Hillary Clinton may have foreign policy experience, but it is experience comprised of disaster after disaster.
In an interview with the New York Daily News, journalist Juan González dug a skeleton out of Clinton’s closet: He
asked the presidential candidate about her role in the coup in Honduras.
In 2009, the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected government of President Manuel Zelaya. The populist left-wing leader was woken up in the middle of the night, kidnapped and whisked away from his own country.
The international community immediately condemned the coup. The U.S. response was quite different. The Obama administration, and particularly the State Department under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, defended the coup.
Emails released from Clinton’s time as the secretary of state show that some of her top aides urged her to dub the putsch a military coup and to cut off U.S. aid. She refused to do so.
Instead, the U.S. defied the Organization of American States and pushed for the world to recognize the coup government.
Zelaya, a left-wing leader who challenged the interests of Western corporations, was never reinstated. In 2013, current President Juan Orlando Hernández
kicked off his reign with the slogan “Honduras is open for business.”
Today, Honduras has a violent, repressive and incredibly corrupt government. Renowned activists like environmentalist Berta Cáceres are murdered in cold blood, and with complete impunity. Just before her assassination, in fact,
Cáceres singled out Hillary Clinton for her role the coup.
From the 2009 coup until 2012, the U.S.-backed Honduran regime
killed more than 300 people.
Honduras soon earned a dubious honor: From
2012 to
2014, it was the murder capital of the world.
Clinton has responded to this tragedy — described in a New York Times
op-ed as “a mess made in the U.S.” — with whitewashing and sheer fabrication.
“I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it, but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the Constitution and the legal precedents,” Clinton said of the 2009 coup in her interview with the Daily News.
“I think we came out with a solution that did hold new elections, but it did not in any way address the structural, systemic problems in that society,” she added, expressing “concern that it’s not just government actions — drug gangs, traffickers of all kinds are preying on the people of Honduras.”
Experts disagree, and say Clinton is trying to rewrite history.
Clinton’s “emails show that early on in the 2009 coup against Manuel Zalaya, when there was a real chance of restoring the reformist president to his office, she was working with the most retrograde elements in Honduras to consolidate the putsch,” explained historian Greg Grandin, an expert on U.S. policy in Latin America.
“Let’s be clear,” Grandin told journalist Doug Henwood for his book “My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency,” “grassroots Democrats who support Clinton for president would be enormously sympathetic to the coalition that was trying to reverse the Honduras coup, comprised of environmentalists, LGBT activists, people trying to make the morning-after pill available, progressive religious folks, anti-mining and anti-biofuel peasants and legal reformers working to humanize Honduras’ lethal police-prison regime.”
“Clinton betrayed them, serving them up to Honduras’ crime-ridden oligarchy,” Grandin added.
“Hundreds of good people have since been murdered by the people Clinton sided with in late 2009 and early 2010.”
No comments:
Post a Comment