Washington’s Invented Honduran Democracy

Washington’s Invented Honduran Democracy


• With the wave of killings now besieging the country, the White House will be hard put to provide credible evidence that it has helped found a democracy in Honduras

• It should come as no surprise that the Obama administration’s disappointing Honduran policy has done little to discourage the seventh murder of a Honduran journalist in recent days, making the tiny Central American country the world’s murder capital when it comes to gunning down media professionals with impunity.

Since the constitutionally-elected government of President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a military coup on June 28, 2009, Washington has dragged its feet and repeatedly has acted as an apologist in first defending the Honduran de facto government of Roberto Micheletti and its successor, the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Although the (U.S. based) National Democratic Institute’s characterized Lobo’s election as democratic, it was boycotted by dozens of anti-coup candidates, carried out under conditions of state-sanctioned violence, and the UN, EU, OAS and Carter Center refused to send monitors to Honduras to evaluate the quality of the elections. Despite the U.S. position of glossing over the non-democratic aspects associated with U.S. policy towards Honduras, most of the world has established a cordon sanitaire around the tainted heir of the coup government and has blocked military, financial, and diplomatic ties to it.

Washington’s Latin American policy makers have insisted in their erratic and inconsistent policy gyrations and rapidly altered scripts that they were following a policy aimed against the protagonists of a coup d’état against the legitimate Zelaya government, but the reality of U.S. policy was another matter. The June 2009 coup that ousted Zelaya took place five months after the Obama administration had assumed office; as such, the entire affair has occurred on president Obama’s watch. In October of 2009, COHA expressed its extreme concern that conservative Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) had been playing a definitive, if not destructive role in the formulation of U.S.-Honduran foreign policy by placing a “hold” on two U.S. diplomatic nominations by the Obama White House. These included Arturo Valenzuela, who had been nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. COHA further reported that “Senator DeMint has stated that he will release his hold on the confirmations of Valenzuela and [Thomas] Shannon [to be Ambassador to Brazil] only after the U.S. affirms that it will recognize the upcoming November elections in Honduras.”

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Staff

ENDS

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