Latin America

HONDURAS

Honduras Photos and Protestor Testimonies Show Extent of Police Violence

Student beaten by police during a peaceful demonstration in Honduras on 30 July 2009 against the coup d'etat

© Amnesty International

Honduran student beaten by police during a peaceful demonstration

© Amnesty International

Female protestor hospitalized after taking part in peaceful protests

© Amnesty International

View all 4 images

19 August 2009

HONDURAS

Pro-Coup Honduras Presidential Candidate Elvin Santos Is a Key Beneficiary of Continued US Government Funding

The Liberal Party Nominee’s Construction Company Enjoys a Multi-Million Dollar Contract, Government Records Show

A taxpayer funded US foreign aid agency, chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, earlier this year inked a multi-million dollar contract with a company controlled by one of the ringleaders of the recent coup d’état against the democratically elected president of Honduras, according to documents obtained by Narco News.

Despite representations to the contrary by the State Department, that foreign-aid agency, called the Millennium Challenge Corp., has continued to funnel money — some $6.5 million in July alone — into Honduras since the coup, money that is going into the coffers of the companies it contracts with in Honduras.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in June 2009 with Honduras Pro-Coup Presidential Candidate Elvin Santos, a Construction Contractor Who Receives $7.5 Million in US Taxpayer Dollars through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, on which Clinton Chairs the Board of Directors

Santos stepped down as vice president of Honduras last December upon winning the Liberal Party nomination for president for the November 2009 elections. In the wake of the June 28 coup, the putsch government of Honduras installed the head of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, also of the Liberal Party, as the regime’s de facto president. Santos, who would end up the next leader of the coup regime if successful in Honduras’ November “election,” has described Zelaya’s pre-coup efforts to explore amending the Honduran constitution, with voter consent, as a path to dictatorship.

Subsequent to the June 28 coup d’etat Santos – who, as a presidential candidate has access to top-shelf public opinion polling data – has attempted to backpedal from his golpista reputation. “I will go to all corners of the country to explain that I was in no way a part of the events of June 28,” Santos told Channel 5’s “Frente a Frente” program on August 5. “The huge mistake was taking him (Zelaya) out of the country and leaving him defenseless.”

But on that same day last week, Santos then went to the national university and upon being booed and cat-called by students, his private bodyguards pulled out pistols – caught on video – to threaten the youths. Students responded to his provocation by blocking a street outside the university, and National Police troops were nearby, ready and waiting with a violent attack that included knocking the university’s rector to the pavement.

Santos’ company is not alone in benefiting from U.S. taxpayer funding via MCC. Two other large road-construction contracts awarded as part of MCC’s aid compact with Honduras were snared by multi-national companies — both of which have done their part to advance the great NAFTA highway through the heart of Latin America.

And that’s what the MCC assistance seems, in the main, to be directed at in Honduras — providing millions of dollars for highway improvements that will help speed the delivery of maquiladora-produced goods through the heart of the nation to a port on its northern Caribbean coast.

In the Oven

In September of last year, MCC-Honduras awarded a $48.4 million highway-improvement contract to a consortium formed by Costa Rica-based FCC Construction Central America SA (formerly known as M&S International Corp. CA). FCC describes itself as a pioneer in opening up international markets with a history of success in Central America.

Earlier this year, FCC also retained a law firm in-country, Garcia & Bodan Honduras, to advise it on corporate and tax matters. Interestingly, FCC, as part of its global aspirations, also is doing contract roadwork in Nicaragua on MCC’s dime. (Actually, that would be on your dime, if you’re a U.S. citizen, given MCC is funded by taxpayers).

Another big winner in the MCC funding game in Honduras is the Italian construction giant Astaldi, which shows up in the MCC-Honduras contracting records as having been awarded two highway-improvement contracts with a total value of some $40 million — both of which went into effect in July 2008.

In 2007, Astaldi also landed a contract from the government of Honduras to complete the infrastructure work for a huge tourism project (a hotel, condos, retail and eventually a golf course) in Tela Bay on Honduras’ Caribbean coast. The indigenous Garifuna peoples who live in the area oppose the project, fearing it will wreak havoc on their lands and way of life.

From a September 2007 report by Chiapas Indymedia:

In the next few weeks the Atlantic Coast of Honduras will once again be featured in the Italian TV reality show “The Island of the Famous.” This year’s participants will include Astaldi, the second-largest Italian construction company. Astaldi has just won a contract from the government of Honduras to build the basic infrastructure of a mega-tourist resort “Los Micos Beach & Resort Centre” along the coast of Tela Bay, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. The local Garífuna residents are adamantly opposed to the project, which will have a devastating environmental, social and economic impact on their lands.

So it appears, along with the company run by golpista Santos, MCC also puts its money into some big multi-national players, such as FCC and Astaldi, all in the interest of free trade — a universal trump card that appears to trump even democracy in the MCC playbook.

The highway-improvements project FCC is tackling with MCC funding in Honduras, for example, specifically involves a stretch of road that is used by some 7,000 vehicles daily, a third of which is truck traffic. Arguably, the entire MCC-funded highway-improvements effort in Honduras, including Astaldi and Santos’ parts, is aimed at juicing up the lanes of commerce for free trade.

