejected this “center” in 2000, 2004 and 2016, to the elite who rubbed shoulders there it was nevertheless a utopian model city to be achieved at all costs, where none of our paid Wall Street speeches would be taxed, and where—thanks to the barriers keeping ordinary voters out—the splattering blood would not reach our bespoke shoes.

truthdig.com

Beginning in the early 2000s, another plan was devised by US national security planners ensconced in their faux academia “think tanks.” Their plan was simple: overthrow anti-American elected leaders in Latin America through the courts. In effect, lawyers and judges, not generals, caudillos, or military juntas, would carry out coups by abusing constitutional provisions and laws as a clever ruse.

Under Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on the old tried and true method of promoting coups via the façade of a “popular” rebellion. After the 1973 CIA-directed coup in Chile, which saw Socialist president Salvador Allende die in a hail of bullets fired from aircraft and tanks at the La Moneda presidential palace, the CIA began to look at other avenues to overthrow presidents in the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, CIA-influenced media, including the dubious Wikipedia, have insisted Allende committed suicide with an AK-47 assault rifle presented to him by Cuban leader Fidel Castro. However, nature would later provide the evidence that Allende was assassinated. The proof came in a 300-page top secret report found in the debris of the house of a former military officer. The house had been destroyed in the 2011 Chilean earthquake. The story of Allende’s “suicide” was spread around CIA-friendly media to mask the agency’s role in yet another assassination of a foreign leader. The CIA’s media manipulation was honed during its pre-eminent role in covering up the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King. For the CIA, however, assassinations were costly in terms of the agency’s public image, so some other method of dispatching targeted leaders was in order.

A formerly CONFIDENTIAL CIA "Intelligence Memorandum," dated December 29, 1975, concluded that Latin America had to be weaned away from "Third Worldism." The conclusion was based on the votes of certain Latin American countries that had voted in favor of a United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. The countries were Brazil, Cuba, Grenada, Guyana, and Mexico. Eleven other countries in the Western Hemisphere abstained.

As the bloody coups in Chile, the Dominican Republic, and other countries showed, there had to be a simpler and less lethal way for the US to bring about undemocratic changes in governments in the hemisphere.

If the CIA were able to infiltrate a nation’s judiciary and law enforcement structures — the latter having already been thoroughly subsumed through CIA-financed “training programs” – it could bring spurious charges against targeted heads of state. This form of coup d’état would become known as “lawfare.”

The leader of the French left, Jean Luc Melenchon, recently condemned the use of lawfare against former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula, as he is popularly known, has been imprisoned since April 2018 on trumped up charges of corruption. Melenchon told the Brazilian press that “lawfare is now used in all countries to get rid of progressive leaders. This is what they did with Lula.” Melenchon added, “the judge [Sergio Moro] who condemned Lula is now a minister [minister of justice and public security] of Jair Bolsonaro, the new president of Brazil.” Lula was sentenced to 12 years in prison on politically-motivated money-laundering charges ginned up by Moro and other neo-fascists in the Brazilian judiciary. Bolsonaro, a champion of Brazil’s former military dictatorship and an admirer of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Donald Trump, has vowed to keep Lula in prison. Lula would have defeated Bolsonaro for the presidency had he been released from prison and allowed to run for political office. However, Moro and his fellow lawfare practitioners ensured that appeals to the Brazilian Supreme Court for Lula’s release were all dead-on-arrival.

Melenchon also stated “Lula has been a direct victim of accusations to destroy his work and image, built in more than 40 years of public life.” British human rights attorney Geoffrey Robertson QC echoed Melenchon in comments made to the “New Internationalist” in January 2018. Robertson cited the “extraordinarily aggressive measures” taken to imprison Lula and prevent him from running for president. Robertson cited as Lula’s enemies the judiciary, media, and “the great sinews of wealth and power in Brazil.”

Lawfare coups have been embraced by both Republican and Democratic administrations over almost two decades. The first example of a coup by semi-constitutional fiat was the February 28, 2004 forced removal from office of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. US Marines and American mercenaries escorted Aristide and his party from the presidential palace to a white plane with no other markings except for an American flag on the tail. The United States claimed Aristide voluntarily resigned his office, something that Aristide and his advisers vehemently denied. Aristide was literally tossed off the plane, along with his wife, in Bangui, Central African Republic. Through the abuse of “national emergency” provisions, the United States installed Haiti’s Supreme Court Chief Justice, Boniface Alexandre, in the presidential palace. The coup began after CIA-supported rebels and narcotics-gangs seized control of northern Haiti and marched to the capital of Port-au-Prince with the intention of ousting Aristide.

The second lawfare coup was against Honduras’s president, Manuel Zelaya. Staged on June 28, 2009, the coup was approved in advance by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as leaked cables from the US embassy in Tegucigalpa attest. Coup leader Roberto Micheletti cited the Honduran Constitution and a decision by the Supreme Court as providing legitimacy for Zelaya being marched from his home in his pajamas to a waiting plane that flew him to Costa Rica. The military junta that replaced Zelaya said that his letter of resignation had been approved by the National Assembly. Zelaya declared the letter to be a forgery.

The third major lawfare coup came in 2012. Paraguay's democratically-elected president, Fernando Lugo, was ousted in a political impeachment carried out by right-wing forces in the Paraguayan Congress and Senate, with the full support of the US-trained and equipped Paraguayan military. From Washington, Secretary Clinton moved hastily to recognize the right-wing vice president, Federico Franco, and his new right-wing government to replace the center-left government of Lugo. As with Haiti and Honduras, the Paraguayan coup was accomplished with the thin veneer of the constitution.

In 2016, it was Brazil’s turn in the lawfare arena. The impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the left-wing Workers' Party ensured that Michel Temer, her right-wing vice president, assumed the presidency. Without Rousseff in the presidential palace, her predecessor, Lula, became fair game for the right-wing.

Next on the American hit list was Venezuela. On December 6, 2015, the US-backed rightist opposition won control over the National Assembly. The rightists immediately commenced procedures to remove progressive socialist President Nicolas Maduro from power through dubious “constitutional” means. However, the plan faltered in Venezuela. In reaction, Washington applied crippling economic sanctions on the country, something that was to be repeated by the Trump administration against both Venezuela and the democratically-elected government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

Pro-democracy forces in Latin America and elsewhere no longer have to worry about sudden troop movements and tanks converging on presidential palaces, but armies of judges and lawyers armed with nothing more than constitutional provisions and criminal codes stretched to the point of incredulity.

On the night of December 2, 2017, a Honduran woman in the rural province of Olancho was protesting what she saw as a stolen election. The woman, eight months pregnant, stood in the streets in violation of a national curfew, and she screamed alongside a rebellious multitude, “Fuera JOH!” (“Out JOH!”), referring to the incumbent president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who many believe fraudulently rigged the elections in his favor to maintain power. The Honduran military and police forces had flooded the streets to enforce the curfew, and the woman was shot in her abdomen, reportedly by a soldier. She was rushed to a nearby clinic where her baby was delivered by emergency cesarean. The child was born with a gunshot wound to the leg.

The curfew and violence were sparked by a strange, contested election. On the day before Hondurans went to the polls, The Economist published evidence of what seemed to be a plan by Hernández’s National Party to commit systematic fraud. The next day, November 26, the election results came in choppy waves: first a sizable lead by Hernández’s opponent, Salvador Nasralla, and then the electronic voting system went off the air. When the system came back up, Hernández was winning. He was then proclaimed victor by a thin margin. International observers noted “strong indications of election fraud,” and a partial recount still handed the win to Hernández. Packed protests and militarized streets followed. As of December 22, human rights organizations in the country have counted more than 30 people killed by security forces, at least four of whom were under the age of 18.

After delivering the wounded baby, the doctor at the clinic sent mother and child to a hospital in Olancho for specialized care. Then, shaken by the experience, the doctor shared with a handful of peers several photographs he had taken of the patients, which he framed carefully to excise their faces. After someone uploaded the photos to Facebook, the doctor received death threats. Although he refused to speak on the record for fear for his safety, the doctor doesn’t know who threatened him. In this province, there’s a sense that danger could come from anywhere.

“I know it sounds conspiratorial,” a journalist from Olancho who followed the baby’s case told me, “but Olancho and the whole eastern fringe of the country are covered in a sort of fog, more than anything due to the drugs that move through the place.” The journalist requested anonymity, like everyone else, because of fear. The journalist’s grandmother worked on a farm in Olancho where 14 people, including religious clergy, were killed in a massacre during land reform protests in 1975. Three more family members died violently between 2012 and 2014, two of them in Olancho. And in the next two years, 19 of the journalist’s family members left the province for the United States, undocumented and desperate.

Similar stories abound. In fact, this reality permeates Honduras, although in Olancho it has a particular flavor. It’s rooted in corruption fed by the Honduran and international elite for generations. Atop this foundation, the 2017 electoral conflict rages – a pyre into which one can be born already a victim of gun violence.

