Showing posts with label Venezuela. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Venezuela. Show all posts
Latin America Threatened By US Military Bases In Colombia
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, Aug. 6, 2009
The announcement of the US occupation of more than 7 military bases in Colombia comes at a time when a dictatorship - supported, if tacitly by Washington - in Honduras is consolidating after almost a month and a half has passed since the violent coup d'etat forced Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from power. The increased US military presence in Latin America has been perceived by a majority of nations in this hemisphere as a threat to stability and peace in the region. How does the Obama administration justify increasing the Pentagon's budget and investing almost $1 billion in its Latin American military operations this year?
Well, maybe by trying to blame Venezuelan President Hugh Chávez of supporting, funding and arming "terrorist" leftist groups in Colombia and "facilitating drug trafficking". Both allegations have never been founded on solid evidence. In fact, yesterday, President Chávez gave a killer press conference to international media, deconstructing every accusation presented against his government by Colombia and Washington. The latest allegation involved Swedish missile launchers sold to Venezuela in the 1980s that apparently ended up in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Uribe government in Colombia, together with Washington, was trying to blame Chávez for selling the weapons to the FARC, therefore justifying its increasing aggression and military presence in the region, to combat "terrorist threats". "You're either with us or against us..."
Chávez revealed a document - given to him previously by the Colombian government - dated 1996 after a FARC attack had taken place on Venezuelan soil against Venezuelan armed forces and a quantity of weapons had been stolen. The 1996 document detailed the named Swedish missile launchers as having been taken during that attack, more than 2 years before Chávez won office and became involved in government.
"Dirty, dirty tactics", said Chávez regarding Uribe's accusations against him. The Colombian government knows very well that those weapons were in the hands of the FARC well before Chávez became president. So why blame him now for something he has nothing to do with?
Cowardly and pathetic Colombian President Uribe is desperately trying to justify turning his country into the launching pad for Washington's war on Latin America - a war seeking to regain its domination and control over the region's vast natural and strategic resources, and to take out any seed of "socialism" remaining in the hemisphere.
But the military bases in Colombia and the coup in Honduras evidence a dangerous and clear intent of Empire to also crush the vibrant people's movements that have been surfacing all over Latin America during the past decade - revolutions seeking to build new models of social and economic justice.
Latin America is on high alert in response to this revived offensive emerging from Washington. Colombia, isolated in its efforts, is not backing down from opening its land to the vast and barbaric US military power. Where is the outcry inside the United States in response to hundreds of millions - billions - of dollars now directed towards waging war in Latin America? Don't wait until it's too late and another nation, like Panama 20 years ago, is bombed and invaded by US forces in order to secure Washington's long-term control over the region's strategic resources. Act now to resist and protest US military expansion in Latin America and US aggression against a humble people struggling for justice.
The announcement of the US occupation of more than 7 military bases in Colombia comes at a time when a dictatorship - supported, if tacitly by Washington - in Honduras is consolidating after almost a month and a half has passed since the violent coup d'etat forced Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from power. The increased US military presence in Latin America has been perceived by a majority of nations in this hemisphere as a threat to stability and peace in the region. How does the Obama administration justify increasing the Pentagon's budget and investing almost $1 billion in its Latin American military operations this year?
Well, maybe by trying to blame Venezuelan President Hugh Chávez of supporting, funding and arming "terrorist" leftist groups in Colombia and "facilitating drug trafficking". Both allegations have never been founded on solid evidence. In fact, yesterday, President Chávez gave a killer press conference to international media, deconstructing every accusation presented against his government by Colombia and Washington. The latest allegation involved Swedish missile launchers sold to Venezuela in the 1980s that apparently ended up in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Uribe government in Colombia, together with Washington, was trying to blame Chávez for selling the weapons to the FARC, therefore justifying its increasing aggression and military presence in the region, to combat "terrorist threats". "You're either with us or against us..."
Chávez revealed a document - given to him previously by the Colombian government - dated 1996 after a FARC attack had taken place on Venezuelan soil against Venezuelan armed forces and a quantity of weapons had been stolen. The 1996 document detailed the named Swedish missile launchers as having been taken during that attack, more than 2 years before Chávez won office and became involved in government.
"Dirty, dirty tactics", said Chávez regarding Uribe's accusations against him. The Colombian government knows very well that those weapons were in the hands of the FARC well before Chávez became president. So why blame him now for something he has nothing to do with?
Cowardly and pathetic Colombian President Uribe is desperately trying to justify turning his country into the launching pad for Washington's war on Latin America - a war seeking to regain its domination and control over the region's vast natural and strategic resources, and to take out any seed of "socialism" remaining in the hemisphere.
But the military bases in Colombia and the coup in Honduras evidence a dangerous and clear intent of Empire to also crush the vibrant people's movements that have been surfacing all over Latin America during the past decade - revolutions seeking to build new models of social and economic justice.
Latin America is on high alert in response to this revived offensive emerging from Washington. Colombia, isolated in its efforts, is not backing down from opening its land to the vast and barbaric US military power. Where is the outcry inside the United States in response to hundreds of millions - billions - of dollars now directed towards waging war in Latin America? Don't wait until it's too late and another nation, like Panama 20 years ago, is bombed and invaded by US forces in order to secure Washington's long-term control over the region's strategic resources. Act now to resist and protest US military expansion in Latin America and US aggression against a humble people struggling for justice.
Honduras coup leaders under pressure as U.S. revokes visas
By Claudia Parsons, washingtonpost.com, July 28, 2009
TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - Honduras' coup leaders came under new pressure on Tuesday to allow ousted President Manuel Zelaya's return to power as the United States revoked visas for four members of the de facto government.
Washington has refused to recognize the government led by Roberto Micheletti, who took over when Zelaya was toppled in a June 28 coup, and it already had cut $16.5 million in U.S. military aid to the Central American country.
Zelaya had asked President Barack Obama to revoke U.S. visas for the coup leaders and he quickly welcomed the move.
"They are isolated, they are surrounded, they are alone," the deposed leftist said of the coup leaders.
"This is a coup that has been dead from the start, so they will have to abandon their position of intransigence in the coming hours," he said in Nicaragua, where he is camped out near the border with Honduras.
Micheletti's government, backed by the Supreme Court and Congress, has refused to bend to international condemnation of the coup. It insists that Zelaya cannot come back and serve his remaining six months in office.
Zelaya, an ally of Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez, was ousted as he sought a referendum to change the constitution, a move the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Zelaya's critics say he was trying to extend presidential term limits so he could be re-elected, but he denies the claims.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias has mediated talks between both sides, but the negotiations so far have failed.
Arias, who will host a regional heads of state meeting in northern Costa Rica on Wednesday, said he supported the U.S. move to strip some Micheletti officials of their visas as a way to pressure those holding power to reopen dialogue.
"If the pressure keeps rising with drastic measures, the de facto government in Honduras will possibly be more compelled to sit down at the table again," Arias told reporters.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said official diplomatic visas had been revoked for four individuals. "We don't recognize Roberto Micheletti as the president of Honduras, we recognize Manuel Zelaya," he said.
Kelly did not name those affected but said the diplomatic visas of others in government also were being reviewed.
Representative Connie Mack, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives who visited Honduras over the weekend, told Reuters it was his understanding that two of the people who had their U.S. visas revoked were Tomas Arita Valle, the Supreme Court justice who signed the order for Zelaya's arrest, and Jose Alfredo Saavedra, president of the Honduran Congress.
Mack criticized the move as intimidation.
Two others who confirmed they had their visas revoked were human rights ombudsman Ramon Custodio and Adolfo Lionel Sevilla, defense minister in the interim government.
Micheletti told reporters at the presidential palace on Tuesday that his U.S. visa had not been revoked.
Rosary in hand, Micheletti later appeared on state television to lead viewers in a "Day of Prayer" for peace. "I ask for forgiveness from those who for one reason or another do not agree with us, and I ask God to show them the light so they realize it is more important to live in peace," he said.
EUROPEAN UNION STEPS
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said during a visit to Venezuela he would ask the European Union to take similar punitive steps against the interim government. The EU has suspended all budgetary support payments for Honduras.
The Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank have frozen loans in a move the interim government says will cost $200 million in 2009, a blow to the coffee and textile exporter that already is one of Latin America's poorest countries.
Zelaya in recent days had questioned whether the U.S. government was doing enough to push for his return, and also called for a ban on the coup leaders' bank transactions.
Zelaya said as many as 1,000 of his supporters have made the trek to join him in Nicaragua, dodging road blocks and a curfew in the border region of Honduras.
Sporting his trademark cream-colored cowboy hat, Zelaya briefly crossed the border into Honduras last Friday but stepped back from security forces waiting to arrest him, saying he wanted to avoid a massacre. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described his actions as "reckless" and not helpful to the negotiation process.
Julia Sweig, a Latin America specialist at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said suspending visas would hurt since "they need to be here (Washington) to press their case and maintain their lobbying efforts."
(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed, Susan Cornwell, Sue Pleming and Tim Gaynor in Washington, Mica Rosenberg, Marco Aquino in Honduras, Miguel Angel Gutierrez in Costa Rica and Ivan Castro in Nicaragua; Editing by Paul Simao)
TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - Honduras' coup leaders came under new pressure on Tuesday to allow ousted President Manuel Zelaya's return to power as the United States revoked visas for four members of the de facto government.
Washington has refused to recognize the government led by Roberto Micheletti, who took over when Zelaya was toppled in a June 28 coup, and it already had cut $16.5 million in U.S. military aid to the Central American country.
Zelaya had asked President Barack Obama to revoke U.S. visas for the coup leaders and he quickly welcomed the move.
"They are isolated, they are surrounded, they are alone," the deposed leftist said of the coup leaders.
"This is a coup that has been dead from the start, so they will have to abandon their position of intransigence in the coming hours," he said in Nicaragua, where he is camped out near the border with Honduras.
Micheletti's government, backed by the Supreme Court and Congress, has refused to bend to international condemnation of the coup. It insists that Zelaya cannot come back and serve his remaining six months in office.
Zelaya, an ally of Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez, was ousted as he sought a referendum to change the constitution, a move the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Zelaya's critics say he was trying to extend presidential term limits so he could be re-elected, but he denies the claims.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias has mediated talks between both sides, but the negotiations so far have failed.
Arias, who will host a regional heads of state meeting in northern Costa Rica on Wednesday, said he supported the U.S. move to strip some Micheletti officials of their visas as a way to pressure those holding power to reopen dialogue.
"If the pressure keeps rising with drastic measures, the de facto government in Honduras will possibly be more compelled to sit down at the table again," Arias told reporters.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said official diplomatic visas had been revoked for four individuals. "We don't recognize Roberto Micheletti as the president of Honduras, we recognize Manuel Zelaya," he said.
Kelly did not name those affected but said the diplomatic visas of others in government also were being reviewed.
Representative Connie Mack, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives who visited Honduras over the weekend, told Reuters it was his understanding that two of the people who had their U.S. visas revoked were Tomas Arita Valle, the Supreme Court justice who signed the order for Zelaya's arrest, and Jose Alfredo Saavedra, president of the Honduran Congress.
Mack criticized the move as intimidation.
Two others who confirmed they had their visas revoked were human rights ombudsman Ramon Custodio and Adolfo Lionel Sevilla, defense minister in the interim government.
Micheletti told reporters at the presidential palace on Tuesday that his U.S. visa had not been revoked.
Rosary in hand, Micheletti later appeared on state television to lead viewers in a "Day of Prayer" for peace. "I ask for forgiveness from those who for one reason or another do not agree with us, and I ask God to show them the light so they realize it is more important to live in peace," he said.
EUROPEAN UNION STEPS
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said during a visit to Venezuela he would ask the European Union to take similar punitive steps against the interim government. The EU has suspended all budgetary support payments for Honduras.
The Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank have frozen loans in a move the interim government says will cost $200 million in 2009, a blow to the coffee and textile exporter that already is one of Latin America's poorest countries.
Zelaya in recent days had questioned whether the U.S. government was doing enough to push for his return, and also called for a ban on the coup leaders' bank transactions.
Zelaya said as many as 1,000 of his supporters have made the trek to join him in Nicaragua, dodging road blocks and a curfew in the border region of Honduras.
Sporting his trademark cream-colored cowboy hat, Zelaya briefly crossed the border into Honduras last Friday but stepped back from security forces waiting to arrest him, saying he wanted to avoid a massacre. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described his actions as "reckless" and not helpful to the negotiation process.
Julia Sweig, a Latin America specialist at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said suspending visas would hurt since "they need to be here (Washington) to press their case and maintain their lobbying efforts."
(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed, Susan Cornwell, Sue Pleming and Tim Gaynor in Washington, Mica Rosenberg, Marco Aquino in Honduras, Miguel Angel Gutierrez in Costa Rica and Ivan Castro in Nicaragua; Editing by Paul Simao)
The Threads of the Story: Surreal Honduras
By CLIFTON ROSS, CounterPunch, July 24 - 26 2009, issue
Gabriel Garcia Màrquez could easily have written "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in any country of Central America. It's a region replete with characters and magical landscapes and myths with power to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you merely hear them. There's the one about the gringo who visited the mining region of Cabañas and soon thereafter the water turned bad and the fish in the river died and the people all began to die simply because a mysterious gringo passed through.
That's the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D'Aubuisson) and the "maras" or gang members.
Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a "Gringo" multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community's water.
In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one's death, it's always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air -- that is, until they're found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.
The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with "mara" gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.
There's a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on "maras" to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn't yet had to consider recruiting "civilian contractors" from the 100,000 or so "maras" operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the "golpista" Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it's only surprising that more didn't die.
The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the "subversives." But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.
Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the "golpista" government isn't any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent "golpe" (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.
One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call "the daily pack of lies."
As I try to discern the Honduran narrative of the "golpe" I recall the copy of the article I left behind in El Salvador, printed in a right wing paper -- and, unfortunately, the newspapers are all right wing in El Salvador, with the exception of the Diario Co-Latino, the latter a blessing not bestowed upon Honduras. The Salvadoran article was based on a piece that appeared in Honduras' El Heraldo. The author claimed to have in possession secret documents that indicated that President Hugo Chavez was working with a large number of "maras" who he was arming and paying, and also infiltrating his own military to do a lightning attack and kill high-ranking officials of the Micheletti government. Supposedly residents have seen armed men in inaccessible regions of the country. Does that sound like the narrative of "Al Qaeda sleeper cells" doped up on the Koran ready to attack Bush's America? Only the names, places and drugs of choice have changed.
I'm looking here at a full page ad in La Tribuna from Tuesday, the 21st, paid for by "Hondurans for Democracy." There is a photo, in the top half, of Chavez aiming a gun. Beside the photo is the caption "Chavez calls for violence and wants bloodshed in Honduras" Beneath that picture is a crowd shot of Hondurans dressed in white (the color of the Conservative Nationalist Party) and holding the blue flags of Honduras. The caption reads, "But Hondurans want peace, unity, democracy and freedom." Ah, behold the foreign devil who has brought death to our peaceful little country. It's a variation on the diabolic gringo myth, but in reverse, since Chavez has been a counterforce to the "deadly gringo."
The following day, (Wednesday, July 22) El Heraldo has an interview with Alejando Peña Esclusa, a right wing Colombian who is president of UnoAmerica, described as "a democracy organization (sic: organización democracia) of Colombia." The headline reads, "The FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Narcotrafficking and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are all the same thing." The surrealism doesn't end with the title, which makes laughable connections between a program of solidarity created by Venezuela to share its wealth with loans and grants to Latin America to facilitate growth and development, and narcotics trafficking and a guerrilla that, while it taxes the cocaine trade, seems to have fewer connections to the actual trade than does the Uribe government.
Esclusa develops his surreal story in this large-spread article on page 6: He says that the coup "has kept Honduras from falling into the project of Hugo Chavez and saved democracy from the Constitutional coup which Zelaya hoped to undertake." What was the "Constitutional coup" Zelaya was plotting? To bring people more deeply into the political process of the country by asking them if they'd like to write a new constitution. So according to Esclusa, the military coup was a way of saving "democracy" by taking it away. And the project of Chavez, well, ask 60-70% of Venezuelans who support Chavez and they'll tell you that his project is to move the country from "representative to participatory democracy." But the interview with Esclusa gets even wilder: "the principle element of the disturbances in Honduras is not "Mel" Zelaya nor the discussion of whether or not he returns" (this would come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people marching daily in Honduras for the single purpose of having their president return) "but it is Hugo Chavez who finances the dirty campaign, buying minds ("conciencias") so as to disinform about Honduran reality."
Again, the utterly implausible charge that Chavez, and not the golpistas, is behind all the country's problems. For Esclusa, the solution is simple: Isolate Chavez from Honduras and all the problems will be solved.
What's fascinating about this analysis is that there's not even a hint of truth in it. First of all, the marches aren't financed by anyone but the marchers. And secondly, the only Venezuelan I've seen has been an old friend who is a documentary filmmaker--and probably the last Venezuelan journalist in the country since Telesur was chased out. Noticeably absent from the marches is even the slightest mention of Chavez or Venezuela, neither of which appear in any of the chants, placards, discussions, programs, or anything else. There's only one message: "Golpistas Leave! Bring Mel Home."
In this surreal world where Chavez is working with narco gangsters and infiltrating along the coast, paying people to demonstrate, the poor golpistas are also unfairly being persecuted by "the OAS, UN and the international community."
This line was repeated to me the other day in the hotel by the woman behind the desk, who identified herself as a National Party supporter. She almost whined as she told me that "everyone is against us." Does that sound a little paranoid? When a sane person is told that everyone is opposed to what he or she is doing, that person begins to reflect again on his or her actions. Not so Micheletti; not so Mr. Esclusa; not so the National Party and Liberal Party members who went out on the 23rd on the march for "peace, unity, democracy and freedom."
Then the bombshell: According to Mr. Esclusa, the FARC, a guerrilla force of 30,000 with shrinking power, is the force behind all the presidents who are part of ALBA which is, in turn, a project of the FARC and financed by cocaine money.
If this were the ravings of a madman in the street, we could afford to ignore him. But this interview is published in one of Honduras' two major newspapers, with big headlines, a photo of Esclusa, on page 6. And obviously the government is taking this same paranoid siege narrative seriously because on page eight is the story and headline, "Honduras Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela" and the subhead reads, "Venezuelan officials, in a confrontational attitude, warn they won't leave the country. The [Honduras] Chancellor cancels the consular visa of Iranians for fear of terrorism."
Now that's interesting. Honduras breaks relations with Venezuela and it's Venezuela that is being confrontational. Takes you back to the bad old days of Bush and the Saddam Hussein "menace" doesn't it? Then there are the Iranians, whose government has never so much as threatened anyone in Latin America, yet who now "feared as terrorist." Wild rumor, speculation on a fantastic level: Vice Chancellor Marta Lorena Alvarado says that "we've confirmed the existence of terrorist Iranian cells in Latin America and considering that there are direct trips from Teheran... to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Nicaragua... there's concern that there's been a terrorist incursion into [Honduras]."
Here we've definitively returned to the bad old days of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush with the Amber, Yellow and Orange alerts when supposed "sleeper" cells that were never uncovered or identified were sleepwalking the US.
These are but a few of the jewels from the Honduran press. You could do with it as I did when I first confronted it in the hotel with the woman behind the desk: you could try reasoning with it. You could, as I did, say, isn't the very definition of a coup when an elected representative is removed from office and, rather than being held and tried and convicted or returned to office, is sent out of the country into exile at gunpoint. But the response is just as wild: "They were trying to prevent bloodshed. If they kept him here, his followers would cause bloodshed." But we're to believe that the people who sent the military to the airport on July 5th to machine gun protesters are really concerned about bloodshed? By the look on the woman's face, a gringo has come to town and poisoned the water.
