Is Uribe Pro-stability or Merely Anti-Guerrilla?: Colombia Stays Soft on Paramilitaries

Though it hardly constitutes breaking news, Colombian newsweekly Semana’s interview with Luis Jorge Garay makes for sobering reading. Garay has a lot to say about the evolution of the “new” paramilitary armies in Colombia and their links to what he calls the Colombian “narco-state,” none of which is very comforting for American policymakers. Garay’s basic insight is that while the Uribe government has weakened the FARC and other left-wing guerrilla groups, new drug-trafficking paramilitary groups have emerged and infiltrated the Colombian state, particularly at the local and regional level. These paramilitaries keep a low profile, but they are quite busy extending their influence across Colombia and subverting the state to meet their ends. Trials for top paramilitary leaders aside, Uribe has done little to uproot the long-term threat paramilitary groups pose to governance, and instead appears willing to sanction tacit cooperation between government officials and the new narco-paramilitaries.

In the mean time, the killings and violations of human rights just keep happening. Much has been made of the murder of trade unionists in Colombia, but the real scandal is the overbearing persecution of journalists and other defenders of human rights by paramilitaries and the government institutions aligned with them. Consider the chilling remarks by Defense Minister Gabriel de Silva to assembled military officers on August 12th:

“May a colonel not tremble, may he have no fear before the codes [of justice], may a general or a soldier not tremble in the face of a [human rights] complaint, may their will to fight not be stopped by a judicial action by the enemies of the fatherland.”

When a Defense Minister tells his military chiefs that they need have no fear of the justice system, it’s usually considered a Bad Thing. And when he goes on to label those who would have it otherwise “enemies of the fatherland,” donor governments generally start making for the exits as fast as diplomatically possible. Yet the U.S. government went on to certify Colombia's human rights record in September, paving the way for continued military aid to Colombia under Plan Colombia.

This explains a lot about the current uproar over the base agreement signed on October 30th. When the U.S. announces a policy to combat narco-trafficking in Colombia, you expect to see funds go to narco-trafficking operations. When most of the money instead funds the Colombian military, and when that military appears to sanction the narco-trafficking operations of new paramilitary groups, regional powers begin to distrust U.S. intentions. And when the U.S. announces a plan to expand its military presence in Colombia, and then admits that its stated objectives in doing so weren’t entirely true…well, you get a regional backlash.

It’s handy to have a friendly government willing to host bases in the region, sure, but it undermines any potential benefit when policymakers fail to take seriously the conditions for aid stipulated in Plan Colombia. A lot of the sturm und drang over the base agreement could have been avoided if the State Department had stuck to the letter of the law and shown it was serious about human rights in Colombia. Instead, we find ourselves in a regional diplomatic conflagration.

Extra Credit: On Saturday Venezuelan authorities reported capturing Magaly Janeth Moreno Vega, a Colombian ex-prosecutor who confessed to aiding paramilitaries and was convicted as an accomplice to murder several years ago, before she fled while on temporary parole. Further evidence of rampant paramilitarism, or Venezuelan showmanship? Your comments are appreciated.

Research Associate Robert Banick

'Fordlandia' by COHA Senior Research Fellow Greg Grandin

BOOK REVIEW: 'Fordlandia' by Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin is a COHA Senior Research Fellow and a former intern from the 1980's. He is also currently a Professor of History at New York University. Below is a review of his recent book, Fordlandia, by Tim Rutten of the LA Times

The fascinating story of Henry Ford's venture to build an American utopia in the Brazilian rain forest.

By Tim Rutten
LA Times

June 24, 2009

From the moment restive medieval scribes began to jot their own thoughts and feelings into the spaces alongside the texts and chronicles they'd been assigned to copy, much that's most fascinating about Western history has seemed, at first, simply marginalia.

Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed just such a marginal event -- Henry Ford's failed attempt to establish a gigantic agricultural industrial complex in the heart of Brazil's Amazon Basin -- and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry's contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of a blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told.

"Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City" is precisely that -- a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist's sense of pace and an eye for character. It's a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.