Municipal office in Concordia, in the Honduran province of Olancho, on Aug. 3, 2015

Photo: Danielle Mackey

OLANCHO IS THE “Wild West” of Honduras, a nickname used even by the U.S. Embassy. It has a slate of mottos to match: “The Sovereign Republic of Olancho,” where it’s “easy to get in, tough to make it out,” and whose swaggering armed cowboys are called “olan-machos.” It has been historically dominated by three gold-rush trades that yielded fortunes for a few: cattle ranching, logging, and mining. Olancho is the birthplace of a legendary bandit, a land of families that evolved into rival clans, where residents are known to claim their nationality first as Olanchano. And in keeping with the autonomous character, Olancho is politically divided: One population center, Juticalpa, is home to the rancher and former president from the right-wing National Party, Porfirio Lobo, so Juticalpa is loyally Nationalist. The other population center, Catacamas, favors Manuel Zelaya, a logger raised there who later became the leftist president ousted in a 2009 coup. The rest of Olancho falls somewhere in between or nowhere at all. Another of the province’s mottos describes the divide: tierra de nadie, no man’s land.

The province of Olancho is larger than the entire neighboring country of El Salvador. It spans much of the eastern end of Honduras. This location has been especially unlucky since 2006, when the pressure of the American drug war rerouted most trafficking off its previous route and instead directly through Central America. Olancho, and the eastern Honduran fringe it dominates, has become a corridor: To the south is the land border with Nicaragua; to the north and east, the Caribbean, which functions as a sea border with producers in South America and consumers in the north. Drugs are forced through whether they float, drive, or fly. “The problem we live is geopolitical — there’s no doubt about that,” said Bertha Oliva, an Olancho native and human rights defender, in an interview in her Tegucigalpa office.

In Olancho, there’s a sense that danger could come from anywhere.

Olancho is gorgeous, with elevated cloud forests flush with orchids and fresh water that tumbles down majestic cliffs, spilling into lowland rainforests or emerald rolling pastures and valleys. But a sinister history lies below the surface and reveals itself only indirectly. As in the white-tipped fence posts that line acres alongside the Olancho highway: a ranch until recently owned by Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros, the man contracted by the CIA to run its planes during Iran-Contra, who later engineered the union of the Colombian and Mexican cartels in Central America. Or the unassuming stucco building in a cove off another local highway, marked by a weathered metal sign at the entrance: “El Aguacate Military Runway” — once the landing pad for covert, illegal U.S. supplies en route to the Contras in Nicaragua.

Years later, olanchanos faced new terrors — no longer an imperial counterinsurgency but the drug trade. They remember that time as a free-for-all. Drug planes used the highways as airstrips at midnight. Bulletproof vehicles circulated without license plates, and everyone else had to drive with windows rolled down so they could be easily identifiable as an unthreatening local. There were gun battles at all hours and targeted killings to eliminate people the narcos considered undesirable: gang members, transgender women, street children. And perhaps more than anything, cocaine for individual consumption was available everywhere: around the corner, in the park, at the neighborhood fruit stand. Narcos often paid their Olancho help in-kind.

Interdiction data extracted from the U.S. government’s Consolidated Counterdrug Database show that the amount of cocaine seized in Honduras tripled from 2005 to 2006, hitting 21,320 kilograms. Annual totals remained similarly high until 2009, the year of the coup, when the total skyrocketed again to 70,272 kg. Then, between 2010 and 2011, U.S. federal government agencies reported almost 250,000 kg of cocaine intercepted in Honduras.

Tegucigalpa, aided by Washington, began a crackdown that was visible to olanchanos by 2011. Special forces police, in units known as Cobras and Tigres, accompanied by the military and public prosecutors office, raided mansions, hotels, construction firms, meat-packing plants, mayoral offices, outlet stores, mineral mines, and private zoos throughout Olancho in the next few years. The Cobras police remained to occupy some areas. Residents say they frequently saw U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents accompanying raids. U.S. agencies registered a drop in intercepted kilograms in 2012 – to just over 68,000 kg – and by 2014, the amount had fallen to about 30,000 kg. In response to the repression, the narcos went underground.

But the narcos who ran wild in Olancho weren’t in charge of the game. The chessboard masters are the elite. In January 2015, the leader of one of Olancho’s own cartels, the Cachiros, was among those caught and extradited to face trial in the Southern District of New York. Once on the stand, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga pointed the DEA to Fabio Lobo, the son of the Olancho cattleman and former president. Fabio was later arrested in Haiti, and his personal cadre of police, who ensured safe passage for the drugs, was arrested in Honduras. Then Hernández’s brother was called to Washington to answer for his apparent involvement with a major trafficker. That same month in a different case, when a Mexican trafficker-turned-DEA informant was asked on the stand who offered to help him move drugs through Honduras, he named Hernández’s current minister of security, Julian Pacheco, a longtime ally of the U.S. military and graduate of the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. The informant also said it was Lobo’s son who had introduced him to Pacheco.

Olanchanos aren’t fooled: They know the leaders of the drug game are the same corrupt networks. The streets may be calmer now, but they still rule, and they make their presence known.

Olanchanos recognize the traces of the drug networks because they’re “out of place,” fuera de lugar. For instance: the imported German beers in the dilapidated refrigerators of corner stores across Catacamas, catering to expensive tastes not from around there. The mayor’s office in Concordia, built like a castle, against which lean the homes of residents, clay block shacks. Sightings of limousines that appear suddenly and meander dirt roads. Elegiac poetry books, sold in gas stations around Juticalpa, honoring former Mayor Ramón Sarmiento, arrested for illegal weapons possession.

Another trace of their presence is large enough to be seen from space.

Narcodeforestation in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, in the Honduran province of Olancho, on Aug. 2, 2015

Photo: Narcodeforestation scientist tea

IN THE SUMMER of 2015, a group of U.S. scientists met in a classroom at the University of Arizona. They have been studying a trend they call narco-deforestation: trees razed because of the drug trade. Suddenly, one scientist gasped and swiveled his computer screen so the rest could see. A Honduran colleague had uploaded to Facebook a satellite image of the middle of a preserved rainforest that traverses Olancho, the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. The image was a cemetery of hacked trees. The extent of the carnage was almost certainly too big and had happened too fast to be funded by anything other than drugs.

Mark Bonta, a geographer at Penn State Altoona, is one of the scientists and earlier that summer, he was in a truck jostling along a dirt path into the heart of the reserve. Three other people rode with him: Oscar, a teacher and lawyer from Olancho, and José, a farmer-cum-environmentalist in Olancho. I sat beside José. For a while, the lowland rainforest appeared just as a 1.3 million-acre plot of federally protected land ought to: The song of tropical birds buoyed off leafy, wet, dense green. But then we rolled into blight. Recently felled trees smoldered, a gray graveyard extending to the horizon. This is what’s called the “colonization front,” the outer edge of a patch of deforestation.

In the age of the American drug war, Olancho’s traditional trades — logging, cattle-ranching, mining — double as vehicles for laundering money and moving drugs. They all lead to deforestation. The logging-to-cattle cycle is particularly useful: Use drug profits to chop trees, grow grass, buy cows, and every step of the process is like a magic wand that transforms bad money into good — and yields a return on the investment. When it’s time to physically move drugs out of the region, send a semi-truck full of those products across the border. Cocaine has been found in many exported Honduran products, including logs, cattle, tomato paste, and coconuts.

That day, as we drove on, we passed pastures of long-ago deforested land, now grassy hills flecked with shining cattle. The scene wouldn’t look out of place in Kentucky, but this is a rainforest preserve.

We took a pitstop when the dirt path hit a patch of houses. A man there told us he worked providing transport, driving his truck up and down the road. He said that the “secreto a voces,” the spoken secret, is that the cattle farms around here are mostly owned by narcos. He said that just across the Coco River that divides Honduras from Nicaragua, the farthest point his work takes him, there are large ranches owned by Colombian traffickers. We heard similar rumors that day about multiple other regions of the country: Narco operations, sometimes in collaboration with international outfits and sometimes under homegrown capos, are to blame for the broken trees.

In fact, satellite images produced by the scientists show active deforestation of lowland rainforest in five Honduran national parks, including the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, a growing colonization front that spans the country like a horizontal belt. Not all this deforestation is narco-related. After all, logging and ranching are historic trades in the region. The drug connection is a scientific hypothesis based on satellite images of unusually rapid land-use change, located in well-known trafficking routes, triangulated with the testimonies of people on the ground and reports from organizations that follow the tides of corruption.

In the age of the American drug war, Olancho’s traditional trades — logging, cattle-ranching, mining — double as vehicles for laundering money and moving drugs.

We piled back into the truck, and along the way we offer rides to various local residents we found walking along the edge of the road. One passenger told us his nephew, a mechanic, took a job with a company in the Río Sico area of the Biosphere Reserve, in La Mosquitia territory. (La Mosquitia is northeast of Olancho, the site of an infamous DEA-involved massacre.) The man said his nephew arrived to discover his new employer was a mineral mine owned by Colombian narcos. The nephew is only occasionally allowed to return home to bring his earnings to his family, the passenger said.

He is one of many people unwittingly recruited into the service of traffickers, said Migdonia Ayestas, the coordinator of a project that collects and analyzes data on violence, based at the National Autonomous University of Honduras or UNAH. It’s common to be hired for illicit duties masked as a normal profession, said Ayestas, and hard to extricate yourself from the situation: As soon as you know it’s a narco operation, you know too much. Leaving the job means going rogue. Drug money so thoroughly permeates everything that when Ayestas’s project was awarded a grant from the government of Spain to investigate campaign finances in 2014, the university had to give the money back, she said in an interview in her campus office. “We couldn’t find anyone willing to take the job. People say all the time, ‘Where did that political campaign come up with so much money?’ We wanted a scientific answer to that question,” she said. “We couldn’t because no one dared do it.”

Edmundo Orellana, who has served as the Honduran public prosecutor, the minister of defense, and delegate to the United Nations, has said that the Honduran economy runs on money laundering. In a phone interview, he said he began to notice legitimate industry used to launder illicit funds in the 1990s when he was public prosecutor. Moguls and politicians were “animated by how easy it was to make money, but also by the security that the justice system wasn’t going to catch up with them.” And then came the drug war. “Honduras’s current situation, in which it has been a victim of drug trafficking and organized crime in general, is the fault of the United States,” he said, continuing that it is U.S. strategy that pushed the drug war into Central America. “What the U.S. is doing from its perspective is good, it’s right. But from Hondurans’ perspective, the problem has become ours.”

Orellana also points to high-level local control of the drug trade. To illustrate, he uses the case of the Cachiros cartel. “When someone at the U.S. Department of Justice called someone in the Honduran government [in 2015] to request the capture and extradition of the Cachiros,” Orellana said, the U.S. mentioned a particular concern: The cartel owned a construction company that was among the Honduran government’s favored contractors for paving highways.

Hernández, who has held office since 2014, is uncomfortably close to drug trafficking — in terms of the sheer volume that has occurred on his watch and because of the alleged narcos among his own people. Other criticisms include his attempts to bring all branches of the government under his control, from the Supreme Court to the public prosecutor, to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and the military police force. Then there’s the fact that Honduras has become, under him, the deadliest place in the world for environmentalists. That reality is especially evident in the unsolved murder of Berta Cáceres, but is widespread beyond her case.

When environmentalists protect natural resources, they threaten the profit of those who’ve monopolized land and water — some of whom are not only politically powerful but are also documented traffickers. An example is the late Miguel Facussé, who was among the wealthiest businesspeople in Central America. His company Dinant was backed in the past by the U.N. and now by the World Bank. Facussé was suspected of drug trafficking by the U.S. government, and Dinant is still the owner of thousands of acres of palm oil plantations on disputed land. While defending that land, more than 100 farm workers have been killed by Facussé’s private security forces working in concert with the Honduran military, which illustrates another piece of the puzzle. When environmentalists resist such characters, they often face retaliation from state security forces acting at the landowners’ behest, as happened with Cáceres. The Honduran police and military have been trained by the U.S., Israel, and Colombia, funded by millions of U.S. dollars annually.

Honduran national police stand guard next to supporters of opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla as they hold a protest march on December 3, 2017 in Tegucigalpa, despite the state of emergency and a 10-day curfew imposed by the government to stop violent demonstrations triggered by claims of presidential election fraud.

Photo: Johan Oordonez/AFP/Getty Images

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT has always known about the inbred kleptocracy of Honduras. One of the more quirky examples of such knowledge was a State Department cable written in Tegucigalpa about U.S. fast food franchises in Honduras. The cable’s author remarked that the same handful of families owns the rights to brands like McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Pepsi, and benefits from “dubious” tax breaks awarded them by a friendly Congress with seemingly no legal explanation, except the flimsy argument that gringo chains bring tourism. (Has a gringo ever traveled to Tegucigalpa to eat a Big Mac?) Another cable, written after Mel Zelaya was elected president, noted that Zelaya’s father-in-law is a prominent lawyer who, at the time, counted among his clients some people who are nominally Zelaya’s political enemies, prominent National Party members. One of the clients was Facussé, the palm baron. The cable also noted that Zelaya’s father owned the Olancho farm that was the site of the 1975 massacre of land reform advocates.

Yet successive U.S. administrations have chosen to cultivate that oligarchy, especially the faction from the political right. Enter President Juan Orlando Hernández, described in a State Department cable as someone who has “consistently supported U.S. interests.” Hernández earned a master’s degree in public administration at the State University of New York at Albany and has a brother who had received extensive care at U.S. army hospitals after being injured in a military parachuting accident.

Now Hernández and his National Party are roundly and globally scrutinized for mounting evidence of electoral fraud. Yet two days after the election, the U.S. State Department certified Honduras as a country that fights corruption and respects human rights and thus, can receive millions of dollars in U.S. aid. On December 2, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa announced it was “pleased” with the ballot recount, saying it “maximizes citizen participation and transparency.” Three days later, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy led a small chorus of congressional rebuttal: “Those of us who care about Central America have watched the election for Honduras’ next president with increasing alarm,” he wrote, citing “a process so lacking in transparency” with “too much suspicion of fraud.” Of the U.S. Embassy’s “troubling” role in the crisis, the senator wrote, “I hope it is not a new standard.”

In fact, it appears to be an old standard, if not a tradition.

On December 17, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal officially crowned Hernández president-elect. That night, the delegation of election observers from the Organization of American States recommended the results be scrapped and that a new election be held. Despite increasing calls from U.S. senators to support the OAS verdict, on December 20 a senior State Department official said that unless presented with additional evidence of fraud, the U.S. government has “not seen anything that alters the final result.” Two days later, the State Department sealed Honduras’ fate, congratulating President Hernández on his victory, prescribing a “robust national dialogue” to “heal the political divide,” and advising those who claim fraud to recur to Honduran law. The Department ended its statement by calling upon Hondurans to refrain from violence.

theintercept.com

Then, there was the case of Theodore Roosevelt severing Panama from Colombia in 1903 for the purpose of building the Panama Canal. And another case in 1908 when the U.S. government cooperated in the ouster of Venezuelan President Juan Vicente Gómez. And, in 1909, when William Taft removed Nicaragua’s José Santos Zelaya because he insisted that U.S. companies in Nicaragua honor their agreements and tried to make his country less dependent on the U.S. by borrowing from European, not American, banks.

In the modern era, Dwight Eisenhower had the CIA overthrow Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and – before leaving office – Eisenhower started the covert action aimed at removing Fidel Castro as Cuba’s leader, a process continued under John Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs invasion and beyond. Then, there was the 1964 coup in Brazil to overthrow Joao Goulart, and the political action to encourage the removal of Guyana’s Chedi Jagan undertaken the same year.

In 1971, Richard Nixon destabilized Chile, encouraging a bloody coup against Salvador Allende. Ronald Reagan sponsored a covert war to oust Nicaragua’s Sandinista government while also throwing U.S. military support behind various brutal and repressive regimes in Central America. In 1989, George H.W. Bush destroyed civilian neighborhoods in Panama City in an invasion to arrest Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega.

And impoverished Haiti periodically showed up on Washington’s radar. With the backing of the Bush-41 and Bush-43 administrations, coup plotters removed Haiti’s popular leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, twice. George W. Bush also supported a short-lived coup in 2002 to oust Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. And this is only a partial list of U.S. interventions in its “backyard.”

So, it is important to evaluate Obama’s performance on his promise to change this tragic and shameful history. Yet, it didn’t take long to see that nothing really had changed. It appears that the Obama administration adopted an eight-year-long strategy of rolling back what has been called the Pink Tide of progressive or socialist leaders who dared challenged Washington’s neoliberal economic model for the hemisphere.

The Obama administration favored a more subtle approach to regime change than some predecessors. Unlike the military coups sponsored by earlier administrations, Obama’s coups didn’t require tanks in the streets. Rather, they were disguised as domestic political clashes, starting with civil unrest and media accusations of abuses by the targeted leader, followed by legislatures or courts using impeachment or other “constitutional” means to effect the regime change. These were silent or “soft” coups carried out in democratic disguise.

An early example came on June 28, 2009, when Honduras’ democratically elected and liberal President Manuel Zelaya was accused of plotting a constitutional amendment that would permit more than one term for a president. At the instructions of his political opponents on the Supreme Court, the military seized him at gunpoint and whisked him away in a plane that refueled at a U.S. military base.

That would have been a good moment for Obama to show that he meant business, that he placed democracy and social progress at the center of his regional agenda. Instead, he allowed his State Department to send signals that the U.S. was privately delighted with Zelaya’s ouster.

After the coup, the American ambassador was not recalled; the U.S. refused to join the demand of the United Nation’s General Assembly and the Organization of American States (OAS) for the return of the elected president; and the word “coup” was banned from the State Department’s lexicon. 

Although the OAS refused to recognize the new coup president, the State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton went in the opposite direction, recognizing the coup government as the winner of controversial new elections. U.S. military support increased, too.

Yet, despite the Obama administration’s linguistic gymnastics in not publicly labeling Zelaya’s removal at gunpoint a coup, Obama’s White House knew that it was a coup. By July 24, 2009, less than a month after the coup, the White House was in receipt of a cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Honduras informing President Obama of the facts.

