Events In Honduras

[Magda Hassan]

Lobbying records reveal his firm is targeting State Department and National Security Council

Lanny Davis, a long-time doorman for the Clinton agenda, has an interesting bedfellow in his latest lobbying assignment on behalf of the business interests behind the illegal putsch regime of Honduras.
Davis, a lawyer, neo-liberal Democrat and now a lobbyist employed by the D.C. office of global law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, was recently retained by the Business Council of Latin America (CEAL in its Spanish initials) to hawk for the coup interests in Honduras,
A sister business coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters with common leadership to CEAL, the Asociacion Hondureña de Maquiladores (AHM), however, is looking to the other side of the U.S. political landscape for its lobbying push in Washington, D.C., and has recently retained a George W. Bush-era neoconservative named Roger Noriega.
Though Davis and Noriega, a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat in Latin America, represent different sides of the U.S. bipolar political system, in their manic pursuit of unbridled capitalism and support for the oligarchical interests in Latin America that control the capital (including Tegucigalpa, Honduras), they are very much cut from the same cloth.
But in the case of Noriega, as has often been the case with Bush-era players, it appears some corners might have been cut in his Honduran lobbying assignment that may run counter to the letter of the U.S. statute governing that activity.
Unfortunately, the U.S. law governing lobbying activity might itself fall short of addressing the realities on the ground in Honduras. That law, the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), requires all agents, or lobbyists, representing “foreign entities” to declare as such on forms they are required to file with the Clerk of the U.S. House and the Secretary of the U.S. Senate.
In the case of Davis, that declaration, and associated disclosures, is included in his filings with respect to the foreign entity CEAL. However, Noriega’s lobbying firm, Vision Americas, for whatever reason, failed to indicate on those forms that the Honduran-based AHM is, in fact, a foreign entity. This shortcoming in Vision Americas’ public LDA filings is in sharp contradiction to the disclosure made by another lobbying firm, The Cormac Group, which also has been retained by AHM to hawk for the business interests now propping up the putsch president of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti.
The Cormac Group, which lists as one of the firm’s founding partners John Timmons, a former legislative counsel for Sen. John McCain, does disclose in its LDA filing that AHM is, in fact, a foreign-controlled entity.
A reading of the LDA statute indicates that any agent (lobbyist) representing a foreign entity must disclose that fact through fil ings made under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is administered by the Department of Justice, if that foreign entity is a government or political party. However, a lobbyist for a foreign commercial entity, such as a business group, is exempt from the FARA requirements if that lobbyist registers under the LDA.
Now, AHM seems to qualify as a commercial entity, which would exempt Noriega, and his lobbying firm, Vision Americas, from the FARA requirements. But given that the business interests in Honduras are, in essence, the puppet masters pulling the strings of “de facto” President Micheletti, and given that the putsch government itself has been deemed as “not legal” by the president of the United States, the definition of an agent of the “government,” for the purposes of LDA and FARA, seems to become a quagmire for lawyers’ play.
In its LDA filing, The Cormac Group states that the “specific lobbying issues” AHM has retained the firm to hype are related to “U.S.-Honduran relations.”
In its filing related to CEAL, Davis’ firm, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, indicates on the LDA registration form, for the same item, that it is lobbying “on behalf of private Honduran business organizations, providing facts relating to the removal of Mr. Zelaya.”
Noriega’s firm, Vision Americas, includes the following explanation on its LDA registration form, again without disclosing that AHM is a “foreign entity”: “Support the efforts of the Honduran private sector to help consolidate the democratic transition in their country.”
Reasonable people may disagree on this, but those explanations advanced by the lobbying firms, given the role business leaders in Honduras are now playing in propping up the illegal coup regime, might be construed as more in line with supporting the interests of the Honduran government than with any specific business agenda.
At a minimum, it would seem the interests of the coup regime and the business players supporting it are inseparable, and the LDA and FARA statutes seem poorly constructed to deal with that situation — which involves U.S. lobbyists hawking for an illegal business-backed government.
The nexus of the Honduran putsch government and business agendas is clearly exposed in the following July 6 press release sent out by The Cormac Group as part of its effort to color the situation in Honduras in the favor of its client, AHM:
Leading members of the Honduran National Congress and private sector and former members of the Honduran Judiciary will hold a press conference in Washington, D.C., to speak on recent events in Honduras. The press conference will be held Tuesday, July 7, 2009, at 3:00 p.m. in the Murrow Room of the National Press Club (529 14th Street, NW).
The delegation will be traveling to Washington for several days of meetings with United States policymakers to clarify any misunderstandings about Honduras' constitutional process and to discuss next steps to ensure the preservation of the country's democratic institutions. [Emphasis added.]
A search of the Justice Department’s online FARA registration database did not produce any matches for The Cormac Group or Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which would seem to indicate they are not registered as being agents of foreign governments or political parties.
However, both Noriega and Vision Americas do show up as being registered under FARA. However, those filing do not list AHM among the credits. Instead, they indicate only that Vision Americas is registered to represent the interests of a Moroccan government entity called the Moroccan American Center for Policy and a Pakistan company called Kestral Holdings Ltd.
But none of this apparent legal ambiguity surrounding lobbying disclosure and the current situation in Honduras gets around the fact that, with respect to specific questions on two separate LDA filings — the initial registration and a follow-up quarterly report — Noriega’s Vision Americas indicated that AHM is not a foreign entity, defined as follows on the LDA form:
14. Is there any foreign entity [that]
a) holds at least 20% equitable ownership in the client [AHM] …;
b) directly or indirectly, in whole or in major part, plans, supervises, controls, directs, finances or subsidizes activities of the client …;
c) is an affiliate of the client … and has a direct interests in the outcome of the lobbying activity?
To that specific question on the LDA registration form, Vision Americas checked the “No” box.
That check might be deemed an errant mark due to an oversight by the chief of staff at Vision Americas who signed the registration form, dated July 14, if the same mistake was not repeated in a separate LDA quarterly report filed on July 20.
On that latter report, on line 19, the lobbying firm is asked to explain what the “interest of each foreign entity” is in the specific issues — in this case, supporting “the efforts of the Honduran private sector to help consolidate the democratic transition in their country,” which, translated, means helping to consolidate the power of the coup regime.
Of importance in this case is the fact that the quarterly report also reveals that Vision Americas, including Noriega, will be lobbying on behalf of AHM in the area of “foreign relations” not only in the U.S. House and Senate, but also in the State Department and before the National Security Council.
That begs the question: What possible interest would the U.S. National Security Council have in the business interests of an organization representing apparel-goods manufactures and exporters?
The failure of Vision Americas to disclose that AHM is a foreign entity, as well as its failure to describe the “interest” of AHM in lobbying the State Department and National Security Council is significant, because it effectively shields from public view the full agenda of a foreign entity seeking to affect, presumably, U.S. national security. It remains significant even if the failure to disclose was an honest mistake, or can somehow be justified with tortured legal logic.
Narco News contacted the U.S. House Office of the Clerk, which is a repository for the LDA records, seeking some insight into Vision Americas’ filings. A spokesman for the Clerk’s office, who asked not to be identified, concurred that an organization like AHM, for the purposes of LDA, would likely be considered a foreign entity, and it should have been disclosed as such in the public filings.
However, the spokesman added that his office “only receives the forms, but it is not an enforcement agency.”
“In a case like this, a referral would have to be made to an executive branch enforcement agency [the Department of Justice]” for further investigation, and action, if warranted, he added.
The penalties for violating the LDA are potentially severe, if those violations are deemed to be intentional fraud:
Whoever knowingly fails: (1) to correct a defective filing within 60 days after notice of such a defect by the Secretary of the Senate or the Clerk of the House; or (2) to comply with any other provision of the Act, may be subject to a civil fine of not more than $200,000, and whoever knowingly and corruptly fails to comply with any provision of this Act may be imprisoned for not more than 5 years or fined under title 18, United States Code, or both.
Narco News also attempted to reach Noriega via his Vision Americas’ phone line, leaving a message on his office’s answering service. To date, he has not returned the call.