In 1927, Ford was America's richest man and (in most "respectable" circles) one of its most admired. He was also in a protean sense our first industrial celebrity, forerunner of figures like David Packard, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, who would be celebrated for organizing transforming technologies. The assembly line obviously was Ford's greatest innovation and the affordable personal auto its great transforming product, but his ambitions hardly stopped there.

'A relentless system'

Social reformers who visited Ford's first auto plants were horrified by what they saw. The British journalist Julian Street called the Model T assembly line in Highland Park "a relentless system" producing "terrible efficiency. . . . Like a river and its tributaries." Ford saw other problems -- high absenteeism and worker turnover. Later that year, Grandin writes, "Ford made an announcement that sent seismic shocks across the globe. . . . [T]he Ford Motor Company would pay an incentive wage of $5 for an eight-hour day, nearly double the average industrial standard. The Wall Street Journal charged Henry Ford with class treason, with 'economic blunders if not crimes.' Yet his absentee and turnover rate plummeted and Ford was jolted into the ranks of the world's most admired men, 'an international symbol of the new industrialism.' "

Ford followed up the raise with a system of educational, health and other benefits and set up a vast network of spies and home visitors to ensure the new wages were spent on "a wholesome life" rather than on "gambling, drinking or whoring." Workers were prodded into spending on houses, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and, of course, Ford cars. The mogul and the cadre of farsighted executives around him "understood that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumers."

Thus was born "Fordism," which many at the time embraced as a kind of "third way" between unrestrained capitalism and Marxism. Ford and his astonishingly -- indeed, tragically -- contradictory character stand at the center of "Fordlandia." Grandin has, in essence, given us a bracing new angle on this strange man's biography. He was a lifelong admirer of Emerson, firm in the "Transcendentalists' belief in human perfectibility," yet he instinctively distrusted every individual's choice but his own -- and more so, as the years went on. He was a pacifist and opponent of capital punishment who ultimately unleashed brutal thugs to terrorize his own workers. He so loathed the farm life of his boyhood that he thought cow's milk should be replaced by soy and wool by linen, but went around founding utopian communities that mixed farming and industry. He was a bitter, vulgar, lifelong anti-Semite.

Ford was, in other words, perhaps that greatest example of a peculiarly American type in which the line between crank and genius is so ephemeral as to be all but invisible. Grandin has said he was drawn to the story of Fordlandia because it "captures the essence of Ford, tying together all the many threads of his life."

By the late 1920s, Ford was feeling many kinds of pressure: Socially, America was closing in on him. The long boom was tottering toward the abyss of 1929; his various social experiments were increasingly rejected, including a plan that in many respects anticipated the Tennessee Valley Authority; at the same time, an Anglo-Dutch attempt to monopolize the production of rubber in Southeast Asia seemed to directly threaten Ford Motor's future.

Rubber plantations

The Southeast Asian plantations were founded with seeds stolen from the Brazilian rain forest, where rubber trees grew wild. Thus, Ford was persuaded to put up $125,000 to acquire 2.5 million acres along an Amazon tributary 500 miles from the Atlantic. There he envisioned a vast plantation in which carefully selected seedlings would be raised scientifically and the latex harvested by local workers under the supervision of American executives. Ford decreed the construction of a model upper Michigan/New England village complete with Cape Cod-style bungalows, a state-of-the-art hospital, company cafeterias, schools, a cinema with American films and -- believe it or not -- nightly square dancing, of which the mogul approved. The local workers, who previously had lived in a kind of debt peonage to their buyers, were to be paid American wages.

Good intentions notwithstanding, it was a disaster from the start. Ford was a supporter of Prohibition and insisted that his workers refrain from alcohol and smoking, which didn't fly with anybody in the rain forest. A floating red-light district soon emerged, and the company hospital did a brisk business treating venereal disease. Most of all, consumerism failed because there was nothing to buy. Ford compensated by opening subsidized shoe stores and ice cream parlors. Similarly, concentrating the rubber trees in plantations made them more prone to the pests indigenous to the rain forest. Production never amounted to much. In 1930, the most serious of a series of riots erupted with chants of "kill all the Americans" after a manager did away with cafeteria table service and made workers line up for alien brown rice and whole wheat bread, which Ford regarded as "healthy."