Clifton Ross is the writer and director of Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out and Translations from Silence, a book of poetry introduced by Jack Hirschman available at: www.freedomvoices.org. He can be reached at: clifross@gmail.com
Gabriel Garcia Màrquez could easily have written "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in any country of Central America. It's a region replete with characters and magical landscapes and myths with power to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you merely hear them. There's the one about the gringo who visited the mining region of Cabañas and soon thereafter the water turned bad and the fish in the river died and the people all began to die simply because a mysterious gringo passed through.
That's the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D'Aubuisson) and the "maras" or gang members.
Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a "Gringo" multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community's water.
In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one's death, it's always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air -- that is, until they're found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.
The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with "mara" gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.
There's a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on "maras" to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn't yet had to consider recruiting "civilian contractors" from the 100,000 or so "maras" operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the "golpista" Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it's only surprising that more didn't die.
The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the "subversives." But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.
Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the "golpista" government isn't any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent "golpe" (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.
One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call "the daily pack of lies."
As I try to discern the Honduran narrative of the "golpe" I recall the copy of the article I left behind in El Salvador, printed in a right wing paper -- and, unfortunately, the newspapers are all right wing in El Salvador, with the exception of the Diario Co-Latino, the latter a blessing not bestowed upon Honduras. The Salvadoran article was based on a piece that appeared in Honduras' El Heraldo. The author claimed to have in possession secret documents that indicated that President Hugo Chavez was working with a large number of "maras" who he was arming and paying, and also infiltrating his own military to do a lightning attack and kill high-ranking officials of the Micheletti government. Supposedly residents have seen armed men in inaccessible regions of the country. Does that sound like the narrative of "Al Qaeda sleeper cells" doped up on the Koran ready to attack Bush's America? Only the names, places and drugs of choice have changed.
I'm looking here at a full page ad in La Tribuna from Tuesday, the 21st, paid for by "Hondurans for Democracy." There is a photo, in the top half, of Chavez aiming a gun. Beside the photo is the caption "Chavez calls for violence and wants bloodshed in Honduras" Beneath that picture is a crowd shot of Hondurans dressed in white (the color of the Conservative Nationalist Party) and holding the blue flags of Honduras. The caption reads, "But Hondurans want peace, unity, democracy and freedom." Ah, behold the foreign devil who has brought death to our peaceful little country. It's a variation on the diabolic gringo myth, but in reverse, since Chavez has been a counterforce to the "deadly gringo."
The following day, (Wednesday, July 22) El Heraldo has an interview with Alejando Peña Esclusa, a right wing Colombian who is president of UnoAmerica, described as "a democracy organization (sic: organización democracia) of Colombia." The headline reads, "The FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Narcotrafficking and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are all the same thing." The surrealism doesn't end with the title, which makes laughable connections between a program of solidarity created by Venezuela to share its wealth with loans and grants to Latin America to facilitate growth and development, and narcotics trafficking and a guerrilla that, while it taxes the cocaine trade, seems to have fewer connections to the actual trade than does the Uribe government.
Esclusa develops his surreal story in this large-spread article on page 6: He says that the coup "has kept Honduras from falling into the project of Hugo Chavez and saved democracy from the Constitutional coup which Zelaya hoped to undertake." What was the "Constitutional coup" Zelaya was plotting? To bring people more deeply into the political process of the country by asking them if they'd like to write a new constitution. So according to Esclusa, the military coup was a way of saving "democracy" by taking it away. And the project of Chavez, well, ask 60-70% of Venezuelans who support Chavez and they'll tell you that his project is to move the country from "representative to participatory democracy." But the interview with Esclusa gets even wilder: "the principle element of the disturbances in Honduras is not "Mel" Zelaya nor the discussion of whether or not he returns" (this would come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people marching daily in Honduras for the single purpose of having their president return) "but it is Hugo Chavez who finances the dirty campaign, buying minds ("conciencias") so as to disinform about Honduran reality."
Again, the utterly implausible charge that Chavez, and not the golpistas, is behind all the country's problems. For Esclusa, the solution is simple: Isolate Chavez from Honduras and all the problems will be solved.
What's fascinating about this analysis is that there's not even a hint of truth in it. First of all, the marches aren't financed by anyone but the marchers. And secondly, the only Venezuelan I've seen has been an old friend who is a documentary filmmaker--and probably the last Venezuelan journalist in the country since Telesur was chased out. Noticeably absent from the marches is even the slightest mention of Chavez or Venezuela, neither of which appear in any of the chants, placards, discussions, programs, or anything else. There's only one message: "Golpistas Leave! Bring Mel Home."
In this surreal world where Chavez is working with narco gangsters and infiltrating along the coast, paying people to demonstrate, the poor golpistas are also unfairly being persecuted by "the OAS, UN and the international community."
This line was repeated to me the other day in the hotel by the woman behind the desk, who identified herself as a National Party supporter. She almost whined as she told me that "everyone is against us." Does that sound a little paranoid? When a sane person is told that everyone is opposed to what he or she is doing, that person begins to reflect again on his or her actions. Not so Micheletti; not so Mr. Esclusa; not so the National Party and Liberal Party members who went out on the 23rd on the march for "peace, unity, democracy and freedom."
Then the bombshell: According to Mr. Esclusa, the FARC, a guerrilla force of 30,000 with shrinking power, is the force behind all the presidents who are part of ALBA which is, in turn, a project of the FARC and financed by cocaine money.
If this were the ravings of a madman in the street, we could afford to ignore him. But this interview is published in one of Honduras' two major newspapers, with big headlines, a photo of Esclusa, on page 6. And obviously the government is taking this same paranoid siege narrative seriously because on page eight is the story and headline, "Honduras Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela" and the subhead reads, "Venezuelan officials, in a confrontational attitude, warn they won't leave the country. The [Honduras] Chancellor cancels the consular visa of Iranians for fear of terrorism."
Now that's interesting. Honduras breaks relations with Venezuela and it's Venezuela that is being confrontational. Takes you back to the bad old days of Bush and the Saddam Hussein "menace" doesn't it? Then there are the Iranians, whose government has never so much as threatened anyone in Latin America, yet who now "feared as terrorist." Wild rumor, speculation on a fantastic level: Vice Chancellor Marta Lorena Alvarado says that "we've confirmed the existence of terrorist Iranian cells in Latin America and considering that there are direct trips from Teheran... to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Nicaragua... there's concern that there's been a terrorist incursion into [Honduras]."
Here we've definitively returned to the bad old days of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush with the Amber, Yellow and Orange alerts when supposed "sleeper" cells that were never uncovered or identified were sleepwalking the US.
These are but a few of the jewels from the Honduran press. You could do with it as I did when I first confronted it in the hotel with the woman behind the desk: you could try reasoning with it. You could, as I did, say, isn't the very definition of a coup when an elected representative is removed from office and, rather than being held and tried and convicted or returned to office, is sent out of the country into exile at gunpoint. But the response is just as wild: "They were trying to prevent bloodshed. If they kept him here, his followers would cause bloodshed." But we're to believe that the people who sent the military to the airport on July 5th to machine gun protesters are really concerned about bloodshed? By the look on the woman's face, a gringo has come to town and poisoned the water.
Clifton Ross is the writer and director of Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out and Translations from Silence, a book of poetry introduced by Jack Hirschman available at: www.freedomvoices.org. He can be reached at: clifross@gmail.com
Honduras At Standstill; Arias Proposal Of "San Jose Agreement" Rejected By Both Parties
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 23, 2009
President Zelaya is giving a press conference right now, presumably from Nicaragua. About one hour ago, President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica presented a new proposal, called the "San Jose Agreement" of 12 points, adding and modifying his previous 7-point proposal that was rejected by the coup regime on Sunday. The 12 points, available in Spanish here, incorporated several of the requests of the coup regime into Arias' original proposal.
Specifically, point number one was changed from calling for President Zelaya's immediate return to power to become a call for a "government of unity and reconciliation" to be composed of members of the coup regime together with representatives from each political party. Zelaya would have been returned to the presidency, but with his hands completely tied. The proposal again called for amnesty for the coup regime, and, in an inference to the coup regime's allegations against President Zelaya, also called for amnesty to be granted to him as well. This factor clearly legitimates the coup regime's theories.
Another point incredibly called on the Zelaya government and supporters to refrain from convening a constitutional assembly, directly or indirectly, and in fact also ordered a refrain from even holding any kind of consultation, survey or opinion poll on any issue remotely related to constitutional form. This is absolutely outrageous because no government has the right to usurp the people's sovereign right to choose their form and model of government. This is not a right that can be transferred or taken away, it is inalienable.
Another point called for presidential elections to be held in October instead of November, and then again prohibited the people from protesting such elections, regardless of outcome or process, or engaging in any kind of civil disobedience, insurrection or any kind of manifestation of discontent regarding the political process in the country. That is also a completely outrageous and unacceptable usurpation of the people's innate right to protest and manifest their will.
There were a series of other points which, once I translate (or someone else does ;-) ) the "San Jose Agreement", can be analyzed. For now, I just wanted to update on today's situation.
Again, no meetings were held today, just the proposal set forth by Oscar Arias to "resolve" the situation. The Zelaya delegation immediately rejected the agreement, declaring the mediation as failed and called upon the United Nations Security Council, the Central American Integrated System (SICA) and the Organization of American States (OAS) to convene immediately - tonight if possible - and implement extreme measures of pressure against the coup regime in Honduras.
The coup regime's delegation rejected Arias' proposal as well, but still based on their original disagreement relating to the return of President Zelaya to power.
Today, the insane coup Foreign Minister called on Venezuela to recognize their regime, stating that it was "inconceivable" that neighbor nations would not recognize their government as legitimate. The coup regime is being recognized now by both the right wing governments in Panama and Colombia, as well as the United States, in its own, underhanded way.
By the way, the leading military figure in the coup, School of the Americas graduate General Romeo Vasquez, is in Miami today, invited to speak at some evangelical conference funded by the Cuban mafia. So, the State Department hasn't revoked his visa, obviously, despite his clear role in kidnapping - at gun point - and forcing into exile the democratically elected president of Honduras. Yet another clear indication of Washington backing the coup.
Zelaya is calling for insurrection in Honduras. Personally, I think that is the only way to resolve this situation with dignity.
President Zelaya is giving a press conference right now, presumably from Nicaragua. About one hour ago, President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica presented a new proposal, called the "San Jose Agreement" of 12 points, adding and modifying his previous 7-point proposal that was rejected by the coup regime on Sunday. The 12 points, available in Spanish here, incorporated several of the requests of the coup regime into Arias' original proposal.
Specifically, point number one was changed from calling for President Zelaya's immediate return to power to become a call for a "government of unity and reconciliation" to be composed of members of the coup regime together with representatives from each political party. Zelaya would have been returned to the presidency, but with his hands completely tied. The proposal again called for amnesty for the coup regime, and, in an inference to the coup regime's allegations against President Zelaya, also called for amnesty to be granted to him as well. This factor clearly legitimates the coup regime's theories.
Another point incredibly called on the Zelaya government and supporters to refrain from convening a constitutional assembly, directly or indirectly, and in fact also ordered a refrain from even holding any kind of consultation, survey or opinion poll on any issue remotely related to constitutional form. This is absolutely outrageous because no government has the right to usurp the people's sovereign right to choose their form and model of government. This is not a right that can be transferred or taken away, it is inalienable.
Another point called for presidential elections to be held in October instead of November, and then again prohibited the people from protesting such elections, regardless of outcome or process, or engaging in any kind of civil disobedience, insurrection or any kind of manifestation of discontent regarding the political process in the country. That is also a completely outrageous and unacceptable usurpation of the people's innate right to protest and manifest their will.
There were a series of other points which, once I translate (or someone else does ;-) ) the "San Jose Agreement", can be analyzed. For now, I just wanted to update on today's situation.
Again, no meetings were held today, just the proposal set forth by Oscar Arias to "resolve" the situation. The Zelaya delegation immediately rejected the agreement, declaring the mediation as failed and called upon the United Nations Security Council, the Central American Integrated System (SICA) and the Organization of American States (OAS) to convene immediately - tonight if possible - and implement extreme measures of pressure against the coup regime in Honduras.
The coup regime's delegation rejected Arias' proposal as well, but still based on their original disagreement relating to the return of President Zelaya to power.
Today, the insane coup Foreign Minister called on Venezuela to recognize their regime, stating that it was "inconceivable" that neighbor nations would not recognize their government as legitimate. The coup regime is being recognized now by both the right wing governments in Panama and Colombia, as well as the United States, in its own, underhanded way.
By the way, the leading military figure in the coup, School of the Americas graduate General Romeo Vasquez, is in Miami today, invited to speak at some evangelical conference funded by the Cuban mafia. So, the State Department hasn't revoked his visa, obviously, despite his clear role in kidnapping - at gun point - and forcing into exile the democratically elected president of Honduras. Yet another clear indication of Washington backing the coup.
Zelaya is calling for insurrection in Honduras. Personally, I think that is the only way to resolve this situation with dignity.
Honduras Talks Postponed; Zelaya Says "On His Way" To Honduras; Coup Regime Expels Venezuelans
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 22, 2009
Supposedly the "final" talks scheduled for today in Costa Rica - after President Oscar Arias, the designated (via Washington) mediator, requested an additional 72-hours on Sunday, when the talks had failed - have now been postponed. Last night, President Manuel Zelaya announced his return to Honduras today, and charged chief military commander General Romeo Vasquez - heavily involved in the coup d'etat that ousted Zelaya over three weeks ago - with his safety. "If anything happens to me", said President Zelaya last night in a press conference from Nicaragua, "General Romeo Vasquez is responsible". The Honduran military, trained, armed and funded by the United States, which also maintains a major strategic military base in the Central American nation, kidnapped and forced President Zelaya into exile on June 28, and since then has militarized the streets, repressed the people protesting the coup, assassinated, injured and detained over 1000 Hondurans, and shut down media outlets reporting on the events in the country.
Coup regime leader Roberto Micheletti declared his delegation will not attend the talks today in Costa Rica, claiming that Arias is drafting a new proposal that allegedly will "appease" the illegal regime. The main issue of contention is President Zelaya's return to power. The coup regime refuses to allow the constitutionally elected head of state to assume his position again, despite the fact that the current presidential term ends on January 27, 2009 and the Honduran Constitution does not allow for reelection.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a "tough" phone call to Micheletti on Sunday - coincidentally as Arias announced he was requesting an additional 72-hours to arrive at an agreement between the two parties. Clinton's call to Micheletti was an effort to arrive at some kind of resolution that would allow Washington to save face. So far, the Department of State has declared the events in Honduras do not constitute a "coup d'etat" (see this post) despite the fact that the whole rest of the world sees it as a coup. Washington is also the only government with a remaining ambassador in place in Honduras, and has broken absolutely no diplomatic, military or economic ties with the coup regime. Yesterday the European Union suspended over $90 million in aid to Honduras because of the coup.
The coup regime also issued an order to the Venezuelan Embassy declaring all Venezuelans to leave the country immediately. Nevertheless, Venezuela responded by stating it does not recognize the order from the illegal coup regime, since it does not constitutionally represent Honduras. The Venezuelan Ambassador was recalled right after the coup, but some diplomats do remain at the embassy in Tegucigalpa and have been key in protecting international journalists that have come under attack by the regime.
Meanwhile, the Honduran people are still out in the streets protesting the coup, on this 25th day since the de facto regime was first installed. The economy remains shut down by striking workers, schools remain closed because of teacher's strikes and there are disturbances throughout the nation. A national curfew is still in effect, imposed by the dictatorial regime.
The new Panamanian government, led by recently inaugurated President Martinelli, a multi-millionaire neoliberal conservative, has applauded the Honduran military for "keeping order" in the country. Apparently, Panama is recognizing the coup regime and working closely with Micheletti to resolve the growing economic problems in Honduras. Micheletti and Martinelli are old friends, both members of several business councils in Central and Latin America.
The longer things stall, the coup regime consolidates. On Sunday, a month will have passed since the coup d'etat was executed. Hopefully, it will be defeated before then.
Supposedly the "final" talks scheduled for today in Costa Rica - after President Oscar Arias, the designated (via Washington) mediator, requested an additional 72-hours on Sunday, when the talks had failed - have now been postponed. Last night, President Manuel Zelaya announced his return to Honduras today, and charged chief military commander General Romeo Vasquez - heavily involved in the coup d'etat that ousted Zelaya over three weeks ago - with his safety. "If anything happens to me", said President Zelaya last night in a press conference from Nicaragua, "General Romeo Vasquez is responsible". The Honduran military, trained, armed and funded by the United States, which also maintains a major strategic military base in the Central American nation, kidnapped and forced President Zelaya into exile on June 28, and since then has militarized the streets, repressed the people protesting the coup, assassinated, injured and detained over 1000 Hondurans, and shut down media outlets reporting on the events in the country.
Coup regime leader Roberto Micheletti declared his delegation will not attend the talks today in Costa Rica, claiming that Arias is drafting a new proposal that allegedly will "appease" the illegal regime. The main issue of contention is President Zelaya's return to power. The coup regime refuses to allow the constitutionally elected head of state to assume his position again, despite the fact that the current presidential term ends on January 27, 2009 and the Honduran Constitution does not allow for reelection.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a "tough" phone call to Micheletti on Sunday - coincidentally as Arias announced he was requesting an additional 72-hours to arrive at an agreement between the two parties. Clinton's call to Micheletti was an effort to arrive at some kind of resolution that would allow Washington to save face. So far, the Department of State has declared the events in Honduras do not constitute a "coup d'etat" (see this post) despite the fact that the whole rest of the world sees it as a coup. Washington is also the only government with a remaining ambassador in place in Honduras, and has broken absolutely no diplomatic, military or economic ties with the coup regime. Yesterday the European Union suspended over $90 million in aid to Honduras because of the coup.
The coup regime also issued an order to the Venezuelan Embassy declaring all Venezuelans to leave the country immediately. Nevertheless, Venezuela responded by stating it does not recognize the order from the illegal coup regime, since it does not constitutionally represent Honduras. The Venezuelan Ambassador was recalled right after the coup, but some diplomats do remain at the embassy in Tegucigalpa and have been key in protecting international journalists that have come under attack by the regime.
Meanwhile, the Honduran people are still out in the streets protesting the coup, on this 25th day since the de facto regime was first installed. The economy remains shut down by striking workers, schools remain closed because of teacher's strikes and there are disturbances throughout the nation. A national curfew is still in effect, imposed by the dictatorial regime.
The new Panamanian government, led by recently inaugurated President Martinelli, a multi-millionaire neoliberal conservative, has applauded the Honduran military for "keeping order" in the country. Apparently, Panama is recognizing the coup regime and working closely with Micheletti to resolve the growing economic problems in Honduras. Micheletti and Martinelli are old friends, both members of several business councils in Central and Latin America.
The longer things stall, the coup regime consolidates. On Sunday, a month will have passed since the coup d'etat was executed. Hopefully, it will be defeated before then.
Dept. Of State Agrees With Coup Regime In Honduras That "No Coup D'Etat" Has Taken Place; Says Should Be A Lesson To Zelaya Not To Follow Venezuela
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 20, 2009
The State Department finally concluded 3 weeks of ambiguity on its determination of whether or not a coup d'etat has taken place in Honduras. Despite the United Nations, European Union, Organization of American States and every Latin American nation clearly condemning the events as a coup d'etat, the United States government has today stated it doesn't consider a coup has taken place. The Obama administration joins only with the coup regime and its supporters (other coup leaders and/or executors of coups) in that determination.
Here is the statement made today by Phillip Crowley, spokesman for the Department of State:
"QUESTION: Have you ruled this as a coup d'état there legally --
MR. CROWLEY: No."