So this may well be a case where the interests of the Honduran coup leaders, many of them oligarchs of the business class, go hand in hand with the free-trade agenda of the MCC — with all the consequent negative impact on poor populations in terms of displacement and environmental degradation.

If so, it certainly seems to be a lucrative business. An audit of MCC’s Honduras program conducted by the Office of Inspector General for USAID and made public in late December 2008 reveals that the $126 million reserved for road work — out of the MCC’s total five-year, $215 million Honduran aid package — was not quite cutting the mustard due to unexpected costs associated with the work. As a result, the OIG reports, the government of Honduras secured an additional $130 million loan from the Central American Bank of Economic Integration to supplement the MCC funding for the planned highway work.

So, when the bank loan money is added to the total MCC kitty, the entire wad in play — and now under the watch of an illegal putsch regime — is some $345 million. To date, only about $80 million of those MCC funds have been disbursed in Honduras, including at least $6.5 million in July alone — post-coup. That means there is a big chunk of change still in the pipeline that by necessity of MCC’s structure will flow through the Honduran government first, a government now run by a criminal enterprise under increasing economic pressure due to worldwide isolation and sanctions.

Yet MCC is so far crossing the picket line erected by the Organization of American States (OAS) including the US State Department’s claims that it has put all financial aid “on pause” pending review. There are roads to build, goods to sell and company budgets to meet — including, apparently, the budgets of company’s controlled by coup-plotters like Santos.

MCC spokeswoman Sarah Stevenson confirmed to Narco News this week that her agency’s funding pipeline remains open in Honduras. And if it stays open, according to MCC-Honduras’s own records, another $135 million will be disbursed over the course of this year and 2010 to fund the $192 million in contracts already awarded — a figure that is expected to grow.

Stevenson said that Honduras is expected to be on the agenda at MCC’s next board meeting on Sept. 9,:

“… While the MCC board [chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] is concerned with the situation [in Honduras] and is monitoring it closely, we are moving ahead with projects underway in the country,” Stevenson says.

Contracts Online

For a list of MCC contracts awarded in Honduras through June of this year, go to this link.

By Bill Conroy and Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

August 14, 2009

HONDURAS

The Micheletti dictatorship in Honduras, which prominently includes 1980's death squad "Battalion 3-16" [1] [2]Billy Joya [1] [2], Nelson Willy Mejía Mejía [1] [2]Napoleón Nassar Herrera [1] [2], has suspended human rights since the 28 June 2009 coup d'etat, has "disappeared" at least three people, has extrajudicially executed nearly ten people, and has detained hundreds of people [1] (es) | [2] (en) (es) | [3] (en) (es). Despite this, unprecedented grassroots protests have culminated in the arrival on Tuesday 11 August 2009 in Tegucigalpa of over 70,000 (es) demonstrators and of thousands of others in San Pedro Sula, coordinating through the Front against the coup d'etat. The Front's 19th Communique states that unless the Micheletti regime resigns within the next few days and restores Zelaya to the presidency, then the Front will further extend massive civil disobedience actions (es) that have already paralysed the economy and will file for national and international criminal proceedings against those responsible for the extrajudicial executions and other human rights violations.

The mainstream Western media have with very few exceptions failed to report the participation of the Battalion 3-16 death squad in the Micheletti de factoalso contained death squad members (es), which CODEH and other Honduran local human rights organisations objected to. The Obama-Clinton-Lula so-called "Arias" plan has glaringly omitted any mention of whether or not it proposes to exclude death squad members from any "negotiated" coalition government. government, they have not reported on "disappearances" ;, they have severely underreported the number of extrajudicial executions, and they have almost entirely hidden the unresolved context of the 1980's death squads. The Zelaya government

PHOTOS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
INDEPENDENT MEDIA: IMC Honduras | Front against the coup d'etat | Revistazo | Honduras Resists (en)+(es)
RADIO: Radio Liberada mirrors: [1] - [2] - [3] | Radio Es Lo Demenos | Association of Radios and Participating Programs of El Salvador
HUMAN RIGHTS NGOs: CIPRODEH | CODEH | COFADEH | COMUN/Honduras Laboral
SUPPORT GROUPS: Quixote Center | SOA Watch | Via Campesina | Honduras Resists! (support group)
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS SUMMARIES: COFADEH, 15 July (es) | FIDH and many others, 6 August, preliminary (en) (es) final | Quixote Center (en), 7 August(es)

http://www.indymedia.org/en/2009/08/928050.shtml" title="http://www.indymedia.org/en/2009/08/928050.shtml" target="_blank"http://www.indymedia.org/en/2...

CUBA

End the Embargo of Cuba

A embargo is something that we normally do in times of war. Sometimes we use an embargo against a country whose misconduct has been condemned by the international community, but that is not the case with Cuba. Why are we at war with Cuba?

We have taken the most drastic measures imaginable against a country that poses virtually no threat to us. We have invaded Cuba (more than once), we have tried to asassinate Fidel Castro (many times), we have a naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba (how would you feel if Russia had a military base on the US mainland?). We are attempting to starve children and other civilians. Why?

I am not a communist, and I am not defending Cuba or its political and economic systems. I just don't understand why we are at war with them. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get even a plausible answer to why we have an embargo against Cuba. Here are some of the (not so plasible) answers that I have come up with.

Why do I care?

What you can do.