Roger’s Vision

Roger Noriega may not be a household name in most of America, but he likely will be a subject for the history books for years to come due to his role in undermining democracy and the rule of law in Latin America to the advantage of crony capitalism. His track record dates back to the 1980s when, as part of U.S. Agency for International Development, he played a questionable role in allegedly moving around money in the shadows of the Iran/Contra scandal.
His fingerprints also mark the failed U.S.-backed coup carried out in Venezuela in 2002 and the successful U.S.-sponsored effort to oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in Haiti in 2004. Those efforts were undertaken while Noriega served in increasingly powerful roles within the State Department during the Bush administration.
Noriega, a former Latin American adviser for the arch-conservative and now-deceased Republican Senator Jesse Helms, served as U.S. Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States between 2001 and 2003 before being named Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. In taking that higher post, he replaced Otto Reich, another Iran/Contra retread brought into the Bush administration to carry out an extremist, pro-oligarch agenda in Latin America.
Reich went on to serve as the U.S. Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere as well as on the board of WHISC (better known as the School of the Americas) before leaving the White House in 2004 to launch his own consulting firm, Otto Reich Associates LLC. During his recent presidential bid, Sen. John McCain tapped Reich to serve as a policy adviser on Latin America. At a July 10 House hearing on “The Crisis in Honduras,” Reich offered testimony designed to bolster the standing of the putsch junta that seized power from that nation’s democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya.
Noriega served in the Assistant Secretary of State post until October 2005, and after a stint with a law firm, he went into the lobbying business through Vision Americas. Like Reich, Noriega has been an outspoken proponent of the June 28 coup d'état in Honduras, penning numerous op/eds, in publications such as Forbes, to that effect.
Another key figure of the Bush administration’s Latin American team was the current U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, who, from 2002 through 2003, served as national security advisor to Bush on matters related to several South American nations, including Colombia, Bolivia and Venezuela.
So Reich, Llorens and Noriega were all playing in the same sandbox when the U.S. lined up behind the failed Venezuelan coup coup d'état, and now, coincidentally or by design, all three show up behind the scenes pulling various strings as the current Honduran putsch plays out.

The Battle Line

But the strange web of connections doesn't end on the Washington stage of this tragic usurpation of democracy, that has, and is continuing to, cost the lives of innocent citizens in Honduras as the rule of law in that nation has been replaced by the rule of the gun under the direction of a powerful junta of business and political elites.
As the connections to the U.S. lobbyists employed by CEAL and AHM are unraveled in Honduras, one family name seems to rise to the top. What that means is not clear, at this point, but if Shakespeare’s McBeth can be used as a guide, it would not be a stretch to speculate that, in Honduras, the coup was about far more than ideology.
Clinton insider Davis was hired by CEAL — and his LDA lobbying forms show, and he has admitted in the press — that a key contact and paying party for that contract is Organizacion Publicitaria, which is a media company controlled by Jorge Canahuati Larach, owner of the pro-coup Honduran newspapers La Prensa and El Heraldo. Another key player in CEAL is Jesus Canahuati, who serves as its vice president and who, according to press reports, is the son Juan Canahuati, the founder of Honduran textile manufacturing giant Grupo Lovable.
Jesus Canahuati also happens to be the brother of Mario Canahuati, who served as Honduran ambassador to the U.S. from 2002 to 2005, at the same time Noriega was the top gun for the Western Hemisphere at State under Bush II — and Noriega and Mario Canahuati both were big backers of a free-trade, pro-oligarch agenda for Latin America, embodied for Honduras at the time in CAFTA. While ambassador to the U.S., Mario Canahuati even testified in support of the free-trade pact CAFTA before the Congress.
Mario Canahuati also recently made a bid for the presidency of his nation and sought his National Party’s nomination last November to stand as its candidate in the general election slated for this fall — pre-coup that is. He lost badly to Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa — who himself was defeated by Zelaya in the 2005 presidential election.
Current putsch President Micheletti also sought his party’s nomination for the upcoming presidential ballot, running on the Liberal ticket. He too lost, yet now finds himself as the supposed leader of Honduras despite that rejection by his own party only months prior to the coup.
In addition, AHM, which has retained both Noriega’s Vision Americas and The Cormac Group as lobbyists, is touched by the Canahuati clan as well. AHM's current president is Daniel Facusse, but Jesus Canahuati served as president of the group prior to Facusse and still sits on the organization’s board of directors (called the Junta Directiva) along with his father and oligarch supreme Juan Canahuati.
And as an indicator of where this group of Honduran business elites stands on the presidency of Zelaya and his recent violent overthrow, the words of Juan Canahuati are of value, since they seem to show he has blurred the lines between business and government interests — which may go a long way in explaining the murky legality of the lobbying now underway in Washington by the likes of Davis and Noriega.
From a July 3 article in the Latin Business Chronicle:
"For the past…months, since our ex-president tried to change the constitution [in reality, Zelaya sought a national referendum that might have allowed for changes to the constitution], everybody was nervous," says Juan M. Canahuati, president of Grupo Lovable, a major textile and apparel exporter and one of the largest employers in Honduras. “There was no more investing, no more business growth. Everybody was trying to see what would happen.”
… Zelaya's policies were also increasingly hurting business. "He was against capitalism," Canahuati told Latin Business Chronicle in a telephone interview.
… Zelaya’s ouster was largely self-inflicted, he argues. “He used to be my friend,” Canahuati says. “But he committed the biggest mistake in his life. He followed advice from [Venezuelan president Hugo] Chavez [about changing the constitution and running for re-election].
Maybe Canahuati’s distain for Chavez explains why Noriega — an equally virulent critic of the Venezuelan president — is now seeking to bend the ear of the U.S. National Security Council with an agenda that seems to be hidden from public view, or at least not articulated adequately in his firm’s LDA filings.
Maybe, even in the United States, in the shadows of official Washington, a battle to define this era of Latin American history is being waged.
On one side are foreign oligarchs seeking to cloak their self-interested pecuniary agenda under the mantle of U.S. national security and from that concealed, disingenuous platform are working to trump even democracy.
On the other side, in the streets of Honduras, and from below all across the Americas, are the forces of authentic democracy, fighting back the only way they can — with their hearts, minds and the blood of their convictions.
Stay tuned ….

Links to Lobbying Records
• The Cormac Group
• Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP [Lanny Davis]
Vision Americas LLC [Roger Noriega]
• Lobbying Registration
• Quarterly Report
[URL="http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/Noriega.Quarter.Report.pdf"]http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/08/former-us-ambassador-roger-noriega-hired-push-honduran-putsch-agenda
[/URL]

[Magda Hassan]

A quick update.
The US have canceled the diplomatic visa for the coup mongers US Honduran embassy and those of their dependents. They have not however canceled any other visas such as tourist visas etc to visit co-conspirators and enablers such as Lanny Davis and Otto Reich etc. In any case it seems to have pissed to the coup mongers as they are now talking about the reciprocal right to cancel the visas of the US embassy staff in Honduras. They tried to cancel the visas of the Venezuelan embassy representatives but this was rejected by the Venezuelan mission who do not recognise the right of the coup mongers to do anything in the name of the Honduran government. So it is business as usual at the Venezuelan embassy.

The other day after Zelayas meeting in Nicaragua with the US ambassador to Honduras and other US agents First Lady of Honduras addressed the people of Honduras from the back of a truck. She said that the US State Department has given an ultimatum to the coup leaders to vacate within one week. Or else what I am not sure.

[Magda Hassan]

Otto Reich and the Honduran Coup D’Etat: The Provocateur, his Protege, and the Toppling of a President – Part One

July 30, 2009 · [/url]

The story of Otto Reich’s role in fomenting the June coup d’etat in Honduras is not a brief one. This report will be posted over two days.

OTTO REICH AND THE HONDURAN COUP D’ETAT:
The Provocateur, his Protégé, and the Toppling of a President (Part One)

By Machetera*
The very same day that the coup d’etat in Honduras began, in an emergency session of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington D.C., Roy Chaderton, the Venezuelan ambassador to the OAS, spoke with a simmering fury as he looked directly at Hector Morales, the U.S. Ambassador to the OAS.
“There’s a person who’s been very important within U.S. diplomacy, one who has re-connected with old friends and colleagues and helped encourage the coup perpetrators,” he said.

“The gentleman’s name is Otto Reich, former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs during the government of George [W.] Bush. We in Venezuela have suffered this man, as the U.S. Ambassador in Venezuela, as an interventionist, we suffered him later in his position as Assistant Secretary of State…we had the First Reich, later, the Second Reich, now unfortunately we’re facing the Third Reich, moving within the Latin American ambit through an NGO [non-governmental organization], to fan the flames of the coup.”

