US role in Colombia and Honduras sparks Latin American criticism

US role in Colombia and Honduras sparks Latin American criticism

Author: Emile Schepers and W.T. Whitney Jr.
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 08/30/09 20:15

Storm signs are up over Latin America as new tensions play out against historical memories. The great liberator, Simon Bolivar, said in 1829 that the United States is “destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty”. Over nearly 200 years of U.S. military and economic intervention in Latin American affairs have taught the leaders, governments and peoples of the hemisphere to be on their guard.

Will the Obama administration change this century’s long pattern of arrogant hegemonism? At the start of Obama’s administration, some things pointed to a change for the better. In March, Obama broke with the precedent of the Bush administration by pointedly refraining from intervening in the presidential elections in El Salvador. To the protests of the Republicans, he assured Salvadoran voters that if Mauricio Funes, candidate of the left-wing FMLN party won, there would not be reprisals against Salvadoran immigrants living in the United States, as the Bush administration had threatened to impose during the 2005 elections.

At the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad in April, Obama’s comments were of a conciliatory nature that made a generally good impression on the leaders present and on the Latin American public.

But two new situations have developed which have put these originally positive impressions under a cloud.

First, the June 28 military coup d’état in Honduras: Although Obama denounced the coup and his administration has stuck to the position that Manuel Zelaya is the legitimate president of Honduras, the perception in Latin America has been that the U.S. has been slow to impose the sanctions necessary to oust the coup regime from power. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s move to put Costa Rican president Oscar Arias in charge of a mediation effort which has not gone anywhere has raised suspicions that the U.S. policy objectives may indeed be to restore Zelaya, but also to keep him from aligning with the more left-wing states in the area. And everyone in the hemisphere is aware of the historic U.S. military and C.I.A. involvement in all aspects of Honduras public life. Once the sanctuary of Cuban exile terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, Honduras hosted bases for U.S. support of the brutal “Contras” in the wars during the 1980s to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and to stop the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador. Honduran officers involved in the coup were trained at the U.S. Army “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia. So when the coup took place, many quickly concluded that is was one of many such events “made in the U.S.A.”. Major Latin American leaders such as Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, himself nearly the victim of a U.S. supported coup in 2002, are careful not to say that Obama personally ordered up the coup, but nevertheless it is clear that the situation has damaged U.S. prestige.

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/16869/

Here is Simon Bolivar's letter to British Colonel Patrick Campbell, dated August 5, 1829: