...of many women in Honduras who have been peacefully protesting the fascist government, including the recent murder of the famed indigenous environmental activist, Berta Caceres (winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize). Women have been particularly evident in leadership roles in the Honduran democracy movement. Gays have also been targeted with brutality.
Clinton is some feminist, huh? What a crock!
I followed the coup events as closely as possible from both the corporate press and alternative news sources. What I think happened is this: The coup was planned by the Bush junta, possibly intended as a time-bomb to sabotage Barack Obama, early in his first term, and prevent him from acting on his stated intention of improving U.S./Latin America relations. (U.S./Latin America relations were basically dead during the Bush junta, of course. The Bush junta did terrible things there.)
When the military kidnapped the elected president of Honduras and flew him out of his own country, Obama's first reaction was that this was a "military coup" which triggers a law to stop U.S. funding to the usurpers. He then fell silent on the matter. He was VERY preoccupied at the time with global financial meltdown--an economic catastrophe inherited from the Bush Junta--and TWO wars inherited from the Bush junta, both of them clusterfucks of major proportions. I don't think Obama had anything to do with the Honduran coup, and I don't think he had an early warning about it. His only mistake may have been figuring that his new Sec of State Hillary Clinton would handle it satisfactorily.
Sec of State Clinton acted to legitimize the fascists who had taken power. Her emails reveal she was determined that Mel Zelaya, the elected president, would NOT return to his country and his rightful office. (He is a leftist who was doing things like raising the minimum wage and providing school lunches--actions offensive to Clinton's potential donors). Everything she did--from the talks in Costa Rica to the phony, State Dept.-run election in Honduras--was aimed at NOT restoring the rightful president and instead installing a rightwinger who would do U.S. corporate bidding.
No reputable election monitoring group in the world would touch this situation. They all refused. Leftists were being murdered. Martial law was in effect. Zelaya was under threat of arrest if he returned. Conditions for a fair election did not exist. So Clinton had the U.S. Dept. itself run an election, using outfits like the International Republican Institute (a John McCain project--McCain had telecommunication interests in Honduras). The rightwing 'won,' of course.
Just want to add in here a slight correction of the OP. The OP says this was "a coup that was widely condemned in Central America." The coup was widely condemned throughout Latin America. The President of Brazil, for instance, gave Zelaya asylum in the Brazilian embassy in Honduras, so Zelaya could return to his country. The OAS refused to send its election monitors to oversee Clinton's phony election. The coup was universally condemned. And Barack Obama's plan to improve relations with LatAm was destroyed, for the time being.
I think that Obama's trip to Cuba, and Obama's and Sec of State Kerry's support for the Colombia/FARC peace talks have been efforts to UNDO the damage that Clinton did to U.S./Latin America relations when she was Sec of State.
What has happened since the coup? The fascists have been emboldened to use death squads to end their problems with the leftist majority. And crime and murder have run rampant. The U.S. funded and trained Honduran military and police support the fascists. The Pentagon meanwhile has been building up its presence in Honduras. (The military plane carrying Zelaya out of his country at gunpoint stopped at a U.S. base in Honduras for refueling.) All the profiteers have taken over Honduras--the military profiteers, the police profiteers, the "war on drugs" profiteers, the corporate profiteers and the gangs warring over the ever-more lucrative drug profits. (The more drugs are warred upon, the higher the price, the more violence there is.)
Some of these problems pre-existed in Honduras, but all were made worse--much worse--by this U.S.-supported coup, and the poor majority in Honduras was stripped of their advocate, Mel Zelaya, who was implementing quite modest reforms to improve their lives.
Clinton was responsible for inflicting three clusterfucks on Obama's presidency--Honduras, Libya and Syria--plus the possibility that his presidency will end in scandal from the corruption at the Clinton Foundation and her insecure private email server setup.
On Libya and Syria, she was following the neocon plan (her adviser, Robert Kagan, of the Project for a New American Century--Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld's blue print). And on Honduras? Henry Kissinger (another adviser of hers).
Here is what one Honduran coup general said about their coup: The purpose of the coup "was to prevent communism from Venezuela reaching the United States" (quoted in a report on the coup by the Zelaya government-in-exile). (Note: Hugo Chavez was NOT a communist. He did, however, advocate labor rights, a living wage, universal health care, education, public participation and other "communist" ideas.)
I wondered at the time where this coup general got such a strange notion--that Honduras must stand in the way of "communism from Venezuela reaching the United States."
Kissinger used the same excuse to slaughter about a million people in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. He also used that excuse--communism--to destroy the elected leftist government in Chile in the same era.
Kissinger and Kagan intend to ride Clinton back into the White House to continue their wars. That is my greatest fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Honduras is evidence of it. So are Libya and Syria--where, I should add, women are suffering the most from the chaos and violence that Clinton helped to unleash.
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