Events In Honduras

[Magda Hassan]

Honduras: Enter Oscar Arias

Posted by Al Giordano - July 7, 2009 at 10:39 pm By Al Giordano

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaL-INcX6...r_embedded

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, 69, will mediate the first (it could well end up being the only) face-to-face encounter since the June 28 coup d’etat between Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the gorilla coup "president" Roberto Micheletti on Wednesday in San José. Costa Rica.
Arias is best known for his 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in mediating negotiations to end civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Central American left and right both have ambivalent feelings toward him, a social democrat turned neoliberal capitalist but one with very strong tendencies regarding democracy and human rights, tendencies that have built-in conflicts with each other. The paradox is that it is the fact that neither ideological pole completely trusts him that makes him strangely palatable as mediator to both. That’s what happened in the 1980s and it will be attempted again tomorrow in San José.
Last weekend, Arias broadcast the above five-and-a-quarter-minutes message to Costa Ricans on national TV. If his voice sounds a little bit funny, it may be because, last year, he was diagnosed with cyst on his vocal chords.
In that video he said (I'll translate these key passages):

In the dawn of Sunday June 28 President Jose Manuel Zelaya was taken by force and expelled from Honduras by soldiers of the army. From any point of view, that is unjustifiable. What happened before it loses all relevance in light of this coup d’etat.

And then at 58 seconds into his talk, ominous music begins to play under his voice, as the broadcast shows images of the military coups in Latin America in the 60s and 70s. Arias continued:

For those that don’t remember, there was an era in Latin America when the armies decided who was president, how, and until when. It was the darkest era of our history.
Thousands died or were tortured. Millions had to flee from their country. Force was more important than the law. Fear more powerful than the popular will. Our people were never more unhappy and less free than when the capacity to govern was in the hands of the military…
It is unacceptable that in the 21st century some celebrate a coup d’etat… To topple him by violent means it was Honduran democracy and not him who suffer from a mortal coup…
We have called to reestablish the Coinstitutional order and restore the elected president…
The whole world, without exception, has repudiated this coup d’etat…

We’ll see what, if anything, happens when Zelaya and Micheletti (they once were political allies) come face to face in the presence of Arias on Wednesday.
I certainly can’t predict what, if anything, will ensue. This is not like an election day with a fixed yes or no outcome on a certain deadline.
This is the path that the legitimate president of Honduras, Mel Zelaya, has chosen. If we believe that the Honduran people's choice for president is the only legitimate president no matter what one's opinion about that president may be, as we do, then that therefore extends to the decisions he makes in this process. And so far, we haven’t heard complaint from Insulza or Chávez or any other leader in América about this next step, which is your first indication that Zelaya is pleased with it, and the rest are as curious as we are to see whether anything comes of it.
And so we wait… It could be an adventure in futility... Or it could be the face-saving pretext for the Simian Council behind the coup to give up their illegitimate grasp on the country after their coup-in-clown-shoes in which everything that could go wrong did.
Update: I'll add another well-informed thought to this analysis.
Some are scratching their heads, asking, "how can it be possible that both the United States - and its allies - and Venezuela - and its allies - say they oppose this coup?"
And a related question: "What can the coup plotters be thinking that they can do without US and World Bank and PetroCaribe funds?"
The answer is that there is indeed a powerful network behind this coup. It is an attempt by a certain element of organized crime to resurrect the Batista experiment of Cuba in the 1950s - a safe haven for narco-trafficking, money laundering and right-wing terrorism in the hemisphere, with billions of dollars already in its combined coffers. That is the power behind Micheletti and his Simian Council.
There is a scene from The Godfather Part II that portrays what was attempted in the late 1950s to set up just such a safe haven in Cuba:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYUqxHwYg...r_embedded
Understand that governments are secondary players in this globalized uber-state of capitalism. There are organized crime groups that have far more money at their disposal today than the $3.5 billion dollar annual budget of Honduras. This is not something that is viewed as positive in either Washington, or Caracas, or in any other national capital in this hemisphere (except among some, apparently, in Tegucigalpa). This coup is a play by a twenty-first century mafia to win itself a flag to fly over its banks and business interests, and render them untouchable by any legitimate government. The stakes are, thus, high for all aspiring democracies, not just that in Honduras.


http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefiel...scar-arias