Following Chaderton’s furious denunciation, Reich penned a [url=http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1133623.html]strange non mea-culpa opinion piece which the Miami Herald obligingly printed, complete with Reich’s deliberate misspellings of Chaderton’s name. He said that he was not the coup’s “architect,” which is quite some distance from a total denial.
Shortly thereafter, news reports began to circulate about an unusual guest making the rounds in Tegucigalpa. He had checked into the Plaza Libertador Hotel under the pseudonym Armando Valladares, and was seen making frequent visits to the Presidential Palace and the National Congress. Armando Valladares was the Cuban prisoner who faked paralysis to gain worldwide support for his release, and went on to become chairman of a CIA-linked non-profit front group in New York: the Human Rights Foundation, until he resigned this July, angry that the Foundation had not supported the coup. The man traveling under his name was actually Robert Carmona-Borjas, Reich’s protégé and the notorious figurehead for yet another “non-profit” front group: the Arcadia Foundation. This was the NGO Chaderton was talking about. Until now, a detailed summary of Arcadia’s activities in Honduras has not been reported outside Latin America.
The story that emerged outside Honduras about Zelaya’s insistence on holding a public opinion poll being the trigger for the coup is only a partial one, because the effort to undermine Zelaya was proceeding on several tracks in the years leading up to the coup. A whispering campaign about corruption was one of them. Juiced with Reich’s contacts at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the Arcadia Foundation coordinated a farcically one-sided media campaign against the Honduran state telephone company, Hondutel, in order to create the public perception, similar to the accusations made some years ago against Haiti’s deposed president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, that Zelaya’s government was hopelessly corrupt from the top on down, and that Zelaya was unfit for the presidency.
Reich’s history in U.S./Latin American relations is a repellent one. He has worked tirelessly in support of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, helped the anti-Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch find shelter in the United States, and produced domestic anti-Sandinista propaganda for the Reagan White House, through the State Department Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America. In that post, he worked with a non-profit front group called Citizens for America to spread that propaganda throughout the U.S. press. He came to his final State Department post under such a cloud of controversy due to these activities and so many others just like them, that Bush II was forced to install him through a one-year recess appointment in 2001, in order to avoid a Congressional confirmation process that was likely to fail, not to mention dredge up unpleasant reminders. Once installed, Reich busied himself supporting the unsuccessful 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the successful 2004 coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.
Carmona-Borjas is a Venezuelan attorney who drafted the Carmona decree, named not for himself but for Pedro Carmona, to whom he bears no evident relation. Pedro Carmona seized power in Venezuela during the two days of the unsuccessful 2002 coup d’etat against Hugo Chávez. The Carmona decree was the document that dissolved the Constitution, the Congress and all other democratic institutions in Venezuela during those two days. Following his involvement in the failed coup, Carmona-Borjas sought and easily received political asylum in the United States.
Just as there were remarkable similarities in the kidnapping of President Aristide in 2004 in Haiti, and President Zelaya in Honduras, both being put on planes with the shades drawn and flown to unannounced destinations, there were similarities in the use of telecom as a propaganda tool to turn public opinion against them and set the groundwork for them to be prematurely removed from office, and once out, kept out.

A Brief History of Washington’s Relationship to Telecom
From a neoliberal political point of view there are two advantages to a propaganda offensive centered upon telecom corruption. The first is obvious. If telecom corruption can be tied directly to a leader who is not following Washington’s agenda, it promotes public support for the leader’s removal. The second is a little less obvious, but equally as important. It promotes the argument that telecom companies under state control really ought not to be, especially in underdeveloped countries, and would be better off privatized.
To make that argument, one must of course ignore the abundant evidence of telecom corruption in the United States, where men like Bernie Ebbers and Joseph Nacchio, who became telecom kingpins thanks to privatization (called “deregulation” in the U.S.) are serving federal prison terms for accounting fraud and insider trading. The fact is that telecom, as an essential service in the modern world, has always been a kind of money printing press, and the fight over state control vs. private control is all about who gets to control the switch, and what will be done with the profits.
ITT, which owned the Cuban phone company at the time of the revolution in 1959, was the first foreign owned property to be nationalized in Cuba, in 1961. In 1973, ITT was so fearful of repeating the experience in Chile that John McCone, a board member and former CIA man promised Henry Kissinger a million dollars to prevent Salvador Allende’s election. According to the U.S. Ambassador to Chile at the time, Edward Korry, ITT did pay $500,000 to a member of the compensation committee for expropriated properties in Chile, until Allende found out about the payments and nixed the compensation entirely.
In Venezuela in 2007, privatization was also reversed, and Verizon was paid $572 million for its share in the Venezuelan phone company, Cantv. This sent chills down the spine of every U.S. politician and telecom executive or consultant (like Reich) invested in expanding telecom privatization extra-territorially. And the chill was bipartisan. Democrats as well as Republicans had benefited equally from global privatization of the telecom mint.
As someone who counted AT&T and Bell Atlantic (Verizon) among his former (acknowledged) clients and a proven antipathy for leftist governments, Reich had plenty of motive. A front group disguised as a foundation would provide the opportunity.
A Brief History of Washington Front Groups
Political front groups are a relatively recent Washington phenomenon, at least on an overt basis. The CIA of course, has been in the front group business since its inception. But during the Reagan years, public front groups with pleasant names and non-profit status began to flourish. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is the largest federally funded non-profit front group, set up to funnel enormous amounts of money to the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Allan Weinstein, one of the NED’s founders, said “A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The NED was formed in 1983, the same year as the corporate funded non-profit Citizens For America, which received contributions from Northrup, Shell Oil, Chase Manhattan and a variety of right-wing tycoons to drive its anti-communist agenda.
The IRI and NDI provide money and resources to foreign groups working in support of U.S. foreign policy, which basically means that in non-capitalist countries or those with non-capitalist leanings, they fund whoever is in opposition. The corporate supported non-profit front group on the other hand usually has a domestic agenda and is above all, a propaganda tool, used to facilitate favorable press coverage that in turn drives policy. Relatively unencumbered by burdensome government reporting requirements, they are quite a bit more agile and can be comparatively opaque, both useful qualities in the propaganda business. In Latin America, where the press is highly concentrated in the hands of a small oligarchy, the front group provides a unique opportunity. When an oligarchy is eager to topple a leftist president, a front group can be a third-party source of useful allegations which can be printed without question, as well as a distanced, albeit fake, source of comment on reaction to those allegations, adding fuel to the fire. It’s a kind of self-licking ice-cream cone, and it is exactly the role Arcadia has played in Honduras.
The one thing this type of front group must be certain to do is file for non-profit status in the U.S. They therefore must make at least a passing effort to put together a plausible board of directors and a credible mission statement, and comply with tax and other public disclosure requirements. The Arcadia Foundation has the mission statement – a rambling treatise on democracy and civil society, but little else. Carmona-Borjas shares billing at the group with Betty Bigombe, a Ugandan World Bank consultant who appears to have lent Arcadia nothing beyond her name. Although Carmona-Borjas has insisted the group’s activities are entirely legal, he has concealed the documents he is required to make available to any member of the public upon request and is reportedly hostile to those who ask to see them.
Both Reich and Carmona-Borjas have denied Reich’s connection to the group, but a legal connection would have been both unnecessary and inconvenient. Reich could have worked the same way with Arcadia as he did with “Citizens For America,” without being legally tied to the group, and based on the available evidence it seems likely that this is exactly what he did.