Crowley also made this statement, which appears to be a not-so-veiled attempt to tell President Zelaya and any other head of state overthrown by US allies that they better have learned their lesson: Washington will back (fund, support, design) coups against governments that align themselves with Venezuela. Breathe deep. And please do remember, this is Obama's State Department, not Bush's. Here it is:
"QUESTION: Coming back to Honduras, we’re getting some reports out of the region that there might be some sort of rift now between Zelaya and the Venezuelan Government. Is that Washington’s understanding? And if so, is that something that can be leveraged as these negotiations move on? To put it another way, is Chavez out of the way, and does that make Washington happy?
MR. CROWLEY: (Laughter.) We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.
QUESTION: When you say that the Venezuelan Government is – should not be an example of government for any leader --
MR. CROWLEY: I’m a believer in understatement.
QUESTION: Can you say that again? (Laughter.) It’s like – it’s justifying, sort of, the coup d’état, because if any government try to follow the socialist Government of Venezuela, then it’s fair, then, that somebody can try to make it – you know, defeat the government or something like that? Can you explain a little bit where we’re – what was your statement about Venezuela?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, I think, as we have talked about and as the Secretary has said in recent days, we have, on the one hand, restored our Ambassador to Venezuela. There are a number of issues that we want to discuss with the Venezuelan Government.
On the other side of the coin, we have concerns about the government of President Chavez, not only what he’s done in terms of his own country – his intimidation of news media, for example, the steps he has taken to restrict participation and debate within his country. And we’re also concerned about unhelpful steps that he’s taken with some of this neighbors, and interference that we’ve seen Venezuela – with respect to relations with other countries, whether it’s Honduras on the one hand, or whether it’s Colombia on the other. And when we’ve had issues with President Chavez, we have always made those clear."
Full text here.
The State Department finally concluded 3 weeks of ambiguity on its determination of whether or not a coup d'etat has taken place in Honduras. Despite the United Nations, European Union, Organization of American States and every Latin American nation clearly condemning the events as a coup d'etat, the United States government has today stated it doesn't consider a coup has taken place. The Obama administration joins only with the coup regime and its supporters (other coup leaders and/or executors of coups) in that determination.
Here is the statement made today by Phillip Crowley, spokesman for the Department of State:
"QUESTION: Have you ruled this as a coup d'état there legally --
MR. CROWLEY: No."
Crowley also made this statement, which appears to be a not-so-veiled attempt to tell President Zelaya and any other head of state overthrown by US allies that they better have learned their lesson: Washington will back (fund, support, design) coups against governments that align themselves with Venezuela. Breathe deep. And please do remember, this is Obama's State Department, not Bush's. Here it is:
"QUESTION: Coming back to Honduras, we’re getting some reports out of the region that there might be some sort of rift now between Zelaya and the Venezuelan Government. Is that Washington’s understanding? And if so, is that something that can be leveraged as these negotiations move on? To put it another way, is Chavez out of the way, and does that make Washington happy?
MR. CROWLEY: (Laughter.) We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.
QUESTION: When you say that the Venezuelan Government is – should not be an example of government for any leader --
MR. CROWLEY: I’m a believer in understatement.
QUESTION: Can you say that again? (Laughter.) It’s like – it’s justifying, sort of, the coup d’état, because if any government try to follow the socialist Government of Venezuela, then it’s fair, then, that somebody can try to make it – you know, defeat the government or something like that? Can you explain a little bit where we’re – what was your statement about Venezuela?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, I think, as we have talked about and as the Secretary has said in recent days, we have, on the one hand, restored our Ambassador to Venezuela. There are a number of issues that we want to discuss with the Venezuelan Government.
On the other side of the coin, we have concerns about the government of President Chavez, not only what he’s done in terms of his own country – his intimidation of news media, for example, the steps he has taken to restrict participation and debate within his country. And we’re also concerned about unhelpful steps that he’s taken with some of this neighbors, and interference that we’ve seen Venezuela – with respect to relations with other countries, whether it’s Honduras on the one hand, or whether it’s Colombia on the other. And when we’ve had issues with President Chavez, we have always made those clear."
Full text here.
Journalists From Telesur & Venezuela Detained By Coup Government In Honduras
VTV and Telesur Journalists arrested by De Facto Regime in Honduras
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 12, 2009
On Saturday night, reporters and correspondents from Telesur and Venezolana de Television (VTV) were arrested by the de facto regime in Honduras.
During the arrest, the journalists were subjected to a review of their documents, under threat of expulsion from Honduras by police loyal to the dictatorial government.
They were freed after the Foreign Minister of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, intervened.
The Telesur team is currently being protected by the Venezuelan embassy in Honduras while the VTV team will return to the hotel where they were originally staying, though still under the threat of expulsion this afternoon.
The coup forces that arrested them told them to leave country because "there is nothing for them to report on in Honduras".
The coup in Honduras is consolidating more each day, as failed "negotiations" continue in Costa Rica and Washington stalls, giving space for the de facto regime to gain political ground internationally. Last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, representatives from the coup regime were received warmly by the US Congress. On Friday, Congress held hearings on the Honduran coup, inviting - of all people - war hawk Otto Reich to provide expert testimony on the situation. A group of US congress members are promoting a resolution to support the coup and recognize the de fact regime. Unfortunately, President Zelaya has been either "captivated" by the Department of State or simply believes that his political future depends on his subordinate position towards Washington, since yesterday he made statements on Telesur excusing the US Government from any role in the coup.
But the US Government role is evident and amply documented. See all my prior posts! (and more to come...)
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 12, 2009
On Saturday night, reporters and correspondents from Telesur and Venezolana de Television (VTV) were arrested by the de facto regime in Honduras.
During the arrest, the journalists were subjected to a review of their documents, under threat of expulsion from Honduras by police loyal to the dictatorial government.
They were freed after the Foreign Minister of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, intervened.
The Telesur team is currently being protected by the Venezuelan embassy in Honduras while the VTV team will return to the hotel where they were originally staying, though still under the threat of expulsion this afternoon.
The coup forces that arrested them told them to leave country because "there is nothing for them to report on in Honduras".
The coup in Honduras is consolidating more each day, as failed "negotiations" continue in Costa Rica and Washington stalls, giving space for the de facto regime to gain political ground internationally. Last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, representatives from the coup regime were received warmly by the US Congress. On Friday, Congress held hearings on the Honduran coup, inviting - of all people - war hawk Otto Reich to provide expert testimony on the situation. A group of US congress members are promoting a resolution to support the coup and recognize the de fact regime. Unfortunately, President Zelaya has been either "captivated" by the Department of State or simply believes that his political future depends on his subordinate position towards Washington, since yesterday he made statements on Telesur excusing the US Government from any role in the coup.
But the US Government role is evident and amply documented. See all my prior posts! (and more to come...)
Honduras, Washington, and Liberal-Left Grasping at Straws
By Paul Street, ZNet, July 7, 2009
So liberal-left Obama supporters think they've got something to crow about in regard to Honduras. As George Ciccareillo-Maher noted recently on Counterpunch: "Previously resigned Obamaphiles, desperate to grasp at any shred of proof suggesting that they were right to get high on hope and expect imminent change, are closing ranks around their government and insisting that the U.S. government's response to the Honduran coup is proof positive of such change. Some even go so far as to claim that the Obama administration's support for Zelaya has been ‘unambiguous,' adding that ‘complaints that Washington hasn't acted fast enough to denounce the Honduran coup are silly and ignorant on the face of them.'"[1]
SOME "BLUNT LESSON[S] ABOUT POWER"
"Rebranding War and Occupation"
We'll return to Washington and Honduras in a moment, after some comments on why Obama's "progressive" fans are clutching at straws. It's been a weird and lonely time for many of them, what with Barack Obama's blatant escalation of terrorist, civilian-slaughtering war in South Asia, his apparently indefinite continuation of the Iraq occupation, his increase of the "defense" (empire) budget (Morgan Stanley reported last November that Obama rejects the silly concept of a "peace dividend"), his advance approval for an Israel attack on Iran, his refusal to move in any serious way against Israel's occupation of Palestine, his continuing refusal to permit Jean Bertrand Aristide back into the Caribbean, and...so on (the list goes on and on).
Did anyone besides Noam Chomsky notice the June 10th New York Times article in which we learned that Obama was pressuring the Iraqi government not to permit the popular referendum required by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) - the withdrawal document forced on the Bush administration by the Iraqi resistance. As the Times explained, the Obama administration fears that the Iraqi population might insist on the immediate removal of all U.S. troops, rejecting the SOFA provision that delays U.S. withdrawal until 2012. Such insistence, described as "anti-Americanism" by U.S. officials, would be consistent with longstanding majority Iraqi opinion, recorded in Pentagon-run polls and other Western surveys. The legally mandated referendum (described by the Times as a "potent poison pill approved at the same time as the security agreement as a way to appease political factions that did not want to be tarred with the accusation that they had voted for a measure that allowed American soldiers to stay on Iraqi soil until 2012") was scheduled for July 30, 2009. In likely "deference to American concerns," the Times reported, the Iraqi cabinet declared its wish to delay the vote for six months so that it could be held at the same time as national elections in January "to save money and time."[2]
"Overall," the prolific left journalist Jeremy Scahill noted in mid-June of 2009, Obama is "implementing a U.S. foreign policy that in some ways --or, I think, in many ways--advances the interest of the American empire in a way the Republicans could only have dreamed of doing." Further:
"What people, I think, misunderstand about Barack Obama is that this is a man who is a brilliant supporter of empire - who has figured out a way to essentially trick a lot of people into believing they're supporting radical change, when in effect what they're doing is supporting a radical expansion of the U.S. empire."
"I think that Obama is showing himself to be a master of misdirection--almost like a magician. He'll say a few things in his speech that sound like they're new, like a totally different U.S. approach, but then he'll also at the same time roll out a policy that is further than even Bush took things."
The title of the article in which Scahill made these comments said a mouthful: "Rebranding War and Occupation." [3] In comments made around the same time during a speech at the annual meetings of the International Socialist Organization, Scahill observed that "Obama is an incredibly Orwellian character. He can make people think that war is peace."[4]
"The Architects of Policy Protect Their Own Interests"
Then there's Obama's domestic agenda of, for, and by the wealthy Few. In the May 2009 edition of the centrist public affairs magazine The Atlantic, Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (no leftist!), argued that the Obama administration was for all intents and purposes in Wall Street's pocket. In an article titled "The Quiet Coup," Johnson argued that, in the words of the Atlantic's editors, "the finance industry has effectively captured our government— a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time." By Johnson's account, "Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here...[the] elite business interests [who] played a central role in creating the crisis...with the implicit backing of the government" [are] "now using their influence to prevent precisely [the] reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive...The [Obama] government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them."[5]
Chomsky rightly sees this statement as chilling confirmation of the great 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith's warning that "the architects of policy protect their own interests, no matter how grievous the effect on others."
"And they are the architects of policy," Chomsky adds. "Obama made sure to staff his economic team with advisors from [the financial] sector."[6]
As giant financial bailouts for Wall Street oligarchs combined with growing destitution amongst the popular Many to expose the chasm between the investor and political classes and the broad citizenry last March, the liberal-left journalist and author William Greider made a telling observation in the Washington Post:
"People everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn't. They [have] watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. ‘Where's my bailout,' became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sides nationwide. Then to deepen the insult, people [have] watched as establishment forces re-launched their campaign for ‘entitlement reform - a euphemism for whacking Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid." [7]
A glowing Los Angeles Times assessment of Obama's first hundred Days reproduced an interesting statement from Obama to the leaders of the banking industry last March. As the financial chieftains began to complain to him about the public's failure to understand their industry's need for high levels of compensation, Obama cut them off. "Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen" Obama said. "The public isn't buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." [8]
A student who told me about this Los Angeles Times report wrote me with an interesting comment: "The question for me (and I assume for many leftists) is why is Obama using his administration to protect the bankers from the angry rabble (us)? Why doesn't his administration simply address the people's needs and leave the bankers to their fate? These are, of course, rhetorical questions. We know that he is serving to protect and legitimate the highly undemocratic and destructive class system of state capitalism through another crisis."
HONDURAS
Oh, but look, liberal-left Obama fans exult, there's Honduras! Yes, Honduras, where right-wing generals and politicians undertook a coup against a left-leaning and democratically elected president and....our "progressive" NOT Bush president.... DID NOT RUSH TO DEFEND the criminal action! He even "condemned" it!! Obama has "unambiguously" expressed his belief that the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, should be returned to power - an opinion shared with nearly every Latin American state and the United Nations General Assembly!!!
Isn't it wonderful, indicative of a dramatically new democratic day in U.S. foreign policy? Isn't it just so different from how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to the short-lived business-media-military coup against Venezuela's leftist president Hugo Chavez in April of 2002? Hosanna Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Ho Sanna Hey Sanna Ho Superstar!
"Lukewarm, Proper, Belated, and Mixed"
Not so fast. Obama has responded with pronounced imperial ambiguity toward the blatantly illegal[9] coup, which was of course carried out by U.S.-trained and U.S. funded military forces and conducted with U.S.-supplied military equipment.[10] While he somewhat belatedly condemned the Honduran coup, Obama has "stepped lightly" (as the Washington Post put it)[11] when it comes to reacting. The White Houses possesses [12] but has yet (as of this writing, on the morning of Monday, July 6th) to decisively exercise the power to quickly restore Zelaya to his rightful office in Honduras, a nation whose government and economy had long been exceedingly dependent on the U.S.
On the first evening following the Honduran coup, Obama expressed "deep concern" regarding "the detention and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya" and called on "all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms" and the "the rule of law" so as to resolve "existing tensions and disputes... through dialogue free from any outside interference." Still, the White House refused to officially/legally declare the removal of Zelaya "a coup." Making such a declaration would have triggered (under the Foreign Assistance Act) a cutoff of tens of millions of dollars of U.S. aid to the Central American nation.[13] John Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras and a leading, blood-soaked figure in U.S. coordination of mass-murderous right-wing state terror across Central America under Ronald Reagan [14], told the Post that the Obama administration's disinclination to fully acknowledge the reality of recent events "appeared to reflect reluctance to see Zelaya returned unconditionally to power."[15]
Would the U.S. work seriously for Zelaya's return? Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "We haven't laid out any demands that we're insisting on, because we're working with others on behalf of our ultimate objectives."[16] Clinton refused to say whether the declared U.S. goal of "restoring the constitutional order" meant returning Zelaya to power. Her spokesperson Ian Kelly acknowledged on June 29th (one day after the coup) appeared to be holding back from calling the coup a coup because of White House hopes for some sort of "negotiated solution," [17] which could only have meant the possible return of Zelaya on more U.S. friendly terms.
The White House's tepid condemnation and measured rhetoric stood in sharp contrast to most Latin American nations' and the European Union's quick and sharp call for Zelaya's rapid and unconditional return to power, raising what economist and Latin America expert Mark Weisbrot called "suspicions about what the U.S. government is really trying to accomplish in this situation."[18]
Yesterday the Honduran government denied Zelaya's plane the right to land at the airport in Honduras' capital and killed at least two protestors calling for the restoration of democracy. In the wake of these events, Washington applauded as "positive" the coup's government's apparent willingness to "offer some sort of dialogue"[19] with the Organization of American States. As it turns out, however, the coup's foreign minister says this has proclaimed that Zelaya's return is "not negotiable."[20] According to the liberal-left journalist Al Giardano, "this situation has evolved beyond the capacity of diplomacy to solve it. Calling for ‘dialogue' - although it's what diplomats do, including in their sleep - isn't going to shake anything loose from [the coup leaders]. It is time for State to move aside and bring on the officials with the badges....The hour has now arrived for Washington to classify Honduras as a ‘military coup,' triggering the cut-off of aid to a country whose budget is 65 percent dependent on foreign assistance." [21]
Perhaps that will occur tomorrow or the day after - quite tardily from my perspective. Perhaps not. Either way, the veteran left U.S. foreign policy critic William Blum is right: "the response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed." [23] It's certainly nothing for "liberal"-progressive types to write home to their leftist grandmas about - that's for sure. With just a tiny portion of the military and political force it pours into sustaining illegal invasions and occupations (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine) and dictatorships in oil-rich Southwest Asia, the Obama administration could (in line with majority Latin American and global opinion) have quickly and "unambiguously" restored the democratically elected president to power in Honduras. It seems likely that the White House is working to bring Zelaya back on a conditional basis (on the model of the Clinton administration's re-installation of Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1994)[22], returning him to power on more disciplined, U.S.-friendly terms. But, as Weisbrot notes, any effort to "extract concessions from Zelaya as part of a deal for his return to office" violate the essence of "how democracy works. If Zelaya wants to negotiate a settlement with his political opponent after he returns, that is another story. But nobody has the right to extract political concessions from him in exile, over the barrel of a gun."[24]
How Much Better Than Bush-Cheney 2002?
Insofar as there is anything "progressive" about the Obama administration's willingness to condemn the Honduran coup, much of the credit should go to popular forces and left political developments in Latin America. The southern half of the hemisphere (home to left governments now in Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Chile has moved in a left-progressive direction since the failed coup against Chavez. The Obama operatives, smarter on the whole than the Bush team, certainly know very well that the balance of political forces and opinion has shifted in ways that would make it counter-productive to be seen as allied with a transparently criminal coup in Central America. They know they have bigger fish to fry in the oil-rich Middle East. At the same time, the Bush administration actually abandoned the anti-Chavez coup fairly quickly, once it saw the handwriting on the wall. As Weisbrot notes:
"Many press reports have contrasted the Obama administration's rejection of the Honduran coup with the Bush administration's initial support for the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But actually there are more similarities than differences between the U.S. responses to these two events. Within a day, the Bush administration reversed its official position on the Venezuelan coup, because the rest of the hemisphere had announced that it would not recognize the coup government. Similarly, in this case, the Obama administration is following the rest of the hemisphere, trying not to be the odd man out but at the same time not really sharing their commitment to democracy"
"Washington Says it Tried Its Best"
Last but not least, there are some disturbing, yet-to-be answered questions about the Obama administration's role leading up to the coup. As Scahill noted one day after Zelaya's removal:
"It is impossible to imagine that the US was not aware that the coup was in the works. In fact, this was basically confirmed by The New York Times...While the US has issued heavily-qualified statements critical of the coup—in the aftermath of the events in Honduras—the US could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down. The US ties to the Honduran military and political establishment run far too deep for all of this to have gone down without at least tacit support or the turning of a blind eye by some US political or military official(s)."
"Here are some facts to consider: the US is the top trading partner for Honduras. The coup plotters/supporters in the Honduran Congress are supporters of the ‘free trade agreements' Washington has imposed on the region. The coup leaders view their actions, in part, as a rejection of Hugo Chavez's influence in Honduras and with Zelaya and an embrace of the United States and Washington's ‘vision' for the region. Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup with a simple series of phone calls." [25]
According to Blum in the latest edition of his always instructive Anti-Empire Report:
"The United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military's plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It's difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with ‘a frown.' The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional "golpe" bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate."[26]
The administration can claim that it tried to "discourage" the coup in advance through conversations with top Honduran military officials. But, as Weisbrot notes, "It would be interesting to know what these discussions were 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 every one else will?' Or was it more like, ‘Don't do it, because we will do everything in our power to reverse any such coup?'" As Weisbrot correctly observes, "The administration's actions since the coup indicate something more like the former, if not worse." [27]
"Rather Than Conform to America's Rules"
Obama recently told a Chilean reporter that the U.S. cannot apologize for its critical role in the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Chile's then elected president Salvador Allende and ushered in the bloody rule of the neo-fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. This, Obama explained, is because the U.S. is "an enormous force for good in the world," one that prefers to "look forward," not "backwards" (sound familiar?). Obama's lukewarm response to the Honduran coup of June 28 - ???? 2009 may fall short of what one might expect from such an "enormous force," but it fits rather nicely the imperial mindset articulated in his deeply conservative 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope:
"Of course there are those who would argue with my starting premise - that any global system built in America's image can alleviate misery in poorer countries...Rather than conform to America's rules, the argument goes, other countries should resist America's efforts to expand its hegemony; instead, they should follow their own path to development, taking their lead from left-leaning populists like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, or turning to more traditional principles of social organization, like Islamic law...I believe [Chavez and other] critics [of the U.S. and neoliberalism] are wrong...The system of free markets and liberal democracy... offer[s] people around the world their best chance at a better life" [28]
If I might step outside immediate events for a moment, it's worth noting that neoliberal global capitalism has offered no such thing, especially to Latin Americans. [29]Candidate Obama's reflections ended on a profoundly false judgment, properly rejected by "Mel" Zelaya, who came into office in early 2006 as a center-right politician but who subsequently moved left and shifted his desperately impoverished and U.S.-controlled nation into Hugo Chavez's socialist "Bolivarian Alternative for the America's" (ALBA).[30]
Paul Street is the author of many essays, speeches, chapters, reviews, and books, including (most recently) Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (order the latter at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987).