I guess the best thing to do is talk. If the majority of Americans tell them that they think the embargo is wrong, then the politicians will listen. For more information about Cuba, contact Global Exchange. They have a Cuba reader (compiled by Diana Downton) that contains reprints of articles about Cuba from well-known sources (for example, Time, Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, Business Week, Miami Herald, New York Times, Washington Post, and San Francisco Examiner). I have found Global Exchange's reporting on Cuba to be fair -- they include sources from both sides of the issues. Global Exchange also runs legal trips to Cuba.

http://leler.com/cuba/embargo.html" title="http://leler.com/cuba/embargo.html" target="_blank"http://leler.com/cuba/embargo...

Brazil

Zelaya, Lula Ask For Bigger U.S. Role In Solving Honduran Crisis

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Wednesday called on the United States to use more political influence to help solve the Honduran crisis.

Zelaya, who was in Brazil for a visit, called on the U.S. government to take more measures such as trade sanctions against the Honduran interim government. 70 percent of the Honduran economy depends on the United States.

Reaffirmed his support for Zelaya's "immediate and unconditional" return to Honduras, Lula said he would talk to his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama on the issue at an appropriate time.

But there wasn't a date set for the conversation between the two leaders.

After the meeting, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celson Amorim told the press that Zelaya's return would largely depend on the position of the United States.

"President Lula said that clearly we are concerned by the delay (of Zelaya's return), because as time passes, the possibility that President Zelaya's legitimate elections (scheduled for November) is weakening," Amorim said.


Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shakes hands with Honduras' ousted President Manuel Zelaya (L) during a meeting at the Cultural Center Banco do Brasil in Brasilia August 12, 2009.(Xinhua/AFP Photo)

Zelaya was expected to end his term as president at year-end.

"This depends on what the United States will act," Amorim said.

"It must be a multilateral action. We believe that actions should be conducted by the OAS (Organization of American States)," he added.

Zelaya was deposed in a June 28 military coup. Following the coup, Brazil recalled its ambassador from Honduras and suspended cooperation with the Central American nation.

Zelaya arrived in Brasilia Tuesday and was welcomed by the Brazilian government with honors for a head of state.

He will leave Thursday morning for Chile to meet with President Michelle Bachelet.

Source: Xinhua

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Honduras

The Honduras Coup Is A Sign: The Radical Tide Can Be Turned

If this were Burma or Iran the assault on democracy would be a global cause celebre. Instead, Obama is sitting on his hands

If Honduras were in another part of the world – or if it were, say, Iran or Burma – the global reaction to its current plight would be very different. Right now, in the heart of what the United States traditionally regarded as its backyard, thousands of pro-democracy activists are risking their lives to reverse the coup that ousted the country's elected president. Six weeks after the left-leaning Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at dawn from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa and expelled over the border, strikes are closing schools and grounding flights as farmers and trade unionists march in defiance of masked soldiers and military roadblocks.

The coup-makers have reached for the classic South American takeover textbook. Demonstrators have been shot, more than a thousand people are reported arrested, television and radio stations have been closed down and trade unionists and political activists murdered. But although official international condemnation has been almost universal, including by the US government, barely a finger has been lifted outside Latin America to restore the elected Honduran leadership.

Of course, Latin America has long been plagued by military coups – routinely backed by the US – against elected governments. And Honduras, the original banana republic, has been afflicted more than most. But all that was supposed to have changed after the end of the cold war: henceforth, democracy would reign. And as Barack Obama declared, there was to be a "new chapter" for the Americas of "equal partnership", with no return to the "dark past".

But as the coup regime of Roberto Micheletti digs in without a hint of serious sanction from the country's powerful northern sponsor, there is every sign of a historical replay. In a grotesquely unequal country of seven million people, famously owned and controlled by 15 families, in which more than two-thirds live below the poverty line, the oligarch rancher Zelaya was an unlikely champion of social advance.

But as he put it: "I thought I would bring about changes from within the neoliberal scheme, but the rich didn't give an inch." Even the modest reforms Zelaya did carry out, such as a 60% increase in the minimum wage and a halt to privatisation, brought howls of rage from the ruling elite, who were even more alarmed by his links with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba, and his determination to respond to the demands of grassroots movements to wrest political power from the oligarchs and reform the constitution.

Zelaya's attempt to hold a non-binding public consultation on a further vote for a constitutional convention was the trigger for the June coup. The move was portrayed by the coup's apologists as an attempt to extend Zelaya's term in office, which could not have happened whatever the result. But, as in the case of the Chilean coup of 1973, a supreme court decision to brand any constitutional referendum unlawful has been used by US and Latin American conservatives to give an entirely spurious veneer of legality to Zelaya's overthrow.

Behind these manoeuvres, the links between Honduras and US military, state and corporate interests are among the closest in the hemisphere. Honduras was the base for the US Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s; it hosts the largest US military base in the region; and it is almost completely dependent economically on the US, both in terms of trade and investment.

Whatever prior traffic there may have been between the Honduran plotters and US officialdom, it's clear that the Obama administration could pull the plug on the coup regime tomorrow by suspending military aid and imposing sanctions. But so far, despite public condemnations, the president has yet to withdraw the US ambassador, let alone block the coup leaders' visas or freeze their accounts, as Zelaya has requested.

