John Perkins (.... Economic Hitman) - Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?

Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?

By John Perkins

August 07, 2009
"Information Clearing House"

-- I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president were not standing up for democracy.

Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor to work in their sweatshops.

Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s.

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”
It did not take much imagination to envision the turmoil sweeping through every Latin American capital. There had been a collective sign of relief at Barack Obama’s election in the U.S., a sense of hope that the empire in the North would finally exhibit compassion toward its southern neighbors, that the unfair trade agreements, privatizations, draconian IMF Structural Adjustment Programs, and threats of military intervention would slow down and perhaps even fade away. Now, that optimism was turning sour.

The cozy relationship between Honduras’s military coup leaders and the corporatocracy were confirmed a couple of days after my arrival in Panama. England’s The Guardian ran an article announcing that “two of the Honduran coup government's top advisers have close ties to the US secretary of state. One is Lanny Davis, an influential lobbyist who was a personal lawyer for President Bill Clinton and also campaigned for Hillary. . . The other hired gun for the coup government that has deep Clinton ties is (lobbyist) Bennett Ratcliff.” (1)

DemocracyNow! broke the news that Chiquita was represented by a powerful Washington law firm, Covington & Burling LLP, and its consultant, McLarty Associates (2). President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder had been a Covington partner and a defender of Chiquita when the company was accused of hiring “assassination squads” in Colombia (Chiquita was found guilty, admitting that it had paid organizations listed by the US government as terrorist groups “for protection” and agreeing in 2004 to a $25 million fine). (3) George W. Bush’s UN Ambassador, John Bolton, a former Covington lawyer, had fiercely opposed Latin American leaders who fought for their peoples’ rights to larger shares of the profits derived from their resources; after leaving the government in 2006, Bolton became involved with the Project for the New American Century, the Council for National Policy, and a number of other programs that promote corporate hegemony in Honduras and elsewhere.

More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23211.htm

World boycott campaign to Chiquita for its support of the Coup d’ Etat in Honduras

In response to the call made by the National Front against the Coup d' Etat in Honduras we are promoting a world campaign to boycott Chiquita which supports the Coup d'Etat in Honduras. Visit the web page of Chiquita's Headquarter in Cincinnati, OH (USA) and send them the following message: I DON'T BUY CHIQUITA BECAUSE IT SUPPORTS THE COUP D' ETAT IN HONDURAS
FACTS: On June 28, 2009, military commandos involved in the coup d'etat arrested the legitimate president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. They attacked his residence with machineguns, kidnapped him and took him to the US military base at Palmerola. The plane carrying the "president-prisoner" flew to Costa Rica, where he was abandoned in pajamas on one of the runways. It is a military-business coup d'etat, planned by the United States IV Fleet, which buries Honduras once again in its dark past of military dictatorships.

All of the international organizations of the American continent, the United Nations, the European Union, etc. condemned the Coup d'Etat and demanded Zelaya's return to the Presidency of the Republic, out of respect for the will of the Honduran voters. We have therefore launched the World Campaign to Boycott Chiquita, one of the corporations that most stridently oppose Zelaya's government and support the coup. It is urgent to strike back at the transnationals that, behind the scenes, finance and support the coup-installed government!

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/10/394743.shtml

now only sell Fairtrade bananas as far as I'm aware.

“From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America”

“When the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya two weeks ago there might have been a sigh of relief in the corporate board rooms of Chiquita banana,” writes journalist Nikolas Kozloff. “Earlier this year the Cincinnati-based fruit company joined Dole in criticizing the government in Tegucigalpa which had raised the minimum wage by 60%.” Kozloff goes on to trace Chiquita’s “long and sordid” political history in Central America.


http://i2.democracynow.org/2009/7/21/from_arbenz_to_zelaya_chiquita_in

Audio, video, transcript at link.

Segment was titled "The Price of Bananas" but it's not available on YouTube.

Entire show, including this segment, is available as audio podcast on iTunes.

They include the transcript, and also the video, if you click the link below the first photo.

Aug. 9, 2009
The Price Of Bananas
Steve Kroft On How Colombian Paramilitaries Landed A U.S. Corporation In Hot Water
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/08/60minutes/main4080920.shtml

I saw the program, too, and really appreciated it.

Thanks for mentioning it.

NOT.

I'm sure he's right but don't see the mechanism yet. Are the gopistas paid off? Favored? Motivated with threats? Is it just tacit agreement?

The left trend forces good corporate neighbors like Chiquita to step in and get things straightened out.


:eyes:

Aerosmith - Train Kept A Rollin'

(if you're wondering what I'm referring to)

I try not to buy national/multinational brands of any food anyway. There's not a lot of choice when it comes to bananas, but screw it. I'll just do without.

Thanks for the informative post. There's hardly any coverage of this coup anywhere mainstream.

against Gallo, I never found out when the boycott was over! I still don't buy grapes and it's been like 35 years!

:rofl:

Who's in charge of US foreign policy?
The coup in Honduras has exposed divisions between Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton

-snip

When the coup occurred on 28 June, the first statement that came out of the White House was a major blunder. Although the US and international press gave Obama a pass, the diplomatic community could hardly help noticing that the White House issued the only official statement in the world that didn't have a bad word to say about the coup when it happened.

This position shifted as events moved forward, and Obama himself even went so far as to say: "We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras." But then his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, seemed to contradict him. Twice she was asked by the press whether restoring the democratic order in Honduras meant restoring the elected president, and twice she declined to answer.

There appear to be others in the administration who would be content to let the coup government stall out the remaining months of Zelaya's term.

Obama needs to lay down the law and make it clear that this coup will not stand. He could start by firing the adviser wrote that initial statement in response to the coup. It's not like they were taken by surprise. Everyone saw this coming, and the Obama administration was talking to the Honduran military right up to the day before the coup.



-snip
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/16/honduras-coup-obama-clinton

I cannot understand how the US public got sold the belief that the folks mowing their yards are not refugees. The US sponsored the death squads and dictators and the indigenous people had a choice of staying and die or run.

They are refugees ... 'nuff said.

As someone mentioned above, Chiquita has previously gotten in trouble for its payoffs to the right-wing AUC paramilitaries in Columbia. That's a long and dirty story in itself, involving Carl Lindner, the politicized Bush Justice Department, and the push for a free trade agreement (See http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/21/buying-the-law)

But what's catching my attention now is the recent report that Honduran landowners have been hiring AUC mercenaries. To me, that strongly suggests a possible link with the powerful US firms that have found a warm welcome in Columbia.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/09/honduras-colombia-auc-landowners

Honduran landowners have reportedly hired former Colombian paramilitaries as mercenaries to protect them against possible violence stemming from government tensions, a UN panel said today.

The UN working group on mercenaries said that it has received reports that some 40 former members of United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC. The US government classifies the AUC as a terrorist organisation.

They will protect properties and individuals "from further violence between supporters of the de facto government and those of the deposed President Manuel Zelaya," it said.

Separately, a 120-person group of paramilitaries from several countries in that region was reportedly created to support the coup in Honduras, the panel said.