In an almost comical lack of subtlety that was clearly never meant to be public, the cable is called “Open and Shut: the Case of the Honduran Coup.” In it, the embassy reported, “There is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup.” 

The conclusion could not be clearer. But just in case there were any remaining doubt, the cable added that “none of the… arguments [of the coup defenders] has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution.”

In the most generous interpretation of Obama’s action or inaction, you could say he permitted the coup to succeed by maintaining his silence. More likely, however, his administration was a supportive participant, holding a dialogue with the Honduran military up to the day of the coup and by recognizing the coup government as legitimate soon afterwards. Zelaya has always insisted that “the coup came from the north from the U.S.”

In the heat of the coup, the plane that was carrying the kidnapped president landed at the U.S. military base of Palmerola for 15 to 20 minutes while it refueled. The U.S. chose not to intervene. 

In her memoir, Hard Choices, Clinton admitted that she aided the new leadership by short-circuiting any efforts to restore Zelaya to power. “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] 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,” she wrote.

Ecuador in the Crosshairs

After the coup against Zelaya, Ecuador’s popularly elected president, Rafael Correa, said, “We have intelligence reports that say that after Zelaya, I’m next.” He may have been right. The year after the Honduran coup, there was an attempted coup against Correa. Although the action failed, Latin American expert Mark Weisbrot said it was clearly an attempted coup to overthrow Correa’s government.

Correa had renegotiated oil contracts and demanded a larger share of the big oil companies’ revenue for the people of Ecuador. He also opposed a free trade agreement with the U.S. and closed the U.S. military base in Ecuador. And, he joined Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and successfully defaulted on over $3 billion of foreign debt that was illegitimately contracted by Ecuadorian leaders who Correa said were CIA-supported dictators.

The U.S. had started action against Correa during George W. Bush’s presidency. An October 2005 embassy cable sent by U.S. Ambassador Linda Jewell outlined action for “desirable political and economic change in Ecuador.” In 2006, she cabled that a Correa election would “derail” U.S. hopes as the embassy expects Correa to join Chavez and other nationalist South American leaders. In the same cable [06QUITO2150], Jewell said that the U.S. has “actively discouraged potential alliances” with Correa. She admitted [06QUITO2991] to “working in concert with other Ecuadorians and groups who share our vision.”

During the Obama years, the U.S. would continue to intervene in Ecuador. In March 2009, Ecuador expelled Mark Sullivan, an American official who was accused of being the CIA station chief in Quito and of playing a role in the suspension of U.S. assistance to a special investigative police unit when Ecuador named a new chief of whom the U.S. didn’t approve.

On Oct. 30, 2010, the attempted coup that Correa had been expecting came. The coup leader was a graduate of the School of the Americas. A government-appointed commission found that “foreign actors” had participated. One of members of the commission announced his belief that the U.S. State Department and the CIA had been involved in the failed attempt to remove Correa from power.

Haiti, Again

In 2010, Obama failed another test when Washington bankrolled the Haitian elections at the cost of $14 million, a price tag that presumably gave America significant say. Yet, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) banned 14 parties from running, including Fanmi Lavalas, the party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had twice been removed in U.S.-backed coups. 

Haiti’s largest and most popular party, Fanmi Lavalas has won every election that it has been allowed to participate in. But in this U.S.-sponsored election, Fanmi Lavalas was not allowed to compete. In other words, the Obama administration financed the election that specifically excluded the party the people wanted to elect.

The next indicator of Obama’s failing grade came in Paraguay, where in June 2012, Fernando Lugo, the democratically elected leader of Paraguay was removed in a coup. The right-wing opposition opportunistically capitalized on a skirmish over disputed land that left at least 11 people dead to unfairly blame the deaths on President Lugo. It then impeached him after giving him only 24 hours to prepare his defense and only two hours to deliver it.

The Latin American organizations Unasur and Mercosur suspended the new Paraguayan government, but the U.S. government spent the day of the coup negotiating a new military base in Paraguay. As with Honduras, U.S. officials publicly avoided using the word “coup.”

Yet, as early as 2009, a U.S. embassy cable recognized that Lugo’s political opposition has as its goal to “Capitalize on any Lugo missteps” and to “impeach Lugo and assure their own political supremacy.” The cable noted that to achieve this goal, the opposition was willing to “legally” impeach Lugo “even if on spurious grounds,” a so-called “soft coup.”

Focus on Venezuela

The next year, 2013, the focus moved to Venezuela in the wake of Hugo Chavez’s death from cancer. Against the wishes of the United States, Hugo Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, won the right to continue the Bolivarian Revolution by winning the next national election. The U.S. was the only country in the world to refuse to recognize the election results, though 150 electoral monitors from around the world observed Venezuela’s election, including delegations from the Union of South American Nations and the Carter Center.

The Obama administration’s pressure on Venezuela’s government has been unrelenting. American money – totaling at least $90 million since 2000 – has been pumped into Venezuela to fund groups who oppose the Chavezista movement with the U.S.-backed opposition attempting another coup in 2015, which Maduro blamed on the U.S. government.

Though mocked by the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. news media, the accusation was not an empty one. Venezuelan officials produced a significant volume of evidence that the events constituted a failed coup that had U.S. support, including a recording of a communique that was to be issued after the Maduro government was removed from power. Maduro’s government has also shown confessions by military officials. And, there was a recorded phone conversation between opposition leaders discussing the coup and involving Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma, who is known to have made phone calls to a U.S. phone number.

Lucas Koerner of Venezuelanalysis.com added that the aircraft to be used as part of the failed coup has links to the notorious American security firm Academi (formerly Blackwater). And it has been reported that a number of the coup leaders obtained U.S. visas from the American embassy to facilitate escape should the coup fail.

And, just this past May, President Maduro declared a state of emergency, accusing the U.S. of once again conspiring with right-wing groups in Venezuela to overthrow his government. Maduro said that “Washington is activating measures at the request of Venezuela’s fascist right.”

The Ebbing Pink Tide

The cumulative effect of all this pressure on progressive leaders in Latin America has been a noticeable ebbing of the Pink Tide movement, which had to its credit a significant improvement in the living standards of the region’s poorest citizens, although many of those gains are now being reversed. 

Perhaps the sharpest blow to Latin America’s attempts to reduce poverty and structure economies more for the benefit of average people, not the wealthy, came just this year in Brazil when another “soft coup” was organized to remove Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from office and replace her with a right-wing regime.

Again the evidence of a coup was obvious with opposition parties seizing on a budgetary dispute to overturn the voters’ will in South America’s largest country and biggest economy. The evidence included the publication of a transcript of the call between Romero Jucá, who was a senator at the time of the call, and former oil executive Sergio Machado, discussing “a national pact” to remove Rousseff and install Michel Temer as president. Jucá revealed that not only opposition politicians but members of the military and Supreme Court were in on the conspiracy.

Regarding the military’s role, Jucá says, “I am talking to the generals, the military commanders. They are fine with this, they said they will guarantee it.” And, as for the Supreme Court, Jucá admitted that he “spoke with and secured the involvement of numerous justices on Brazil’s Supreme Court,” according to journalist Glenn Greenwald who is based in Brazil. Jucá further boasted that “there are only a small number” of Supreme Court justices that he had not spoken to. (Jucá has since become planning minister in Temer’s new government.)

So confident was Michel Temer that he had U.S. support for his coup that he was comfortable to openly boast about it in New York in front of an audience of business and foreign policy leaders in September. Temer confirmed to his American audience that Rousseff was removed from power because she refused to implement a pro-business economic plan, which featured cuts to health, education and welfare spending as well as increased emphasis on privatization and deregulation.

Temer said, “many months ago, while I was still vice president, we released a document named ‘A Bridge to the Future’ because we knew it would be impossible for the [Rousseff] government to continue on that course. We suggested that the government should adopt the theses presented in that document called ‘A Bridge to the Future.’ But, as that did not work out, the plan wasn’t adopted and a process was established which culminated with me being installed as president of the republic.”

As Inacio Vieira reported for The Intercept, “Temer’s sales pitch was chock full of standard neoliberal euphemisms and buzzwords, including the ‘universalization of the Brazilian market,’ ‘reestablishing trust,’ ‘extraordinary political stability,’ public-private partnerships, and the implementation of ‘fundamental reforms’ in areas like labor law, social security and public spending.”

And if there was any remaining doubt about the coup government’s motivation – ostensibly its indignation at Rousseff’s fiscal maneuver – there is the fact that one of the coup government’s first acts of legislation was to explicitly legalize the very budgetary act that they had impeached Rousseff for two days earlier.

American Satisfaction

While direct American participation in the Brazilian coup has not been established, Obama’s satisfaction with the coup was clear from his silence over the reversal of one more democratic result, occurring in the most important economic country in Latin America.

Considering how his administration denounces supposedly undemocratic developments in, say, Russia, Obama’s unwillingness to protest another severe blow to democracy in the Western Hemisphere suggests a happiness with the imposition of a new neo-liberal economic agenda in Brazil.