The Launch

In the fall of 2007, the El Universal newspaper in Mexico printed a story based on a report it had received from the Arcadia Foundation. Interestingly, the report itself is not available at the Arcadia website, but there are clues to its contents and objectives in the newspaper stories which followed.
The report evidently contained allegations about corruption in the Honduran phone company, peppered with innuendo, a Reich trademark. It claimed that income to Honduras’s phone company, Hondutel, had declined by nearly 50% between 2005 and 2006. Out of the dozens, if not hundreds of companies involved in Honduran telecom, Arcadia exclusively targeted one: Cable Color, a company owned by the wealthy and influential Honduran family, the Rosenthals, for diverting calls away from Hondutel, thereby depriving the phone company of revenue.
It was an old horse that had seen service once before, in Haiti, against Aristide.
Interconnection and the Haiti Case
All international telecom traffic is subject to interconnection fees with the phone company in the country where the call is terminated. These interconnection fees are split 50/50 between the company sending the call and the company receiving the call so that they are only paid if there is an excess of traffic in one direction or another.
With underdeveloped countries such as Honduras or Haiti, there is an overwhelming excess of one-way traffic as a result of emigrants to the U.S. or other Western countries calling their families back home. It is precisely in these extremely poor countries, where the telephone company has not been privatized, that interconnection settlements represent a vital source of revenue to the state. Until recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) intervened on behalf of the multiple carriers who’d emerged as a result of privatization (deregulation) in the United States, to negotiate interconnection rates with other countries that would apply equally to all carriers. In 2004 the FCC’s intervention began to be phased out, and since 2006 it has vanished entirely except for a short list of countries that does not include Haiti or Honduras.
During the fixed-rate years, some U.S. companies still tried to get a better deal regardless, and while state owned companies such as Haiti’s Teleco and Honduras’s Hondutel were free to offer lower interconnection rates than those set by the FCC, they were supposed to be offering them equally to all carriers, not just a privileged few, so as not to make a mockery of the FCC’s system. If payments from the U.S. carrier were involved in securing the discount it would also be a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
This appears to be what occurred with IDT, a New Jersey telecom company that negotiated a special rate to interconnect with Haiti’s Teleco. The FCC’s rate at the time was supposed to be 23 cents per minute for connections to Haiti, but IDT negotiated and received a contract for 9 cents a minute. When a former IDT employee claimed that part of that fee was a kickback to Aristide, the anti-Aristide lobby went crazy.
The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady, followed by Lucy Komisar writing for another non-profit front group sponsored by a Haitian oligarch, the Haiti Democracy Project, claimed that Aristide knew of and personally benefited from the kickback. Before, corruption allegations against Aristide had tended to be confined to equally unproven insinuations about profiting from drug trafficking, such as those Reich provided to O’Grady when he sat down with her for an interview in 2002.
None of the defamatory allegations about Aristide’s involvement in any of the schemes could be proven, and a much publicized court case brought against Aristide by the Haitian (U.S.) puppet government was quietly shelved. But proving the case was secondary to floating the allegations, both as a propaganda tactic against Aristide, and political intimidation of his supporters in the U.S. Congress.

Grey Traffic
In Honduras, Arcadia had no “whistleblower” to rely on, like Michael Jewett, the ex-IDT employee who originally smeared Aristide and whose wrongful dismissal case provided much of the fuel for O’Grady’s and Komisar’s strident accusations. Carmona-Borjas would have to be a little more creative. The report he fed El Universal claimed that the Rosenthal’s company, Cable Color, had diverted the incoming international calls and turned them into “grey traffic.”
Grey traffic means that a call is being diverted to an Internet (IP) network rather than a switched one. Voice over IP (VoIP) which is essentially telecom over a broadband connection works this way – Skype and Vonage are both well-known varieties of this kind of service.
Theoretically, an internet service provider (ISP) could purchase lines from a regular phone company like Hondutel, but then use those lines to sell cheap international phone calls to its own customers, providing international phone service at a vastly discounted rate. This is said to be an exploding practice in Africa. The only problem with it is that it is usually illegal for an ISP to offer such a service – when phone calls are handled this way, the state or incumbent telephone company, quite naturally, prefers to make an interconnection agreement with whoever is buying the lines for voice purposes, so as not to completely lose out on the revenue.
Carmona-Borjas wasn’t claiming that Cable Color was ending up with the termination fees, as this would have been impossible. He just mentioned Hondutel’s traffic decline, pointed to Cable Color, said “grey traffic” and left the rest to the reader’s imagination. And he threw in a few extra details.
“According to the report,” said El Universal, “the Cable Color business is owned by the prominent Rosenthal family, with strong political and financial interests, and according to the document, is presently headed by Jaime Rosenthal, proprietor of the El Tiempo newpaper, the television Channel 11, and father of Yani Rosenthal, a presidential minister and someone who is considered in Honduras to be a potential presidential candidate.”
The report was likely fed first to the Mexican paper rather than the Honduran papers, because with the exception of El Tiempo, all are owned by Zelaya’s bitter opponents, the Canahuati Larach family, (Roberto Micheletti, the president of the Honduran National Congress, who would later rise to dictator in the 2009 coup, owns La Tribuna) and the self-interest in publishing such a report was a bit too obvious. Once the story had been safely floated in Mexico however, El Heraldo, La Prensa and La Tribuna were delighted to run with it and over the next two years, would go on to print Carmona-Borjas’s allegations whenever they surfaced (with frequency), always describing him as the “Vice President of an NGO based in Washington” and raising no questions whatsoever about his funding or other “anti-corruption” projects.
Jaime Rosenthal sent a letter to El Universal which said that the Arcadia report had been “planted” by someone “interested in divulging in Honduras what couldn’t [be published] or wasn’t convenient to publish directly within [Honduras itself].” Rosenthal pointed out that the decline in Hondutel’s revenues between 2005 and 2006 was directly attributable to the end of its monopoly on terminating international calls, which disappeared on December 31, 2005, when Hondutel opened contracts with two international cellphone service providers. International calls were valued at 16 U.S. cents per minute, he said, “but wireless providers don’t pay anything to Hondutel.”
In a subsequent radio debate between Carmona-Borjas and the Rosenthals, they also explained that Cable Color was in the business of selling phone lines to ISPs and whenever it found that the ISPs were illegally repackaging the service as telephone service rather than internet service, without the benefit of an interconnection agreement, it notified Hondutel, whose responsibility it was to take action.

Arcadia vs. Rosenthal
In that radio debate on September 12, 2007, Yani Rosenthal asked why, if Otto Reich had nothing to do with the Arcadia Foundation, his name had appeared on the foundation’s website until September 10th, and was then erased on September 11th? Carmona-Borjas initially avoided answering the question, insisting that the Foundation was legally set up within the United States and it had nothing against Yani personally – “…caramba! We congratulate him [on his campaign] and wish him the best…” returning to his accusation that Cable Color had 340 lines connected to Hondutel that were causing great losses for the phone company because they were being used for grey traffic.
Yani responded: “… yesterday when Mr. Roberto Carmona spoke with Channel 5, he said unequivocally that the honorable Otto Reich, whom he respects and deeply admires for being a fighter for democratic principles in the region had nothing to do with the Arcadia Foundation. These were his words, here you can see what he said last night on Channel 5 and here I’m showing you Arcadia’s website until September 10, where Otto Reich appeared. And then I show you that here, on September 11, the erasure of the list of the Arcadia Foundation’s members begins and also the report here that Robert Carmona himself signed and sent to Hondutel on July 14, 2006 was also copied to Ambassador Otto Reich. So, if Mr. Carmona will lie so shamelessly and obviously on something as simple as this where the lie can so easily be seen, what else will he lie about?….I can also show you communication between Cable Color and Hondutel, and how Cable Color cooperated with Hondutel so that Cable Color’s clients who dedicated themselves to this [illegal grey traffic] operation were punished. And Hondutel even knows about it, there were two businesses who had these numbers and their equipment was confiscated…”
Carmona-Borjas insisted again that Arcadia had nothing whatsoever to do with Reich, qualifying the statement by adding, “from a legal point of view,” and said that any columns that appeared at the Arcadia website were not even necessarily related to Arcadia, which was really more or less an open bulletin board, where even Rosenthal could express his ideas if he wished. (The only media reports on the Arcadia site then, and now, are those generated by Carmona-Borjas.)
The Rosenthals said they’d been forced to go to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa to explain the situation, since Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan/U.S. citizen, had so helpfully gone there first, supplying the Embassy with a copy of his Arcadia report.
Rasel Tomé, the president of the Honduran telecom regulatory authority CONATEL, joined in, adding that there were no complaints on record at CONATEL against Hondutel or Cable Color for grey traffic, to which Carmona-Borjas repeated that grey traffic was the only possible explanation for such a serious decline in revenue, insinuating that Tomé’s position was based on the fact that he had been the Rosenthal’s attorney for many years.
Tomé would find later find himself the focus of Carmona-Borjas’s unique contacts within the Honduran justice system, when shortly before the coup d’etat on June 28, 2009, he was ordered not to leave the country as a result of an investigation prompted by Carmona-Borjas and a business called Eldi, that had complained that Tomé, along with two other commissioners had illegally granted the license for television channel 12 to the Rosenthals, rather than Eldi.
The previous fall, Carmona-Borjas also filed a complaint at the Public Ministry against Tomé for illegal enrichment, based on the fact that he believed Tomé’s advertising campaign for a seat in the National Congress was so massive that Tomé could not possibly have afforded it.
In yet another radio debate, Tomé called Carmona-Borjas “an international blackmailer, a mercenary, who was being investigated for money laundering and was paid by powerful groups.” Tomé was running for Congress under the Micheletti wing of the Liberal Party.