Meanwhile, an even more ambivalent line is being followed by Hillary Clinton. Instead of calling for the restoration of the elected president, the secretary of state – one of whose longstanding associates, Lanny Davis, is now working as a lobbyist for the coup leaders – promoted a compromising mediation and condemned Zelaya as "reckless" for trying to return to Honduras across the Nicaraguan border. A clue as to why that might be was given by the state department's Phillip Crowley, who explained that the coup should be a "lesson" to Zelaya for regarding revolutionary Venezuela as a model for the region.

Obama this week attacked critics who say the US "hasn't intervened enough in Honduras" as hypocrites because they were the same people who call for the "Yankees to get out of Latin America". But of course the unanimous call from across the continent isn't for more intervention in Honduras – but for the US government to end effective support for the coup-makers and respond to the request of the country's elected leader to halt military and economic aid.

The reality is that Honduras is a weak vessel on the progressive wave that has swept Latin America over the past decade, challenging US domination and the Washington consensus, breaking the grip of entrenched elites and attacking social and racial inequality. While the imperial giant has been tied down with the war on terror, the continent has used that window of opportunity to assert its collective independence in an emerging multipolar world.

It's scarcely surprising that the process is regarded as threatening by US interests, or that the US government has used the pretext of the lengthy "counter-insurgency& quot; war in Colombia to convince the rightwing government of Alvaro Uribe to allow US armed forces to use seven military bases in the country – which goes well beyond anything the Bush administration attempted and is already heightening tensions with Ecuador and Venezuela.

That's why the overthrow of democratic government in Honduras has a significance that goes far beyond its own borders. If the takeover is allowed to stand, not only will it embolden coup-minded military officers in neighbouring countries such as Guatemala, act as a warning to weaker progressive governments and strengthen oligarchies across the continent. It would also send an unmistakable signal that the radical social and political process that has been unleashed in Latin America – the most hopeful development in global politics in the past two decades – can be halted and reversed. Relying on Obama clearly isn't an option: only Latin Americans can defend their own democracy.

By Seumas Milne

guardian.co.uk

http://u.tv/News/The-Honduras-coup -is-a-sign-the-radical-ti de-can-be-turned/dae8b9ed -fe0c-4fde-9b4d-e321a719f 5b1" title="http://u.tv/News/The-Honduras-coup -is-a-sign-the-radical-ti de-can-be-turned/dae8b9ed -fe0c-4fde-9b4d-e321a719f 5b1" target="_blank"http://u.tv/News/The-Honduras...

Honduras

Millennium Challenge Corp. Poured Millions Into Honduras In Months Leading Up To Putsch

U.S. aid agency, established under Bush, seeks to promote “economic freedom”

The coup d'état that rocked Honduras in late June and removed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya from office, sending him into exile in Costa Rica, was preceded by a multi-million dollar build-up of foreign aid from a U.S. agency that includes on its board of directors the president of the International Republican Institute as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That taxpayer-funded agency, called the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), oversees a multi-billion dollar foreign-aid fund called the Millennium Challenge Account. It was established in 2004 under the Bush administration as means of combating terrorism by funding development in poor nations under a strict neo-conservative free-trade model.

A review of publicly available financial records reveals that between April 1 and July 31 of this year, nearly $17 million in aid was disbursed to Honduras through the MCC program. That money flowed into Honduras after President Zelaya called for a national referendum in March to decide whether a ballot question should be included in that nation’s November 2009 general elections — which would have asked voters to decide if a national assembly should be convened to amend the Honduran constitution.

But Zelaya had fallen out of favor with the Honduran business class that controls the country well before that point. He was accused of becoming too intertwined with the agenda of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a long-time nemesis of the Washington political class and Wall Street capital interests. That drift toward the left was marked by Zelaya’s decision to join the Chavez-led, Latin American-centered Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA in its Spanish initials) — a move ratified by the Honduran Congress in October 2008.

At the time, media reports warned that Honduras’ decision to join ALBA might result in the MCC rescinding its five-year, $250 million aid compact with Honduras — inked in 2005. But it seems quite the opposite happened.

In fact, since Oct. 1, 2008, according to public records, a total of $45.3 million in MCC aid has been pumped into Honduras, representing 56 percent of all aid disbursed under the program through July 31 of this year. (Even though the MCC compact with Honduras calls for an aid package of $250 million to be distributed between 2005 and 2010, as of July 31, 2009, according to MCC records, a total of only $80.3 million in aid has been disbursed to the country — more than half, as mentioned, since October 2008.)

The MCC Honduras program is designed to fund agricultural and transportation projects that “will increase the productivity and business skills of farmers and their employees who operate small- and medium-sized farms, and will reduce transportation costs between targeted production centers and national, regional, and global markets,” according to the MCC’s description of the aid compact.

But a criticism of the MCC program is that, though designed in theory to help the poor, its programs actually do more to benefit the wealthy and business class.

A 2007 U.S. Government Accountability Office report focused on the MCC’s aid program in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu spells out that criticism:

MCC states that the [Vanuatu] compact is expected to benefit approximately 65,000 poor, rural inhabitants “living nearby and using the roads to access markets and social services.” According to the MCC’s underlying documentation, 57 percent of the compact’s monetary benefits will accrue to tourism services providers, transport providers, government workers, and local businesses and 43 percent of the benefits will go to the local population — that is, local producers, local consumers, and inhabitants of remote communities. However, MCC does not establish the proportion of local-population benefits that will go to the rural poor.