Ford never visited Fordlandia, but he poured money into it and another nearby village, perhaps imagining that projects his fellow Americans had rejected might come to fruition there. By the time Ford Motor sold Fordlandia back to the Brazilian government in 1945 for $244,200, the company had spent, in inflation-adjusted figures, roughly $1 billion on the project.

Honduras: Guaranteeing the elections

Paolo Luers, a commentator of El diario de Hoy of El Salvador sent us one of his articles regarding the current situation in Honduras. We would like to re-publish it in order to enhance the discussion regarding the current situation in Honduras and also to help identify and clarify different positions taken in the current debate.

The opinions expressed here correspond solely to the author and do not reflect the views of COHA.

The English synopsis of this article was prepared by COHA Research Associate Andres Ochoa

Letter to the editor The Miami Herald "Let the Haitians Stay"

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Dear Editor,

Your editorial “Let the Haitians stay”, makes a strong case for the necessity to grant a protected status to the thousands of Haitians that have fled to the United States. Refusing to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitians has only furthered the long standing discrimination that they have been forced to face in the region, whether it be the systematic discrimination of citizenship rights for Haitian-Dominicans in the Dominican Republic, or the internationally overlooked upheaval following food shortages in 2008. Haitians, like past TPS groups, should be entitled to the same human dignity which international instruments and agreements seek to protect. By recognizing a protected status for the Haitians in the U.S., the calamities of their failed nation, Haiti, which has confronted unremitting natural and man-caused disasters, can be acknowledged. Furthermore, the promotion of human rights and international solidarity for a people who have been dealt a poor hand throughout their history would be clearly recorded. The U.S., as it seeks to champion human rights in the region, must take the critical first step by granting the Haitians greater dignity, which can only reward all concerned.




Andres Ochoa
Research Associate, Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Washington D.C.

Response to "Venezuela's Polarized Society Split by Another Issue"

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The latest polls show significant erosion in Chavez’ popular support. One problem he faces is his reliance on cash disbursements and other transfers to the population, which are based on high oil prices and a reasonably efficient oil industry. This, alas, isn’t what it used to be. Both oil prices and oil industry efficiency are down, and therefore the government is increasingly unable to disburse the cash. The problem is compounded because the rest of the economy is slowly dying as he continues nationalizing portions of the economy using a fairly adhoc method. As the cash flow ceases, the masses don’t support him the way they did, so it’s going to get very interesting in the next few years.

Comment by Braulio Perez

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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Articles like this, in which critical links are based on “may” and “it is said” are what characterizes Fox News and other neocon publications. Sadly, it also means they carry little credibility.

Comment by Braulio Perez

Response to "What the Drug War Needs is a Debate"

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Adequate management of drugs requires a worldwide permanent dialoque. There is no permanent solution. And any balancing point will be dynamic. It is like pushing on water.
A string of treaties would be the best framework but is difficult to achieve. Second best is each country working towards a solution model of the same structure. The good news is that such model can be built to handle any type of drug.
At least some LA countries seem to be convinced now that one should not penalize drug consumers. This appears to be close to the Dutch “coffeeshop” model for drugs. By the way, the Dutch are top drugproducers, close to Colombia and Afghanistan. Further, one should not forget alcohol and tobacco. These produce heavier damage than the drugs we talk about here. But they are “accepted” to a certain degree. This shows the way to better management. Demand can only be reduced by information and education. Treatment of health damage can be financed by excise-duties.
Supply follows demand. So, it is not efficient to fight the problem in the production countries. The battle must be won in the consumer markets. We can manage it by making it a state monopoly. This will guarantee quality and control prices.
May be it would be even better to hand out licences to a limited number of private dealers. Their market behavior can be tightly controlled. It is even worthwhile to consider some of the large actual traders. Let them apply and pay for the licence. They are so rich and powerful that pushing them back will be very difficult and costly. Moreover, if we would succeed, they will shift their huge resources to other illegal activities like prostitution, armstrade and slavelabour. That will be the day! Thanks to God these criminals have a propensity to legalize their business if we allow it.
As for the remaining illegal traders, we must be merciless.
Even capital punishment may be involved.