The Circling Sharks

“What is going to happen in this country if the government no longer receives the important revenues that are going to be generated through Hondutel? We’ve come to this company with one mission from President Manuel Zelaya Rosales: We have to go out and defend this company, because they want to eat it like sharks, and that’s what we’re doing, defending it tooth and nail and only with the collaboration of certain friends who are opening this kind of space for us.”
- Marcelo Chimirri, Hondutel Director, September 13, 2007 (From an interview conducted 5 days after Arcadia’s corruption accusations were first reported.)

Arcadia would wage its “grey traffic” crusade in Honduras from September 2007 until the present. Carmona-Borjas first targeted the Rosenthal media family, but his focus and passion quickly began to shift to the fertile territory offered by Marcelo Chimirri Castro, Hondutel’s director.
If you were to look for the colorful personification of a character from a Latin telenovela, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Marcelo Chimirri. Born in Sicily to an Italian father and Honduran mother who later returned to Honduras, he bears a passing resemblance to Antonio Banderas and has a fondness for thoroughbred horses, luxury vehicles, Harley Davidsons and beautiful women. He did appear in Arcadia’s original report, in a deeply slanderous way: “despite having been considered innocent, [Chimirri] remains the object of attention by the Honduran attorney general for the death of his ex-girlfriend Yadira Miguel Mejia, and for threats and aggressive behavior toward journalists.” Another man was convicted for that crime, and there are no indications new evidence exists, yet Arcadia had no qualms about trying to connect him to a brutal murder. Chimirri is also the nephew of Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro.
Like Zelaya, he is plainspoken, and appears to have a sense of humor. After many months of being hounded by Carmona-Borjas, Chimirri finally told El Heraldo that the reason Carmona-Borjas could not stop talking about him was that he was fatally attracted to him.
Arcadia’s contacts within the Honduran justice system may have been unusual but they were trivial compared with its connections to the U.S. Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Carmona-Borjas informed La Prensa that two small U.S. telecom companies who had interconnection contracts with Hondutel had transferred $70,000 to the bank account of a business owned by Chimirri: Inversiones Chicas, or Inverchicas (Little Investments), and helpfully supplied the dates of the transfers and the bank account number. The newspaper had no questions about how Carmona-Borjas would have come by such specific information, which Chimirri denied, explaining that Inverchicas had long since closed by the time of the supposed transfers.
Carmona-Borjas insisted that Chimirri had overseen not only the grey traffic diversion, which he claimed had robbed Hondutel of some $48 million dollars, but also that the payments to Inverchicas were indicative of a bribe of some kind.
Micheletti, who at that time presided over the Honduran Congress and had held Chimirri’s important position as director of Hondutel in the late 1990’s, weighed in early on Carmona-Borjas’s accusations. “Those responsible for grey traffic deserve to go to jail, just like any other criminal,” he said.
The Cobra Raid and the Wiretapping
It wasn’t long before Arcadia’s whispering campaign bore fruit, and in early November, 2007, the state-sponsored Cobra paramilitary force launched dramatic and violent raids on Hondutel’s offices, as well as Chimirri’s home. Chimirri said guns had been pointed at his children’s heads. A year and a half later, TeleSUR’s president, Andrés Izarra, would identify the Cobra squadron as the force responsible for monitoring and threatening TeleSUR journalists reporting on the aftermath of the coup, that is, until they were thrown out of the country.
The justification for the raid was that Chimirri was accused of “abuse of authority, illegal weapons possession, and revelation of secrets.” Zelaya was furious about it, and called it a brutal assault on Chimirri’s family, that better belonged in a terror film, and said that a simple citation summoning the Hondutel officials to court would have sufficed.
A couple of weeks earlier, on October 22, President Zelaya had filed a complaint for telephone espionage, after his phone was illegally tapped without his knowledge and he was taped speaking to subordinates, including Chimirri, about strategies to control hostile press coverage and emerging problems with Micheletti. Two other Hondutel employees were charged with participation in the wiretapping: Oscar Danilo Santos, and Luis Alejandro Arriaga.
Arcadia helpfully posted the criminally obtained recordings on YouTube.