The MCC’s overtly neo-conservative, pro-oligarch underpinnings are further illuminated by its strongest proponents, including the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

From an article on the Heritage Foundation’s Web site:

The MCC has a number of advantages over traditional assistance. MCC programs encourage and allocate aid to countries that embrace policies linked to economic growth and development. The objective indicators used by the MCC to determine which countries will receive funding —"based on their performance in governing justly, investing in their citizens, and encouraging economic freedom" — mirror those used by The Heritage Foundation in preparing its Index of Economic Freedom.

Among the indicators established under MCC for providing, or continuing to provide, aid to a foreign nation, include: business start-ups, trade policy, fiscal policy, and land rights and access.

Whether the MCC’s approach to doling out taxpayers’ money is appropriate, or not, really is not the point in this case, however. The question here is why would a taxpayer-funded federal agency with a conservative, free-market/free-trade agenda suddenly start ramping up aid to Honduras after it’s president, Zelaya, clearly took a turn to the left toward Venezuela’s Chavez, a perceived arch-enemy of that conservative agenda?

One possible explanation is that the huge flow of MCC money into Honduras had nothing to do with the agency's objectives in Latin American and everything to do with its budget agenda in Washington.

MCC has a terrible track record of disbursing funds under its control — preferring instead to keep them stashed away in its own coffers. And so to overcome that image, it may have simply began rapidly ramping up disbursements to secure additional funding from Congress — the old trick of spending down your old budget to assure your new budget isn’t cut.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, in a statement made on the Senate Floor in November 2008, seems to verify that this is, in fact, one possible scenario in play in the case of MCC.

From Leahy’s Floor statement justifying the Senate’s move to cut President Bush’s $2 billion funding request for MCC to $254 million for fiscal 2009:

We also considered the fact that Congress had appropriated $7.5 billion for the MCC, and by July 18 only $235 million had been disbursed of which a significant portion was for administrative expenses. While we made clear that we were not advocating faster disbursements, we do not support additional [foreign aid] compacts until more of the funds we have already appropriated produce sustainable results.

In the wake of Leahy’s chastisement, the MCC, it can be aruged, took action to address its bloated books by ramping up disbursements under the aid program — resulting in some $45.3 million in MCC funds being disbursed to Honduras alone between Oct. 1, 2008, and July 31, 2009 — again, representing 56 percent of all funds disbursed under the MCC Honduras compact as of July 31 of this year.

But, there are some who might see a more cynical motive for the rapid unleashing of MCC funds in Honduras, given that it is a hard case to make that those funds would have been distributed if they were deemed to be assisting Zelaya’s perceived alliance with Chavez. Surely, the MCC could have ramped up its disbursements in other regions of the world outside Chavez' reach to address the concerns raised by Leahy, no?

Funding Change

Once MCC funds are provided to a foreign nation, such as Honduras, under the agency’s guidelines, the further distribution of that money is overseen and managed by the receiving county. In the case of Honduras, the entity in charge of spending the MCC funds (under the terms and reporting guidelines established by the MCC) is called MCA-Honduras — which is overseen by a board that includes presidential ministers from that nation.

A review of documents obtained from MCA-Honduras outlining its projections for future MCC funding reveals that a total of $28.5 million in MCC funds are slated for delivery between July and September 2009. And, for the following three quarters (through June 2010) the MCC is scheduled to disburse nearly $80 million in funding to MCA-Honduras under the Honduran foreign-aid compact.

That money, if it comes through, would go into the coffers of the putsch regime now in control of Honduras — assuming it remains behind the wheel of power. Whether by design or coincidence, that represents a hefty nest egg for the putsch leadership to tap — even if in violation of MCC rules — as those usurpers seek to ride out the worst of the world’s short-term memory over their illegal coup.

In addition, the $45 million in MCC funds already taken in since October 2008 surely gave a lift to the coup plotters — to the extent that not all of that money was actually distributed to grant targets within Honduras, or to the extent it was distributed to players in line with the coup regime’s interests.

A thorough accounting of what happened to those funds, vetted outside the MCC or the putsch Honduran government, seems to be in order given recent developments in that nation.

Now, there have been a few media reports indicating that some of the MCC funds targeted for Honduras post-coup are on hold — to the tune of $11 million, according to a report by The Hill.com.

But, based on a review of proceeding transcripts and press releases posted on the MCC Web site, the agency’s board has taken no official action, to date, to either suspend or terminate its Honduran foreign-aid compact — as the MCC has done recently in other cases where it has determined the receiving nations have violated the agency's rules.

For example, in early June, the MCC partially terminated its’ foreign-aid compact with Nicaragua after alleging that nation (which borders Honduras and has a left-leaning government) had violated the agency’s rules with respect to “economic freedom,” “democracy” and the “rule of law.” And in May, the MCC board terminated its compact with Madagascar in the wake of the coup in that nation.

Maybe a similar fate is in store for Honduras down the road, if the current coup regime fails to find a path to MCC-style democracy. But just how that will be judged by the MCC remains a mystery — other than it seems clear that democratic path will be good for business interests.