NOTES
1 George Ciccareillo-Maher, George Ciccariello-Maher, "The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeteed," (July 5, 2009), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/maher07032009.html.Ciccareillo-Maher quotes the intelligent but occasionally abusive Al Giardano, "America Held Hostage: Day Two of the Coup in Honduras," The Narcosphere (June 29, 2009), read at http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/am%C3%A9rica-held-hostage-day-two-coup-honduras.
2 Noam Chomsky, "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours," Speech to the Riverside Church, New York City (June 12, 2009), transcript available at www.democracynow.org/2009/7/3/noam_chomsky_on _crisis_and_hope; Alissa Rubin, "U.S. Moves Ahead With Vote on Security Pact," New York Times, June 10, 2009. As Chomsky noted, "the current U.S. efforts to prevent the legally required referendum are extremely revealing. Sometimes they're called ‘democracy promotion.'"
3 Jeremy Scahill and Anthony Arnove, "Rebranding War and Occupation," Socialist Worker (June 19, 2009).
4 Jeremy Scahill, "Barack Obama and U.S. Foreign Policy," speech at "Socialism 2009," annual conference of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), June 19, 2009, Chicago, Illinois.
5 Simon Johnson, "The Quiet Coup," The Atlantic (May 2009), read online at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice.
6 Chomsky, "Crisis and Hope."
7 William Greider, "Obama told Us to Speak Out, But Is He Listening?" Washington Post, March 22, 2009.
8 Fay Fiore and Mark Barabak, "AUDACITY AND AMBITION: Obama Begins Leading America in a New Direction," Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2009.
9 Albert Vallente Thoreson, "Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal," CounterPunch (July 1, 2009), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/thorensen07012009.html; Mark Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?" The Guardian (UK), July 1, 2009.
10 Evan Gollnger, "Obama's First Coup d'Etat: Honduran President Has Been Kidnapped," Venezuelanalaysis (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554; Nicholas Kozloff, "The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?" CounterPunch (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/kozloff06292009.html.
11 Mary Beth Sheridan, "U.S. Condemns Honduran Coup: Still, Administration Steps Lightly," Washington Post, June 30, 2009, read at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR2009062904239.html.
12 Roberto Lovato, "Obama Has the Power and Responsibility to Restore Democracy in Honduras," Huffington Post (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/obama-has-the-power-and-r_b_222170.html.
13 FOX News, "Obama Calls for Order," FOX News (June 28, 2009), read at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/28/obama-calls-order-military-arrests-honduran-president/; Scahill, "A Few Thoughts;" Greg Grandin, "Democracy Derailed in Honduras," The Nation (June 30, 2009), read at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090713/grandin/single; Reuters, "U.S. Could Cut Off Aid to Honduras After Coup," AlterNet (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N29384895.htm.
14 Noam Chomsky, "John Negroponte: From Central America to Iraq" (July 28, 2004), pp. 89-92 in Chomsky, Interventions.
15 Sheridan, "U.S. Condemns Honduran Coup: Still, Administration Steps Lightly."
16 Quoted in Sheridan, "U.S. Condemns Honduran Coup."
17 http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2009/125481.htm
18 Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?"
19 Jose De Cordoba and David Luhnow, "Honduras Standoff Heats Up," The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2009, p.A6.
20 Al Giardano, "Honduras Coup's Preconditions Leave Nothing to Negotiate," The Narcosphere (July 6, 2009), read at http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/honduras-coups-preconditions-leave-nothing-negotiate#comments.
21 Giardano, "Honduras Coup's Preconditions"
22 William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2005), pp. 202-03.
23 William Blum, The Anti-Empire Report (July 3, 2009), read at http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer71.html
24 Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?"
25 Jeremy Scahill, "A Few Thoughts on the Coup in Honduras," Common Dreams (June 30, 2009), read at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/29-11.
26 Blum, Anti-Empire Report.
27 Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?"
28 Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York, 2006), p. 315.
29 Mark Weisbrot, "The Mirage of Progress," American Prospect (January 1, 2002), read at http://www.prospect.org/cs/articlesarticle=the_mirage_of_progress; Mark Weisbrot, "Globalization Fails to Deliver the Goods," Common Dreams (August 29, 2002), read at http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0829-05.htm
30 Kozloff, "The Coup in Honduras;" Grandin, "Democracy Derailed."
So liberal-left Obama supporters think they've got something to crow about in regard to Honduras. As George Ciccareillo-Maher noted recently on Counterpunch: "Previously resigned Obamaphiles, desperate to grasp at any shred of proof suggesting that they were right to get high on hope and expect imminent change, are closing ranks around their government and insisting that the U.S. government's response to the Honduran coup is proof positive of such change. Some even go so far as to claim that the Obama administration's support for Zelaya has been ‘unambiguous,' adding that ‘complaints that Washington hasn't acted fast enough to denounce the Honduran coup are silly and ignorant on the face of them.'"[1]
SOME "BLUNT LESSON[S] ABOUT POWER"
"Rebranding War and Occupation"
We'll return to Washington and Honduras in a moment, after some comments on why Obama's "progressive" fans are clutching at straws. It's been a weird and lonely time for many of them, what with Barack Obama's blatant escalation of terrorist, civilian-slaughtering war in South Asia, his apparently indefinite continuation of the Iraq occupation, his increase of the "defense" (empire) budget (Morgan Stanley reported last November that Obama rejects the silly concept of a "peace dividend"), his advance approval for an Israel attack on Iran, his refusal to move in any serious way against Israel's occupation of Palestine, his continuing refusal to permit Jean Bertrand Aristide back into the Caribbean, and...so on (the list goes on and on).
Did anyone besides Noam Chomsky notice the June 10th New York Times article in which we learned that Obama was pressuring the Iraqi government not to permit the popular referendum required by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) - the withdrawal document forced on the Bush administration by the Iraqi resistance. As the Times explained, the Obama administration fears that the Iraqi population might insist on the immediate removal of all U.S. troops, rejecting the SOFA provision that delays U.S. withdrawal until 2012. Such insistence, described as "anti-Americanism" by U.S. officials, would be consistent with longstanding majority Iraqi opinion, recorded in Pentagon-run polls and other Western surveys. The legally mandated referendum (described by the Times as a "potent poison pill approved at the same time as the security agreement as a way to appease political factions that did not want to be tarred with the accusation that they had voted for a measure that allowed American soldiers to stay on Iraqi soil until 2012") was scheduled for July 30, 2009. In likely "deference to American concerns," the Times reported, the Iraqi cabinet declared its wish to delay the vote for six months so that it could be held at the same time as national elections in January "to save money and time."[2]
"Overall," the prolific left journalist Jeremy Scahill noted in mid-June of 2009, Obama is "implementing a U.S. foreign policy that in some ways --or, I think, in many ways--advances the interest of the American empire in a way the Republicans could only have dreamed of doing." Further:
"What people, I think, misunderstand about Barack Obama is that this is a man who is a brilliant supporter of empire - who has figured out a way to essentially trick a lot of people into believing they're supporting radical change, when in effect what they're doing is supporting a radical expansion of the U.S. empire."
"I think that Obama is showing himself to be a master of misdirection--almost like a magician. He'll say a few things in his speech that sound like they're new, like a totally different U.S. approach, but then he'll also at the same time roll out a policy that is further than even Bush took things."
The title of the article in which Scahill made these comments said a mouthful: "Rebranding War and Occupation." [3] In comments made around the same time during a speech at the annual meetings of the International Socialist Organization, Scahill observed that "Obama is an incredibly Orwellian character. He can make people think that war is peace."[4]
"The Architects of Policy Protect Their Own Interests"
Then there's Obama's domestic agenda of, for, and by the wealthy Few. In the May 2009 edition of the centrist public affairs magazine The Atlantic, Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (no leftist!), argued that the Obama administration was for all intents and purposes in Wall Street's pocket. In an article titled "The Quiet Coup," Johnson argued that, in the words of the Atlantic's editors, "the finance industry has effectively captured our government— a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time." By Johnson's account, "Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here...[the] elite business interests [who] played a central role in creating the crisis...with the implicit backing of the government" [are] "now using their influence to prevent precisely [the] reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive...The [Obama] government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them."[5]
Chomsky rightly sees this statement as chilling confirmation of the great 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith's warning that "the architects of policy protect their own interests, no matter how grievous the effect on others."
"And they are the architects of policy," Chomsky adds. "Obama made sure to staff his economic team with advisors from [the financial] sector."[6]
As giant financial bailouts for Wall Street oligarchs combined with growing destitution amongst the popular Many to expose the chasm between the investor and political classes and the broad citizenry last March, the liberal-left journalist and author William Greider made a telling observation in the Washington Post:
"People everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn't. They [have] watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. ‘Where's my bailout,' became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sides nationwide. Then to deepen the insult, people [have] watched as establishment forces re-launched their campaign for ‘entitlement reform - a euphemism for whacking Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid." [7]
A glowing Los Angeles Times assessment of Obama's first hundred Days reproduced an interesting statement from Obama to the leaders of the banking industry last March. As the financial chieftains began to complain to him about the public's failure to understand their industry's need for high levels of compensation, Obama cut them off. "Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen" Obama said. "The public isn't buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." [8]
A student who told me about this Los Angeles Times report wrote me with an interesting comment: "The question for me (and I assume for many leftists) is why is Obama using his administration to protect the bankers from the angry rabble (us)? Why doesn't his administration simply address the people's needs and leave the bankers to their fate? These are, of course, rhetorical questions. We know that he is serving to protect and legitimate the highly undemocratic and destructive class system of state capitalism through another crisis."
HONDURAS
Oh, but look, liberal-left Obama fans exult, there's Honduras! Yes, Honduras, where right-wing generals and politicians undertook a coup against a left-leaning and democratically elected president and....our "progressive" NOT Bush president.... DID NOT RUSH TO DEFEND the criminal action! He even "condemned" it!! Obama has "unambiguously" expressed his belief that the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, should be returned to power - an opinion shared with nearly every Latin American state and the United Nations General Assembly!!!
Isn't it wonderful, indicative of a dramatically new democratic day in U.S. foreign policy? Isn't it just so different from how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to the short-lived business-media-military coup against Venezuela's leftist president Hugo Chavez in April of 2002? Hosanna Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Ho Sanna Hey Sanna Ho Superstar!
"Lukewarm, Proper, Belated, and Mixed"
Not so fast. Obama has responded with pronounced imperial ambiguity toward the blatantly illegal[9] coup, which was of course carried out by U.S.-trained and U.S. funded military forces and conducted with U.S.-supplied military equipment.[10] While he somewhat belatedly condemned the Honduran coup, Obama has "stepped lightly" (as the Washington Post put it)[11] when it comes to reacting. The White Houses possesses [12] but has yet (as of this writing, on the morning of Monday, July 6th) to decisively exercise the power to quickly restore Zelaya to his rightful office in Honduras, a nation whose government and economy had long been exceedingly dependent on the U.S.
On the first evening following the Honduran coup, Obama expressed "deep concern" regarding "the detention and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya" and called on "all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms" and the "the rule of law" so as to resolve "existing tensions and disputes... through dialogue free from any outside interference." Still, the White House refused to officially/legally declare the removal of Zelaya "a coup." Making such a declaration would have triggered (under the Foreign Assistance Act) a cutoff of tens of millions of dollars of U.S. aid to the Central American nation.[13] John Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras and a leading, blood-soaked figure in U.S. coordination of mass-murderous right-wing state terror across Central America under Ronald Reagan [14], told the Post that the Obama administration's disinclination to fully acknowledge the reality of recent events "appeared to reflect reluctance to see Zelaya returned unconditionally to power."[15]
Would the U.S. work seriously for Zelaya's return? Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "We haven't laid out any demands that we're insisting on, because we're working with others on behalf of our ultimate objectives."[16] Clinton refused to say whether the declared U.S. goal of "restoring the constitutional order" meant returning Zelaya to power. Her spokesperson Ian Kelly acknowledged on June 29th (one day after the coup) appeared to be holding back from calling the coup a coup because of White House hopes for some sort of "negotiated solution," [17] which could only have meant the possible return of Zelaya on more U.S. friendly terms.
The White House's tepid condemnation and measured rhetoric stood in sharp contrast to most Latin American nations' and the European Union's quick and sharp call for Zelaya's rapid and unconditional return to power, raising what economist and Latin America expert Mark Weisbrot called "suspicions about what the U.S. government is really trying to accomplish in this situation."[18]
Yesterday the Honduran government denied Zelaya's plane the right to land at the airport in Honduras' capital and killed at least two protestors calling for the restoration of democracy. In the wake of these events, Washington applauded as "positive" the coup's government's apparent willingness to "offer some sort of dialogue"[19] with the Organization of American States. As it turns out, however, the coup's foreign minister says this has proclaimed that Zelaya's return is "not negotiable."[20] According to the liberal-left journalist Al Giardano, "this situation has evolved beyond the capacity of diplomacy to solve it. Calling for ‘dialogue' - although it's what diplomats do, including in their sleep - isn't going to shake anything loose from [the coup leaders]. It is time for State to move aside and bring on the officials with the badges....The hour has now arrived for Washington to classify Honduras as a ‘military coup,' triggering the cut-off of aid to a country whose budget is 65 percent dependent on foreign assistance." [21]
Perhaps that will occur tomorrow or the day after - quite tardily from my perspective. Perhaps not. Either way, the veteran left U.S. foreign policy critic William Blum is right: "the response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed." [23] It's certainly nothing for "liberal"-progressive types to write home to their leftist grandmas about - that's for sure. With just a tiny portion of the military and political force it pours into sustaining illegal invasions and occupations (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine) and dictatorships in oil-rich Southwest Asia, the Obama administration could (in line with majority Latin American and global opinion) have quickly and "unambiguously" restored the democratically elected president to power in Honduras. It seems likely that the White House is working to bring Zelaya back on a conditional basis (on the model of the Clinton administration's re-installation of Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1994)[22], returning him to power on more disciplined, U.S.-friendly terms. But, as Weisbrot notes, any effort to "extract concessions from Zelaya as part of a deal for his return to office" violate the essence of "how democracy works. If Zelaya wants to negotiate a settlement with his political opponent after he returns, that is another story. But nobody has the right to extract political concessions from him in exile, over the barrel of a gun."[24]
How Much Better Than Bush-Cheney 2002?
Insofar as there is anything "progressive" about the Obama administration's willingness to condemn the Honduran coup, much of the credit should go to popular forces and left political developments in Latin America. The southern half of the hemisphere (home to left governments now in Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Chile has moved in a left-progressive direction since the failed coup against Chavez. The Obama operatives, smarter on the whole than the Bush team, certainly know very well that the balance of political forces and opinion has shifted in ways that would make it counter-productive to be seen as allied with a transparently criminal coup in Central America. They know they have bigger fish to fry in the oil-rich Middle East. At the same time, the Bush administration actually abandoned the anti-Chavez coup fairly quickly, once it saw the handwriting on the wall. As Weisbrot notes:
"Many press reports have contrasted the Obama administration's rejection of the Honduran coup with the Bush administration's initial support for the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But actually there are more similarities than differences between the U.S. responses to these two events. Within a day, the Bush administration reversed its official position on the Venezuelan coup, because the rest of the hemisphere had announced that it would not recognize the coup government. Similarly, in this case, the Obama administration is following the rest of the hemisphere, trying not to be the odd man out but at the same time not really sharing their commitment to democracy"
"Washington Says it Tried Its Best"
Last but not least, there are some disturbing, yet-to-be answered questions about the Obama administration's role leading up to the coup. As Scahill noted one day after Zelaya's removal:
"It is impossible to imagine that the US was not aware that the coup was in the works. In fact, this was basically confirmed by The New York Times...While the US has issued heavily-qualified statements critical of the coup—in the aftermath of the events in Honduras—the US could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down. The US ties to the Honduran military and political establishment run far too deep for all of this to have gone down without at least tacit support or the turning of a blind eye by some US political or military official(s)."
"Here are some facts to consider: the US is the top trading partner for Honduras. The coup plotters/supporters in the Honduran Congress are supporters of the ‘free trade agreements' Washington has imposed on the region. The coup leaders view their actions, in part, as a rejection of Hugo Chavez's influence in Honduras and with Zelaya and an embrace of the United States and Washington's ‘vision' for the region. Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup with a simple series of phone calls." [25]
According to Blum in the latest edition of his always instructive Anti-Empire Report:
"The United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military's plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It's difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with ‘a frown.' The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional "golpe" bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate."[26]
The administration can claim that it tried to "discourage" the coup in advance through conversations with top Honduran military officials. But, as Weisbrot notes, "It would be interesting to know what these discussions were 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 every one else will?' Or was it more like, ‘Don't do it, because we will do everything in our power to reverse any such coup?'" As Weisbrot correctly observes, "The administration's actions since the coup indicate something more like the former, if not worse." [27]
"Rather Than Conform to America's Rules"
Obama recently told a Chilean reporter that the U.S. cannot apologize for its critical role in the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Chile's then elected president Salvador Allende and ushered in the bloody rule of the neo-fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. This, Obama explained, is because the U.S. is "an enormous force for good in the world," one that prefers to "look forward," not "backwards" (sound familiar?). Obama's lukewarm response to the Honduran coup of June 28 - ???? 2009 may fall short of what one might expect from such an "enormous force," but it fits rather nicely the imperial mindset articulated in his deeply conservative 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope:
"Of course there are those who would argue with my starting premise - that any global system built in America's image can alleviate misery in poorer countries...Rather than conform to America's rules, the argument goes, other countries should resist America's efforts to expand its hegemony; instead, they should follow their own path to development, taking their lead from left-leaning populists like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, or turning to more traditional principles of social organization, like Islamic law...I believe [Chavez and other] critics [of the U.S. and neoliberalism] are wrong...The system of free markets and liberal democracy... offer[s] people around the world their best chance at a better life" [28]
If I might step outside immediate events for a moment, it's worth noting that neoliberal global capitalism has offered no such thing, especially to Latin Americans. [29]Candidate Obama's reflections ended on a profoundly false judgment, properly rejected by "Mel" Zelaya, who came into office in early 2006 as a center-right politician but who subsequently moved left and shifted his desperately impoverished and U.S.-controlled nation into Hugo Chavez's socialist "Bolivarian Alternative for the America's" (ALBA).[30]
Paul Street is the author of many essays, speeches, chapters, reviews, and books, including (most recently) Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (order the latter at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987).
