Honduras: Diplomatic Fail
by cadejo4
Sat Jul 04, 2009 at 05:14:49 PM PDT
This afternoon we are awaiting a decision by the OAS on whether to eject Honduras for last Sunday's military coup. The decision will be made after Secretary-General Insulza's fruitless trip to the country yesterday, during which Honduran leaders steadfastly refused to admit a coup had occurred in their country. Ejection of Honduras would cap a week of perhaps the most incompetent diplomatic offensive in history, led by the golpistas' new "foreign minister," a choleric racist named Enrique Ortez Colindres. Last week, he managed to insult El Salvador as a country too small to play football in and referred to U.S. President Barack Obama as "that little black man who doesn't know anything about anything," while implying Obama can't read or write. I expect someone else here will be covering the OAS decision when it's announced, so I'll use this diary just to summarize a few odds and ends that we missed last week.
~snip~
Everyone who had come to admire Patricia Rodas, the exiled foreign minister, for her well-spoken, highly educated way of expressing herself, was in for a rude shock on Monday, when the golpistas swore in Enrique Ortez Colindres as foreign minister and he took the microphone. Within a matter of hours, he had insulted Spain, El Salvador and the OAS and made comments about Barack Obama that were widely viewed as racist. The Prensa Grafica, in El Salvador, tartly called Ortez a "jewel of Honduran diplomacy."
Q: Do you think the "gringos," as you call them, would permit an invasion of Honduras promoted by Chavez?
A: They permit anything. The United States is no longer a defender of democracy. In the first place, the president of the republic , with all due respect to the little black man, doesn’t know where Tegucigalpa is. We’re the ones who know where Washington is and we’re the ones who are obliged, as a small country, a democratic pygmy, to clarify the concepts for him and read to him, maybe in his language, what’s going on.
While the epithet negrito, used by Ortez to describe Obama, is sometimes a term of affection for very close friends or family members, it's use in this context by Ortez has been widely criticized in the Latin American press as racist. Here's another example quoted by Clarín newspaper in Argentina:
However, the golpistas made their position clear on Monday, from the mouth of the new "foreign minister," Enrique Ortez Colindres. When, on a popular Honduran tele-journalism program, he was asked about international reaction to the coup, he had no problem saying he gave no importance whatsover to the OAS and "the other little groups up there," asked that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero "go back to his shoes" and said he wouldn't speak of El Salvador, "because it's not worth talking about a country so tiny that you can't play football in it because the ball lands in another country." But he went even further, in describing United States President Barack Obama as "that little black man who doesn't know anything about anything."
More:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/4/749985/-Honduras:-Diplomatic-Fail
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