That is also the conclusion of many analysts close to the Brazilian scene. “There is no doubt that the biggest players in this coup attempt – people like former presidential candidates José Serra and Aécio Neves – are U.S. government allies,” according to Latin American expert Mark Weisbrot.

And Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Brazil is awash infinancing from American sources, including “CIA-related organizations.”

The day after the impeachment vote, Sen. Aloysio Nunes, a significant player in the coup government, began a three-day visit to Washington. Nunes scheduled meetings with, among others, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker and Ben Cardin, as well as with Undersecretary of State and former Ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon.

Though Nunes denies it, there were reports that his trip to Washington was ordered by Michel Temer. The willingness to go ahead with the planned meetings with Nunes right after the impeachment vote demonstrated, once again, at least tacit approval on the part of Washington. If the U.S. government wanted to send a message of disapproval, the trip could have been canceled.

The cumulative impact of Obama’s presidency on Latin America has been the steady rollback of the Pink Tide as socially progressive governments around the hemisphere were either removed via “soft coups” or placed under enormous economic pressure, reversing many of the social gains that occurred in the previous decade.

Ironically, progressive Latin American governments made greater strides when Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, was in office because his administration was focused more on the Middle East and the “war on terror.”

So, Obama’s presidency represented less a new page in the history of U.S. relations toward its Latin neighbors than a repeat of old chapters in which the U.S. government teamed up with local oligarchs and right-wing ideologues to create an economic climate favorable to outside investors and the traditional local elites.

Obama’s approach may have been more subtle than that of earlier U.S. presidents – using “soft coups” rather than deploying tanks in the streets – but the effect has been much the same, imposing U.S. economic and political domination over the region and casting aside democratic governments that dared put their people’s interests first.

consortiumnews.com

Israel’s support for fascism in Latin America actually began during the Jimmy Carter presidency. After Carter embargoed U.S. weapons exports to Nicaragua’s brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza, Israel stepped in to fill the void.

Today, Obama has permitted Israel and Israel’s agents of influence in his own administration, to use all the means at their disposal to undermine progressive governments in Latin America. After the death of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, a bitter critic of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, the subversive activities of Israeli and American operatives, operating under George Soros-linked non-governmental organization (NGO) cover, have increased across the region.

Although Obama, unlike Reagan, does not have congressional bans like the Boland Amendment, to stymie efforts to overthrow progressive Latin American leaders, he does have a public perception that he, as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, is committed to peace. Rather than sacrifice his public persona with bloody moves to overthrow Latin American governments, Obama has chosen stealthily to work through Israel and its sayanim foreign foot soldiers to return Latin America to the status quo ante of a series of dictatorships that protect the wealthy and subjugate the poor and working class.

Latin America believed it was beginning to witness long sought justice when a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 and sentenced the 86-year old former general to 80 years in prison. Rios Montt, a convert to the Pentecostal Church of the Word (Iglesia el Verbo), which preaches dogma that is in lockstep with Zionist Judaism, was found guilty of massacring hundreds of thousands of Mayan Ixil natives and other opponents of Guatemala’s military rulers. Rios Montt’s genocide could not have been possible without the military and intelligence support given his regime by Israel, with the normal «wink and a nod» from Washington. Israel had long been active in Guatemala helping the regime to commit genocide against native Guatemalans. The Israeli government always felt at ease in dealing with right-wing fascist Guatemalan leaders, including presidents Rios Montt and Kjell Laugerud Garcia, both graduates of the genocide-training School of the Americas. The hopes of Guatemalans and other Latin Americans suppressed by military dictators propped up by Israel and the United States were dashed when Guatemala’s highest court struck down Rios Montt’s conviction. The conviction was opposed by Guatemala’s ruling elite of military brass and corporate chieftains, most of whom have strong ties to the Jewish state.

Competing trade blocs

One of Israel’s most trusted allies, Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper, journeyed to Lima, Peru during one of his worst political scandals at home, to push for a corporate dream trade bloc – the Pacific Alliance – bringing together Canada, Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico – to complete against Hugo Chavez’s American- and Canadian-free Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the associated PetroCaribe oil trading bloc. Venezuela is the newest member of the powerful trade bloc Mercosur (Southern Common Market), long dominated by Argentina and Brazil. Israel’s sayanim, long dominant in Chilean, Peruvian, and Colombian business conglomerates and media, are proclaiming the corporation-friendly Pacific Alliance is the wave of the future and that ALBA, Mercosur, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) are moribund and destined for the garbage can of alphabet soup organizations.

Meanwhile, the Israeli-influenced U.S. State Department and its U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) CIA adjunct have turned up the heat on progressive governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador. Bolivian President Evo Morales, said after banning USAID activities in his country that the organization allocated «no more than 10 to 15 percent» of its Bolivian funds for economic improvement. The remainder of the funds were used to engage in anti-government intelligence activities and promoting the political careers of anti-Morales and pro-U.S. and Israel politicians and political parties.

The first Argentine pope, Francis I, formerly the archbishop of Buenos Aires, has resulted in Israel’s increasing its budget to bring Latin American Roman Catholic priests to Israel for ideological indoctrination by rabbis. Francis’s statements criticizing «savage capitalism» have not sat well in the halls of power in Jerusalem or New York and London.

Targets Honduras and Venezuela

After its involvement, along with the CIA and the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in the 2009 ouster in a military coup of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, Israel’s intelligence service is organizing its agents of influence to ensure that Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, is not successful in her presidential bid in November.

Israel’s propaganda machine and sayanim agents in the U.S. media were operating at full strength after the Honduran coup. After his forced exile, Zelaya covertly returned to Honduras with the help of loyal elements in the Honduran military. Zelaya was subsequently besieged by Honduran police and military forces inside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. The ruling Honduran junta sporadically cut off electricity, water, and food supplies to the embassy, a violation of international law on the inviolability of diplomatic missions.

The strongly pro-Israeli Miami Herald reported on a telephone interview it had with Zelaya and reported that the Honduran leader said he was being subjected to "high-frequency radiation" from Israeli mercenaries who were supporting the Honduran junta. The paper also reported that Zelaya said the Israelis were using "mind-altering" gas and radiation. In actuality, that is not what Zelaya stated in his phone conversation on September 24 with Venezuela’s President Chavez, who was attending the UN General Assembly session in New York. Chavez said he spoke to Zelaya by phone and the Honduran leader told him a piece of equipment on the rooftop of a neighboring home had been recovered by his supporters and brought into the embassy. When Zelaya checked the gear’s serial number on the Internet, it turned out the equipment was a cell phone jamming device manufactured in Israel. 

What Zelaya stated to Chavez and presumably to the Miami Herald is that the junta and its Israeli private security company advisers were jamming the cell phones of those holed up inside the embassy. Zelaya never spoke of radiation death rays but that is the impression the Herald gave and it was quickly picked up by various neo-con and Zionist-controlled media outlets. Zelaya was called an «anti-Semitic lunatic» by the sayanim media chorus in the United States and Latin America that included The New York Times and The Washington Post editorial boards. The U.S. State Department and its Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Beach Jacobson has as her primary mission the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his replacement with the «Holocaust grandchild» Henrique Capriles Radonski and the prevention of Zelaya de Castro from being elected President of Honduras.

Israel’s Venezuelan interlocutors, active mainly in Capriles’s Radonski’s right-wing Justice First Movement, are trying to delegitimize Maduro’s government by claiming the April 14 election was rigged. No credible international election monitors have agreed with the election rigging charges. Chavez always maintained that Venezuela’s opposition was financed by Israel. In fact, the American Jewish Committee, based in New York, and its hemispheric sub-set, the Latin American Jewish Committee, have provided much of the propaganda ammunition over the years targeting Chavez and Maduro… One of Israel’s chief agents of influence in Venezuela is opposition politician Antonio Ledezma. George Soros’s non-governmental organizations have weighed in by supporting calls for international support for the Venezuelan opposition, especially from the European Union where Soros’s influence is often suffocating.

Hollywood, dominated by Zionists, is preparing to release a film titled «World War Z» about a plague sweeping the planet which portrays zombie-afflicted Arabs piling over the «separation wall» into Israel. It is clear that what the world faces is not a plague of «zombies» but a scourge wrought by «Zionists». The real «World War Z (Zionists) is now being waged in Latin America but this war will not soon be coming to a theater near you.

The elections in Honduras are scheduled for the last Sunday of November, 2013. The left-centrist Libertad y Refundación – Libre was the first of the political parties in Honduras to announce who would represent it in the upcoming pole. Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of former president of Honduras M. Zelaya, removed from his post in a coup engineered by the CIA, the US Defense Intelligence Department, and the local rightists, took the key role in resisting the creeping US occupation of the country. The resistance is completely peaceful: Xiomara Zelaya counts on an honest competition and offers a healthy reformist program. The populists in Honduras are determined to retake power and to put into practice their plan for a socialist transformation in the interests of the majority.  