Comment by Charles Janssen

Response to "What the Drug War Needs is a Debate"

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Marijuana Legalization does not require ANY more debate. Polls are showing time and time again that the majority of Americans support legalizing pot. What we need is the Ability to prosecute out Representatives for KNOWINGLY disobeying the will of the people. A law like this would be Good to preserve OUR democracy from lobbyists and crooked politicians.

Comment by Todd

Response to "What the Drug War Needs is a Debate"

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Debaters debate the two wars as if Nixon’s civil war on Woodstock Nation didn’t yet run amok. One need not travel to China to find indigenous cultures lacking human rights or to Cuba for political prisoners. America leads the world in percentile behind bars, thanks to ongoing persecution of hippies, radicals, and non-whites under banner of the war on drugs. If we’re all about spreading liberty abroad, then why mix the message at home? Peace on the home front would enhance global credibility.

The drug czar’s Rx for prison fodder costs dearly, as lives are flushed down expensive tubes. There’s trouble on the border. My shaman’s second opinion is that psychoactive plants are God’s gift. God didn’t screw up. Canadian Marc Emery sold seeds that enable American farmers to outcompete cartels with superior domestic herb. He is being extradited to prison, for doing what government wishes it could do, reduce demand for Mexican.

The constitutionality of the CSA (Controlled Substances Act of 1970) derives from an interstate commerce clause. Only by this authority does it reincarnate Al Capone, endanger homeland security, and throw good money after bad. Official policy is to eradicate, not tax, the number-one cash crop in the land. America rejected prohibition, but it’s back. Apparently, SWAT teams don’t need no stinking amendment. Father, forgive those who make it their business to know not what they do.

Nixon promised that the Schafer Commission would support the criminalization of his enemies, but it didn’t. No matter, the witch-hunt was on. No amendments can assure due process under an anti-science law without due process itself. Psychology hailed the breakthrough potential of LSD, until the CSA halted all research and pronounced that marijuana has no medical use, period.

The RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993) allows Native American Church members to eat peyote, which functions like LSD. Americans shouldn’t need a specific church membership to obtain their birthright freedom of religion. Denial of entheogen sacrament to any American, for mediation of communion with his or her maker, precludes free exercise of religious liberty.

Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought. The Constitution doesn’t enumerate any governmental power to embargo diverse states of mind. How and when did government usurp this power to coerce conformity? The Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity. Legislators who would limit cognitive liberty lack jurisdiction.

Common-law must hold that adults are the legal owners of their own bodies. The Founding Fathers decreed that the right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. Socrates said to know your self. Mortal lawmakers should not presume to thwart the intelligent design that molecular keys unlock spiritual doors. Persons who appreciate their own free choice of path in life should tolerate seekers’ self-exploration.

Comment by Bill Harris

Response to "What the Drug War Needs is a Debate"

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The current focus of the drug war in the Americas must change. The existing direction, one held for the previous forty plus years has been ineffective and wasteful for all economies involved. While hundreds of billions of dollars have been dumped into this black hole of a policy, Hundreds of billions more are directed in profit towards gangs and cartels in every country. This improvident policy ignored all of the lessons of the prohibition of Alcohol in the United States during the period from 1920 to 1933. What the U.S. learned from their failed attempt at prohibiting their citizens’ access to a vice was the vice would multiply many times over previous levels. Second the emergence of gangs and organized crime syndicates would flourish and profit from filling the supply chain disrupted by laws and restrictions. This current policy does little more than create alternative methods for people to obtain their drugs. Without draconian measures, most in violation of the tenets of the United States Constitution, it will be impossible to eradicate drug use in this country.
In contrast a managed narcotic distribution program would supply the product to those who desire, tax revenue to those countries producing and selling, and withhold from the cartels the life blood of their crime families. It has taken well over six decades to weaken the stranglehold organized crime had over the political process of the U.S., and it will take several decades more to unseat the crime cartels of Latin America from their positions of political control, both within and outside of their countries. One quick method is to restrict their flow of hard currency. By legalizing possession, and licensing distribution and point of sale with methods currently used for the sale of alcohol, a system can quickly be put in place. One large requirement would be to ensure that the product has an equal profit distribution chain as well as providing medical support for those addicts who wish to end their addiction.
Too little thought has been given to the policies desired by the people of the Americas, and too much to the desires of those who profit from warfare and bloodshed. This isn’t a simple problem to fix, but dialogue on the subject is the best place to begin.