That pursuit by the MCC of a vibrant corporate-centered slant to democracy in Honduras (which by definition would be anti-Chavez in tone) seems to be a given, since the current board of the MCC includes not only Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner — both sensitive to Wall Street concerns — but also former Republican Sen. William Frist; venture capitalist Alan Patricof; and Lorne Craner, the president of the International Republican Institute — which is chaired by Republican Sen. John McCain.

The MCC board also includes the president of Catholic Relief Services, Ken Hackett. That is of note since the Catholic archbishop of Honduras, Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, has been very vocal in his opposition to Zelaya. Archbishop Rodriquez Maradiaga has warned, as reported by the conservative American Spectator, that Zelaya’s return to power could lead to a “blood bath” and he has demanded that the Organization of American States investigate the alleged “illegal deeds” carried out under Zelaya’s administration — referring, it seems, to Zelaya’s call for a ballot referendum on the matter of convening a constitutional convention.

As Secretary Clinton put it (striking a more diplomatic note) when asked about the future of MCC funding at a press briefing on June 29, the day after the coup in Honduras played out (and first reactions are normally the most honest):

... Much of our [foreign] assistance is conditioned on the integrity of the democratic system. But if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome.

So the end game for the putsch regime now headed by President Robert Micheletti and backed by the oligarchical business interests of Honduras must entail holding out until the nation’s general election in November. With those elections, the illegal regime, and the business oligarchs propping it up, can attempt to put the glossy sheen of the “status quo” and “rule of law” on their raw, undemocratic power grab.

Clinton and the MCC have invested a lot of political and economic capital, to date, in ensuring that is the outcome, it appears.

The civil society in Honduras now working nonviolently from below to assert authentic democracy — not linked to MCC or U.S. State Department preconditions — clearly sees a different landscape ahead.

The fate of Latin America, in many ways, will be revealed in that as yet undiscovered country.

Stay tuned….

MCC Spending Records for Honduras

• Fiscal 2009 First Quarter Disbursements

• Fiscal 2009 Second Quarter Disbursements

• Total Disbursements as of March 31, 2009

• Total Disbursements as of July 31, 2009

• MCA-Honduras Funding Disbursement Projections

Past stories in the Following the Money series

• Former U.S. Ambassador Roger Noriega hired to push Honduran putsch agenda

• Who's behind Lanny Davis’ putsch paycheck?

 Posted by Bill Conroy - August 9, 2009 at 5:46 pm

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Honduras

The Wall Street Journal Walls Itself In and Ridiculously Defends the Dictatorship of Roberto Micheletti

Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Unwilling to Be a Real News Reporter, Cribs Her Stories Jayson Blair Style from Emails and Cable TV

By Juan Carlos Rivera
Mirada del Halcón Honduras, Translated by Narco News

August 9, 2009

Since June 30, the US newspaper The Wall Street Journal has published the weekly opinion columns of Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who in lieu of providing objective information offers the reader a strong dose of intrigue, fiction and ideological propaganda to defend the dictatorship of Roberto Micheletti in Honduras and ridiculously discredit the Constitutional President Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

Pro-Coup Ideologue Mary Anastasia O’Grady Publishes a Weekly Opinion Column and Edits “News” Stories at the Wall Street Journal

On July 6, the editor, supposedly a specialist in Latin American affairs, left her work methods nakedly exposed. That day she published a column titled: Honduras at the Tipping Point.

“Hundreds of emails from Hondurans flooded my in-box last week,” she wrote in her lead. But the part that caught my attention said: “All but a handful of my letters pleaded for international understanding of the threat to the constitutional democracy that Mr. Zelaya presented. One phrase occurred again and again: ‘Please pray for us.’”

Kind reader of Mirada de Halcón, as you can divine, O’Grady writes those texts closed in her cubicle, in side the walls of the Journal, watching CNN, copying facts from the dispatches of the press agencies, transcribing the emails sent serially from Honduras and reading the newspapers of the businessmen that financed the coup d’etat. On more than one occasion she has quoted El Heraldo.

In contrast with we, the journalists who are in the streets of Honduras and that, more than once, have endured the sting of the teargas launched by coup forces, O’Grady opts to follow in the footsteps of Jayson Blair, the New York Times Journalist who wrote about a sniper in Washington when he was really in New York.

The New York Times fired Blair for writing lies in his informative reports, but the Wall Street Journal will never dismiss O’Grady for writing untruths, because she has the green light from the newspaper’s owner, the magnate Rupert Murdoch, arch enemy of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Any matter with the scent of Chávez is and will be satanized by the Wall Street Journal, as long as it is in the hands of Murdoch. That’s the powerful reason why O’Grady, when she speaks of Zelaya Rosales and Honduras, ends up throwing sparks and lightning at the Venezuelan president.

For example, in that same text (“Honduras at the Tipping Point”) this columnist wrote: “Mr. Zelaya’s violations of the rule of law in recent months were numerous. But the tipping point came 10 days ago, when he led a violent mob that stormed a military base to seize and distribute Venezuelan-printed ballots for an illegal referendum.”

O’Grady ignores or falsifies information for economic and ideological reasons. On June 28, Zelaya Rosales wasn’t going to hold any referendum. The executive branch, instead, through the National Census Institute (INE, in its Spanish initials), was to hold an “opinion consultation,” authorized and protected by Article 5 of the Citizen Participation Law.

“Do you agree that in the 2009 general election there should be a Fourth Ballot Box in which the people will decide whether to convene a national constitutional convention?” was the question on the piece of paper which O’Grady had likely never seen, but which one can find on this blog.