The Mounting Accusations
The U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa didn’t wait for the case against Chimirri to work its way through the Honduran courts. On January 24, 2008 it announced that Chimirri was no longer allowed to enter the United States, because of his links to “serious cases of public corruption.” With an Italian passport, Chimirri had never needed a visa but now even that would not get him through U.S. customs. Visas had always been a Reich specialty.
Then the dead bodies showed up. On Friday, February 8, four people were found dead inside a truck with Guatemalan license plates, under a bridge. They had been shot and later set on fire.
Again, Carmona-Borjas surged forward with an explanation. Two of the bodies were Guatemalan, a third was unidentifiable, and the last was said to have been a computer technician by the name of Alejandro Laprade Rodriguez. According to Carmona-Borjas, Laprade had come to Washington on March 27, 2007 to deliver a 49 minute tape recording which he claimed was proof of an extortion attempt by Hondutel employees. Laprade claimed that they had raided his business for no reason whatsoever and demanded $100,000 so as not to be hauled directly to jail. This too was posted by Arcadia to YouTube.
The fact that the crime scene looked very much like a drug deal gone bad was for Carmona-Borjas only proof of the opposite and he insisted it was all a big show. Having no ability to oblige Carmona-Borjas to come to Honduras, and with Carmona-Borjas, (like his mentor) refusing to come anyway because of what he called “the prevailing climate of insecurity in the country,” the Public Prosecutor who was responsible for investigating the supposed extortion spoke of going to Washington to interview Carmona-Borjas.
By the end of March, La Prensa published a report that said that forensic specialists had positively ID’d one of the burned bodies as Laprade, with 21 matches between the teeth of one of the cadavers, and a mold that Laprade’s dentist happened to have on hand. But several days later, the head of the Honduran Police Detective Force (DGIC), Francisco Murillo Lopez, said not so fast. “A dental analysis is credible when 75 points coincide,” not 21, he said, “and when it is done by a dental forensic specialist…As a police detective I respect the position of the Public Ministry, but I believe that this case ought to be examined further and as a detective, I have my doubts,” he added. He also asked to see the preliminary DNA results for all four cadavers.
Carmona-Borjas shot back, dismissing Murillo’s comments and throwing some new information into the mix. He claimed that just days before Laprade was murdered, he had called Carmona-Borjas again, claiming this time to have a tape of Marcelo Chimirri confessing his involvement in grey traffic. Unfortunately, Laprade’s computer expertise did not appear to extend to YouTube uploads, and Carmona-Borjas did not have a copy of the tape because he claimed that Laprade had been looking for a way to deliver it to him without raising suspicion, when he disappeared.
With his fondness for the collective pronoun combined with strategic insinuation, Carmona-Borjas said, “We told him that he should be extremely careful considering that…Marcelo Chimirri had been linked at one time between 1997 and 1998 to the crime against the young girl, Yadira Mejia.” After that, he said, he did not hear from Laprade again. The tape has never been proven to exist.
Over the summer and fall of 2008, Carmona-Borjas would continue to stalk Chimirri, but he also began to turn up the heat against Arcadia’s real target. At the end of July, he reportedly presented a formal complaint against President Zelaya, at the Honduran embassy in Washington, accusing him of acting against the legal order in Honduras and against democratic principles. It was a shot across the bow.
Real Corruption of No Interest Whatsoever to Arcadia
Suddenly, at the beginning of April, 2008, the tension between the Public Prosecutor’s office (Public Ministry, in Honduras) and the National Congress erupted into something extraordinary. Four prosecutors began a hunger strike on April 6, which they held on the ground floor of the National Congress building. The motive for the strike had its origins in 14 records of supposed corruption involving “well known figures, influential in the country’s political and economic sector” which had been shelved for years without any follow-up or investigation, let alone public revelation of their names.
As the hunger strike continued, it gained sympathizers and by the time a month had gone by, 22 additional people from a wide variety of organizations had joined the original four prosecutors, among them two priests and the evangelical Pastor Evelio Reyes.
After Pastor Reyes interceded, the Honduran Congress named a commission to mediate, consisting of Ramón Custodio, the commissioner for Human Rights and the executive secretary of the National Anti-Corruption Council, Juan Ferrera. The fasting prosecutors rejected the idea of mediation. Both Ferrera and Custodio went on to support the illegal coup government of Roberto Micheletti the following year.
Micheletti’s own proposal for resolving the standoff involved bringing the complaint to the Organization of American States (OAS); a proposal that was also rejected by the prosecutors, who insisted that the problem be addressed in Honduras. The prosecutors were also demanding that the current Attorney General, Leonidas Rosa Bautista and the Assistant Attorney General, Omar Cerna, step down, for having engaged in illegal activities.
President Zelaya supported the group, visiting them at the National Congress and also asking that Cerna resign, saying “The real problem in Honduras is that the law is not applied to those who break it.”
The Honduran press and those allied with the Attorney General characterized the strike as an attempt by the president to replace the AG and his assistant with people from his own Liberal Party, rather than the National Party that the two belonged to. The prosecutors rejected this, insisting that they simply wanted an investigation into the reasons for the Public Ministry’s weakness, and a review of the cases of organized crime, corruption and environmental and human rights abuses which had never been punished.
Cerna refused to resign, saying that it would be a terrible precedent, and in a refrain that would come to be repeated by the putschists a year later, added that his decision to reject the president’s request, was really a “strengthening of institutions and democracy [in Honduras].”
For his part, the astonishingly arrogant Rosa Bautista denied that he had done anything improper, and anyway, if he had, he had done it while in private practice as a trial lawyer, and not as an administrator. Therefore, Decree 49-2008, which was passed by the Congress the previous year to provide sanctions for administrative offenses did not apply to him. Furthermore, he said that people were confusing the issue, that he was actually more like a judge, not a run of the mill administrator, and as a sort-of-judge, he was subject to the Supreme Court rather than the National Congress. He threatened to go to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to ask that precautionary measures be taken to guarantee his freedoms as well as the freedoms of the Public Ministry.
Despite his declarations, the public demonstrations in support of the hunger strikers were clearly beginning to unnerve Rosa Bautista, and he began traveling in cars provided by the Secretary of Defense. “If the people’s protests for the benefit of the media had taken place within the framework of the Constitution, something would have been done a long time ago,” he said. “But these threats to the peace, to the freedom of the press, the demonstrations, the irresponsible accusations of everyone…we should return to peace and tranquility.”
It ought to have been a prime opportunity for the anti-corruption crusader from Washington to weigh in, and finally Carmona-Borjas did. He was convinced the whole hunger strike was nothing but theatre and accused the hunger strikers of lounging on comfortable Coleman brand camping mattresses, sustaining themselves with energy drinks, energy bars and Evian. Why all the fuss over a few corruption cases when there was grey traffic to be dealt with and Chimirri on the loose?
Carmona-Borjas directed most of his wrath at Pastor Reyes however, an interesting choice considering that Reyes came out in support of the coup a year later, but like many sectors in Honduras, the evangelical’s relation to politics is complicated and cannot be distilled into a simple right-wing/left-wing narrative. No stranger himself to the charms of an expensive suit, Carmona-Borjas lashed out in a radio “debate” at the pastor for his luxurious attire worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars” (sic) and gold Rolex.
In return, Reyes delivered what must have been a far more cutting insult to Carmona-Borjas. He had never heard of him.
A month and a half after it began, the hunger strike ended, when a commission of congressional representatives was named to investigate Rosa Bautista and Cerna. The commission went nowhere. One of the four original hunger strikers, Jari Dixon Herrera, said that the commission’s report “did not surprise us much, it’s what they were going to do [all along], they were never going to allow those cases to be reviewed.” Referring to Rosa Bautista and Cerna, he added, “Nor were they going to allow their best two workers inside the Public Ministry to be exposed, seeing as they’ve protected so many.”
Latinode
In April of 2009, Arcadia’s accusations against Hondutel finally gained traction when a $2 million fine was leveled by the U.S. federal court for the Southern District of Florida against Latinode, a telecom company that was fined under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for supposedly paying more than a million dollars in bribes to “third parties” that were then to pass “some or all of those funds” to Hondutel employees in order to receive a discount on their interconnection rates. (IDT on the other hand was sanctioned by the FCC in the Haitian telecom case, but no FCPA case has ever been brought against it.)
Latinode had been under investigation by the FBI and the Miami office of U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to the Department of Justice (DOJ) news release on the settlement, Latinode also bribed officials in Yemen to receive interconnection discounts. DOJ said that Latinode received interconnection discounts between 2004 and 2007, and that the payments were meant to eventually go to five Hondutel employees. The “intended payment recipients” were not named, but the “deputy general manager (who later became the general manager)” could only be Chimirri.
Hondutel denied it, and said that an internal audit performed between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2007 had revealed discrepancies in Latinode’s traffic that eventually reached $4.6 million dollars owed to Hondutel. Paying a $2 million fine (over a three year period, according to DOJ) in Miami and shutting Latinode down was therefore a no-brainer, especially for eLandia, the Coral Gables telecom firm that had paid $25 million to purchase Latinode in 2007.
But the DOJ news release had another curious note. It said “The resolution of the criminal investigation of Latinode reflects, in large part, the actions of Latinode’s corporate parent, eLandia International Inc. (eLandia), in disclosing potential FCPA violations to the Department of Justice after eLandia’s acquisition of Latinode and post-closing discovery of the improper payments. “
Similarly to Arcadia, the made-in-Washington front group, the Latinode case has the flavor of a made-in-Miami event. Despite the DOJ English language press release, neither Arcadia nor the Latinode case are very important for U.S. consumption, yet they are playing significant political roles in Honduras. Although the DOJ’s settlement with Latinode does not prove the guilt of any Hondutel employee, that is exactly how Arcadia and the coup government have interpreted it, and spread it through the media. When Chimirri and other officials of the Zelaya administration were arrested on July 2, 2009, the sole evidence cited by the pro-coup press relates to the Latinode accusations made public by the U.S. court settlement. The same federal court in Miami tried the Cuban Five case and the recent “suitcase scandal” case, demonstrating that the DOJ there is not above politicizing events in order to serve hard-right foreign policy objectives in Latin America.
The New Third Reich

“[This] huge network of people who are going after communications, not just in Honduras but in Central America – the same who achieved their objective in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua where they managed to totally privatize the telecommunications sector without a single benefit to the people…So they already have a perfectly planned out scheme through which they are taking over all telecoms in Central America.”