Comment by Mario Minichino

Response to "Washington's Double Standard on Cuba"

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Double standards exemplified:Air Cubana flight 455, see,inter alia:

http://www.cubaminrex.cu/English/Terrorism/Articulos/From-the-Press/Barbados.html

(Although not mentioned in the description on this site, it is reputed that Captain Perez ditched the airliner in Payne’s bay on the West coast of the island rather than landing at Barbados’ airport in order to spare the lives of Barbadians on the ground.)

Comment from Clive Lewis

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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The Arcadia Foundation has been a champion of democracy and an advocate for rule of law. When the President of any nation illegally attempts to prolong their executive position, it is a clear indicator of someone disregarding constitutional law and in this case, symbolizes corruption at the highest level of government. Robert Carmona-Borjas and the Arcadia Foundation believe that democracy is crucial for the effective exercise of fundamental freedoms and human rights in their universality. The OAS charter indeed states that ‘ representative democracy is an indispensable condition for stability, peace and development ‘ within the regions of the Americas.

The Arcadia Foundation will be building an open forum where we look forward to regularly engaging with those interested in the processes of combating corruption and promoting the values of democracy.

Comment by The Arcadia Foundation

Response to "Obama Wrong on Latin America, Wrong on Cuba"

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Obama is doing something as possible , George W did what we have now.

Comment by Jose

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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I see nothing wrong with well informed speculation, especially given the recent history of US-American involvement in Central America and of those people mentioned in this article.

Whoever claims that Zelaya violated the Honduran constitution is either promoting the coup maker’s agenda, or has swallowed the propaganda of the de facto government, and the people that support Michelettis illegitimate government.

The policies Zelaya was implementing before the coup were perfectly legal. He was not trying to get reelected. He was trying to perform a non-binding survey, with the intention of finding out if Hondurans wanted a fourth ballot-box in November’s elections. This fourth ballot-box would have to be approved by Congress and it would decide on the establishment of a National Constituent Assembly, like the one suggested by de facto president Micheletti in 1985 to reelect president Suazo, and the one set up by the Honduran military and the Americans in 1982 to write a new Constitution as a part of their counter-insurgency programs (Honduras’ 12th constitution). It is a perfectly legal and democratic procedure to write a new constitution, which is not equivalent to reforming the current constitution. The reason is that according to the constitution, Honduran people and their will are above the constitution itself. Zelaya was trying to legally open up for citizen participation in a rigid and undemocratic political system that Hondurans have not created themselves. His opponents violated the law to get rid of him. Colonel Bayardo Inestroza, the legal advisor of the military has accepted this in interviews with The Miami Herald and El Faro. A very good analysis made by a Spanish lawyer Enrique Santiago is available here: http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=90457 The decrees that support Zelaya’s policies are also available in the Internet: PCM- 05-2009, PCM 019-2009, PCM 20-2009, PCM 27-2009. None of those decrees speak about reelection. I am all for well informed speculation, and we can speculate about Zelaya’s intention, but there this does not mean we can legally convict him for his actions. By the way, there hasn’t been a due process to establish guilt. He was kidnapped and flown off. Why?

Another interesting fact that is not mentioned here is that this coup parallels what happened in Haiti in 2004, when President Jean Bertrand Aristide was ousted after being kidnapped and flown out of the country.

