This ^^^ is Berta Cáceres.
Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup...
But before we talk about her, let’s be honest, most Americans do not give a sh!t about Honduras. That’s a shame, but it simply makes Honduras like every other South and Central American country: invisible to most Americans.
And no one knows this better than our politicians. They KNOW that you don’t care, and for generations that apathy has allowed them to do whatever they want to the population in South America without more than a passing worry about being exposed. And largely that’s worked out fine for the elite in America.
Less so for the civilian population in South and Central America. One estimate, by an ex-station chief in South America was that the CIA alone was responsible for the deaths of over 6,000,000 people in the region.
And this practice of using our power to interfere with South American countries continues largely unabated. One of the most recent atrocities we’ve been involved with was the 2009 coup in Honduras. And yes, I remember you don’t care about Honduras, but in 2016 you may need to make an exception… because Honduras, like Libya and Iraq before it highlights — strongly — the difference between experience and judgement.
Here’s the background, more or less:
The 2009 Honduran coup d'état, part of the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis, occurred when the Honduran Army on orders from the Honduran Supreme Court ousted President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile on 28 June 2009. It was prompted when Zelaya attempted to schedule a non-binding poll on holding a referendum about convening a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. After Zelaya refused to comply with court orders to cease, the Honduran Supreme Court secretly issued a warrant for his arrest on 26 June. Two days later, Honduran soldiers stormed the president's house in the middle of the night and detained him, forestalling the poll. Instead of bringing him to trial, they put him on a military aeroplane which flew him to Costa Rica. Later that day, after reading a resignation letter of disputed authenticity, the Honduran Congress voted to remove Zelaya from office, and appointed Speaker of Congress Roberto Micheletti, his constitutional successor, in his place.
International reaction to the 2009 Honduran coup d'état was marked by widespread condemnation of the events. The United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the European Union condemned the removal of Zelaya as a military coup. On 5 July, the OAS, invoking for the first time Article 21 of the Inter-American Democratic Charter voted by acclamation of all member states to suspend Honduras from the organisation.
In July 2011, Honduras's Truth Commission concluded that Zelaya broke the law when he disregarded the Supreme Court ruling ordering him to cancel the referendum, but that his removal from office was illegal and a coup. The designation by Congress of Roberto Micheletti as interim president was ruled by the commission as unconstitutional and his administration as a "de facto regime".
en.wikipedia.org/...
When this happened Hillary sprang into acton:
In 2009, democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by the Honduran military, allied with opposition parties. The coup against Zelaya was widely condemned by governments across Latin America, the European Union, the Organization of American States and other regional blocs.
But then-Secretary of State Clinton moved in swiftly. She admitted in her autobiography “Hard Choices,” that she used her power to shift the crisis into a favorable position for the U.S., even if it meant forgetting about democracy.
“We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot,” she admitted in her book.
www.telesurtv.net/...
According to an email exchange in the aftermath of the coup, Clinton requested the assistance of a prominent PR advisor Lanny Davis as a back-channel to Roberto Micheletti, the interim president after the coup. Davis was also an adviser to a group of Honduran businessmen who had supported Zelaya's ouster .
The request came a week before Clinton brokered a deal to reinstall Zelaya through a national unity government. According to the Intercept, this was an attempt at undermining the democratically elected left-wing president while not explicitly endorsing the coup.
The plan failed however as the legal vacuum left by the coup made the return of Manuel Zelaya impossible. The U.S. State Department continued to support and recognize what many considered fraudulent elections by the post-coup government, saying they were “free, fair and transparent.”
According to the Intercept, the U.S. presented a facade in the media saying they were working to restore the democratically elected Honduran government, while in fact ensuring the coup government’s grip on power.
In another email exchange Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, who was in Honduras the week prior to the coup to meet with the civilian and military groups that later participated in the coup, applauded the U.S. for “having worked so hard to manage and resolve this crisis.”
Zelaya was inspired by the policies of Hugo Chavez to combat poverty and had joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) a year prior to his ouster.
In the aftermath of the coup, the homicide rate increased by 50 percent while political repression and assassinations of political opponents, farmer organizers and LGBTQI activists heightened dramatically.
www.telesurtv.net/...
About those free and fair elections:
Of course, the “free and fair” elections that Clinton envisioned included a media blackout and targeted assassinations of anti-coup leaders ahead of the polls. No international institutions monitored the elections. Due to the power vacuum created after the coup, left-wing, and legitimate, Zelaya was never returned to power.
