July 17, 2012
Behind the all-consuming, overheated hypermania of the presidential campaign – Romney! Taxes! Swiss banks! Bain, Bain, Bain! – the dull-lidded behemoth of empire continues to trudge its way back and forth across the earth, knee-deep in human blood. Those who pray and pump and polemicize for the re-election of the behemoth’s current commander have to repeatedly gouge out their own eyes to avoid seeing the rank corruption and carnage their champion empowers and inflicts on the vulnerable and the defenseless.
We write here frequently of Honduras – the land where Barack Obama made his bones as hemispheric hierarch with the ritual overthrow of a democratic Latin American government and its replacement by murderous thugs. (Any American president who would be truly great must carry out this traditional blood sacrifice in the time-honored fashion.) The repression, death and corruption engendered in Honduras with Obama’s aid and complicity have been remarkable – yet have gone completely unremarked by the legion of progressives who rightly strained at the slightest gnat of evil during George W. Bush’s lawless regime but now happily swallow whole camels of crime when Obama wears the purple. Blind guides indeed.
Still, in fitful scraps and snatches, the story of what is actually happening in Honduras filters through on occasion, usually from foreign sources. Obama has seized the opportunity of the coup to launch a "surge" of a militarized American presence in Latin America, building new "forward bases" in Honduras and entwining U.S. soldiers and government agents more and more tightly with his compliant caudillos. The Guardian reports:
The deep bullet wound in Hilda Lezama's thigh is a livid pointer to Honduras's unwanted status as the latest front line in America's war on drugs. For all of her 53 years Lezama has lived in Ahuas, a village of wooden homes built on stilts, close to the fast-flowing Patuca river in the remote Mosquitia region of eastern Honduras. For 25 years, her family have run a business ferrying locals up and down the waterways that link the isolated jungle settlements.
On such a trip two months ago, she was shot from an American helicopter in a counter-narcotics raid involving US drug enforcement agents and Honduran troops. Four other local people, including two women, were killed.
"We were returning from a trip downriver with the fishermen," she remembered. "We were travelling at night to avoid the heat. We heard the helicopters above us, but we couldn't see them. They could have let us dock and then searched the boat, but instead they shot us. Maybe they were thinking we were someone else."
US officials say Lezama's boat had picked up a stash of drugs flown into an airstrip close to the river, a charge she categorically denies. "If we were criminals we could not complain, but we are innocent working people," she insisted.
As usual, the militarisation of the situation by the United States and its local coupsters has exacerbated the problems it was ostensibly launched to combat:
...The key to the traffickers' success was corruption, said Marlon. "Always, always, always when drugs are being moved, a member of the military is involved," he said. "They allow police officers to intercept a certain amount of drugs while the other part, majority is coming in through another channel. The police take a minimal amount, just to make it look as if they are doing a good job. Narco-trafficking has taken control of our country, it's everywhere, in politics, even in the churches."
...It is hardly surprising that Honduras's political institutions have failed to stem the tide of violence and corruption sweeping the country: Honduran democracy itself was undermined by a military coup on 28 June 2009, which ousted the populist president Manuel Zelaya … Latin American states condemned the coup. So – rather belatedly – did the Obama administration. But within months the US backed a new presidential election, and offered a warm welcome to the winner, Florida-educated conservative Porfirio Lobo. ...
According to the Honduran human rights group COFADEH, more than 300 civil society campaigners have been murdered since the coup. The figure includes trade unionists, campesino farmers demanding the restoration of lands acquired by Honduras's biggest landowners, gay rights activists, and more than 20 journalists.
...There is abundant evidence that elements within the police have been committing, not solving, murders. … According to Marvin Ponce, vice-president of the Honduran congress, up to 40% of police have ties to organised crime.
More than 300 innocent people murdered -- by the warmly-welcomed coupsters -- for the crime of supporting human rights and democracy: the very values we're told are the guide and goal of all American policy. Perhaps in wan acknowledgement of this powerful but empty myth, there was once a feeble flickering of institutional opposition to the flesh-ripping, murder-enabling, all-corrupting agenda being pursued by the Peace Laureate in Honduras, as the Guardian reports:
Last year 94 members of the US Congress called on the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to end all financial and logistical support for the Honduran security forces, "given the credible allegations of widespread, serious violations of human rights".
So what happened? What do you think happened?
But US support for the Honduran government has in fact been boosted; a clear indication that Lobo is currently seen as a vital ally in seemingly never-ending war on drugs in Latin America.
I think we must set aside that bit of reflexive 'contextualizing' in the typical Establishment media mode at the end there. Washington is not supporting the Lobo regime because he's an ally in the 'war on drugs' -- especially given the glaring fact (outlined in the story itself) that the Lobo regime is facilitating the drug trade with its corruption. The 'war on drugs in Latin America' is simply the excuse du jour for the ancient American crusade to impose its military and economic will on Latin America -- and to thwart the rise of any possible alternative to rule by client thugs.
But what of that? Mitt Romney had a bad week! Obama looked cool in the rain! Who cares if the behemoth goes lumbering on? The ludicrous, hideous, hallucinatory sideshow is all that matters.
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