NOTES
1 George Ciccareillo-Maher, George Ciccariello-Maher, "The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeteed," (July 5, 2009), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/maher07032009.html.Ciccareillo-Maher quotes the intelligent but occasionally abusive Al Giardano, "America Held Hostage: Day Two of the Coup in Honduras," The Narcosphere (June 29, 2009), read at http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/am%C3%A9rica-held-hostage-day-two-coup-honduras.
2 Noam Chomsky, "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours," Speech to the Riverside Church, New York City (June 12, 2009), transcript available at www.democracynow.org/2009/7/3/noam_chomsky_on _crisis_and_hope; Alissa Rubin, "U.S. Moves Ahead With Vote on Security Pact," New York Times, June 10, 2009. As Chomsky noted, "the current U.S. efforts to prevent the legally required referendum are extremely revealing. Sometimes they're called ‘democracy promotion.'"
3 Jeremy Scahill and Anthony Arnove, "Rebranding War and Occupation," Socialist Worker (June 19, 2009).
4 Jeremy Scahill, "Barack Obama and U.S. Foreign Policy," speech at "Socialism 2009," annual conference of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), June 19, 2009, Chicago, Illinois.
5 Simon Johnson, "The Quiet Coup," The Atlantic (May 2009), read online at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice.
6 Chomsky, "Crisis and Hope."
7 William Greider, "Obama told Us to Speak Out, But Is He Listening?" Washington Post, March 22, 2009.
8 Fay Fiore and Mark Barabak, "AUDACITY AND AMBITION: Obama Begins Leading America in a New Direction," Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2009.
9 Albert Vallente Thoreson, "Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal," CounterPunch (July 1, 2009), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/thorensen07012009.html; Mark Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?" The Guardian (UK), July 1, 2009.
10 Evan Gollnger, "Obama's First Coup d'Etat: Honduran President Has Been Kidnapped," Venezuelanalaysis (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554; Nicholas Kozloff, "The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?" CounterPunch (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/kozloff06292009.html.
11 Mary Beth Sheridan, "U.S. Condemns Honduran Coup: Still, Administration Steps Lightly," Washington Post, June 30, 2009, read at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR2009062904239.html.
12 Roberto Lovato, "Obama Has the Power and Responsibility to Restore Democracy in Honduras," Huffington Post (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/obama-has-the-power-and-r_b_222170.html.
13 FOX News, "Obama Calls for Order," FOX News (June 28, 2009), read at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/28/obama-calls-order-military-arrests-honduran-president/; Scahill, "A Few Thoughts;" Greg Grandin, "Democracy Derailed in Honduras," The Nation (June 30, 2009), read at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090713/grandin/single; Reuters, "U.S. Could Cut Off Aid to Honduras After Coup," AlterNet (June 29, 2009), read at http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N29384895.htm.
14 Noam Chomsky, "John Negroponte: From Central America to Iraq" (July 28, 2004), pp. 89-92 in Chomsky, Interventions.
15 Sheridan, "U.S. Condemns Honduran Coup: Still, Administration Steps Lightly."
16 Quoted in Sheridan, "U.S. Condemns Honduran Coup."
17 http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2009/125481.htm
18 Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?"
19 Jose De Cordoba and David Luhnow, "Honduras Standoff Heats Up," The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2009, p.A6.
20 Al Giardano, "Honduras Coup's Preconditions Leave Nothing to Negotiate," The Narcosphere (July 6, 2009), read at http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/honduras-coups-preconditions-leave-nothing-negotiate#comments.
21 Giardano, "Honduras Coup's Preconditions"
22 William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2005), pp. 202-03.
23 William Blum, The Anti-Empire Report (July 3, 2009), read at http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer71.html
24 Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?"
25 Jeremy Scahill, "A Few Thoughts on the Coup in Honduras," Common Dreams (June 30, 2009), read at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/29-11.
26 Blum, Anti-Empire Report.
27 Weisbrot, "Does the U.S. Back the Honduran Coup?"
28 Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York, 2006), p. 315.
29 Mark Weisbrot, "The Mirage of Progress," American Prospect (January 1, 2002), read at http://www.prospect.org/cs/articlesarticle=the_mirage_of_progress; Mark Weisbrot, "Globalization Fails to Deliver the Goods," Common Dreams (August 29, 2002), read at http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0829-05.htm
30 Kozloff, "The Coup in Honduras;" Grandin, "Democracy Derailed."
The Role of the International Republican Institute (IRI) in the Honduran Coup
The International Republican Institute talks of “coup” in Honduras, months before
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 6, 2009
The International Republican Institute (IRI), considered the international branch of the U.S. Republican Party, and one of the four “core groups” of the congressionally created and funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), apparently knew of the coup d’etat in Honduras against President Zelaya well in advance. IRI is well known for its role in the April 2002 coup d’etat against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and its funding and strategic advising of the principal organizations involved in the ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2004. In both cases, IRI funded and/or trained and advised political parties and groups that were implicated in the violent, undemocratic overthrow of democratically elected presidents.
After the 2002 coup d’etat occured in Venezuela, IRI president at the time, George Folsom, sent out a celebratory press release claiming, “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…” Hours later, after the coup failed and the people of Venezuelan rescued their president, who had been kidnapped and imprisoned on a military base, and reinstalled constitutional order, IRI regretted its premature, public applause for the coup. One of its principal funders, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was furious that IRI had publicly revealed the U.S. government had provided funding and support for the coup leaders. NED President Carl Gershman was so irritated with IRI’s blunder, that he sent out a memo to Folsom, chastising him: “By welcoming [the coup] – indeed, without any apparent reservations – you unnecessarily interjected IRI into the sensitive internal politics of Venezuela”. Gershman would have much preferred that NED and IRI’s role in fomenting and supporting the coup against President Chávez have remained a secret.
IRI, chaired by Senator John McCain, was created in 1983 as part of the National Endowment for Democracy’s mission to “promote democracy around the world”, a mandate from President Ronald Reagan. In reality, one of NED’s founders, Allen Weinstein, put it this way in a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." IRI’s own history, according to its website (www.iri.org), also explains that its original work was in Latin America, at a time when the Reagan administration was under heavy scrutiny and pressure from the U.S. Congress for funding paramilitary groups, dictatorships and death squads in Central and South America to install U.S.-friendly regimes and suppress leftist movements. “Congress responded to President Reagan’s call in 1983 when it created the National Endowment for Democracy to support aspiring democrats worldwide. Four nonprofit, nonpartisan democracy institutes were formed to carry out this work – IRI, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS).”
“In its infancy, IRI focused on planting the seeds of democracy in Latin America. Since the end of the Cold War, IRI has broadened its reach to support democracy and freedom around the globe. IRI has conducted programs in more than 100 countries.”
In its initial days, IRI, along with the other coup groups of the NED, funded organizations in Nicaragua to foment the destabilization of the Sandinista government. Journalist Jeremy Bigwood explained part of this role in his article, “No Strings Attached?”, "’When the rhetoric of democracy is put aside, NED is a specialized tool for penetrating civil society in other countries down to the grassroots level’ to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals, writes University of California-Santa Barbara professor William Robinson in his book, A Faustian Bargain. Robinson was in Nicaragua during the late ‘80s and watched NED work with the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan opposition to remove the leftist Sandinistas from power during the 1990 elections.”
The evidence of IRI’s role in the 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela has been well documented and investigated. Proof of such involvement, which is still ongoing in terms of IRI’s work, funding, strategic advising and training of opposition political parties in Venezuela, is available through documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act posted here: , and also available in my book, The Chávez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela (Olive Branch Press 2006). None of the claims or evidence regarding IRI’s role in fomenting and supporting the April 2002 in Venezuela and its ongoing support of the Venezuelan opposition has ever been disclaimed by the institution, primarily because all evidence cited comes from IRI and NED’s own internal documentation obtained under FOIA.
Hence, when the recent coup d’etat occured in Honduras, against democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, there was little doubt of U.S. fingerprints. IRI’s name appeared as a recipient of a $700,000 Latin American Regional Grant in 2008-2009 from NED to promote “good governance” programs in countries including Honduras. An additional grant of $550,000 to work with “think tanks” and “pressure groups” in Honduras to influence political parties was also given by the NED to IRI in 2008-2009, specifically stating, "IRI will support initiatives to implement [political] positions into the 2009 campaigns. IRI will place special emphasis on Honduras, which has scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in November 2009.” That is clear direct intervention in internal politics in Honduras.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) also provides approximately $49 million annually to Honduras, a large part of which is directed towards “democracy promotion” programs. The majority of the recipients of this aid in Honduras, which comes in the form of funding, training, resources, strategic advice, communications counseling, political party strengthening and leadership training, are organizations directly linked to the recent coup d’etat, such as the Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran Private Enterprise Council (COHEP), the Council of University Deans, the Confederation of Honduran Workers (CTH), the National Convergence Forum, the Chamber of Commerce (FEDECAMARA), the Association of Private Media (AMC), the Group Paz y Democracia and the student group Generación X Cambio. These organizations form part of a coalition self-titled “Unión Cívica Democrática de Honduras” (Civil Democratic Union of Honduras) that has publicly backed the coup against President Zelaya.
IRI’s press secretary, Lisa Gates, responded to claims that IRI funded or aided (which also involves non-monetary aid, such as training, advising and providing resources) groups involved in the Honduran coup as “false reports”. However, there are several interesting links between the republican organization and the violent coup d’etat against President Zelaya that do indicate the institute’s involvement, as well as to the above mentioned funding that exceeds $1 million during just this year. In addition to its presence on the ground in Honduras as part of its “good governance” and “political influence” programs, IRI Regional Program Director, Latin America and the Carribean, Alex Sutton, has recently been closely involved with many of the organizations in the region that have backed the Honduran coup. Sutton was a featured speaker at a recent 3-day conference held in Venezuela by the U.S.-funded ultraconservative Venezuelan organization CEDICE (Centro para la Divulgación de Conocimiento Económico). CEDICE’s director, Rocío Guijarra, was one of the principal executors of the 2002 coup d’etat against President Hugo Chávez, and Guijarra personally signed a decree installing a dictatorship in the country, which led to the coup’s overthrow by the people and loyal armed forces of Venezuela. The conference Sutton participated in, held from May 28-29 in Venezuela was attended by leaders of Latin America’s ultra-conservative movement, ranging from Bolivian ex president Jorge Quiroga, who has called for President Evo Morales of Bolivia’s overthrow on several occasions, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and his son Alvaro, both of whom have publicly expressed support for the coup against President Zelaya in Honduras, and numerous leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, the majority of whom are well known for their involvement in the April 2002 coup and subsequent destabilization attempts. The majority of those present at the CEDICE conference in May 2009, have publicly expressed support for the recent coup against President Zelaya.
But a more damning piece of evidence linking IRI to the Honduran coup, is a video clip posted on the institute’s website at http://www.iri.org/multimedia.asp. The clip or podcast, features a slideshow presentation given by Susan Zelaya-Fenner, assistant program officer at IRI, on March 20, 2009, discussing the “good governance” program in Honduras. Curiously, at the beginning of the presentation, Zelaya-Fenner explains what she considers “a couple of interesting facts about Honduras.” These include, “Honduras is a very overlooked country in a small region. Honduras has had more military coups than years of independence, it has been said. However, parodoxically, more recently it has been called a pillar of stability in the region, even being called the U.S.S. Honduras, as it avoided all of the crisis that its neighbors went through during the civil wars in the 1980s.”
Important to note is that what Zelaya-Fenner refers to as “U.S.S. Honduras” and “avoid[ing] all of the crisis that its neighbors went through during the civil wars in the 1980s” was because the U.S. government, CIA and Pentagon utilized Honduras as the launching pad for the attacks on Honduras’ neighbors. U.S. Ambassador at the time, John Negroponte, and Colonel Oliver North, trained, funded and planned the paramilitary missions of the death squads that were used to assassinate, torture, persecute, disappear and neutralize tens of thousands of farmers and “suspected” leftists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Zelaya-Fenner continues, “Thus, Honduras has been more recently stable, and it’s always been poor, which means that it’s below the radar, and gets little attention. The current president, Manuel Zelaya and his buddies, the leftists in the Latin American region have caused a lot of political destabilization recently in the country. He is a would-be emulator of Hugo Chavez and Hugo Chavez' social revolution. He has spent the better part of this administration trying to convince the Honduran people, who tend to be very practical and very 'center' that the Venezuelan route is the way to go. Zelaya's leftist leanings further exacerbate an already troubled state. Corruption is rampant, crime is at all time highs. Drug trafficking and related violence have begun to spill over from Mexico. And there's a very real sense that the country is being purposefully destabilized from within, which is very new in recent Honduran history. Coups are thought to be so three decades ago until now (laughs, audience laughs), again.”
Did she really say that? Yes, you can hear it yourself on the podcast. Is it merely a coincidence that the coup against President Zelaya occured just three months after this presentation? State Department officials have admitted that they knew the coup was in the works for the past few months. Sub-secretary of State Thomas Shannon was in Honduras the week before the coup, apparently trying to broker some kind of deal with the coup planners to find another “solution” to the “problem”. Nevertheless, they continued funding via NED and USAID to those very same groups and military sectors involved in the coup. It is not a hidden fact that Washington was unhappy with President Zelaya’s alliances in the region, principally with countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua. It is also public knowledge that President Zelaya was in the process of removing the U.S. military presence from the Soto Cano airbase, using a fund from the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA – Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, St. Kitts, Antigua & Barbados and Venezuela) to convert the strategically important Pentagon base into a commercial airport.
IRI’s Zelaya-Fenner explains the strategic importance of Honduras in her presentation, "Why does Honduras matter? A lot of people ask this question, even Honduran historians and experts. Some might argue that it doesn't and globally it might be hard to counter. However, the country is strategic to regional stability and this is an election year in Honduras. It's a strategic time to help democrats with a small “d”, at a time when democracy is increasingly coming under attack in the region.”
There is no doubt that the coup against President Zelaya is an effort to undermine regional governments implementing alternative models to capitalism that challenge U.S. concepts of representative democracy as “the best model”. Countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, are building successful models based on participatory democracy that ensure economic and social justice, and prioritize collective social prosperity and human needs over market economics. These are the countries, together now with Honduras, that have been victims of NED, USAID, IRI and other agencies’ interventions to subvert their prospering democracies.
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 6, 2009
The International Republican Institute (IRI), considered the international branch of the U.S. Republican Party, and one of the four “core groups” of the congressionally created and funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), apparently knew of the coup d’etat in Honduras against President Zelaya well in advance. IRI is well known for its role in the April 2002 coup d’etat against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and its funding and strategic advising of the principal organizations involved in the ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2004. In both cases, IRI funded and/or trained and advised political parties and groups that were implicated in the violent, undemocratic overthrow of democratically elected presidents.
After the 2002 coup d’etat occured in Venezuela, IRI president at the time, George Folsom, sent out a celebratory press release claiming, “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…” Hours later, after the coup failed and the people of Venezuelan rescued their president, who had been kidnapped and imprisoned on a military base, and reinstalled constitutional order, IRI regretted its premature, public applause for the coup. One of its principal funders, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was furious that IRI had publicly revealed the U.S. government had provided funding and support for the coup leaders. NED President Carl Gershman was so irritated with IRI’s blunder, that he sent out a memo to Folsom, chastising him: “By welcoming [the coup] – indeed, without any apparent reservations – you unnecessarily interjected IRI into the sensitive internal politics of Venezuela”. Gershman would have much preferred that NED and IRI’s role in fomenting and supporting the coup against President Chávez have remained a secret.
IRI, chaired by Senator John McCain, was created in 1983 as part of the National Endowment for Democracy’s mission to “promote democracy around the world”, a mandate from President Ronald Reagan. In reality, one of NED’s founders, Allen Weinstein, put it this way in a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." IRI’s own history, according to its website (www.iri.org), also explains that its original work was in Latin America, at a time when the Reagan administration was under heavy scrutiny and pressure from the U.S. Congress for funding paramilitary groups, dictatorships and death squads in Central and South America to install U.S.-friendly regimes and suppress leftist movements. “Congress responded to President Reagan’s call in 1983 when it created the National Endowment for Democracy to support aspiring democrats worldwide. Four nonprofit, nonpartisan democracy institutes were formed to carry out this work – IRI, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS).”
“In its infancy, IRI focused on planting the seeds of democracy in Latin America. Since the end of the Cold War, IRI has broadened its reach to support democracy and freedom around the globe. IRI has conducted programs in more than 100 countries.”
In its initial days, IRI, along with the other coup groups of the NED, funded organizations in Nicaragua to foment the destabilization of the Sandinista government. Journalist Jeremy Bigwood explained part of this role in his article, “No Strings Attached?”, "’When the rhetoric of democracy is put aside, NED is a specialized tool for penetrating civil society in other countries down to the grassroots level’ to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals, writes University of California-Santa Barbara professor William Robinson in his book, A Faustian Bargain. Robinson was in Nicaragua during the late ‘80s and watched NED work with the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan opposition to remove the leftist Sandinistas from power during the 1990 elections.”
The evidence of IRI’s role in the 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela has been well documented and investigated. Proof of such involvement, which is still ongoing in terms of IRI’s work, funding, strategic advising and training of opposition political parties in Venezuela, is available through documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act posted here: , and also available in my book, The Chávez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela (Olive Branch Press 2006). None of the claims or evidence regarding IRI’s role in fomenting and supporting the April 2002 in Venezuela and its ongoing support of the Venezuelan opposition has ever been disclaimed by the institution, primarily because all evidence cited comes from IRI and NED’s own internal documentation obtained under FOIA.
Hence, when the recent coup d’etat occured in Honduras, against democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, there was little doubt of U.S. fingerprints. IRI’s name appeared as a recipient of a $700,000 Latin American Regional Grant in 2008-2009 from NED to promote “good governance” programs in countries including Honduras. An additional grant of $550,000 to work with “think tanks” and “pressure groups” in Honduras to influence political parties was also given by the NED to IRI in 2008-2009, specifically stating, "IRI will support initiatives to implement [political] positions into the 2009 campaigns. IRI will place special emphasis on Honduras, which has scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in November 2009.” That is clear direct intervention in internal politics in Honduras.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) also provides approximately $49 million annually to Honduras, a large part of which is directed towards “democracy promotion” programs. The majority of the recipients of this aid in Honduras, which comes in the form of funding, training, resources, strategic advice, communications counseling, political party strengthening and leadership training, are organizations directly linked to the recent coup d’etat, such as the Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran Private Enterprise Council (COHEP), the Council of University Deans, the Confederation of Honduran Workers (CTH), the National Convergence Forum, the Chamber of Commerce (FEDECAMARA), the Association of Private Media (AMC), the Group Paz y Democracia and the student group Generación X Cambio. These organizations form part of a coalition self-titled “Unión Cívica Democrática de Honduras” (Civil Democratic Union of Honduras) that has publicly backed the coup against President Zelaya.
IRI’s press secretary, Lisa Gates, responded to claims that IRI funded or aided (which also involves non-monetary aid, such as training, advising and providing resources) groups involved in the Honduran coup as “false reports”. However, there are several interesting links between the republican organization and the violent coup d’etat against President Zelaya that do indicate the institute’s involvement, as well as to the above mentioned funding that exceeds $1 million during just this year. In addition to its presence on the ground in Honduras as part of its “good governance” and “political influence” programs, IRI Regional Program Director, Latin America and the Carribean, Alex Sutton, has recently been closely involved with many of the organizations in the region that have backed the Honduran coup. Sutton was a featured speaker at a recent 3-day conference held in Venezuela by the U.S.-funded ultraconservative Venezuelan organization CEDICE (Centro para la Divulgación de Conocimiento Económico). CEDICE’s director, Rocío Guijarra, was one of the principal executors of the 2002 coup d’etat against President Hugo Chávez, and Guijarra personally signed a decree installing a dictatorship in the country, which led to the coup’s overthrow by the people and loyal armed forces of Venezuela. The conference Sutton participated in, held from May 28-29 in Venezuela was attended by leaders of Latin America’s ultra-conservative movement, ranging from Bolivian ex president Jorge Quiroga, who has called for President Evo Morales of Bolivia’s overthrow on several occasions, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and his son Alvaro, both of whom have publicly expressed support for the coup against President Zelaya in Honduras, and numerous leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, the majority of whom are well known for their involvement in the April 2002 coup and subsequent destabilization attempts. The majority of those present at the CEDICE conference in May 2009, have publicly expressed support for the recent coup against President Zelaya.