So “active diplomacy that resolved a constitutional crisis and paved the way for legitimate democratic elections,” is stretching the truth a little.
www.telesurtv.net/...
And the problem, as always, was that the party the US wanted in power in Honduras — like in so many past instances — was a right-wing party, with little regard for the rule of law. In PARTICULAR the interim President is so socially conservative he makes Ted Cruz look like Barack Obama.
Despite the fact that he was a rural patriarch, Zelaya as president was remarkably supportive of “intersectionality” (that is, a left politics not reducible to class or political economy): He tried to make the morning-after pill legal. (After Zelaya’s ouster, Honduras’s coup congress—the one legitimated by Hillary Clinton—passed an “absolute ban on emergency contraception,” criminalizing “the sale, distribution, and use of the ‘morning-after pill’—imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted.”) He supported gay and transgender rights. (Read this. Among the first to be murdered was Vicky Hernandez Castillo, a transgendered activist in San Pedro Sula. Hernandez left her home on the night of the coup, apparently unaware that the new government had decreed a curfew. She was found dead the next morning, shot in the eye and strangled; Sentidog, an LGBT monitoring group, writes that 168 LGBT people were killed in Honduras between the coup and 2014.) Zelaya apologized for a policy of “social cleansing”—that is, the murder and disappearance of street children and gang members—executed by his predecessors. And he backed rural peasant and indigenous movements, such as the one Cáceres led, in the fight against land dispossession, mining, and biofuels.
www.thenation.com/...
And now we can talk about Berta again. Let me sum it with with the opening two paragraphs of an excellent article in The Nation:
Hillary Clinton will be good for women. Ask Berta Cáceres. But you can’t. She’s dead. Gunned down yesterday, March 2, at midnight, in her hometown of La Esperanza, Intibuca, in Honduras.
Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible. InThe Nation, Dana Frank and I covered that coup as it unfolded. Later, as Clinton’s emails were released, others, such as Robert Naiman, Mark Weisbrot, and Alex Main, revealed the central role she played in undercutting Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, and undercutting the opposition movement demanding his restoration. In so doing, Clinton allied with the worst sectors of Honduran society.
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Since Zelaya’s ouster, there’s been an all-out assault on these decent people—torture, murder, militarization of the countryside, repressive laws, such as the absolute ban on the morning-after pill, the rise of paramilitary security forces, and the wholesale deliverance of the country’s land and resources to transnational pillagers. That’s not to mention libertarian fantasies, promoted by billionaires such as PayPal’s Peter Thiel and Milton Friedman’s grandson (can’t make this shit up), of turning the country into some kind of Year-Zero stateless utopia. (Watch this excellent documentary by Jesse Freeston on La Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguán Valley.)
Such is the nature of the “unity government” Clinton helped institutionalize. In her book, Hard Choices, Clinton holds up her Honduran settlement as a proud example of her trademark clear-eyed, “pragmatic” foreign policy approach.
www.thenation.com/...
That article is called, “The Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous Leaders”. And it details in grim specificity the way the regime Hillary actively helped put into power, backed back a close friend of her, given cover by her in the national press, how that regime is on a murderous rampage. And has been for a long while. Targetting indiginous people, political activists and the LGBT community specifically.
Surely though, after watching all of her “pragmatic” choices backfire so dramatically, she’d admit it was all a horrible mistake?
When asked by Latino USA if the former secretary of state “is still proud of the hell she helped routinize in Honduras” as a result of the country’s 2009 coup, a spokesperson responded that the accusation in the question is “simply nonsense.”
“That charge is simply nonsense,” Director of Hispanic Media Jorge Silva wrote in an email to Latino USA. “Hillary Clinton engaged in active diplomacy that resolved a constitutional crisis and paved the way for legitimate democratic elections.”
The exchange between the Clinton campaign and Latino USA came after The Nation published an article explaining the links between the death of beloved Honduran activist, Berta Caceres, who opposed the coup, and Clinton.
And the publication isn’t the only one to link the assassination of the human rights campaigner and Clinton’s veiled support of the 2009.
Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director, Mark Weisbrot, released a statement after the tragedy, noting that political repression, including targeted killings of activists, had increased drastically after the coup, as Honduras’ post-coup governments and the U.S. government turned a blind eye. Clinton “did her best to help the coup government succeed and legitimate itself,” said Weisbrot.
www.telesurtv.net/...
So, if anyone needs to answer questions about vigilantes that they’ve supported, it’s not Bernie Sanders.