There has also been a lot of speculation about the involvement of American right wing extremists in the 2004 coup against Aristide.

According to an article by Naomi Klein, published in The Nation Magazine in 2005, Jean Bertrand Aristide told her in person that the reason there was a coup against him was that he told Washington he would not privatize TeleCo, Haiti’s telecommunications company. Just as Arcadia Foundation and among others Otto Reich staged a propaganda campaign against president Zelaya in Honduras before the coup, accusing him of corruption in Hondutel, there had been a propaganda campaign that accused Aristide of corruption before the coup in Haiti.

Answering a comment above, companies are privatized because investors are always after more profit.

It is important to remember that in 1987 the Comptroller General of the United States found that public funds had been misused by the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean to finance a “white propaganda” campaign against the government of Nicaragua. The House Foreign Affairs Committee called this office a propaganda operation against the Sandinistas. This office was led by Mr. Otto Reich, who is mentioned in this analysis.

Arcadia Foundation is run by a Venezuelan exile, involved in the 2002 coup against Venezuela. He had bee campaigning in Honduras against Zelaya before the coup.

These are all important facts and they raise relevant and legitimate questions. It doesn’t have to do with being from the right or the left (the democratic and peaceful versions, that is).

Hopefully the resolution of events in Honduras will eventually answer these questions. In the meantime there will always be short minded people that are afraid to speculate and brush off this information and confuse foreign policy and geopolitical interests with “conspiracy theories”. Such a naïve view of politics has no historical conscience.

Comment by Alberto Valiente Thoresen

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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IRI’s work is not focused on privatization or the telecommunications industry. IRI, as does the National Democratic Institute, supports the strengthening of democratic institutions and processes. The bulk of IRI’s programming in Honduras is concentrated on helping city governments better serve their citizens. Our program and record is very clear and transparent there. We encourage those who are interested to learn more about our governance programming at: http://www.iri.org/lac/cen_good_gov.asp. The other aspect to our program in Honduras seeks to help encourage political parties and civil society focus on substantive issues such as healthcare, roads, education and economic development. IRI stands by that work as well.

Comment by Lisa

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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So finally the IRI’s cover has been blown and it is glaringly clear that once again the U.S. will protect its interests, meaning business interests who are friendly with U.S. Senators. Could just have well been the National Endowment for Democracy – same agenda. The first respondent is correct, in a way this is old news because the U.S. State Dept cannot resist demands from big business, never has, never will. The third respondent throws in the straw man of Hugo Chavez. So let me get this right, either Latin American countries have to turn over ALL state assets to someone like Mexico’s Carlos Slim who immediately buys out the competition to create a monopoly – or they are Chavezistas or Fidelistas and deserve to be ousted by the military? Give me a break. I wonder whether on the CNN program tonight anyone will ask a question concerning Otto Reich – McCain’s handmaiden – and his role in getting the terrorist Orlando Bosch released from a Venezuelan jail where he was incarcerated for blowing up 73 people in an airliner in 1976. Bosch now lives in Florida, a location to which the “war on terror” doesn’t extend.

Comment by Jonathan

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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My comment referred to the second from “A.B.” I want to add and to tell him that the credibility of U.S. policy is since long at stake and so is the coverage by U.S. mainstream medias. Thanks to Internet everybody can research by him- or herself when honestly searching for the facts and compare them to each other.
I am a German woman engaged in the campaign to free the Cuban Five which is shared by millions all over the globe.
As Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban Parliament, recently and complete correctly said: “Many Americans do not know about the Cuban Five because they have not been permitted to know.
Not only was the long trial of the Five maintained in the dark, Americans have not even been allowed to know that this case has been very much in the minds of many millions around the globe. The big corporate media that didn’t report their legal battle threw a similar curtain of silence around the wide, ever growing, movement of solidarity that the Cuban Five have received practically everywhere from Ireland to Tasmania, from Canada to Namibia. Churches, parliaments, human rights organizations, labor unions, writers, lawyers and peoples from all walks of life have expressed their concern and interest in all languages, English included.
But the Supreme Court did not bother to listen.” Neither do the U.S. mainstream medias, so far.

