Joaquin Bustelo Hits the Honduran Nail on the Head "NYT Confirms US Role in Coup"

Joaquin Bustelo: NY Times confirms US role in Honduras coup
Posted by: "Walter Lippmann" walterlx@earthlink.net walterlx
Tue Jun 30, 2009 10:45 am (PDT)


Great analyais of Honduran situation which is revealed
in the coverage of the NY Times, though not quite in
the spirit which that august institution might like.
Keep in mind that Article 3 of the constitution of
Honduras includes the right of ARMED INSURRECTION
against those who would overthrow that constitution,
as the Honduran military, supreme court and also the
national legislature have just conspired to do!


NY Times confirms US role in Honduras coup
by Joaquin Bustelo
jbustelo at gmail.com
Mon Jun 29 22:58:25 MDT 2009

FROM MARXMAIL:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2009-June/051256.html

Right now the NY Times web site has as its top story a story confirming U.S.
conspiring with the plotters who overthrew the president of Honduras.

Students of journalism will want to look carefully at this effort, a story
cleverly written to communicate certain information while ostensibly seeming
to say exactly the opposite.

Why would one do such a thing? Because the gig is up. With the help of his
friends, President Zelaya has more or less cornered the U.S. into admitting
that, yes, this is a coup and, yes, the right thing to do is to restore the
president to his position. Unsaid, because it doesn't really need to be, is
that those who usurped the power should be dumped in jail.

Unfortunately in the Honduran case those who have OPENLY acted to carry out
the coup include the Supreme Court, national legislature and military
command. The legalistic pretexts offered to justify these actions are
idiotic: for example, that the military gorilas who attacked Zelaya's home
were acting pursuant to a warrant issued by the Supreme Court.

Except that it's not within the competence of such a body to issue military
orders. The way THAT works is that the Supreme Court orders the executive
branch of government (that would be President Zelaya) to do something and
then ACTING THROUGH THE CHAIN OF COMMAND, the president as commander in
chief issues orders to the troops.

I guess, in theory, it could be argued that Zelaya, obeying the Supreme
Court, did order his own arrest and expulsion from the country, but NOT EVEN
the Honduran oligarchs have been able to pretend this is what happened.

Now, what is to be done if the president is in contempt of the court or laws
or whatever? The legislative branch of the government swings into action,
impeaches, tries him and gives him the boot. Now all the Honduran oligarchs
CLAIM that President Zelaya is guilty as sin, but the problem is that this
is not why the Congress replaced him. The Congress replaced him because he
had supposedly resigned.

But he hadn't, and unfortunately for the legislature, no sooner had they
finished reading the fabricated resignation letter than Zelaya was on the
phone from Costa Rica with CNN en Español's Glenda Umaña explaining hell no,
he hadn't resigned: he'd been kidnapped and put on a plane to Costa Rica.

So where does the NY Times story come into this? It described the
discussions among the coup plotters in the days LEADING UP to the coup:

* * *

"Obama administration officials said that they were surprised by the coup on
Sunday. But they also said that they had been working for several weeks to
try to head off a political crisis in Honduras as the confrontation between
Mr. Zelaya and the military over his efforts to lift presidential term
limits escalated.

"The United States has long had strong ties to the Honduras military and
helps train Honduran military forces. Those close ties have put the Obama
administration in a difficult position, opening it up to accusations that it
may have turned a blind eye to the pending coup. Administration officials
strongly deny the charges, and Mr. Obama’s quick response to the Honduran
president’s removal has differed sharply from the actions of the Bush
administration, which in 2002 offered a rapid, tacit endorsement of a
short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez.

"On June 2, Obama administration officials got a firsthand look at the
brewing political battle when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
traveled to Honduras for an Organization of American States conference. Mrs.
Clinton met with Mr. Zelaya, and he reportedly annoyed her when he summoned
her to a private room late in the night after her arrival and had her shake
hands with his extended family.

"During a more formal meeting afterward, they discussed Mr. Zelaya’s plans
for a referendum that would have laid the groundwork for an assembly to
remake the Constitution, a senior administration official said.