Speaking to supporters on July 1, Xiomara Zelaya stated clearly that her party's goal would be to break the existing ruthless and oppressive system and that the left would not bow to any force or tolerate violence against them. She stressed that resistance is turning global as peoples across the world fight against lawlessness, militarisms, and coups, and, therefore, Hondurans are not lonely in their current struggle. Explaining why she believes that regime change is necessary in Honduras, Xiomara Zelaya slammed the government of P. Lobo for the unprecedented rise of politically motivated violence, poverty, and famine. Problems in the country multiply, with no steps to address them in sight. The ruling National Party staunchly upholds the neoliberal doctrine, helps oligarchic groups build stronger positions within the state machinery, and puts obstacles in the way of the socially oriented reforms launched by M. Zelaya. Xiomara Zelaya blamed on the rightist parties backed by the US the growing underdevelopment of Honduras, the miserable living standards endured by the majority of its population, and and the sellout of the country's national riches. 

Formulating the agenda of the Libre party, Xiomara Zelaya cited the program espoused by her husband, which includes convening a constitutional assembly, scrapping the neoliberal economic model, condemning as illegitimate the host of legislative acts passed by the new parliament of Honduras to feed the natural resources of the country to international corporations, departing from militarist methods in the struggle against drug cartels, and reconnecting to ALBA and Latin America's populist regimes. Xiomara Zelaya and her flock favor Latin American integration and pledge to stay immune to Washington's invasive whip and carrot policies. It is already obvious that, if Xiomara Zelaya wins the electoral race, the US anti-populist achievements in Honduras will be completely reversed. Washington is fully aware of the possibility and takes measures accordingly, with priority being given to scenarios involving the use of force. 

The putchists started to selectively kill off the supporters of M. Zelaya in Honduras immediately following his ouster, but since the time political terror in Honduras has reached sweeping proportions. According to Xiomara Zelaya, over 86 deaths from violence per 100,000 citizens – four times the Latin American average – were reported in Honduras in 2011. Slightly under 13,000 cases of the type – 20 deaths daily – occurred under the National Party's rule. Journalism in Honduras seems to be linked to top occupational hazards, considering that the death toll among the media people has climbed to 24. The conflict over land in the Bajo Aguan district already cost the lives of 50 activists who demanded that farmlands become available to peasants, with no probes whatsoever opened in this connection. The country being run by putschists is in decline, with its administrative system stalling, and the result is a tide of crime and widespread human rights violations. The situation deteriorated visibly this year as terror is at full swing and it is obvious that a bloody plan to wipe out the resistance movement in Honduras is materializing. 

Major land owners illicitly maintain private armies which they unleash against the farmers whose estates have been seized. For example, Miguel Facussé, a producer of biodiesel exported to the US, is known to practice this type of terror. It is no secret to the US embassy in Honduras that Facussé supplies Columbian cocaine to the US East Coast, and the US DEA has more than enough evidence implicating the tycoon, but Facussé sponsored the anti-Zelaya plot and sent his henchmen to help do the job, and can feel safe so far.

The US embassy pulls the strings of practically the entire state apparatus in Honduras. It enjoys unlimited influence over the country's government, parliament, army, law-enforcement agencies, and media. The ruling elite in Honduras and its US patrons coexist in a near-perfect harmony, and have no difficulty reaching compromise when differences do arise as common opposition to populists far outweighs all other regards. 

For the most part, the US embassy staff responsible for the operation which culminated in the deportation of M. Zelaya no longer works in Honduras. Shifting people from place to place after two or three years of service makes it possible to avoid security breaches, as over the short periods of time they do not make it to fraternalize with the corrupt environment in their private interests. Lisa Kubiske, an officer with a career steadily combining employment at the US Department of State and in the CIA currently represents the US in Honduras. For a while, her interests revolved around China as she spied in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and later she switched to Latin America. Prior to landing the job in Honduras, she used to be the US embassy counselor in Brazil, handling the Dilma Rousseff problem. In Tegucigalpa, Kubiske will similarly be watching over a female politician, this time – Xiomara Zelaya who, therefore, has to duel with an experienced opponent. 

Matthias Mitman, player number two in the US team, formerly headed the economic section of the US embassy in Moscow. One of his earlier assignments was that of an embassy science department counselor, which implies technological espionage. Mitman's record abounds with impressive twists: he was a deputy political counselor at the US embassy in Athens (an adviser to a CIA resident, in other words), then — a senior economic adviser in Baghdad. Later on, Mitman dealt with East Europe as a special assistant to the US ambassador, an assistant to the US State Secretary for non-proliferation, and a US envoy to the Global Partnership team. Someone with the above record could realistically expect to nab a serious post in the top echelon of the US Department of State or the CIA, and Mitman's sitting in the unattractive Tegucigalpa gives a good idea of how high, as of today, the task of defeating populists in Honduras ranks on the list of the US priorities. 

The US Department of State, the CIA, and the US Defense Intelligence Department are not the only agencies diverting top-level human resources to Honduras. USAID and the Peace Corps are also there, and vast employment opportunities are open for contractors with combat experience or a record of service in the special forces, Columbian warriors, and former officers from Pinochet's army. Dogs of war are currently gathering across Latin America to beat the recovering populists in Honduras. 

No doubt, the objective pursued by the US embassy in Honduras is to make sure that Xiomara Zelaya will not be on the list of candidates when the presidential race in the country evolves into the decisive phase.

Zelaya was wearing his trademark white cowboy hat, which has become a kind of a symbol already like a red beret worn by Hugo Chavez. The meeting with his supporters at the airport marked a new turn in Zelaya`s political career.

President Zelaya was arrested and ousted from Honduras following a coup that toppled him in June 2009. The coup was plotted at the US air base of Palmerola. And nobody ever had any doubts that Zelaya`s enemies inside the country had arranged their plans with the Pentagon and the CIA… As if they were true friends, the US recommended that Zelaya should give up his political career in exchange for being 'forgiven' for his misdeeds and regaining his rights to own real estate and bank accounts in Honduras and the US. To prevent protests in Honduras, the country`s former de facto president Roberto Micheletti hired AUC rebels from Colombia as well as other militants from Guatemala, Salvador and Miami to intimidate farmers. The rate of murders for political reasons peaked too, claiming thelives of labor union activists, student leaders, journalists and members of the FNRP which was founded after the coup.

When Zelaya had tried to regain his presidential post, he received a death threat and had to escape into Brazilian embassy. After the embassy`s siege Zelaya was transported to the Dominican Republic, where he was watched by secret police and CIA agents day and night. Washington wanted tough restrictions on Zelaya`s freedom. It took Zelaya and his allies in the FNRP almost three years to get a new chance. They were actively supported by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). This organization had no contacts with Micheletti and wanted Zelaya back since the ousting of the leader who had been elected in democratic voting was likely to set up a risky precedent. In case the Organization of American States (OAS) puts up with the way its charter is being violated,the region`s stability will be in jeopardy. Violence gives rise to violence only, so the revival of guerrilla warfare is a question of time.

Micheletti had to give way to a new Washington's puppet- Porfirio Lobo. Zelaya`s supporters described the last presidential elections as ''coup laundering''. Meanwhile, Honduras faced serious social and economic problems. The people of Honduras opposed privatization amid growing unemployment and the government failing to fulfill its promises of modernization and economic growth.

Petrol and diesel prices went up after the coup halted Honduran membership in Petrocaribe. The country no longer enjoyed discount offers from fuel suppliers. Under Micheletti and Lobo, petrol prices increased 26 times! Apart from this, the nation faced growing food prices. However, the US did not seem to worry a lot about the issue, and focused only on military needs and anti-drug policies.

The way the FNRP strengthened its positions and prepared for an armed resistance coupled with worsening energy crisis made Lobo and his allies abroad think it all over. ALBA countries were very much preoccupied with what was going on in Honduras. The Obama administration was looking for evidence of interference of 'populist' leaders into Honduran home policy. Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez was on Washington`s top list of populist leaders. Both were accused of manipulating the Front and providing it with money.

Nicaragua and Venezuela indeed were concerned over the situation in Honduras. That is why as soon as Zelaya and Lobo declared their readiness to sit down for talks were welcomed in Managua, Caracas as well as in other countries of Latin America.

Zelaya and Lobo appointed their aides to hold preliminary consultations, which were followed by the signing of the ''national reconciliation and democracy agreement'' in Cartagena aimed at resolving the country's political crisis. The signing took place with the mediation of Venezuelan leader Chavez and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Many in Latin America saw the agreement as the victory of Zelaya and the FNRP. All corruption allegations were then removed from the ex-president, and he was guaranteed a free entry in the country. The government of Honduras was given a green light to regain membership in the OAS (the procedure is due on the 1st of June).

The agreement was also welcomed at the Forum of São Paulo held in Nicaragua this month. Delegates at the forum unanimously agreed that success of the Honduran people proved that even the US was not in its best form. This is a truly historic chance for Honduras and other Latin American states. Honduras and the FNRP are now trying to build a democratic society as they see it. In Cartagena the sides also announced that they might convene a Constitutional Assembly. The Front says it will fight for every sentence in the new document relying on the Constitutions of Venezuela and Ecuador.