But a more damning piece of evidence linking IRI to the Honduran coup, is a video clip posted on the institute’s website at http://www.iri.org/multimedia.asp. The clip or podcast, features a slideshow presentation given by Susan Zelaya-Fenner, assistant program officer at IRI, on March 20, 2009, discussing the “good governance” program in Honduras. Curiously, at the beginning of the presentation, Zelaya-Fenner explains what she considers “a couple of interesting facts about Honduras.” These include, “Honduras is a very overlooked country in a small region. Honduras has had more military coups than years of independence, it has been said. However, parodoxically, more recently it has been called a pillar of stability in the region, even being called the U.S.S. Honduras, as it avoided all of the crisis that its neighbors went through during the civil wars in the 1980s.”
Important to note is that what Zelaya-Fenner refers to as “U.S.S. Honduras” and “avoid[ing] all of the crisis that its neighbors went through during the civil wars in the 1980s” was because the U.S. government, CIA and Pentagon utilized Honduras as the launching pad for the attacks on Honduras’ neighbors. U.S. Ambassador at the time, John Negroponte, and Colonel Oliver North, trained, funded and planned the paramilitary missions of the death squads that were used to assassinate, torture, persecute, disappear and neutralize tens of thousands of farmers and “suspected” leftists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Zelaya-Fenner continues, “Thus, Honduras has been more recently stable, and it’s always been poor, which means that it’s below the radar, and gets little attention. The current president, Manuel Zelaya and his buddies, the leftists in the Latin American region have caused a lot of political destabilization recently in the country. He is a would-be emulator of Hugo Chavez and Hugo Chavez' social revolution. He has spent the better part of this administration trying to convince the Honduran people, who tend to be very practical and very 'center' that the Venezuelan route is the way to go. Zelaya's leftist leanings further exacerbate an already troubled state. Corruption is rampant, crime is at all time highs. Drug trafficking and related violence have begun to spill over from Mexico. And there's a very real sense that the country is being purposefully destabilized from within, which is very new in recent Honduran history. Coups are thought to be so three decades ago until now (laughs, audience laughs), again.”
Did she really say that? Yes, you can hear it yourself on the podcast. Is it merely a coincidence that the coup against President Zelaya occured just three months after this presentation? State Department officials have admitted that they knew the coup was in the works for the past few months. Sub-secretary of State Thomas Shannon was in Honduras the week before the coup, apparently trying to broker some kind of deal with the coup planners to find another “solution” to the “problem”. Nevertheless, they continued funding via NED and USAID to those very same groups and military sectors involved in the coup. It is not a hidden fact that Washington was unhappy with President Zelaya’s alliances in the region, principally with countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua. It is also public knowledge that President Zelaya was in the process of removing the U.S. military presence from the Soto Cano airbase, using a fund from the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA – Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, St. Kitts, Antigua & Barbados and Venezuela) to convert the strategically important Pentagon base into a commercial airport.
IRI’s Zelaya-Fenner explains the strategic importance of Honduras in her presentation, "Why does Honduras matter? A lot of people ask this question, even Honduran historians and experts. Some might argue that it doesn't and globally it might be hard to counter. However, the country is strategic to regional stability and this is an election year in Honduras. It's a strategic time to help democrats with a small “d”, at a time when democracy is increasingly coming under attack in the region.”
There is no doubt that the coup against President Zelaya is an effort to undermine regional governments implementing alternative models to capitalism that challenge U.S. concepts of representative democracy as “the best model”. Countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, are building successful models based on participatory democracy that ensure economic and social justice, and prioritize collective social prosperity and human needs over market economics. These are the countries, together now with Honduras, that have been victims of NED, USAID, IRI and other agencies’ interventions to subvert their prospering democracies.
Honduras Targets Protesters With Emergency Decree
Media in Country Also Feel Pressure
By William Booth and Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, July 2, 2009
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, July 1 -- The new Honduran government clamped down on street protests and news organizations Wednesday as lawmakers passed an emergency decree that limits public gatherings following the military-led coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya from office.
The decree also allows for suspects to be detained for 24 hours and continues a nighttime curfew. Media outlets complained that the government was ordering them not to report any news or opinion that could "incite" the public.
A dozen former ministers from the Zelaya government remain in hiding, some hunkered down in foreign embassies, fearing arrest. News organizations here remain polarized. Journalists working for small independent media -- or for those loyal to Zelaya -- have reported being harassed by officials.
Before emergency measures were tightened, thousands of protesters rallied Wednesday to urge Zelaya's return. They were answered by counterdemonstrations in support of the new government. Local radio reported that several bombs were found but safely defused.
Zelaya vowed that he would come back to Honduras over the weekend, while the newly appointed interim president, Roberto Micheletti, repeated in a news conference Wednesday "that when he comes into the country, he will be arrested."
Asked whether Honduras could withstand international isolation and risk losing the foreign aid that keeps the impoverished nation running, Micheletti said, "You know that the Europeans are not going to cut the aid to our country, nor will the Americans."
But on Wednesday, the Inter-American Development Bank did suspend aid, after a similar move by the World Bank. As the impasse continued in Honduras, diplomats at the Organization of American States struggled to organize a mission that would restore Zelaya to power and avoid a clash between him and the military that ousted him.
After nearly 12 hours of debate, the OAS approved a resolution shortly before dawn Wednesday that called on its secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, to undertake every effort to reinstate Zelaya. If Insulza did not succeed within 72 hours, Honduras would be suspended from the OAS, the main forum for political cooperation in the hemisphere.
The passage of the resolution prompted Zelaya to postpone a trip home he had scheduled for Thursday, which diplomats had feared could sharply escalate tensions in the Central American country.
"I am going to return to Honduras. I am the president," Zelaya told reporters Wednesday. But he added that he did not want to complicate the diplomatic efforts of the OAS over the next few days.
Insulza faces an unusually complex task in trying to reverse the coup. Normally, he would negotiate with the de facto government for the return of the deposed president. But OAS members, furious about the military ouster, do not want him to talk to Micheletti, for fear that would legitimize the new regime.
Even hard-core coup backers here say they were surprised how quickly and forcefully the Latin American countries condemned their actions.
"This coup is a mess," said the outgoing Italian ambassador, Giuseppe Magno. "Mistakes have been made on all sides, and the only solution is for a compromise. We hear that different parties are talking among themselves. That is good. The solution has to come from the Hondurans themselves. It cannot be imposed on them."
Honduras is finding itself increasingly isolated. France, Spain, Italy, Chile and Colombia began recalling their ambassadors Wednesday. The Pentagon suspended joint military operations with Honduras.
"What provoked an enormous indignation among Latin Americans, above all, was the military coup," said one diplomat involved in the planning at the OAS, referring to the way soldiers seized Zelaya at dawn and bundled him onto a plane bound for Costa Rica.
Insulza, of the OAS, is trying to establish contact with people who are not closely allied with either Zelaya or Micheletti to build a compromise, the diplomat said. It was not clear when he would fly to Honduras.
The coup is the first big test for the Obama administration's policy of seeking a more diplomatic and collegial role in a region traditionally dominated by the United States. The military action has been roundly condemned internationally, including by President Obama. But U.S. diplomats have sought to prevent a response that is so tough it leads to bloodshed.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that they would hold off formally designating the Honduran military action a "coup" until Insulza reports back to the OAS on Monday. Such a move is significant, because it would lead to the cutoff of millions of dollars in military and development aid.
However, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it had decided to reduce military contact with the Honduran armed forces. "We're still reviewing and making decisions" about what cooperation would be affected, said a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command, José Ruiz.
The U.S. military also has cut off contact since Sunday with those who orchestrated the coup, officials said. The United States has a contingent of about 700 military personnel at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, focused on disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and counternarcotics activities in Honduras and the region.
Honduras also is facing a freeze on petroleum exports from Venezuela and a halt in trade from other Central American countries.
"In the 21st century, these kinds of coups don't last long. It is very hard for a country like Honduras to maintain this kind of position in the face of overwhelming rejection by the world, and especially the region and its major trading partners," a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.
Zelaya is a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who led a bloc of leftist governments in pressing the OAS to suspend Honduras immediately and support Zelaya's quick return to the country -- even at the risk of his being arrested. The governments believe that unless there is a tough response to the coup, their own leftist governments could be threatened, diplomats said.
Venezuela's ambassador to the OAS, Roy Chaderton, described the approach as "diplomatic asphyxiation." The Venezuelan government provided a plane for Zelaya's trips Tuesday to the United Nations and the OAS.
Sheridan reported from Washington.
By William Booth and Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, July 2, 2009
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, July 1 -- The new Honduran government clamped down on street protests and news organizations Wednesday as lawmakers passed an emergency decree that limits public gatherings following the military-led coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya from office.
The decree also allows for suspects to be detained for 24 hours and continues a nighttime curfew. Media outlets complained that the government was ordering them not to report any news or opinion that could "incite" the public.
A dozen former ministers from the Zelaya government remain in hiding, some hunkered down in foreign embassies, fearing arrest. News organizations here remain polarized. Journalists working for small independent media -- or for those loyal to Zelaya -- have reported being harassed by officials.
Before emergency measures were tightened, thousands of protesters rallied Wednesday to urge Zelaya's return. They were answered by counterdemonstrations in support of the new government. Local radio reported that several bombs were found but safely defused.
Zelaya vowed that he would come back to Honduras over the weekend, while the newly appointed interim president, Roberto Micheletti, repeated in a news conference Wednesday "that when he comes into the country, he will be arrested."
Asked whether Honduras could withstand international isolation and risk losing the foreign aid that keeps the impoverished nation running, Micheletti said, "You know that the Europeans are not going to cut the aid to our country, nor will the Americans."
But on Wednesday, the Inter-American Development Bank did suspend aid, after a similar move by the World Bank. As the impasse continued in Honduras, diplomats at the Organization of American States struggled to organize a mission that would restore Zelaya to power and avoid a clash between him and the military that ousted him.
After nearly 12 hours of debate, the OAS approved a resolution shortly before dawn Wednesday that called on its secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, to undertake every effort to reinstate Zelaya. If Insulza did not succeed within 72 hours, Honduras would be suspended from the OAS, the main forum for political cooperation in the hemisphere.
The passage of the resolution prompted Zelaya to postpone a trip home he had scheduled for Thursday, which diplomats had feared could sharply escalate tensions in the Central American country.
"I am going to return to Honduras. I am the president," Zelaya told reporters Wednesday. But he added that he did not want to complicate the diplomatic efforts of the OAS over the next few days.
Insulza faces an unusually complex task in trying to reverse the coup. Normally, he would negotiate with the de facto government for the return of the deposed president. But OAS members, furious about the military ouster, do not want him to talk to Micheletti, for fear that would legitimize the new regime.
Even hard-core coup backers here say they were surprised how quickly and forcefully the Latin American countries condemned their actions.
"This coup is a mess," said the outgoing Italian ambassador, Giuseppe Magno. "Mistakes have been made on all sides, and the only solution is for a compromise. We hear that different parties are talking among themselves. That is good. The solution has to come from the Hondurans themselves. It cannot be imposed on them."
Honduras is finding itself increasingly isolated. France, Spain, Italy, Chile and Colombia began recalling their ambassadors Wednesday. The Pentagon suspended joint military operations with Honduras.
"What provoked an enormous indignation among Latin Americans, above all, was the military coup," said one diplomat involved in the planning at the OAS, referring to the way soldiers seized Zelaya at dawn and bundled him onto a plane bound for Costa Rica.
Insulza, of the OAS, is trying to establish contact with people who are not closely allied with either Zelaya or Micheletti to build a compromise, the diplomat said. It was not clear when he would fly to Honduras.
The coup is the first big test for the Obama administration's policy of seeking a more diplomatic and collegial role in a region traditionally dominated by the United States. The military action has been roundly condemned internationally, including by President Obama. But U.S. diplomats have sought to prevent a response that is so tough it leads to bloodshed.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that they would hold off formally designating the Honduran military action a "coup" until Insulza reports back to the OAS on Monday. Such a move is significant, because it would lead to the cutoff of millions of dollars in military and development aid.
However, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it had decided to reduce military contact with the Honduran armed forces. "We're still reviewing and making decisions" about what cooperation would be affected, said a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command, José Ruiz.
The U.S. military also has cut off contact since Sunday with those who orchestrated the coup, officials said. The United States has a contingent of about 700 military personnel at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, focused on disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and counternarcotics activities in Honduras and the region.
Honduras also is facing a freeze on petroleum exports from Venezuela and a halt in trade from other Central American countries.
"In the 21st century, these kinds of coups don't last long. It is very hard for a country like Honduras to maintain this kind of position in the face of overwhelming rejection by the world, and especially the region and its major trading partners," a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.
Zelaya is a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who led a bloc of leftist governments in pressing the OAS to suspend Honduras immediately and support Zelaya's quick return to the country -- even at the risk of his being arrested. The governments believe that unless there is a tough response to the coup, their own leftist governments could be threatened, diplomats said.
Venezuela's ambassador to the OAS, Roy Chaderton, described the approach as "diplomatic asphyxiation." The Venezuelan government provided a plane for Zelaya's trips Tuesday to the United Nations and the OAS.
Sheridan reported from Washington.
The grassroots takeover technique: "Color revolution" fails in Iran
By Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, June 27, 2009
Tehran’s "green revolution" is the latest version of the "color revolutions" which have allowed the United States to impose subservient governments in several countries without needing to use force. Thierry Meyssan, who advised two governments facing this type of crisis, analyses this method and the reasons for its failure in Iran.
"Color revolutions" are to revolutions what Canada Dry is to beer. They look like the real thing, but they lack the flavor. They are regime changes which appear to be revolutions because they mobilize huge segments of the population but are more akin to takeovers, because they do not aim at changing social structures. Instead they aspire to replace an elite with another, in order to carry out pro-American economic and foreign policies. The "green revolution" in Tehran is the latest example of this trend.
Origin of the concept
This concept appeared in the 90s, but its roots lie in the American public debate of the 70s-80s. After a string of revelations about CIA instigated coups around the world, as well as the dramatic disclosures of the Church and Rockefeller Senate Committees [1], admiral Stansfield Turner was given the task by President Carter to clean up the agency and to stop supporting "local dictatorships". Furious, the American Social Democrats (SD/USA) left the Democratic party and sided with Ronald Regan. They were brilliant Trotskyist intellectuals [2], often linked to Commentary magazine. After Regan was elected, he charged them with pursuing the American interference policy, this time using different methods. This is how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1982 [3] and the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in 1984. Both of these institutions are organically intertwined: NED administrators sit on the USIP board of directors and vice versa.
Legally the NED is a not-for-profit organization under US law, financed by an annual grant voted by Congress as part of the State Department budget. In order to operate, this organization is co-financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is part of the State Department. This legal structure is used jointly as a cover by the American CIA, the British MI6 and the Australian ASIS (and occasionally by Canadian and New Zealand secret services).
The NED presents itself as an agency promoting democracy. It intervenes either directly or using one of its four tentacles: one designed to subvert unions, the second responsible for corrupting management organizations, the third for left-wing parties and the fourth for right-wing parties. It also intervenes through friendly foundations, such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (UK), the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Canada), the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Fondation Robert-Schuman (France), the International Liberal Center (Sweden), the Alfred Mozer Foundation (Netherlands), the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Friedrich Naunmann Stiftung, the Hans Seidal Stiftung and the Heinrich Boell Stiftung (Germany). The NED thus claims to have corrupted over 6000 organizations throughout the world over roughly 30 years. All of this, of course, under the disguise of training and assistance programs.
As for the USIP, it is an American national institution. It is financed annually by Congress as part of the Defense Department budget. Contrary to the NED which serves as a cover for the three allied states, the USIP is exclusively American. Under the guise of political science research, it can pay salaries to foreign politicians.
As soon as it commanded resources, the USIP financed a new and discrete structure, the Albert Einstein Institution [4]. This small association for the promotion of nonviolent action was initially charged with designing a form of civil defense for the populations of Western Europe in case of an invasion by the Warsaw Pact. It quickly became autonomous and designed a model following which a state, whatever its nature, can lose its authority and collapse.
First attempts
The first attempted "color revolution" failed in 1989. The goal was to overthrow Deng Xiaoping by using one of his close collaborators, the Chinese Communist Party secretary-general Zhao Ziyang, in order to open Chinese markets to American investors and to bring China into the US orbit. Young supporters of Zhao invaded Tiananmen square [5]. They were presented in the Western media as unpoliticized students fighting for freedom against the party’s Conservative wing, when in fact this was infighting within the Deng entourage between pro-American and nationalist factions. After having ignored provocations for a long time Deng decided to use force. Depending on sources, the repression ended with 300 to 1000 dead. 20 years later, the Western version of this failed coup has not changed. Western media which recently covered the anniversary of that event presented it as a "popular uprising" and expressed surprise that people in Beijing do not remember the event. This is because there was nothing "popular" about this struggle for power within the Party. This was not a concern for people.
The first successful "color revolution" succeeded in 1990. As the Soviet Union was disintegrating, state secretary James Baker went to Bulgaria to participate in the electoral campaign of the pro-American party, heavily financed by the NED [6]. However, despite pressure from the UK, the Bulgarians – afraid of the social consequences induced by the transformation from soviet union to market economy – made the unforgivable mistake to elect in Parliament a post communist majority. While European community observers testified to the legality of the voting process, the pro-American opposition screamed that electoral fraud had occurred and took to the streets. They set up camp in the center of Sofia and threw the country into chaos for the following six months, until pro-American Zhelyu Zhelev was elected president by the parliament.
"Democracy": selling your country to foreign interests behind the people’s back
Since then, Washington has kept instigating regime changes everywhere in the world, using street unrest rather than military juntas. It is important here to understand what is at stake. Behind the soothing rhetoric of "the promotion of democracy", Washington’s actions aim to impose regimes that are opening their markets to the US without conditions and which are aligning themselves to their foreign policy. However, while these goals are known by the leaders of the "color revolutions", they are never discussed and accepted by the mobilized demonstrators. In the event when these takeovers succeed, citizens soon rebel against the new policies imposed on them, even if it is too late to turn back. Besides, how can opposition groups who sold their country to foreign interests behind their populations’ backs be considered "democratic"?
In 2005, the Kyrgyz opposition contested the legislative elections and brought to Bishkek demonstrators from the south of the country. They toppled President Askar Akayev. This was the "Tulip Revolution". The national assembly elected Kurmanbek Bakiyev as president. Unable to control his supporters who were looting the capital, he announced having chased the dictator and pretended that he intended to create a national union government. He pulled General Felix Kulov (former Bishkek Mayor) out of prison and named him prime minister. After the situation was back under control, Bakiyev got rid of Kulov and sold the country’s few resources to US companies with no invitation to tender but with significant backhanders. He set up a US military base in Manas. The population’s standard of living had never been lower. Felix Kulov offered to get the country back on its feet by federating it to Russia as it used to be. He was quickly sent back to jail.
A blessing in disguise?
It is sometimes objected that for states which were subjected to repressive regimes, even if these "color revolutions" only bring the appearance of democracy, they nonetheless constitute an improvement for their populations. Experience shows however that this is far from certain. The new regimes can turn out to be far more repressive than the old ones.
