03/15/16 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got Steven Zunis, Dr. Steven Zunis, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.
And he's got this very important article here, the U.S. role in the Honduras coup and subsequent violence.
He's in The National Catholic Reporter at ncronline.org.
Welcome back to the show, Steven.
How are you?
Good to be with you again.
Greetings from New Zealand.
Oh, wow, New Zealand, huh?
Good times.
Yeah, you do get around, don't you?
Yeah, I'm a visiting professor this year at the National Center of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago.
Wow.
I'm in the city of Dunedin on the South Island, and it's just before dawn here tomorrow, your time.
Awesome.
Well, thanks for doing this.
I appreciate that, especially at an off time like that, so early in the morning.
All right.
So, yeah, I really appreciate that.
Now, so I know you have limited time, busy morning over there tomorrow.
So tell us quickly, you got 10 minutes.
What exactly, as best you could tell, was America's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's role in the coup d'etat before, after the fact, accessory, however you want to describe it, or whatever you want, Manuel Zelaya, the coup of Manuel Zelaya in 2009 in Honduras?
Yeah, Manuel Zelaya was a democratically elected president who came from a kind of establishment mainstream party.
He was from a wealthy landowning family, but he recognized how desperately the country was needed in reforms, and he built new schools, helped public transportation, got a free and discount on school lunches, and milk for young children, pensions for the elderly, scholarship for students, raised the minimum wage, things like that that make Washington kind of nervous where he placed, we had a lot of foreign investment and the like.
There was a coup by these military officers.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say nervous, I mean, I think you mean not just that they want that money, but that they're afraid he's going to start nationalizing foreign owned property, right?
But do they have any reason to fear that, really?
No, no, not really.
Just because he's buying school lunches and stuff?
Yeah, the guy was a capitalist, but he believed that when you had gross inequality, the government should play at least some role in helping out the inequities and making the market work a little better if you don't have a bunch of foreign companies running everything, hiring small business people and the like.
The person who led the coup was a graduate of the School of the Americas, the notorious training center at Fort Benning, Georgia, where we brought in a whole bunch of officers who later ended up staging military coups.
Now, I found no evidence that the United States itself was responsible for the coup itself, but what was really important was what happened immediately afterwards.
The Organization of American States, all these Latin American countries said, hey, this is illegitimate, let's not go back to the bad old days of military coups.
We don't recognize this new government, Zelaya needs to come back and complete his term.
If you don't like him, the people can vote him out, but don't force him out through force.
That's when Hillary Clinton came in and said, oh, not so fast, let's just negotiate some kind of compromise here.
Let's not have Zelaya come back, let's let these guys rule for a while, let's have some elections under their military rule, and let's put this stuff, let's keep Zelaya out of power, and let's let the new guys kind of set the direction for Honduras, and that's what has happened, and there have been thousands and thousands of people killed, trade unionists, indigenous rights activists, environmentalists, human rights lawyers, I mean, you name it.
In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, this brave and outspoken indigenous Honduran environmental activist named Caceres, who had won the Goldman Environmental Prize, she was really an amazing woman, she was gunned down in her hometown, and she's just one of thousands of people, including opposition political candidates, who have been murdered since this coup, and in Hillary Clinton's autobiography, she bragged about her role in stopping Zelaya's return and restoring stability to the country, interestingly enough, she dropped it from the paperback edition.
Really?
Yes, when some of her critics started using this against her, but it's in the original hardback, Hard Choices, and some of these emails that have recently come out, they have her working with this guy, who, what's his name, Lanny...
Lanny Davis, I was going to ask you about that.
Yeah, Lanny Davis.
Because at the time, I remember Obama had said, you know, we don't really like coup d'etats or something, and then Hillary came out and said, yeah, we do, coup d'etats are wonderful, I'm paraphrasing, and then it came right out immediately that her buddy Lanny Davis, who was one of her flacks going back to the 90s, was, I guess, owned the PR firm or something like that, was very close to the guys who had done the coup in a financial connection.
And Lanny Davis, he was working for the Honduran chapter, the Business Council of Latin America, you know, which supported the coup, and it was through him she opened communication with Micheletti, who was the interim ruler installed by the military, that everybody else was refusing to talk to directly, because he was a, you know, he seized power illegally, and, you know, basically, you know, basically, they strategize a way to restore order, and would, and in her words, render the question of Zelaya moot, as in, let's make sure this democratically elected president not get back into power.
And this was when you had tens of thousands of Hondurans on the streets, peacefully protesting for his return, who are being gunned down and beaten and suppressed, you know, by this, you know, by this junta.
And it's really revealing, because you and I have talked a lot about her role in the Middle East and supporting various tyrants and occupying armies and things like that.
But it's not just the Middle East.
We're seeing how she's doing it in Latin America as well.
Well, you know, I actually don't remember specifically, Stephen, but I'd be willing to bet that you and I talked about this at the time.
I've certainly interviewed people ever since then about it from time to time.
Yeah, we didn't quite know, I mean, I think both of us suspected, you know, that Hillary was doing something, because it was interesting, the White House statements were far more equivocal in their condemnation of the coup, but the State Department, which was really doing the stuff behind the scenes under Clinton, you know, they were, Obama's willing to call it a coup, the State Department refused to do so, and we're getting a lot more mixed signals from the State Department.
But, you know, since that time, you know, again, the emails, her autobiography, at least the first edition, and other things, you know, have made it very clear she played a major role in preventing the return of democratic governance, and we've seen the horrible things that have happened.
It has become literally the murder capital of the world.
More people killed per capita.
And, again, the targets are like the cream of the crop, the very people, the civil society leaders, you know, the folks who are really working to support the poor, support the environment, support indigenous rights, support human rights, support, you know, the opposition parties, you know, these are the people who are being killed at record numbers.
And this kind of reminds us of the battle days in the 1980s in places like El Salvador and Guatemala.
I'm sorry, we only got one minute.
But so, yeah, no, back to the refugees, where we had all the child refugees.
Imagine what it would take for you to send your minor child, not just like a teenager, but a child alone across Mexico to try to get to America, how desperate you would have to be to be in that situation that you would do that.
And then, as you say, Hillary supported is on the record, and you have the link in your article here to the proof of her supporting sending those kids back to the murder state that she had helped to create.
There is really exactly such a scandal.
And Sanders refusal to hit her on this, especially in the debate the other night when they were talking about Latin American coups is unforgivable, by the way.
Anyway, we're out of a lot of.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Come back on the show, Steve.
Appreciate it.
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