Among other things, Zelaya and Lobo agreed to turn the FNRP into a full-fledged political party and thus give Zelaya more chances to regain power. The Front already has its branches all across the country. However, Honduran opposition is likely to protest the Cartagena agreement. President Lobo has already used force methods to oppose the FNRP: he ordered army and police to use water cannons and battle cartridges. If Lobo proceeds with the same course, Honduras may face quite unfavorable consequences.

Chavez`s role in Honduran political stabilization meets criticism from left-wing Latin American parties. They accuse Chavez of ignoring ''ideas of revolution'' for the sake of getting more support ahead of the 2012 presidential elections in Venezuela. There is a grain of truth in it. An experienced revolutionary politician Chavez is aware that successful social reforms have changed attitude of his voters in the poorest areas. Now their behavior and habits can be attributed to that of the middle class, while revolutionary phrases do not impress them any longer. This all makes Chavez take steps to approach the middle class and lure those who usually vote against all.

Manuel Zelaya owes his return to Hugo Chavez to quite a big extent because this became possible against all obstacles put by the US. By all means, the FNRP will make its contribution to the history of democratic development of Honduras.

President Barack Obama continues to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against progressive governments throughout Latin America and thus continues the policies of his recent predecessors, including Lyndon Johnson as seen in his invasion of the Dominican Republic; Richard Nixon by his bloody coup d'etat against Chilean President Salvador Allende and his creation of Operation Condor that targeted Latin American leftists for assassination, torture, and imprisonment; Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada; George H. W. Bush's invasion of Panama; Bill Clinton's constant interference in Haiti as president and after his term; and George W. Bush's attempted coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Obama's support for the military coup against Honduras President Manuel Zelaya and his fingerprints on the attempted "police coup" against Ecuador's Rafael Correa are the latest examples of the continued use of the Monroe Doctrine using the assets of the CIA and Pentagon to enforce American domination over the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Obama's operations against the democratically-elected government of Zelaya sums up his attitude toward Latin America. Zelaya joined a long list of Latin American leaders who were ousted by the combined forces of the CIA, the U.S. military, and local military officers trained at Fort Benning's school, formerly known as the "School of the Americas" when it was headquartered in Panama but still called the "School of the Assassins" by critics of U.S. interventionism in Latin America.

The Honduras Caper

The June 28, 2009, coup d'etat against President Zelaya had the support of key officials of the Obama administration who were supported by right-wing political interests in the United States, multinational companies with interests in Honduras, and right-wing governments in other countries, including Colombia and Israel. The conspiracy against Zelaya has been borne out by a July 24, 2009, cable — released in the Wikileaks tranche of cable disclosures — from the right-wing Cuban-American U.S. ambassador in Tegucigalpa to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with copies to the CIA, US Southern Command, and the CIA, that admitted the coup was unconstitutional:

"Post has attempted to clarify some of the legal and constitutional issues surrounding the June 28 forced removal of President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya. 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, while accepting that there may be a prima facie case that Zelaya may have committed illegalities and may have even violated the constitution. There is equally no doubt from our perspective that Roberto Micheletti's assumption of power was illegitimate."

Llorens's cable was hypocritical in ignoring the fact that the coup plotters were supported by U.S. military personnel stationed at the Palmerola airbase, the very same base where Zelaya was held under arrest and from which he was flown into exile to Costa Rica. Llorens states:

"Regardless of the merits of Zelaya's alleged constitutional violations, it is clear from even a cursory reading that his removal by military means was illegal, and even the most zealous of coup defenders have been unable to make convincing arguments to bridge the intellectual gulf between 'Zelaya broke the law' to 'therefore, he was packed off to Costa Rica by the military without a trial.'" Yet Llorens and his embassy's military attaches and CIA personnel worked closely with the Honduran military to oust Zelaya.

In addition, the top hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in Honduras, including Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez, actively encouraged and supported the military coup plotters. In addition, the leadership of a number of Protestant fundamentalist churches in Honduras, many with links to right-wing parent bodies in the United States, also supported the coup leaders. Llorens, himself, has close links to the right-wing elements of the Cuban community in southern Florida who supported the coup against Zelaya and have backed similar operations against Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, President Evo Morales in Bolivia, President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, President Desi Bouterse in Suriname, and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina.

Llorens's cable also ignored the fact that supporting the coup were multinational banana and mining companies that feared Zelaya's support for improving the working conditions of workers in both industries. One of the junta's first moves was to cancel plans by the Zelaya administration to change the mining laws in Honduras to give Hondurans greater control over mining operations and restrict open pit gold mining. Mining companies active in Honduras and supported the coup include those based in Canada.

Peter Kent, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs for the Americas in the mining interests-beholden Tory government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has been less than enthusiastic about Zelaya's return to Honduras. Kent, who represents a heavily-Jewish Toronto constituency, is a major backer of the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC) (Canada's version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC). Many of Canada's mining companies in Honduras, especially those involved in gold mining, are linked to Israeli investors.

Contrary to Obama administration statements that the United States was not involved in any way with the coup, the U.S. military in Honduras, which is headquartered at the Soto Cano air base, also known as the Palmerola base, 60 miles from Tegucigalpa, oversees a virtual U.S. military occupation of the country. The virtual occupation enabled the Honduran military, many of whose top officers were trained at the WHINSEC, to successfully carry out the coup against Zelaya.

There was also a flurry of joint Honduran-U.S. military activity prior to and shortly after the coup. The coup leader, General Romeo Orlando Vasquez Velasquez, had been invited to the SOUTHCOM change of command ceremony at its Miami headquarters in the days prior to the coup, but abruptly changed his plans, sending a signal to top Pentagon commanders that a move was afoot to oust Zelaya and his government. Vasquez and Honduran Air Force commander General Luis Javier Prince Suazo, also a coup leader, both attended the School of the Americas in Fort Benning.

Instead of traveling to Miami for the SOUTHCOM ceremony, Vasquez sent a subordinate, Brigadier General José Gerardo Fuentes, to represent him. In Miami, Fuentes, met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Corps General James Cartright; outgoing SOUTHCOM commander Admiral James Stavridis, who is taking up the post as NATO Commander; and Stavridis's successor as SOUTHCOM chief, Air Force Gen. Douglas ''Skeet'' Fraser. Top Pentagon and SOUTHCOM leadership was aware of and supported the plans for the coup against Zelaya.

Llorens was aware that Zelaya was taken to the U.S. Soto Cano/Palmerola air base after he was arrested at his home by Honduran troops. Once at the American base, Zelaya was guarded by Honduran and American troops before being put on a plane to Costa Rica and forced exile. Soto Cano base commander, U.S. Army Colonel Richard Juergens, closed off access to the base and restricted U.S. personnel from leaving the base following the coup and the detention of Zelaya at what has been termed by one former U.S. Army intelligence source who served at the base as a 'U.S. aircraft carrier' in Central America.

In 2002, Chavez was arrested and taken to La Orchila island off the Venezuelan coast where he saw a U.S. registered aircraft on the runway that was to have flown him into forced exile. However, the U.S.-backed coup against Chavez failed when loyal Venezuelan military forces turned the tables on the coup leaders. In 2004, Haitian President Aristide was overthrown and flown into forced exile to Africa by a U.S. aircraft.

Zelaya announced plans, before his ouster, to move Tegucigalpa's commercial international airport from Toncontin, considered to be a dangerous airport, to Palmerola. The decision did not sit well with the Honduran military or SOUTHCOM and the Pentagon.

Just a few days before Stavridis turned over command of SOUTHCOM to Fraser, the Miami-based command dispatched a KC-135 Stratotanker, two F-16 Fighting Falcons, an F-16, and a team of Air Force support personnel to Armando Escalon Air Base near San Pedro Sula, a stronghold of Zelaya support, to participate in an "airshow" to raise money for a local hospital.

In addition to U.S. military support, Israeli intelligence and security advisers worked closely with the coup leaders prior to, during, and after the coup against Zelaya. A similar nexus of American mercenaries and Israeli operatives are engaged in similar activities directed against the Ortega government in Nicaragua.

"Axis of Mischief" canard

A January 30, 2006, cable from the U.S. embassy in Caracas, spoke of an "axis of mischief" between Venezuela and Cuba in the region. Similar jargon, the infamous "axis of evil," was used by the Bush administration to describe Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and was used as a pretext for war against all three nations. Obama continues the same "anti-axis" strategy without actually using the terms.

Current Obama administration plans are to use the models for the abortive coup and planned exile of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002 and the successful coups and exiling of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and Zelaya in Honduras as ways to rid Latin America of other progressive presidents, including Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, as well as Chavez in Venezuela. The scenario played out unsuccessfully in Ecuador in the police coup against Correa.

The American plan coincides with Israel's plans to stop Iran's growing influence in Latin America. Released State Department cables show how the State Department was targeting the Lugo government in Paraguay by making spurious claims of Hezbollah and Hamas operations in the country. Similarly, charges of Hamas and Hezbollah agents in Honduras were used to galvanize Israel Lobby support for the coup against Zelaya. In fact, Lanny Davis, a Democratic lobbyist and a key member of the Lobby in Washington, was hired by the Roberto Micheletti junta that seized power from Zelaya to act as its lobbyist in the United States. According to leaked cables, then-Director for National Intelligence Dennis Blair tried to push the fanciful notion that Venezuela and Iran were jointly engaged in terrorism and narcotics trafficking in Latin America.