In another column, titled, The White House’s Latin Connection, the expert wrote: “It was his first time back in Honduras since he (Zelaya) was arrested and deported on June 28 for violating the constitution.

That day in dawn hours, as all Hondurans including those in the military know, elements of the Armed Forces took the President from his home at gunpoint, under threat of death, and expelled him to Costa Rica. They never brought him to a jail to face a trial.

This week, as seen, the Latin American specialist had writer’s block, so she had to establish a forced and impossible relationship between political situations in two dissimilar countries. She titled it, What Haiti Can Teach Us About Honduras. And thus continued her ideological campaign in favor of the dictatorship.

(Originally published, in Spanish, by Mirada del Halcón.)

Honduras

AFP in Honduras Hung By Its Own Photograph

By Al Giordano

August 3, 2009, CATACAMAS, HONDURAS: Here in the jungle border outpost that is home to Honduras’ legitimate First Family, freelance journalist Belén Fernández, also reporting from this region, brought additional information to our attention about the follies of the professional simulators at the French Press Agency (AFP) which had made the false claims last weekend of supposed but non-existent “threats of violence” from the legitimate but exiled President Manuel Zelaya.

It turns out that AFP’s make-believe “journalist,” Francisco Jara knew full well that his statements about military-style “training exercises” by what he called “Zelaya’s ‘popular army’” were false and he chose to lie about it anyway. The proof of his deceit comes from AFP’s own photographs, like the one above. The exercises – see for yourself – were more akin to a Sunday Easter egg hunt or picnic than the conspiratorial scenario conjured by Jara in his felony against journalism.

In that photo of ordinary people of all ages without uniforms or weapons of any kind is the scene that AFP portrayed with frightening militaristic imagery. Oooh, scary!

An AFP story that appeared in the pro-coup daily El Heraldo on Saturday also made some evidently bizarre and self-conflicting claims about anti-coup Hondurans gathered on the Nicaraguan side of the border last week: That they had supposedly “threatened AFP journalists and tried to confiscate their photographic equipment.” How do we know that is false? Because if the hundreds of Hondurans there had wanted to take the AFP cameras away, there’s not much that the AFP staffers could have done to stop it. Yet the photos demonstrate that they were able to do take photos and later publish them.

In other words, the AFP reporter, it is now plain for all to see, is singularly dedicated not to reporting news truthfully, but to distorting and smearing one side of the conflict in ways that only make AFP correspondent Francisco Jara look as ridiculous as he is.

In other news, the National Front Against the Honduras Coup d’Etat met on Saturday. We were invited to attend part of its governing board’s closed-door meeting at 9 a.m. that day at the Beverage Workers Union hall (SITBYS, in its Spanish initials). There, they determined to launch, on Wednesday, August 5, a series of long-distance protest walks that begin on Wednesday to wind toward the capital city of Tegucigalpa and the second largest city of San Pedro Sula, near the northern coast. The marches will last five to seven days and converge in large demonstrations in both locales.

The coup regime is frightened enough by the growing wave of peaceful protests across the country that it placed advertisements in pro-coup daily newspapers announcing new penalties against the redress of grievances nationwide:

“Anybody who calls for leads any meeting or demonstration illicitly will be punished by a sentence of two to four years in prison and a fine of 30,000 to 60,000 Lempiras (about $1,500 to $3,000 US dollars).”

In other words, one doesn’t even have to present at a protest to be imprisoned for it: Simply calling on others to attend now earns any citizen or broadcaster that honor.

As we shall share in upcoming reports (we've had so many hours on the road the past two days that we've got a backlog of news to report here, hopefully we'll get some additional stories posted tonight or tomorrow morning before embarking on another hours-long journey), the regime’s authoritarian threats are not succeeding in causing anybody to back down.

But the regime is correct about one thing with its shifting obsession: Mel Zelaya is the least of its worries. It is the seven million other Honduran citizens, organizing from below, that are going to finish it off with the greater weapons of Unity, Planning and Discipline.

Update: In our continuing investigation to find out exactly who this AFP reporter by the name of Francisco Jara is (he's just not that widely published to be known to many, which in and of itself raises eyebrows about what he's doing suddenly in Honduras) we came across an interesting 2006 article in which a Chilean "journalist" by the same name is quoted aiding in a cover up regarding the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile.

Washington dispatched CIA operatives inside Chile to work against Allende and many Chileans thought Mormons were among the operatives, says Francisco Jara, a Santiago journalist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Mormons in Chile.

Not so, Jara says.

"Mormon leaders and missionaries helped by teaching anti-Communist doctrines but they didn't serve as spies or covert agents."

It certainly sounds plausible that one who speaks of "anti-Communist doctrines" being helpful to a military coup (as if helping a coup regime is the goal in and of itself) could be one and the same as someone by the same name now engaged in disinformation during the latest coup d'etat in another land. The Oligarch Diaspora still views Chile's violent coup - which killed thousands in its first days, and continued a reign of terror for years on end - nostalgically, as a shining example rather than the war crime it was. And, as we've noted before, the Oligarch Diaspora populates certain sectors of the commercial media and its international correspondents.