Comment by Josie Michel-Brüning

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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All of COHA’s “investigations” on Honduras since June 28 have been so blatantly partialized and they have spread so much false information that they would have made Joseph Goebbels proud. Zelaya was altering the Constitution by summoning a Constituent Assembly that very same day by an exuctive decree that would have dissolved Congress and the Political Parties. Apart from all the violations Zelaya did in three years, he planned to dismantle the Constitution. It was not a coup. It was a legitimmate Constitutional Succession based on Article 239 of the Constitution that states that any attempt to modify articles of the Constitution relating to form and duration of government is high treason and the leader who does it ceases in office. Is Noam Chomsky dictating U.S. foreign policy and writing for COHA? I never thought I’d see the day that the Republican Party would be more democratic, legal and informed than the Democrats.

Comment by Victor Vallejo

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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Dear Michaela D’Ambrosio,
I am appreciating your article very much! However, the last comments show very clear to me how difficult it must be in “God’s own land”, the USA, to tell the truth or even to ask such challenging questions for people with respective, from generation to generation transmitted views, because of the profit of few, the “elite”. Thank you for your courage to do so! And thanks to Larry Burns for having posted it.
May be, Obama needs such support by your information when wanting to keep to his promise of “change”.
I want to add a quotation of one of the political prisoners in the USA, apart from the Cuban 5 having fought against the US Mafia, there is the Indian one, Leonard Peltier (perhaps he is right?):
“September 11-13, 2009
A CounterPunch Exclusive
[...]
The Denial of My Parole
[...]
I am Barack Obama’s political prisoner now, and I hope and pray that he will adhere to the ideals that impelled him to run for president. But as Obama himself would acknowledge, if we are expecting him to solve our problems, we missed the point of his campaign. Only by organizing in our own communities and pressuring our supposed leaders can we bring about the changes that we all so desperately need. Please support the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee in our effort to hold the United States government to its own words.
I thank you all who have stood by me all these years, but to name anyone would be to exclude many more. We must never lose hope in our struggle for freedom.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,

Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier #89637-132
USP-Lewisburg
US Penitentiary
PO Box 1000
Lewisburg, PA 17837
For more information on Leonard Peltier visit the Leonard Peltier Defense-Offense Committee website.”
Best wishes for Obama and all of us!

Comment by Josie Michel-Brüning

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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Wow! Yet another Conspiracy Theory.

How about this one? Zelaya wanted to stay in power as he himself stated on national TV. He was warned by Hondurans that he would be arrested but he continued, so the Honduran Supreme Court arrested him.

There is a National Telephone Company plus 3 private mega companies and about 20 other minor ones. Who needs to nationalize an outdated phone company when you can start up a new one, if you have the cash for any of this?

But those courts in Florida, USA must have it wrong that Zelaya’s cousin and buddies had been payed off. Justice in the States sucks I guess is what you mean.

So, yeah. Venezuelan justice must have it right, so let’s follow their lead.

Where do you people in COHA find these guys? At least, they should get complete facts.

Comment by J Gallardo

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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COHA nevers ceases to amaze me with their claims about “non-partisanship.” Have we defined the word “Coup” all of a sudden? The military is NOT in power in Honduras. The Honduran Supreme Court ordered Zelaya outsted and his VICE-PRESIDENT placed in his place, according to the Honduran Constitution. Zelaya attempted to install a Chavez-like rule about the president running for life and the Honduran people, legislators, and Supreme Court would not hear of it.

What is it that makes this a “coup”??? The same political party is still in power.

Is it perhaps because Zelaya is a leftist like Chavez and Obama, that he’s getting all this support from COHA and the State Department????

Please!!!!

Comment from A.B.

Response to "The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind the Scenes Finagling?"