In 2003, Washington, London and Paris [7] organized the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia [8]. According to a classic scheme, the opposition blew the whistle about electoral fraud during legislative elections and took to the streets. The demonstrators forced president Eduard Shevardnadze to flee and they seized power. His successor, Mikheil Saakashvili, opened the country to US economic interests and broke off from his Russian neighbor. The economic aid that Washington promised to replace Russian aid never came. The already weakened economy collapsed. In order to continue to please his backers, Saakashvili needed to impose a dictatorship [9]. He shut down the media and filled up the prisons, which did not prevent Western media from continuing to describe him as a "democrat". Continuing on his collision course, Saakashvili decided to bolster his popularity by engaging in a military adventure. With the help of the Bush administration and of Israel to which he rented air bases, he ordered the bombing of the population of South Ossetia, killing 1600 people, most of whom also held Russian citizenship. Moscow struck back. American and Israeli advisers fled [10]. Georgia was left devastated.
Enough!
The main mechanism of the "color revolutions" consists in focusing popular anger on the desired target. This is an aspect of the psychology of the masses which destroys everything in its path and against which no reasonable argument can be opposed. The scapegoat is accused of all the evils plaguing the country for at least one generation. The more he resists, the angrier the mob gets. After he gives in or slips away, the normal division between his opponents and his supporters reappears.
In 2005, in the hours following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, a rumor spread in Lebanon according to which he was killed by "the Syrians". The Syrian army, which had been maintaining order since the end of the civil war according to the Taëf agreement, was now booed. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was personally accused by the US authorities, which was as good as proof for the public opinion. To those who noted that Rafik Hariri, despite stormy episodes, had always been useful to Syria and that his death deprived Damascus of a central collaborator, it was answered that the "Syrian regime" is so fundamentally evil that it cannot help but killing even its friends. The Lebanese people were calling for the G.I.s to come and get rid of the Syrians. But to everyone’s surprise, Bashar al-Assad, considering that the costly deployment of his army was not welcome in Lebanon any longer, decided to pull it back. Legislative elections were organized in which the "anti-Syrian" coalition triumphed. This was the "Cedar Revolution". After the situation calmed down everyone realized that even if Syrian generals had looted the country in the past, the departure of the Syrian army did not change anything to the country’s economic situation. Furthermore, the country was now in danger: it was not able to defend itself from the expansionism of the Israeli neighbor. The main "anti-Syrian" leader, general Michel Aoun, thought better of it and joined the opposition. Furious, Washington multiplied assassination plans to get rid of him. Michel Aoun formed an alliance with Hezbollah on a patriotic platform. It was about time: Israel attacked.
In every case, Washington prepared the "democratic" government in advance, which confirms that these are takeovers in disguise. The names composing the new team are kept secret for as long as possible. This is why the pointing out of the scapegoat is always done without suggesting a political alternative.
In Serbia, young pro-US "revolutionaries" chose a logo that belonged to the Communist popular imagination (the raised fist) to hide their subordination to the United States. They used "he is done!" as a slogan, which federated the anger against the personality of Slobodan Milosevic, who was held responsible for the bombing of the country even though it was done by NATO. This model was replicated numerous times, for example by the Pora! group in Ukraine, or by Zubr in Bielorussia.
The deceiving appearance of nonviolence
The PR staff members of the State Department maintain the non-violent image of the "color revolutions". They all put forward the theories of Gene Sharp, who founded the Albert Einstein Institution. Yet nonviolence is a combat method used to persuade authorities to a political change. In order for a minority to seize power and to exercise it, it must always use violence at some point. All "color revolutions" did.
In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic called for anticipated elections despite still having a year to run as president. After the first round, neither he nor his principal opponent, Vojislav Koštunica, had secured a majority of the votes. Without waiting for the second round, the opposition claimed voting fraud and took to the streets. Thousands of demonstrators walked on the capital, including the miners from Kolubara. Their daily salaries were paid indirectly by the NED, without them realizing that they were paid by the United States. The pressure from the demonstration was insufficient so the miners started attacking buildings with bulldozers that they had brought, hence the name "bulldozer revolution".
In cases when the tension is just dragging on, and when counterdemonstrations are being organized, the only solution for Washington is to throw the country into chaos. Inciting agents are then placed in both camps to fire on the crowd. Each party can then observe that the others are shooting while they are peacefully advancing. The confrontation spreads.
In 2002, Caracas’ upper-class took to the streets to protest the social policies of President Hugo Chavez [11]. Using clever manipulation, private TV stations created the impression of a human tidal wave. There were 50,000 people according to observers and 1 million according to the press and the State Department. Then there was the Llaguno Bridge incident. TV stations clearly showed armed pro-Chavez supporters firing on the crowd. In a press conference, the National Guard general and vice minister of domestic security confirmed that the "Chavez militias" fired and killed 19 people. He resigned and called for the dictator to be overthrown. The president was quickly arrested by military rebels. However millions of people descended in the capital’s streets and constitutional order was restored.
A subsequent journalistic investigation went over the details of the massacre of the Llaguno Bridge. It brought to light a deceptive picture manipulation, where chronological order was modified as proved by the protagonists’ watch dials. In reality, the pro-Chavez supporters were under attack and after having fallen back, they were trying to escape by using their weapons. The inciting agents were local policemen trained by a US agency [12].
In 2006, the NED reorganized the opposition to Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki. It funded the creation of the Orange party of Raila Odinga. He received the support of Senator Barack Obama, who was accompanied by destabilization experts (Mark Lippert, current chief of staff for the national security adviser, and general Jonathan S. Gration, current US special envoy to Sudan). During a meeting with Odinga, the Illinois Senator invented a vague family relationship with the pro-US candidate. However Odinga was defeated during the 2007 legislative elections. Supported by Senator John McCain as president of the IRI (the NED’s Republican pseudopod), he disputed the validity of the vote and called for his supporters to take to the streets. This is when anonymous text messages were sent en masse to ethnic Luo voters. "Dear Kenyans, the Kikuyu have stolen the future of our children… we must treat them in the only way that they understand… with violence". The country, despite being one of the most stable in Africa, suddenly erupted in violence.
After days of rioting, president Kibaki was forced to accept the mediation of Madeleine Albright as president of the NDI (the NED’s Democrat pseudopod). A prime minister position was created and offered to Odinga. Since the hate text messages had not been sent from the Kenyan installations, one can wonder which foreign power was behind them.
Mobilizing the international public opinion
During the last few years, Washington had the opportunity to instigate "color revolutions" with the understanding that they would fail to seize power but that they would help manipulate public opinion and international institutions.
In 2007, many Burmans were up in arms because of the domestic fuel price increase. Demonstrations spread as Buddhist monks took a leading role in the protest. This was the "Saffron Revolution" [13]. Washington could not care less about the Rangoon regime; however they were interested in orchestrating the people of Burma in order to exercise pressure on China which holds strategic interests in Burma (pipelines and military bases for electronic intelligence gathering). It was therefore crucial to distort people’s perception of reality. Pictures and films shot on mobile phones started to appear on YouTube. They were anonymous, impossible to verify and without context. It was precisely their lack of reliability that gave them authority, and allowed the White House to fit them with their interpretation of the situation.
More recently, a 2008 student demonstration brought Greece to a grinding halt following the murder of a 15 year old young man by a policeman. Hoodlums were soon seen rioting. They had been recruited in neighboring Kosovo and brought in by bus. The city centers were devastated. Washington was trying to scare foreign investors away in order to secure a monopoly on the investments in the gas terminals that were being built. The weak Karamanlis government was portrayed as being iron fisted. Facebook and Twitter were used to mobilize the Greek Diaspora. Demonstrations spread to Istanbul, Nicosia, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, The Hague, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, etc.
The Green Revolution
The operation conducted in 2009 in Iran belongs to the long list of pseudo revolutions. First, a 400 million dollar budget was voted in 2007 by Congress to orchestrate a "regime change" in Iran. This was in addition to the ad hoc budgets of the NED, the USAID, the CIA & Co. How this money is being used is unclear, but the three main recipients are the following: the Rafsanjani family, the Pahlavi family and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran.
The Bush Administration decided to instigate a "color revolution" in Iran after confirming a decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to conduct a military attack of that country. This choice was then approved by the Obama Administration. The plans for a "color revolution" which had been drawn up by the American Enterprise Institute in 2002 with Israel were then reopened. I had published an article at that time regarding this plan [14]. In it, one can identify the current protagonists: that plan has not changed much since then. A Lebanese chapter was added which predicted an uprising in Beirut in case of a victory of the patriotic coalition (Hezbollah, Aoun), but it was later cancelled.
The script included huge support for the candidate chosen by Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the disputing of the presidential election results, widespread bombings, the toppling of president Ahmadinejad and of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, setting up a transition government headed by Mousavi, restoring the Monarchy and creating a government headed by Sohrab Sobhani.
According to the 2002 plans, the operation was overseen by Morris Amitay and Michael Ledeen. It mobilized in Iran the Irangate network. Here is a necessary quick historical background: the Irangate (Iran–Contra affair) was an illegal arms deal. The White House wished to supply weapons to the rebels in Nicaragua (to fight against Sandinistas) and to Iranians (in order to drag the Iran-Iraq war for as long as possible), but was prevented from doing so by Congress. Israelis then offered to act as subcontractors for both operations. Ledeen, who has both US and Israeli citizenships, served as a link in Washington, while Mahmoud Rafsanjani (the brother of the Ayatollah) was his counterpart in Tehran. This took place over a background of widespread corruption. When the scandal broke out in the United States, an independent inquiry committee was headed by Senator Tower and General Brent Scowcroft (Robert Gates’ mentor) to investigate.
Michael Ledeen is an old fox involved in many secret operations. He could be found in Rome during the assassination of Aldo Moro. He also appears to have been linked to the fake Bulgarian connection after the assassination attempt on John Paul II, or more recently to the fake claims of Nigerian uranium supply to Saddam Hussein. He currently works for the American Enterprise Institute [15] (with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz) and for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies [16].
Morris Amitay is a former director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He is today the vice president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the director of a consulting company for the weapon industry.
On April 27, Morris and Ledeen held a seminar on Iran with Senator Joseph Lieberman at the American Enterprise Institute, regarding the Iranian elections. On May 15, a new seminar was held. The public part of the event consisted of a round table discussion headed by Senator John Bolton about the "haggling" over Iran: would Moscow agree to end its support of Tehran in exchange for Washington renouncing its missile shield project in Central Europe? French expert Bernard Hourcade took part in the debates. At the same time, the Institute launched a website, intended for the press, about the coming crisis: IranTracker.org. The website includes a section on the Lebanese elections.
In Iran, the responsibility for overthrowing old rival Ayatollah Khamenei rested on Ayatollah Rafsanjani. Born in a family of farmers, Hashemi Rafsanjani built his fortune on real estate speculation during the time of the Shah. He became the main pistachio dealer in Iran, and increased his wealth during the Irangate. His assets are estimated to several billion dollars. After he became the wealthiest man in Iran, he became successively president of the parliament, president of the Republic, and now chairman of the Assembly of Experts (an arbitration body for the parliament and the Guardian Council of the Constitution). He defends the interests of Tehran’s merchant class. During the electoral campaign, Rafsanjani required Mir-Hossein Mousavi, his former adversary who became his protégé, to promise he would privatize the oil sector.
With no connection to Rafsanjani, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran have been used by Washington [17]. This organization, protected by the Pentagon, is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department and has been considered as such by the European Union. Indeed, it is responsible for dreadful operations in the 80s, including a huge bombing which killed Ayatollah Beheshti, four department heads, six department head assistants and one fourth of the parliamentary group of the Islamic Republic party. The People’s Mujahedin of Iran is headed by Massoud Rajavi, who first married the daughter of former President Abol-hassan Banisadr and then the cruel Maryam. Its headquarters are located outside of Paris and its military bases in Iraq, first under the orders of Saddam Hussein, are now under the Defense Department. The People’s Mujahedin provided the logistics for the bombing attacks which took place during the electoral campaign [18]. They were responsible for instigating clashes – which they probably did – between Pro Ahmadinejad supporters and their opponents.
Should chaos have followed, the Supreme Leader could have been overthrown. A transition government, headed by Mir-Hossein Mousavi, would have privatized the oil sector and brought back the Monarchy. The son of the former Shah, Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, would have ascended to the throne and would have nominated Sohrab Sobhani as prime minister. With this in mind, Reza Pahlavi published in February a number of interviews with French journalist Michel Taubmann, the director of Arte’s information office in Paris, and who presides the Cercle de l’Observatoire, the club for French neo conservatives. It is useful to remember that Washington had made similar plans for the restoration of the Monarchy in Afghanistan. Mohammed Zahir Shah was supposed to ascend to the throne again and Hamid Karzai would have become prime minister. Unfortunately, at age 88, the pretender had become senile. Karzai thus became president. Both Sobhani and Karzai hold United States citizenships. Both were involved in the Caspian sea’s oil sector.
As far as propaganda was concerned, the initial plan had been given to Benador Associates, a public relations firm. But it evolved with the influence of Goli Ameri, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. This American Iranian woman is John Bolton’s former colleague. As a new media specialist, she implemented infrastructure and Internet training programs for Rafsanjani’s friends. She also developed radio and television programs in Farsi for the State Department propaganda, in conjunction with the BBC.
Iran’s destabilization failed because the main drive behind the "color revolutions" was not appropriately initiated. Mir-Hossein Mousavi did not manage to make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the focus of popular anger. The Iranian people did not fall into the trap; they did not hold the outgoing president responsible for the United States’ economic sanctions against the country. Therefore the protests were limited to the northern suburbs of Tehran. The authorities refrained from creating counter demonstrations, and let the plotters expose themselves.
However, it must be noted that the propaganda was successful with the Western media. International public opinions really believed that two million Iranians took to the streets, when the real figure was ten times lower. The fact that foreign correspondents were under house arrest facilitated these exaggerations because they were exempt from having to provide evidence for their allegations.
Having given up war, and having failed at overthrowing the regime, what is Barack Obama’s remaining option?
Thierry Meyssan - Journalist and writer, president of the Voltaire Network.
Footnotes:
[1] The numerous reports and documents published by these committees are available online on the following website: The Assassination Archives and Research Center.
[2] "New York Intellectuals and the invention of neo-conservatism", Denis Boneau, Voltaire Network, November 26 2004.
[3] "The NED, the networks of democratic interference", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 22 2004.
[4] "The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the CIA", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 4 2005.
[5] "Tiananmen, 20 ans après", professor Domenico Losurdo, Réseau Voltaire, June 9 2009.
[6] At the time, the NED was relying in Eastern Europe on the Free Congress Foundation (FCF), operated by Republicans. Later on, this organization disappeared and was replaced by the Soros Foundation, operated by Democrats, with the assistance of which the NED would plot new « regime changes ».
[7] Concerned with smoothing out relations between France and the US, French president Jacques Chirac tried to establish better relations with the Bush Administration on Georgia’s back, all the more because of French economic interests in Georgia. Salomé Zourabichvili, number 2 in the French secret services, was nominated as ambassador in Tbilisi. She then switched nationalities and became the Foreign Secretary for the « Rose Revolution ».
[8] "The Secrets of the Georgian Coup", Paul Labarique, Voltaire Network, January 7 2004.
[9] "Géorgie : Saakachvili jette son opposition en prison" (Georgia: Saakachvili jails the opposition) et "Manifestations à Tbilissi contre la dictature des roses" (Protests in Tbilisi against the dictatorship of the roses), Réseau Voltaire, September 12 2006 and September 30 2007.
[10] The Bush Administration was hoping that this conflict would act as a smoke screen. Israeli bombers were supposed to take off simultaneously to strike neighboring Iran. But even before attacking Georgian military installations, Russia bombed the airports that had been rented out to Israel, pinning its planes to the ground.
[11] "Opération manquée au Venezuela" (Failed operation in Venezuela), Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, May 18 2002.
[12] Llaguno Bridge. Keys to a Massacre. Documentary by Angel Palacios, Panafilms 2005.
[13] "Birmanie : la sollicitude intéressée des États-Unis" (Burma: United States’ selfish concern), Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, November 5 2007.
[14] "False reasons to intervene in Iran", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, February 12 2004.
[15] "The American Enterprise Institute in the White House", Voltaire Network, June 21 2004.
[16] "Les trucages de la Foundation for the Defense of Democracies" (The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ tricks), Réseau Voltaire, February 2 2005.
[17] "Les Moudjahidin perdus" (The lost Mujahedin), Paul Labarique, Réseau Voltaire, February 17 2004.
[18] "Le Jundallah revendique des actions armées aux côtés des Moudjahidines du Peuple" (The Jundallah claims responsibility for actions with the People’s Mujahedin), Réseau Voltaire, June 13 2009.
Tehran’s "green revolution" is the latest version of the "color revolutions" which have allowed the United States to impose subservient governments in several countries without needing to use force. Thierry Meyssan, who advised two governments facing this type of crisis, analyses this method and the reasons for its failure in Iran."Color revolutions" are to revolutions what Canada Dry is to beer. They look like the real thing, but they lack the flavor. They are regime changes which appear to be revolutions because they mobilize huge segments of the population but are more akin to takeovers, because they do not aim at changing social structures. Instead they aspire to replace an elite with another, in order to carry out pro-American economic and foreign policies. The "green revolution" in Tehran is the latest example of this trend.
Origin of the concept
This concept appeared in the 90s, but its roots lie in the American public debate of the 70s-80s. After a string of revelations about CIA instigated coups around the world, as well as the dramatic disclosures of the Church and Rockefeller Senate Committees [1], admiral Stansfield Turner was given the task by President Carter to clean up the agency and to stop supporting "local dictatorships". Furious, the American Social Democrats (SD/USA) left the Democratic party and sided with Ronald Regan. They were brilliant Trotskyist intellectuals [2], often linked to Commentary magazine. After Regan was elected, he charged them with pursuing the American interference policy, this time using different methods. This is how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1982 [3] and the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in 1984. Both of these institutions are organically intertwined: NED administrators sit on the USIP board of directors and vice versa.
Legally the NED is a not-for-profit organization under US law, financed by an annual grant voted by Congress as part of the State Department budget. In order to operate, this organization is co-financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is part of the State Department. This legal structure is used jointly as a cover by the American CIA, the British MI6 and the Australian ASIS (and occasionally by Canadian and New Zealand secret services).
The NED presents itself as an agency promoting democracy. It intervenes either directly or using one of its four tentacles: one designed to subvert unions, the second responsible for corrupting management organizations, the third for left-wing parties and the fourth for right-wing parties. It also intervenes through friendly foundations, such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (UK), the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Canada), the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Fondation Robert-Schuman (France), the International Liberal Center (Sweden), the Alfred Mozer Foundation (Netherlands), the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Friedrich Naunmann Stiftung, the Hans Seidal Stiftung and the Heinrich Boell Stiftung (Germany). The NED thus claims to have corrupted over 6000 organizations throughout the world over roughly 30 years. All of this, of course, under the disguise of training and assistance programs.
As for the USIP, it is an American national institution. It is financed annually by Congress as part of the Defense Department budget. Contrary to the NED which serves as a cover for the three allied states, the USIP is exclusively American. Under the guise of political science research, it can pay salaries to foreign politicians.
As soon as it commanded resources, the USIP financed a new and discrete structure, the Albert Einstein Institution [4]. This small association for the promotion of nonviolent action was initially charged with designing a form of civil defense for the populations of Western Europe in case of an invasion by the Warsaw Pact. It quickly became autonomous and designed a model following which a state, whatever its nature, can lose its authority and collapse.
