Selling Honduras Off to the Highest Bidder

May 16, 2011

Selling Honduras Off to the Highest Bidder
Repression and Backroom Deals in Honduras
By TANYA KERSSEN

Tear gas and rubber bullets were flying last Friday in the streets of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Nearly two years after the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected president, the new regime was knocking elbows with diplomats and billionaires at a widely publicized business convention unironically called (with no Spanish translation) “Honduras is Open for Business.” What Hondurans saw was their country being sold to the highest bidder.

This is nothing new, perhaps, in a “banana republic” long controlled by U.S. interests. Already by 1917 a few foreign companies, led by United Fruit (now Chiquita) owned a million acres of the best Honduran farmland. After 1954, the U.S. heavily built up the Honduran army—military aid exchanged for access to raw materials—ultimately leading to a military coup in 1963. By this time, the U.S. controlled 95 percent of all foreign investments, including infrastructure, key exports and the two largest banks. A boom in commercial agriculture, especially in cattle and cotton, led to waves of peasant expropriation from their lands.

With the lowest per capita income in Central America, but with a strong military, Honduras in the 80s was viewed as a “U.S. surrogate” in the region, providing a base for counter-insurgency operations. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) signed in 2005 further cemented U.S. economic influence.

But when president Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup in June 2009, with strong support from large landowners and business elites, something changed in Honduras. A national resistance movement emerged, embodied in the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, uniting virtually every sector of Honduran society, from teachers and students to peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, faith-based organizations and LGBT groups. The scale of the repression, little-publicized in the U.S., has also been intense, with regime leader Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa unleashing violence on unarmed pro-democracy protestors.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/kerssen05162011.html

Incredible that the towns/pueblos around the fruit companies had no schools, no hospitals, no civil government, nothing. After nearly 100 years of US companies exporting their bananas, the Hondurans had nothing.

I was genuinely shocked and began to ask myself, "How could this be?"..It was the beginning of my understanding about how corporations rape and pillage and the US government aids and abets them.

"He's not playing ball with the multi-national corporations so we must fabricate the media story that he is a dictator/evil/eats babies for brunch/etc."

The main thing that President Zelaya did was to proclaim that he is against foreign corporations raping Honduras and its people. Obviously this required CIA intervention and a US-backed coup.

Restoring the rule of law in Honduras
Honduras wants readmission to the Organisation of American States – but how, with a supreme court that backed the coup?
Viviana Krsticevic guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 May 2011 22.00 BST

The image of then President Manuel Zelaya in his pyjamas, being forced out of the presidential palace by the military and on to a plane bound for Costa Rica, is easy to remember. Perhaps less memorable is that the coup d'état of June 2009 was carried out with the active participation of the entire supreme court of justice as well as the attorney general of Honduras.

Zelaya's arrest was ordered by Honduras' supreme court and carried out by the armed forces. The court took no action to ensure the protection of Zelaya's rights, or those of thousands of Hondurans who were arbitrarily detained following the coup. Worse still, Honduras' highest court urged its judges to take part in a street demonstration in support of what was dubbed a "constitutional succession". Later, the court went as far as to fire a group of judges that participated in pro-democracy marches.

The dismissal of these judges was roundly and jointly condemned by the United Nations special rapporteurships on independence of judges and lawyers, promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and human rights defenders. Similar statements were made by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organisation of American States (OAS) and by the United Nations in its universal periodic review (UPR). On 14 April, the Inter-American Commission notified the judges who had been arbitrarily dismissed by the pro-coup supreme court of Honduras that their case had been admitted. In the coming months, it may indeed be submitted to the Inter-American Court.

During and since the coup, Honduras' attorney general has displayed inefficiency and bias with regard to the investigation of crimes committed against Zelaya, his cabinet, journalists, teachers, union members, opposition members and activists of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community. A blatant illustration of this is the impunity that prevails regarding the assassinations of journalists and LGBTI people since the coup d'état.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/12/honduras-usforeignpolicy

I don't care one whit what a politician says. The proof is in the pudding. Or their actions/lack of action in this case. The Obama administration could have the Democratically Elected president Zelaya back in his office inside of 72 hours -- if they wanted to. Obviously, more than 2 years later and zero action speaks volumes about the US' true position: we like military coups when it keeps pro-corporate and pro-rich regimes in power.