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Whilst your article contains a certain amount of speculation it is uncanny how the US relationships with Central America seem to repeat themselves. Arbenz in 1954; the Contra business, etc. One wonders if the Israelis were involved in some way in the recent Honduras mess as they were in the late 1970s/early 1980s in Guatemala when they armed the military and the associated death squads.

Comment from John Carnegie

Response to "A Constructive Engagement with Cuba"

For original article click here

Dear Mr. Hayes,
where do you get your information about Cuba from?
Your comment seems to be the repetition of
the so-called “public diplomacy” of somebody like Otto Reich is.
Have you ever been in Cuba, I guess you were not, because you were not allowed to travel to Cuba until now?
“Cuba is the hell,” they tell you, “but you’re not allowed to see yourself, what it is about in such propaganda.
Being a German woman, I am allowed to travel to Cuba, and I did so since more than 10 years frequently. I found out, circumstances are much different there than I was told by our mass medias at home also.
Did you ever read the reports by the UNESCO about Cuban health care, education and about its agricultural sustainable achievements?
And of course you never read reports by your own international well-known and appreciated compatriots, authors and scientists. – Did you ever read John Dinges, “The Condor years – How Pinochet and his Allies brought Terrorism to three Continents”? The manipulators had been within your successive governments, promoting the coups and the tortures …
Did you ever read declassified information about those events?
Apart from that, terrorism was carried out against Cuba by the exile Cubans in Miami causing 3.478 deaths and 2099 invalid people …
For having tried to prevent those acts, 5 Cubans are incarcerated in your country since 11 years. …

Post by Josie Michel-Brüning

Response to "Washington's Double Standard on Cuba"

Read the original article here

Dear Brandon Bloch,

thank you very much for your interesting, comprehensive and well-founded article including at the same time a listing up, what Washington is blaming Cuba for.
In response and to confirm your explanations, I would like to quote another one of your international well-known and appreciated U.S. authors, William Blum. He wrote in 1999 the following:
“Cuba 1959 to present: Fidel Castro came to power at the beginning of 1959. A U.S. National Security Council meeting of 10 March 1959 included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing “another government to power in Cuba.” There followed 40 years of terrorist attacks, bombings, full-scale military invasion, sanctions, embargos, isolation, assassinations … Cuba had carried out The Unforgivable Revolution, a very serious threat of setting a “good example” in Latin America.
The saddest part of this is that the world will never know what kind of society Cuba could have produced if left alone, if not constantly under the gun and the threat of invasion, if allowed to relax its control at home. The idealism, the vision, the talent, the internationalism were all there. But we’ll never know. And that of course was the idea.”
Cuba had had and has still, as your article shows, much more reasons for defending itself, than the USA ever had.
Within all these years, Cuba, nevertheless, tried to support the suppressed people – Nelson Mandela is in his own words still grateful to Fidel Castro for having helped him to come out of his imprisonment on Robin Island after 27 years. Referring to your mentioning that “the Cuban government provides refuge to Joanne Chesimard, who was a member of the Black Liberation Army wanted for the 1973 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper and viewed as notorious by U.S. authorities.” Until now she claims being innocent, not guilty for having committed murder nor even trying to kill a policeman. There is another famous case for example: Mimi Abu Jamul, although the alleged witness of the murder revoke his former testifying after 10 years. Mumia has – after about 30 years – still to fear his execution. Therefore, Cuba does not extradite its refugee on humanitarian grounds.
In addition, another quotation from an article by Leonard Peltier CounterPunch (090912): “The truth is the government wants me to falsely confess in order to validate a rather sloppy frame-up operation, one whose exposure would open the door to an investigation of the United States’ role in training and equipping goon squads to suppress a grassroots movement on Pine Ridge against a puppet dictatorship.
In America, there can by definition be no political prisoners, only those duly judged guilty in a court of law. It is deemed too controversial to even publicly contemplate that the federal government might fabricate and suppress evidence to defeat those deemed political enemies. But it is a demonstrable fact at every stage of my case.”

Being very grateful for your explanations I am going to copy your article and would like to translate it for my friends.

Comment from Josie Michel-Brüning