- Marcelo Chimirri, September 13, 2007 interview

Emerging from the shadows, Reich could not resist the opportunity to comment on the Miami case: “President Zelaya has allowed or encouraged these kinds of practices and now we’ll see that he’s behind this as well,” he told Miami’s El Nuevo Herald. He also referenced Chimirri for the first time in the U.S. press, casually mentioning the family connection (to the Zelayas) and the fact that he’d been accused in Honduras of a series of illegal acts in regard to his management of Hondutel contracts. He did not mention Chimirri’s accuser.
For Zelaya, it was the last straw. Two members of his cabinet as well as his personal secretary were sent to the U.S. to hire legal counsel to sue Reich for defamation. The secretary, Enrique Reina, said that Reich was upset because Hondutel had cancelled the interconnection contract of a firm he represented.
Carmona-Borjas weighed in, repeating his accusation to the Honduran media that Zelaya had acted “unconstitutionally.”
Zelaya would have little time to press the case. Two months later he was awoken by the Cobra paramilitary force which shot its way into his house and put him on a plane to Costa Rica, still wearing his pajamas.
In his strange non-denial op-ed for the Miami Herald, Reich taunted Zelaya, claiming that a little thing like a coup d’etat was no reason for him not to proceed with his defamation lawsuit, and in floating the accusations against Chimirri, inflated the amount of missing Hondutel funds from $48 to $100 million.
The CAFTA Link
The explanation for the wild price inflation may have less to do with Reich’s penchant for hyperbole than it does with CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The pressure to privatize Hondutel did not materialize until CAFTA was implemented. It is a key piece of the neoliberal puzzle, even expanding multinational corporations’ rights in Central America to include the ability to sue for “lost” or “future” profits under a clause that protects companies from “measures equivalent to expropriation.” (CAFTA-DR Treaty, Article 10.7)
CAFTA clearly states that legitimate state actions such as the enacting of environmental and consumer protection laws, may trigger Article 10.7 and allow U.S. corporations to sue signatory countries for all of the money that they might have made otherwise. Illegitimate government actions such as corruption are therefore definitely covered, and mere accusations of corruption could provide the fulcrum to pressure governments into settling in the secret tribunals of ICSID, the World Bank’s arbitration court. But that may not be necessary, since Reich is a self-proclaimed expert in handling “anti-corruption activities, political risk analysis and non-litigious dispute settlement” for US multinationals in Latin America. His backdoor expertise can make it so that multinationals never have to publicly make these immoral and reputation-damaging arguments.
Given Reich’s telecom ties, not to mention those of the Cormac Group and those of Hillary Clinton’s friend, Lanny Davis, who set up a press and congressional lobbying tour in Washington for the Honduran coup regime, the possibility of a future lawsuit of this type cannot be discounted. CAFTA’s rules regarding such lawsuits are broader than NAFTA’s infamous Chapter 11, and such threats are already being utilized by multinationals to pressure the cash-strapped governments of El Salvador and Guatemala into handing over millions.
The Aftermath
Reich admitted to having engaged in “pointing to Zelaya as the enabler of the corruption in Honduras” and added, “had I really been the ‘architect’ of Zelaya’s removal, I would had (sic) advised that he be charged with the almost 20 crimes with which the Honduran Judiciary has now charged him, and be arrested by civilian authorities. I would have urged that the constitutional process be followed: the elevation to the presidency of the next-in-line, President of the Congress Roberto Micheletti, and the continuation of the electoral process, culminating in a November election.”
Except for omitting the part about flying the president to Costa Rica, this was how the coup played out, to the letter, although Reich coyly insisted these events unfolded “without my involvement.”
To La Prensa in Honduras, Reich once again denied any legal association with Arcadia. “I’m not a member of the Arcadia Foundation. I know the Arcadia Foundation very well and the work it has done.” It was exactly the kind of statement he could have made 25 years earlier about Citizens For America.
For his part, Carmona-Borjas fulminated to what was left of the Honduran press about how kicking TeleSUR out of Honduras was not really restricting anyone’s freedom of expression, adding jabs at CNN en Español for not completely ignoring demonstrations in support of Zelaya, and of course, his pet target, Chimirri.
In Honduras, with Zelaya safely out of the way, the new putschist leaders would crank up the witch hunt, nabbing Chimirri and other Zelaya officials post-haste and sending them directly to the national penitentiary, but not without personally introducing Carmona-Borjas at a pro-coup rally and commending him for being the first to incriminate Hondutel and thanking him for Chimirri’s arrest.

An order was issued to Interpol for the capture of the Hondutel employees implicated in the Latinode case: Jorge Alberto Rosa, Julio Daniel Flores, and Oscar Danilo Santos. Charges were also concocted against Rixi Moncada, who was one of the people Zelaya had earlier sent to Miami to hire the firm to sue Reich, and who would play a visible role at the mediation talks with Oscar Arias, arranged by Hillary Clinton. Rebeca Santos, and Aristides Mejía, formerly associated with the state electric company were also targeted.
Although Arcadia’s role was unreported and therefore unknown outside Honduras, the Venezuelans and Hondurans understood it completely. Ambassador Chaderton promised to forward a dossier on the matter to the U.S. mission to the OAS, and in an interview with La Jornada following his remarks to the OAS, Chaderton said they had “absolutely no doubts about it.”
In Latin America, there are many more important state companies to be targeted for privatization, and if not, many more leftist leaders who remain to be convinced or toppled. Meanwhile in Washington, the Arcadia Foundation still exists, like a sleeper cell, awaiting its master’s voice.
http://machetera.wordpress.com/2009/08/0...-part-two/

[Magda Hassan]

I have recently heard that Ivan Marovich is in Honduras giving workshops in 'How to Remove a Dictator' or some such thing. Before he was in Honduras he was in Iran during the post election debacle running similar workshops. He originally got started in Otpor a group in Serbia and a NED front, of which he was a co-ordinator, which was instrumental in the overthrow of Milosevic. Now, Ivan, if it is indeed the same one, may just be a man who is generous with his time and skillls in helping other overthrow their governments and has a family who can pay for all this travel and accommodation and expenses. Let's hope so. When I asked who was funding him and who he worked for over at Narco News site my post was removed from the comments section. Perhaps my post did not conform with their rules. I don't know. I just know that when I worked in community work it was next to impossible to get the money one would need to that sort of workshop all over the world. I would love to access his network, assuming it come string free. God knows the world sure does need more real democracy and freedom and justice.

I sure would hate the current Honduran popular resistance to be led right up the garden path away from its chance at true sovreignty and democracy by the National Endowment for Democracy, an organisation which is so far from trasparent and democratic in practice and outcome. None of its colour revolutions have ever delivered the real democracy and freedom for the people of any country in which they have been imposed and manipulated. However, the NED has always some how managed to deliver for the State Department a pliant local right wing clique who are willing to do Washington's bidding. I am wondering if the NED's interest in Honduras may be to guide the Honduran resistence to help impose the lesser of two evils by removing the current golpistas and having ready a nicer kinder more photogenic post-modern neo-liberal friendly clique to insert into government instead and all the while still being able to shaft the majority of Honduran people and keep them in the underclasses and away from real power over their country.

Some info about Otpor:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Otpor

Otpor

From SourceWatch


[/url]
Otpor was a Serbian political youth group formed ahead of the 2000 elections. The group has a wesbite (http://www.otpor.com), but it is a single page with the group's symbol and nothing else.


From Wikipedia

Otpor! ([url=http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cyrillic&action=edit]Cyrillic: ОТПОР!) was a pro-democracy youth movement in Serbia which is widely credited for leading the eventually successful struggle to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. It was formed in October 1998 as a response to repressive University and Media laws that were introduced that year. In the beginning Otpor had activities at Belgrade University. In the aftermath of NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia, Otpor started a political campaign against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. This resulted in nation wide police repression against Otpor activists during which almost 2000 of them were arrested and some beaten. During the presidential campaign in September 2000 Otpor launch "Gotov je" (He's finished) campaign that galvanized Serbian discontent with Milosevic and resulted in his defeat. Some students who led Otpor (whose name means "Resistance" in the Serbian language) used Serb translations of Gene Sharp's writings on nonviolent action as a theoretical basis for their campaign.
…
Otpor was instrumental in inspiring and training several other civic youth organizations in Eastern Europe, including Kmara in the republic of Georgia (itself partly responsible for the downfall of Eduard Shevardnadze), Pora in Ukraine (currently involved in protests following the Ukrainian presidential election, 2004), Zubr in Belarus (opposing president Alexander Lukashenko), and MJAFT! in Albania.
From Diana Johnstone, Fool's Crusade

The U.S. NED provided millions of dollars and training in "methods of nonviolent action" to a network of young activists calling itself Otpor (resistance) with no political program other than the desire to "be normal" on Western terms. Otpor youth plastered walls with posters of clenched fists and tried to get arrested in order to denounce the "regime" as repressive.
In the first round held on 24 September 2000, Milosevic failed to gain re-election. Official results gave Kostunica over 48 per cent of the vote in a five-man race. This fell slightly short of the 50 per cent required to win, but indicated an almost certain landslide in the runoff against Milosevic, who trailed by some ten percentage points. (Yugoslav electoral law calls for a second round if no candidate wins an absolute majority in the first round.) Not satisfied with this prospect of a certain victory at the ballot box, DOS (democratic opposition of Serbia) claimed a first round victory and announced it would boycott the second round. This heightened tension and provided an opportunity for the Otpor agitators to take matters into their own hands. The DOS thereby moved the contest from the ballot box onto the streets. The result was the spectacle of the 5 October 'democratic revolution', when a large crowd stormed the Skupstina, the parliament building in the center of Belgrade. Presented to the world public in the as a spontaneous act of self-liberation, the event was staged for television cameras, which filmed and relayed the same scenes over and over again: youths breaking through windows, flags waving, flames rising, smoke enveloping the parliament building, described as "the symbol of the Milosevic regime". —Fool's Crusade, p. 257.

