Stephen Sefton, June 28th 2019
Among many poignant memories from Tegucigalpa on the morning of the 2009 military coup against Honduran President Mel Zelaya, the sharpest is the forlorn look on the face of a former minister in the government of Salvador Allende as army helicopters circled not far above us. We had been invited as observers of the "Cuarta Urna" referendum scheduled for Sunday June 28th 2009 on whether to allow a public consultation on future changes to the Honduran constitution to allow re-election. Back then, most international corporate media lied through their teeth, reporting as true the false opposition claim that the June 28th referendum was to allow Mel Zelaya to stand for re-election that year.
An army helicopter circles above Tegucigalpa the day of the military coup
Regional and international corporate media, accompanied by most alternative media, continue to lie about events in Honduras, now, as they did then, mainly by systematic omission. As the Nobel prize winning dramatist Harold Pinter once remarked about US crimes against Nicaragua and elsewhere, it is as if the crimes never happen, even as they are happening. Ten years on from the military coup in Honduras, the results every realistic observer predicted have come about. Systematic murderous State and criminal corporate repression and a collapsed, looted public sector wrecked by corrupt government. From the days of Anastasia Somoza and Franklin Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" diplomacy, this has been the model US system of neocolonial organized crime, the better to control and extort local puppet administrations in the region.
Government suporters rescue votes from the "Cuarta Urna" referendum
Among countless egregious systematic abuses has been the Honduran State’s collusion in corporate and related criminal attacks against community leaders, especially women leaders like Margarita Murillo and Berta Caceres, among many others. In this, Honduras closely follows the practice of Colombia’s authorities. Both countries have trained their security forces using the experience and tactics of Israeli advisers derived from genocidal repression in Palestine. Accompanying the attack on the country’s public sector, the US puppet post-coup governments in Honduras vigorously promoted “free market” policies discriminating heavily in favoring of foreign big business and finance while starving the majority small business and farming sectors of support and resources.
Protestors burn tyres outside the Presidential residence occuied by the army
This systematic process of political and economic repression against the country’s majority population represents US policy for the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean. The widely predicted results are clear everywhere these policies have been applied, not just in Honduras, but also in countries as diverse as Haiti, Colombia and Argentina. But the US psychological warfare machinery, composed of Western corporate and alternative media and corporate dominated non governmental organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, focus on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In its turn, this US controlled industrial scale psy-warfare complex controls the dynamics of the international human rights system at a regional level via the US dominated Organization of American States and also in the United Nations, whose current High Commissioner for Human Rights is Chile's mealy-mouthed and malleable former President, Michelle Bachelet .
The Honduran army occupied the Presidential residence prior to initiating their violent repression of protests
US management of this system ensures that murderous repression in Honduras and Colombia goes practically unreported such that, even if aspects of it do get reported, no effective action results in the international human rights system either at the Inter-American level or in the UN. By contrast, opposition generated violence and the resulting deaths in Nicaragua and Venezuela receive wholesale misrepresentation facilitating unjust condemnation of those countries' governments so as to justify sadistic anti-humanitarian sanctions from the US authorities and their allies. The self-evident reality is that the Western elites are attacking any government whose national development plan challenges US and allied control of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Popular resistance
In 500 years, practically nothing has changed. People at grass roots in the region defend their fundamental rights. The US and European elites cut them down. Then it was with muskets and sabres. Now the weapons of choice are equally genocidal sadistic economic sanctions. Now, as then, the West’s propaganda machinery explains that Western governments mean well and the local natives, unable to manage their own affairs, need civilizing. The narrative goes that bad natives like Nicolas Maduro and Daniel Ortega have to be punished so the West can help the good natives put things right. Ten years after the military coup, Honduras offers a perfect example of how, wherever the US and its allies implement that demented, psychopathic narrative, it is bound to break down.
Frightened women civilians absued and threatened by soldiers in Tegucigalpa following the coup
Swedish reporter Dick Emanuelsson - working with his partner video film recorder Miriam Huete -
was one of the few if not the only foreign journalist reporting the truth of the military coup
one month after the military coup of June 28th First Lady Xiomara Castro argues
with a soldier in El Paraíso as she tries to reach Las Manos to meet her husband President Mel Zelaya