Currently, the same game plan of charging Ortega with harboring Hamas and Hezbollah elements, as well as drug traffickers, in Nicaragua is being used as a pretext for launching a pre-2011 "Contra War II" against Ortega's Sandinista government using mercenaries operating from border bases in Honduras and Costa Rica. A contrived border dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua is being used as a cover for cross-border provocations into Nicaragua.

Although Llorens warned her that the coup against Zelaya was unconstitutional and illegal, Secretary of State Clinton refused to cut off financial assistance to the Honduran junta.

Wall Street interests also want to curtail the growing power of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a competitor to the Free Trade Area of the Americas dominated by the United States. ALBA was started as a Venezuelan-Cuban initiative and Zelaya was an active participant, along with other progressive Latin American governments. Other released State Department cables illustrate how the Obama administration sought to bribe ALBA leaders like Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez to abandon the organization.

Latin America's rejection of U.S. suzerainty

At a recent summit in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Ecuador's Correa, who barely survived a CIA/Pentagon-inspired coup against him, summed up the feelings of many Latin American leaders  when he said, "Enough of these things. Enough interfering with our sovereignty, our independence, enough of betraying the confidence of countries that consider the United States to be a friend." Perhaps revelations from the leaked State Department cables that the pro-Zionist U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Clifford Sobel, worked secretly with Brazilian police to set up on drug charges Brazilian-Arabs thought by Sobel to be involved in terrorism resulted in Brazil's decision to recognize a Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders, which means Brazil does not recognize Israel's illegal incorporation of East Jerusalem.

Latin America must realize that with the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary still in effect, the United States has never and never will be a friend of the nations of Latin America.

President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya was displaced slightly over a year ago in a coup staged by the local oligarchy and the US intelligence community. The coup came as a punishment for Zelaya's alignment with H. Chavez and other populist Latin American leaders. Since the time, the news flow from Honduras abounds with stories of political assassinations, the victims being activists of trade unions, peasant and student organizations, and the National Popular Resistance Front opposing the pro-US regime of Porfirio Lobo. Ten journalists who expressed support for the ousted Honduran president have been killed this year alone.

The most recent case of the type was the murder of Israel Zelaya, 56, who was kidnapped by an armed group which easily crossed by car numerous police checkpoints set up as a part of the security-tightening campaign. The journalist was taken to a secluded location, tortured, and shot two times in the head and once – in the chest.

Dozens of similar incidents show that a program of ”political cleansing” is underway in Honduras. Killers selectively target potential leaders capable of galvanizing protesters. Peasant leader Maria Teresa Flores, 50, was the coordinator of the Council of Peasant Organizations of Honduras and a proponent of an agrarian reform including the abolition of latifundias and the establishment of rural cooperatives. She was kidnapped, and a week later her bullet-ridden body with numerous traces of machete strikes and one hand cut off was found by the roadside in the Comayagua department.

Only a fraction of the cases of political assassinations in Honduras become widely known. The operations are carried out in secrecy by specially trained and lavishly paid death squads staffed by police agents, bandits, and professional killers of Honduran origin or brought in from Columbia. These days, mass graves of opponents of the current regime are discovered in Honduras increasingly often. It is an established pattern that political murders become widespread wherever the US “helps restore democracy”. Berta Oliva, president of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras, told the media a few days ago about the discovery of another mass grave with the bodies of over 100 people reported missing in June-August, that is, after the coup that propelled P. Lobo to power.

Leader of the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) Carlos H. Reyes charges that the decisions to kill opposition leaders are made at the top level of the Honduran administration with direct involvement of key US Embassy officers. It is no overstatement considering that preemptive terror implemented by the state is a practice openly endorsed by Washington. Invoking cases of assassinations of foes of the US in Asia and Africa, The New York Times maintained on August 15 that the geography and scale of the CIA secret wars “against terrorists” expanded under B. Obama compared to what the agency was allowed to do under G. Bush. The article contained no mentioning of the assassinations in Latin America, but it is an open secret that CIA operations targeting the regimes unfriendly to the US in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador are at full swing. Serious efforts are being made to strengthen the subversive terrorist networks in the above countries where agents are receiving intense on-site training.

Fighting against the Central American insurgencies and guerrilla groups in the 1960ies – 1980ies, the Pentagon and the US intelligence community developed efficient approaches of the “struggle against terror”. Priority used to be given to decapitating the groups and neutralizing their support bases. In that epoch, peasants and Indians were routinely intimidated, forced to flee or even killed en masse in the regions of heightened guerrilla activity. The methods were later borrowed by the Columbian army and applied under the guidance of US advisers in the country's internal conflict to undermine the potentials of FARC and ELN. So far there are no guerrilla groups in Honduras, and the Honduran administration noiselessly relies on the omnipresent death squads – which act under the US Embassy staff's supervision – to bleed the opposition.

The bloated US mission in Tegucigalpa functions as a de facto parallel Honduran government, largely overshadowing the official one. US ambassador Hugo Llorens appointed under G. Bush is artistically playing the role of an honest diplomat totally uninvolved in the coup that led to the ouster of the legitimate president of Honduras. Llorens can count on Lobo's understanding as the new Honduran president is highly receptive to Washington's initiatives and readily distances himself from the Latin American populist regimes. And, of course, Lobo rejects the ALBA integration project and H. Chavez's “XXI century socialism” and – for Washington's peace of mind – even shies away from discount energy deals with Venezuela, the resulting damage suffered by the Honduran economy notwithstanding.

US military diplomats – Defense Attaché Colonel Robert W. Swisher, Special Tactics Group commander Colonel Kenneth F. Rodriguez, Palmerola Airbase liaison officer Steve Argenthal, and others – are known to contribute a lot to the governance in Honduras. Several dozens of US military intelligence officers are spying on the Honduran National Popular Resistance Front jointly with other US intelligence community staff operating under the cover of the US Embassy, the Peace Corps, DEA, etc. The CIA station in Honduras headed by US Embassy political counselor Silvia Eiriz is at the helm of the activity.

There are obvious reasons behind Washington's involvement in the Honduran crisis. Toppling Zelaya stopped the drift of Honduras towards a strategic alliance with the Latin American populist regimes, but the intensifying resistance mounted by the supporters of the ousted president is likely to confront Lobo's administration with serious problems. Zelaya's Patriotic Alternative and the threat of nation-wide strikes highlight the ineptitude of the current Honduran government.

For Washington, the return of Zelaya would mean a new headache. Secretary General of the Organization of American States Jose Miguel Insulza hopes to see Zelaya reinstated to prevent the emergence of a precedent allowing rightists to throw a legitimate president out of his own country. Zelaya is doing what he can to stage a comeback: he submits appeals to Honduran media nearly on a daily basis calling for unity of protesters and disproving the allegations leveled at him by the US media.

At the moment the official and the shadow administrations of Honduras are bombarding Zelaya with charges. Allegedly, he misappropriated millions of dollars handed out to Honduras by Venezuela as economic aid. There is no clarity what happened to his personal presidential Lexus and to portions of the budget of his administration. Zelaya is aware that in the case of his return to Honduras he will have to defend himself in court.

The surge of terror in Honduras is also a factor Zelaya has to reckon with. He is the number one target for the death squads, and threats are relayed to him via various channels that going back home would be a major risk.

At present Zelaya has the guest status in the Dominican Republic. For Washington, the optimal scenario would be Zelaya's consent to stay where he is – at the fancy La Romana resort frequented by millionaires and pop idols. Zelaya does not give in, though, keeps in touch with the populist leaders, and ignores Washington's displeasure. With Chavez's help, Zelaya became the Petrocaribe coordinator responsible for safeguarding independence and democracy. Holding the post makes it easier for him to travel around the region and to promote the National Popular Resistance Front.

CIA agents in the Dominican Republic are watching Zelaya day and night, sending reports with details of his meetings, phone calls, and e-mails to Langley. The US Embassy's political section – A. Margulis, T. Fitzgibbons, and A. Norman – put collecting information about Zelaya and about his contacts with Chavez high on their agenda. Zelaya is surrounded by CIA agents and sophisticated surveillance systems, and the Dominican police readily shares information with the US. Chief of Dominican police Gen. R.G. Gusman is regarded by the CIA as a partner and enjoys the agency's sponsorship. In a couple of decades, journalists will probably unearth facts about the CIA personal donations to Gen. Gusman. Some findings are already in the media: the police will get $3m to fight drug trafficking and other types of crime plus $250,000 to buy computers and various equipment.

The CIA would readily dispense with even greater sums of money to make sure Zelaya is debarred from Honduras. The US double standards in countering terrorism are common knowledge, and for Washington wars and provocations are acceptable instruments in political games. Chances are Zelaya has already got a Black Spot from the CIA and a team of cleaners is waiting for the moment…