"But American officials did not believe that Mr. Zelaya’s plans for the
referendum were in line with the Constitution, and were worried that it
would further inflame tensions with the military and other political
factions, administration officials said.

"Even so, one administration official said that while the United States
thought the referendum was a bad idea, it did not justify a coup.

"'On the one instance, we’re talking about conducting a survey, a nonbinding
survey; in the other instance, we’re talking about the forcible removal of a
president from a country,' the official said, speaking on the condition of
anonymity during a teleconference call with reporters."

* * *

So the story as presented by the NY Times is simply that the US was, of
course meddling in the internal affairs of Honduras, backing the efforts of
the oligarchy to stop the developing national movement and especially
prevent the movement from cohering around the project for a constituent
assembly, which President Zelaya was pushing via the holding of a
non-binding referendum on whether, as part of the November elections, a
constituent assembly should be authorized.

The Honduran Supremes, Generals, Legislators and Oligarchs all claim this is
a crime of lese majeste and treason because, you see, when they switched
back to ostensibly civilian rule, they wrote a constitution saying you could
not change certain provisions in the constitution and most especially the
part about no re-election. The absurdity of such a clause is evident on its
face: Constituent Assemblies are, by their very nature, not subject to prior
restraint -- either that or they aren't really constituent assemblies. But
even more absurd is the claim that to hold a non-binding referendum on
whether or not to initiate a process of changing the constitution is in and
of itself criminally unconstitutional.

Of special interest in the NYTimes piece is identification of Mrs. Clinton
as having been *directly* involved in meddling in Honduras internal affairs.
Of course, all the stuff about how the US was caught completely by surprise
by the coup is BS. It *may* conceivably be true that the U.S. was not
officially informed of every last detail of the action before it happened,
but the escalating rhetoric by the oligarchy indicated a coup was afoot.

Moreover, how to explain Zelaya's being expelled to a neighboring country
from which he can denounce the coup and organize opposition to it than it
having been viewed by the Honduran coup plotters as a way of relieving the
fear of their American partners that they would be associated with a savage
murder or a blood bath?

This of course explains the original U.S. reaction, which was extremely lame
and very much in keeping with the Venezuelan precedent, contrary to what The
Times claims. For the time being, the U.S. appears to have been
outmaneuvered diplomatically, forcing it to speak more clearly than it would
have liked to.

Normally something like this would be shunted to the OAS, the yanqui
ministry of colonies, where solemn press releases would issue and that would
be the end of it.

But this time, instead the OAS, yes, had to adopt a condemnation but somehow
the progressive forces maneuvered Secretary General Insulza to head to
Central America directly to intervene in the crisis, moving the locus from
Washington.

At the same time, previously scheduled summits of the Central American
nations and the ALBA bloc (which re-christened itself "Alliance," replacing
"Alternative) in Nicaragua kept the initiative in the hands of progressive
forces. And Nicaragua also used the happy coincidence that Miguel dÉscoto is
president of the United Nations General Assembly to seize on the issue, call
a special session of the Assembly to pillory Honduras.

So deftly had US diplomacy been outmaneuvered that Mrs. Clinton was forced
to come out this morning and give another press briefing on Honduras, where
she conceded that yes, it was a coup, and no, the U.S. did not believe what
was done was legitimate. But she insisted the situation was very fluid and
there had to be a "dialogue" between the legitimate President of Honduras,
universally recognized as such, and the criminal thugs trying to overthrow
the government by force and violence.

Then some hours later, either Mrs. Clinton or her mouthpiece held the
telephone off-the-record press briefing the NY Times article alludes to.
It should be noted that normally, the State Department will not allow this
level of detail to be reported, and usually not even that the briefing was
held. In this case it was necessary to alert ruling class circles and their
propagandists of the government's judgment that it could not in this
diplomatic playing field claim it had not known anything: the claim was
obviously absurd, making it would put the U.S. out of the game.

Joaquin

=========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

This is the first time I've heard the info. about the constituent assemby. It's very important to know this material.

Your link shines much more light on the elements of this coup. THANKS.