First attempts
The first attempted "color revolution" failed in 1989. The goal was to overthrow Deng Xiaoping by using one of his close collaborators, the Chinese Communist Party secretary-general Zhao Ziyang, in order to open Chinese markets to American investors and to bring China into the US orbit. Young supporters of Zhao invaded Tiananmen square [5]. They were presented in the Western media as unpoliticized students fighting for freedom against the party’s Conservative wing, when in fact this was infighting within the Deng entourage between pro-American and nationalist factions. After having ignored provocations for a long time Deng decided to use force. Depending on sources, the repression ended with 300 to 1000 dead. 20 years later, the Western version of this failed coup has not changed. Western media which recently covered the anniversary of that event presented it as a "popular uprising" and expressed surprise that people in Beijing do not remember the event. This is because there was nothing "popular" about this struggle for power within the Party. This was not a concern for people.
The first successful "color revolution" succeeded in 1990. As the Soviet Union was disintegrating, state secretary James Baker went to Bulgaria to participate in the electoral campaign of the pro-American party, heavily financed by the NED [6]. However, despite pressure from the UK, the Bulgarians – afraid of the social consequences induced by the transformation from soviet union to market economy – made the unforgivable mistake to elect in Parliament a post communist majority. While European community observers testified to the legality of the voting process, the pro-American opposition screamed that electoral fraud had occurred and took to the streets. They set up camp in the center of Sofia and threw the country into chaos for the following six months, until pro-American Zhelyu Zhelev was elected president by the parliament.
"Democracy": selling your country to foreign interests behind the people’s back
Since then, Washington has kept instigating regime changes everywhere in the world, using street unrest rather than military juntas. It is important here to understand what is at stake. Behind the soothing rhetoric of "the promotion of democracy", Washington’s actions aim to impose regimes that are opening their markets to the US without conditions and which are aligning themselves to their foreign policy. However, while these goals are known by the leaders of the "color revolutions", they are never discussed and accepted by the mobilized demonstrators. In the event when these takeovers succeed, citizens soon rebel against the new policies imposed on them, even if it is too late to turn back. Besides, how can opposition groups who sold their country to foreign interests behind their populations’ backs be considered "democratic"?
In 2005, the Kyrgyz opposition contested the legislative elections and brought to Bishkek demonstrators from the south of the country. They toppled President Askar Akayev. This was the "Tulip Revolution". The national assembly elected Kurmanbek Bakiyev as president. Unable to control his supporters who were looting the capital, he announced having chased the dictator and pretended that he intended to create a national union government. He pulled General Felix Kulov (former Bishkek Mayor) out of prison and named him prime minister. After the situation was back under control, Bakiyev got rid of Kulov and sold the country’s few resources to US companies with no invitation to tender but with significant backhanders. He set up a US military base in Manas. The population’s standard of living had never been lower. Felix Kulov offered to get the country back on its feet by federating it to Russia as it used to be. He was quickly sent back to jail.
A blessing in disguise?
It is sometimes objected that for states which were subjected to repressive regimes, even if these "color revolutions" only bring the appearance of democracy, they nonetheless constitute an improvement for their populations. Experience shows however that this is far from certain. The new regimes can turn out to be far more repressive than the old ones.
In 2003, Washington, London and Paris [7] organized the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia [8]. According to a classic scheme, the opposition blew the whistle about electoral fraud during legislative elections and took to the streets. The demonstrators forced president Eduard Shevardnadze to flee and they seized power. His successor, Mikheil Saakashvili, opened the country to US economic interests and broke off from his Russian neighbor. The economic aid that Washington promised to replace Russian aid never came. The already weakened economy collapsed. In order to continue to please his backers, Saakashvili needed to impose a dictatorship [9]. He shut down the media and filled up the prisons, which did not prevent Western media from continuing to describe him as a "democrat". Continuing on his collision course, Saakashvili decided to bolster his popularity by engaging in a military adventure. With the help of the Bush administration and of Israel to which he rented air bases, he ordered the bombing of the population of South Ossetia, killing 1600 people, most of whom also held Russian citizenship. Moscow struck back. American and Israeli advisers fled [10]. Georgia was left devastated.
Enough!
The main mechanism of the "color revolutions" consists in focusing popular anger on the desired target. This is an aspect of the psychology of the masses which destroys everything in its path and against which no reasonable argument can be opposed. The scapegoat is accused of all the evils plaguing the country for at least one generation. The more he resists, the angrier the mob gets. After he gives in or slips away, the normal division between his opponents and his supporters reappears.
In 2005, in the hours following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, a rumor spread in Lebanon according to which he was killed by "the Syrians". The Syrian army, which had been maintaining order since the end of the civil war according to the Taëf agreement, was now booed. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was personally accused by the US authorities, which was as good as proof for the public opinion. To those who noted that Rafik Hariri, despite stormy episodes, had always been useful to Syria and that his death deprived Damascus of a central collaborator, it was answered that the "Syrian regime" is so fundamentally evil that it cannot help but killing even its friends. The Lebanese people were calling for the G.I.s to come and get rid of the Syrians. But to everyone’s surprise, Bashar al-Assad, considering that the costly deployment of his army was not welcome in Lebanon any longer, decided to pull it back. Legislative elections were organized in which the "anti-Syrian" coalition triumphed. This was the "Cedar Revolution". After the situation calmed down everyone realized that even if Syrian generals had looted the country in the past, the departure of the Syrian army did not change anything to the country’s economic situation. Furthermore, the country was now in danger: it was not able to defend itself from the expansionism of the Israeli neighbor. The main "anti-Syrian" leader, general Michel Aoun, thought better of it and joined the opposition. Furious, Washington multiplied assassination plans to get rid of him. Michel Aoun formed an alliance with Hezbollah on a patriotic platform. It was about time: Israel attacked.
In every case, Washington prepared the "democratic" government in advance, which confirms that these are takeovers in disguise. The names composing the new team are kept secret for as long as possible. This is why the pointing out of the scapegoat is always done without suggesting a political alternative.
In Serbia, young pro-US "revolutionaries" chose a logo that belonged to the Communist popular imagination (the raised fist) to hide their subordination to the United States. They used "he is done!" as a slogan, which federated the anger against the personality of Slobodan Milosevic, who was held responsible for the bombing of the country even though it was done by NATO. This model was replicated numerous times, for example by the Pora! group in Ukraine, or by Zubr in Bielorussia.
The deceiving appearance of nonviolence
The PR staff members of the State Department maintain the non-violent image of the "color revolutions". They all put forward the theories of Gene Sharp, who founded the Albert Einstein Institution. Yet nonviolence is a combat method used to persuade authorities to a political change. In order for a minority to seize power and to exercise it, it must always use violence at some point. All "color revolutions" did.
In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic called for anticipated elections despite still having a year to run as president. After the first round, neither he nor his principal opponent, Vojislav Koštunica, had secured a majority of the votes. Without waiting for the second round, the opposition claimed voting fraud and took to the streets. Thousands of demonstrators walked on the capital, including the miners from Kolubara. Their daily salaries were paid indirectly by the NED, without them realizing that they were paid by the United States. The pressure from the demonstration was insufficient so the miners started attacking buildings with bulldozers that they had brought, hence the name "bulldozer revolution".
In cases when the tension is just dragging on, and when counterdemonstrations are being organized, the only solution for Washington is to throw the country into chaos. Inciting agents are then placed in both camps to fire on the crowd. Each party can then observe that the others are shooting while they are peacefully advancing. The confrontation spreads.
In 2002, Caracas’ upper-class took to the streets to protest the social policies of President Hugo Chavez [11]. Using clever manipulation, private TV stations created the impression of a human tidal wave. There were 50,000 people according to observers and 1 million according to the press and the State Department. Then there was the Llaguno Bridge incident. TV stations clearly showed armed pro-Chavez supporters firing on the crowd. In a press conference, the National Guard general and vice minister of domestic security confirmed that the "Chavez militias" fired and killed 19 people. He resigned and called for the dictator to be overthrown. The president was quickly arrested by military rebels. However millions of people descended in the capital’s streets and constitutional order was restored.
A subsequent journalistic investigation went over the details of the massacre of the Llaguno Bridge. It brought to light a deceptive picture manipulation, where chronological order was modified as proved by the protagonists’ watch dials. In reality, the pro-Chavez supporters were under attack and after having fallen back, they were trying to escape by using their weapons. The inciting agents were local policemen trained by a US agency [12].
In 2006, the NED reorganized the opposition to Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki. It funded the creation of the Orange party of Raila Odinga. He received the support of Senator Barack Obama, who was accompanied by destabilization experts (Mark Lippert, current chief of staff for the national security adviser, and general Jonathan S. Gration, current US special envoy to Sudan). During a meeting with Odinga, the Illinois Senator invented a vague family relationship with the pro-US candidate. However Odinga was defeated during the 2007 legislative elections. Supported by Senator John McCain as president of the IRI (the NED’s Republican pseudopod), he disputed the validity of the vote and called for his supporters to take to the streets. This is when anonymous text messages were sent en masse to ethnic Luo voters. "Dear Kenyans, the Kikuyu have stolen the future of our children… we must treat them in the only way that they understand… with violence". The country, despite being one of the most stable in Africa, suddenly erupted in violence.
After days of rioting, president Kibaki was forced to accept the mediation of Madeleine Albright as president of the NDI (the NED’s Democrat pseudopod). A prime minister position was created and offered to Odinga. Since the hate text messages had not been sent from the Kenyan installations, one can wonder which foreign power was behind them.
Mobilizing the international public opinion
During the last few years, Washington had the opportunity to instigate "color revolutions" with the understanding that they would fail to seize power but that they would help manipulate public opinion and international institutions.
In 2007, many Burmans were up in arms because of the domestic fuel price increase. Demonstrations spread as Buddhist monks took a leading role in the protest. This was the "Saffron Revolution" [13]. Washington could not care less about the Rangoon regime; however they were interested in orchestrating the people of Burma in order to exercise pressure on China which holds strategic interests in Burma (pipelines and military bases for electronic intelligence gathering). It was therefore crucial to distort people’s perception of reality. Pictures and films shot on mobile phones started to appear on YouTube. They were anonymous, impossible to verify and without context. It was precisely their lack of reliability that gave them authority, and allowed the White House to fit them with their interpretation of the situation.
More recently, a 2008 student demonstration brought Greece to a grinding halt following the murder of a 15 year old young man by a policeman. Hoodlums were soon seen rioting. They had been recruited in neighboring Kosovo and brought in by bus. The city centers were devastated. Washington was trying to scare foreign investors away in order to secure a monopoly on the investments in the gas terminals that were being built. The weak Karamanlis government was portrayed as being iron fisted. Facebook and Twitter were used to mobilize the Greek Diaspora. Demonstrations spread to Istanbul, Nicosia, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, The Hague, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, etc.
The Green Revolution
The operation conducted in 2009 in Iran belongs to the long list of pseudo revolutions. First, a 400 million dollar budget was voted in 2007 by Congress to orchestrate a "regime change" in Iran. This was in addition to the ad hoc budgets of the NED, the USAID, the CIA & Co. How this money is being used is unclear, but the three main recipients are the following: the Rafsanjani family, the Pahlavi family and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran.
The Bush Administration decided to instigate a "color revolution" in Iran after confirming a decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to conduct a military attack of that country. This choice was then approved by the Obama Administration. The plans for a "color revolution" which had been drawn up by the American Enterprise Institute in 2002 with Israel were then reopened. I had published an article at that time regarding this plan [14]. In it, one can identify the current protagonists: that plan has not changed much since then. A Lebanese chapter was added which predicted an uprising in Beirut in case of a victory of the patriotic coalition (Hezbollah, Aoun), but it was later cancelled.
The script included huge support for the candidate chosen by Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the disputing of the presidential election results, widespread bombings, the toppling of president Ahmadinejad and of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, setting up a transition government headed by Mousavi, restoring the Monarchy and creating a government headed by Sohrab Sobhani.
According to the 2002 plans, the operation was overseen by Morris Amitay and Michael Ledeen. It mobilized in Iran the Irangate network. Here is a necessary quick historical background: the Irangate (Iran–Contra affair) was an illegal arms deal. The White House wished to supply weapons to the rebels in Nicaragua (to fight against Sandinistas) and to Iranians (in order to drag the Iran-Iraq war for as long as possible), but was prevented from doing so by Congress. Israelis then offered to act as subcontractors for both operations. Ledeen, who has both US and Israeli citizenships, served as a link in Washington, while Mahmoud Rafsanjani (the brother of the Ayatollah) was his counterpart in Tehran. This took place over a background of widespread corruption. When the scandal broke out in the United States, an independent inquiry committee was headed by Senator Tower and General Brent Scowcroft (Robert Gates’ mentor) to investigate.
Michael Ledeen is an old fox involved in many secret operations. He could be found in Rome during the assassination of Aldo Moro. He also appears to have been linked to the fake Bulgarian connection after the assassination attempt on John Paul II, or more recently to the fake claims of Nigerian uranium supply to Saddam Hussein. He currently works for the American Enterprise Institute [15] (with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz) and for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies [16].
Morris Amitay is a former director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He is today the vice president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the director of a consulting company for the weapon industry.
On April 27, Morris and Ledeen held a seminar on Iran with Senator Joseph Lieberman at the American Enterprise Institute, regarding the Iranian elections. On May 15, a new seminar was held. The public part of the event consisted of a round table discussion headed by Senator John Bolton about the "haggling" over Iran: would Moscow agree to end its support of Tehran in exchange for Washington renouncing its missile shield project in Central Europe? French expert Bernard Hourcade took part in the debates. At the same time, the Institute launched a website, intended for the press, about the coming crisis: IranTracker.org. The website includes a section on the Lebanese elections.
In Iran, the responsibility for overthrowing old rival Ayatollah Khamenei rested on Ayatollah Rafsanjani. Born in a family of farmers, Hashemi Rafsanjani built his fortune on real estate speculation during the time of the Shah. He became the main pistachio dealer in Iran, and increased his wealth during the Irangate. His assets are estimated to several billion dollars. After he became the wealthiest man in Iran, he became successively president of the parliament, president of the Republic, and now chairman of the Assembly of Experts (an arbitration body for the parliament and the Guardian Council of the Constitution). He defends the interests of Tehran’s merchant class. During the electoral campaign, Rafsanjani required Mir-Hossein Mousavi, his former adversary who became his protégé, to promise he would privatize the oil sector.
With no connection to Rafsanjani, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran have been used by Washington [17]. This organization, protected by the Pentagon, is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department and has been considered as such by the European Union. Indeed, it is responsible for dreadful operations in the 80s, including a huge bombing which killed Ayatollah Beheshti, four department heads, six department head assistants and one fourth of the parliamentary group of the Islamic Republic party. The People’s Mujahedin of Iran is headed by Massoud Rajavi, who first married the daughter of former President Abol-hassan Banisadr and then the cruel Maryam. Its headquarters are located outside of Paris and its military bases in Iraq, first under the orders of Saddam Hussein, are now under the Defense Department. The People’s Mujahedin provided the logistics for the bombing attacks which took place during the electoral campaign [18]. They were responsible for instigating clashes – which they probably did – between Pro Ahmadinejad supporters and their opponents.
Should chaos have followed, the Supreme Leader could have been overthrown. A transition government, headed by Mir-Hossein Mousavi, would have privatized the oil sector and brought back the Monarchy. The son of the former Shah, Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, would have ascended to the throne and would have nominated Sohrab Sobhani as prime minister. With this in mind, Reza Pahlavi published in February a number of interviews with French journalist Michel Taubmann, the director of Arte’s information office in Paris, and who presides the Cercle de l’Observatoire, the club for French neo conservatives. It is useful to remember that Washington had made similar plans for the restoration of the Monarchy in Afghanistan. Mohammed Zahir Shah was supposed to ascend to the throne again and Hamid Karzai would have become prime minister. Unfortunately, at age 88, the pretender had become senile. Karzai thus became president. Both Sobhani and Karzai hold United States citizenships. Both were involved in the Caspian sea’s oil sector.
As far as propaganda was concerned, the initial plan had been given to Benador Associates, a public relations firm. But it evolved with the influence of Goli Ameri, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. This American Iranian woman is John Bolton’s former colleague. As a new media specialist, she implemented infrastructure and Internet training programs for Rafsanjani’s friends. She also developed radio and television programs in Farsi for the State Department propaganda, in conjunction with the BBC.
Iran’s destabilization failed because the main drive behind the "color revolutions" was not appropriately initiated. Mir-Hossein Mousavi did not manage to make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the focus of popular anger. The Iranian people did not fall into the trap; they did not hold the outgoing president responsible for the United States’ economic sanctions against the country. Therefore the protests were limited to the northern suburbs of Tehran. The authorities refrained from creating counter demonstrations, and let the plotters expose themselves.
However, it must be noted that the propaganda was successful with the Western media. International public opinions really believed that two million Iranians took to the streets, when the real figure was ten times lower. The fact that foreign correspondents were under house arrest facilitated these exaggerations because they were exempt from having to provide evidence for their allegations.
Having given up war, and having failed at overthrowing the regime, what is Barack Obama’s remaining option?
Thierry Meyssan - Journalist and writer, president of the Voltaire Network.
Footnotes:
[1] The numerous reports and documents published by these committees are available online on the following website: The Assassination Archives and Research Center.
[2] "New York Intellectuals and the invention of neo-conservatism", Denis Boneau, Voltaire Network, November 26 2004.
[3] "The NED, the networks of democratic interference", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 22 2004.
[4] "The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the CIA", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 4 2005.
[5] "Tiananmen, 20 ans après", professor Domenico Losurdo, Réseau Voltaire, June 9 2009.
[6] At the time, the NED was relying in Eastern Europe on the Free Congress Foundation (FCF), operated by Republicans. Later on, this organization disappeared and was replaced by the Soros Foundation, operated by Democrats, with the assistance of which the NED would plot new « regime changes ».
[7] Concerned with smoothing out relations between France and the US, French president Jacques Chirac tried to establish better relations with the Bush Administration on Georgia’s back, all the more because of French economic interests in Georgia. Salomé Zourabichvili, number 2 in the French secret services, was nominated as ambassador in Tbilisi. She then switched nationalities and became the Foreign Secretary for the « Rose Revolution ».
[8] "The Secrets of the Georgian Coup", Paul Labarique, Voltaire Network, January 7 2004.
[9] "Géorgie : Saakachvili jette son opposition en prison" (Georgia: Saakachvili jails the opposition) et "Manifestations à Tbilissi contre la dictature des roses" (Protests in Tbilisi against the dictatorship of the roses), Réseau Voltaire, September 12 2006 and September 30 2007.
[10] The Bush Administration was hoping that this conflict would act as a smoke screen. Israeli bombers were supposed to take off simultaneously to strike neighboring Iran. But even before attacking Georgian military installations, Russia bombed the airports that had been rented out to Israel, pinning its planes to the ground.
[11] "Opération manquée au Venezuela" (Failed operation in Venezuela), Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, May 18 2002.
[12] Llaguno Bridge. Keys to a Massacre. Documentary by Angel Palacios, Panafilms 2005.
[13] "Birmanie : la sollicitude intéressée des États-Unis" (Burma: United States’ selfish concern), Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, November 5 2007.
[14] "False reasons to intervene in Iran", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, February 12 2004.
[15] "The American Enterprise Institute in the White House", Voltaire Network, June 21 2004.
[16] "Les trucages de la Foundation for the Defense of Democracies" (The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ tricks), Réseau Voltaire, February 2 2005.
[17] "Les Moudjahidin perdus" (The lost Mujahedin), Paul Labarique, Réseau Voltaire, February 17 2004.
[18] "Le Jundallah revendique des actions armées aux côtés des Moudjahidines du Peuple" (The Jundallah claims responsibility for actions with the People’s Mujahedin), Réseau Voltaire, June 13 2009.
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