AFP now has egg on its face because it did not effectively screen who it allowed to work for the agency, posing as a "journalist." Often such characters are able to worm their way into roles as correspondents for news agencies because, being already wealthy or having covert economic support, they come more inexpensively to the agencies in a news industry that suffers with cash flow problems. This is part of the overall decay of journalism in our hemisphere and our world and what we of the Authentic Journalism Renaissance are struggling to expose, isolate and disarm.

Honduras

Francisco Jara of AFP Commits a Felony Against Journalism

By Al Giordano

AUGUST 1, 2009, TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS: A two-day old story by Francisco Jara of AFP (French Press Agency) has suddenly been reproduced by many English and Spanish language media to claim that Honduras’ legitimate President Manuel Zelaya “threatened violence” if the coup regime is not removed.

The story is demonstrably false.

Looking at the actual statements and the true facts it is difficult not to conclude that AFP reporter Jara intentionally distorted the story, with malice and aforethought.

The interpretation of Zelaya’s statements as a “threat” are not borne out by what the President actually said, and contradict the great body of quotations about nonviolence and peaceful action made by Zelaya in recent days. But the dishonest AFP reporter left all that out of his report, and instead added some colorful but false claims to the story to somehow make it seem like a threat.

La Jornada reporter Arturo Cano transcribed the exact words, used by Zelaya on Nicaragua Channel 4, and here is what Zelaya actually said:

“O se revierte el golpe o viene la violencia generalizada.”

That translates as:

“The coup will end or there will be generalized violence.”

Got it? Zelaya doesn't say he will engage in violence. He doesn't say his supporters will do so. In the context of what has actually happened, the sounder interpretation would be that he was speaking of the generalized violence of the coup regime that has already engaged in brutal acts of violent repression daily. Francisco Jara twisted it, turned it upside down, added the word "threat" to it, to make it sound like the opposite of its intent.

That sort of statement has also been pretty standard boilerplate from all sides in the Honduran crisis. Even peace talks mediator and Costa Rican President, winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace prize, was recently quoted saying the same thing:

If the negotiations have definitively floundered, Mr Arias said he feared "civil war and a bloodbath."

The simulating and crooked faux-journalist Francisco Jara of AFP could have just as easily distorted Arias’ words as a “threat.”

He didn’t do that, of course, because he’s not out to smear Arias in the way he and some other dishonest sniveling pretenders of the media are transparently attempting to do in the case of Zelaya.

Clowns like Francisco Jara are precisely the reason why most people don’t like or trust the news media. Guys like him are a dime a dozen in this business; ready to make up any falsehood in the name of getting a sensationalist headline, usually in ways that distort on behalf of whatever side in a conflict is backed by big financial interests.

Francisco Jara’s crime against the truth and the facts went even further when he wrote these paragraphs in the same story:

"Soon after, around 100 Honduran men belonging to Zelaya's "popular army" began training exercises in a camp on the Nicaraguan side of the border with Honduras, an AFP journalist witnessed.

"The recruits, mostly young men and all unarmed, exercised, marched, and carried out maneuvers under the direction of leaders who said they were Honduran army veterans.

"According to the leaders, other similar camps had been set up along the border."

How big a liar is Francisco Jara? So big that he chopped off the word “peaceful” from Zelaya’s exact phrase, which in every instance as been “peaceful popular army” or, in Spanish, “ejército popular y pacífico.”

It’s one missing word, but a very huge one to leave out, because its absence totally changes the word “army” into something altogether opposite and different than what it means when it is used in the context of “peaceful.”

If you want to get a sense of what Zelaya means by “peaceful popular army,” listen to his interview the other day with Andres Conteris of Democracy Now:

Here, at three-and-a-half minutes into the interview, Zelaya further details what he means, saying:

“I’m someone who professes peaceful means and nonviolence and I don’t support force to resolve things but, rather, dialogue.”

But to read Francisco Jara – whose dirty spin plays into dark oligarch fantasies and media smears about anybody that is not them – he makes it seem like nonviolence training sessions are military “maneuvers.” Jara would have portrayed Martin Luther King as a violent terrorist with that level of distortion.

This episode in Francisco Jara’s felony against journalism is instructive if one learns to read between the lines. When all evidence points to the Honduran civil resistance choosing an avowedly nonviolent path to topple the coup regime, it has become increasingly important for coup supporters to try and claim the opposition is violent. However, all the evidence of the past month has been that it has been the coup that has exercised a monopoly on the use of violence, often brutal, and today mortal.

Be on the alert for more such distortions from make-believe “journalists” like Francisco Jara in the coming days. He and they are an embarrassment to our profession. The good news is that we, too, have a “peaceful popular army” of Authentic Journalists working around the clock to correct their falsehoods and report the real facts. And if Jara or any other such piece of mercenary refuse from the human garbage dump wants to try and distort my words, too, we’re more than ready for them.

Meanwhile, I opine, AFP ought to fire his sorry ass.

Update: Reuters reporter Gabriela Donoso gets the story right:

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya vowed on Saturday to return to power through peaceful means and denied he was rallying groups of armed supporters near the border with Nicaragua...

 

"I am not forming any armed military force, although I have the means to do it because I come from a state where there are weapons everywhere," Zelaya, a logging magnate originally from the ranching state of Olancho, told Honduran television.

"We do not use arms," the left-leaning Zelaya said.

That's called a push back and it's what social movements too often have to do in the face of commercial media simulation.

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