Training and the players

The training and organizing of the Otpor agents was a lengthy and costly operation. This article summarizes how it was done and who was involved:
While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.
During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.
Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharp, whom he describes as "the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement," referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist.[1]

Otpor Activities

Otpor type of activities entail organizing a militant section of society to instill cynicism in the government, drown out the government's message, and convey the impression that there is broad based support for the opposition. Its activities amount to disrupting the government's message and tarnish its image. NB: the same formula has been re-used in Ukraine, Georgia, Albania and Belarus. Otpor's principal activities were:

• graffiti encouraging cynism against those in power. Or as Michael Dobbs put it: "U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan 'He's Finished,' which became the revolution's catchphrase."[Dobbs op. cit.]
  
• leafleting
  
• massed concentrations with flags for the benefit of foreign (CNN) camera crews
  
• Organizing student groups
  
• Shouting down government speakers at public events
  
• Hostile questioning of government officials and demanding resignation; booing…
  

Funding Sources and Training (alpha order)

• Freedom House (Mowat, op. cit.)
  
• International Republican Institute (IRI) (Mowat, op. cit.)
  
• National Endowment for Democracy
  
• Open Society Institute
  
• USAID – Financed T-shirts, stickers, spray-paint (Ackerman, quoted in Mowat, op. cit.)
  
• United States Institute of Peace (Dobbs, op. cit.)
  

SourceWatch Resources

• Swarming Youths
  
• Nenad Belcevic
  

References about Otpor

• PBS series, Bringing Down a Dictator, PBS, 2002. NB: this documentary portrays Optor in a positive light — no references to its origin or possible CIA relationship. Note that the director of the film is Jack DuVall, the producer is Peter Ackerman, and the film was produced for ICNC. Read the history of this film under DuVall's biography.
  
• Roger Cohen, "Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?", New York Times Sunday Magazine, Nov. 26, 2000.
  
• Michael Dobbs, ""U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition: Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple Authoritarian Leader", Washington Post, December 11, 2000.
  
• Interview with Srdja Popovic of Otpor, National Public Radio, March 20, 2002.
  
• Diana Johnstone, Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press, 2002, p. 257.
  
• Stephen Mulvey, Behind the scenes at Kiev's rally, BBC Online, Nov. 28, 2004. States: "Natalia is the deputy leader for the Kiev region of a student protest group called Pora, modelled on the Serbian group Otpor, which played a key role in the ousting of Slobodan Milosevic. In spring she attended lectures in Kiev by Otpor leader Alexander Maric".
  
• Brian Pozun, Planning for an Uncertain Future, CE Review, Feb. 26, 2001. References to Otpor post-Milosevic. (CE Review has been renamed TOL).
  
• Daan van der Schriek, Georgia: How good the revolution has been!, World Press Review, Dec. 7, 2003
  
• Jonathan Mowat, "The new Gladio in action?: Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template", Online Journal, March 19, 2005. Contains descriptions of the operators behind the manipulation of Otpor, and who financed this.
  

My small dog always chases after the bus and barks madly at it. When the bus drives away up the street he returns home and is very pleased with himself that he has managed to chase that really big thing away from his territory. If a bunch of students want to think that they were responsible for the overthrow of a dictator out of favor with the US who am I to shatter their illusions.

[Magda Hassan]

...as he attempts to defend the indefensible. Made my day.
http://casa-del-duderino.blogspot.com/20...crash.html

[Peter Lemkin]

...as he attempts to defend the indefensible. Made my day.
http://casa-del-duderino.blogspot.com/20...crash.html

The very fact he represents the Honduran Business Elite which are the surrogates in large part for the US Multinationals who do business there and treat the country as part of our 'backyard' - says it all. He might as well be working for Chicita...and in fact is...and other such. Nice traincrash. I wish him many more.

[Magda Hassan]

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


http://narcosphere.narconews.com/noteboo...ding-putsc

[Magda Hassan]

US Secretary of State Clinton’s Micro-Management of the Corporation that Funds the Honduras Coup Regime

Records Demonstrate that the Secretary Has Hands-On Control of the Fund that Gave $6.5 Million to the Regime After the June 28 Coup


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

August 11, 2009
In recent days, Narco News has reported that, in the three months prior to the June 28 coup d’etat in Honduras, the US-funded Millennium Change Corporation (MCC) gave at least $11 million US dollars to private-sector contractors in Honduras and also that since the coup it has doled out another $6.5 million.
The latter revelation – that the money spigot has been left on even after the coup – comes in spite of claims by the State Department that it has placed non-humanitarian funding “on pause” pending a yet-unfinished review.
Narco News has further learned – based on a review documents available on the websites of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the US State Department – that Secretary Clinton, as chairman of the MCC board, is not just a figurehead in name only. She has played an extremely active role in governing and promoting the fund and its decisions.
An August 6 statement by MCC acting chief executive officer Darius Mans praises Clinton and President Obama for their balls-out support of MCC:

Now, well into a new administration and era, I am encouraged by the level of support MCC has been given by Congress and senior government leaders. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, chair of MCC’s board, confirms, “President Obama supports the MCC, and the principle of greater accountability in our foreign assistance programs.” The Secretary herself has referred to Millennium Challenge grants as a “very important part of our foreign policy. It is a new approach, and it’s an approach that we think deserves support.” Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew has said, “MCC is getting off the ground and making real progress.

Secretary Clinton’s official “blog” at the State Department reveals that the June 10 meeting of MCC’s board – just 18 days before the Honduras coup – was on the Secretary’s schedule:

Here’s what Hillary has on her plate for today, June 10th:
10:00 a.m. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Board Meeting and Luncheon.


Last March, the previous MCC acting executive director Rodney Bent wrote:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chaired her first MCC Board meeting this week. I was pleased to be part of this historic transition, and I welcomed Secretary Clinton’s active participation at the meeting. Her presence and the presence of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other public and private sector Board members signal the importance of MCC’s ongoing commitment to delivering change in the lives of the world’s poor.

A recent move by the Clinton-led MCC board documents that the US-funded corporation has already discussed the cutting of funds to another Central American country, Nicaragua, based on criticism of its government, and that this was the topic of MCC’s June 10 session, chaired by Secretary Clinton. The Christian Science Monitor reported:

LEÓN, NICARAGUA - US concerns over last year’s questionable municipal elections in Nicaragua could be strong enough to cause leftist President Daniel Ortega, a cold-war nemesis of the US, to lose $64 million in development aid. In a Wednesday meeting with the board of directors of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an international development initiative started during the Bush administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will discuss whether to cancel the remaining portion of a $175 million compact awarded in 2006.
In December, the US government froze new aid after expressing serious concern about “the government of Nicaragua’s manipulation of municipal elections and a broader pattern of actions inconsistent with the MCC eligibility criteria.”

At the June 10 meeting, the MCC board approved partially terminating the agency’s foreign-aid compact with Nicaragua — resulting in some $62 million in U.S. foreign aid being withheld from that nation, which shares a border with Honduras. And in May o f this year, the Clinton-led MCC board approved the termination of the agency’s compact with Madagascar in the wake of a coup in that nation. However, no such action has been taken by the MCC board, to date, in the wake of the Honduran coup.
In the context of President Obama’s statement last weekend that those who urge the US to take stronger action against the Honduras coup regime “think that it’s appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate,” calling it “hypocrisy.” The revelation that Clinton and MCC have already sanctioned the elected government of Nicaragua and its private sector in ways that it so far refuses to sanction the illegal coup regime of Honduras and its private backers has revealed one important fact: That Washington has already determined that “it’s appropriate” to deny MCC funds to a country for lighter and more transient reasons than those that exist to sanction a coup regime in another.
Didn’t a certain US President, last weekend, speak the word “hypocrisy” in the context of the US and the Honduras coup?
If “it’s appropriate” to sanction Nicaragua for lesser reasons, why not apply the sanction of denying MCC funds to a criminal coup regime in Honduras that Washington claims it has “paused” giving money, but that it continues to fund?
http://www.narconews.com/Issue59/article3760.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda - more excellent information.

Deep black hypocrisy.

Hillary Rodham Clinton may not be channelling her husband. But her ass is certainly owned........

[Keith Millea]

Magda - more excellent information.

Deep black hypocrisy.

Hillary Rodham Clinton may not be channelling her husband. But her ass is certainly owned........

Who would want to own that ass??????:vroam: