04/03/13 – Mark Weisbrot – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so next up on the show today is Mark Weisbrot.
And I'm sorry, I should have asked you how to pronounce your name before I brought you on the air.
Hi, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
Well, it's very good to have you here.
Everybody, Mark is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, and he's co-writer of Oliver Stone's documentary, South of the Border.
Huh, that's interesting.
I should probably take a look at that.
All right, well, so you've got this piece which ran in The Guardian and is being rerun today at antiwar.com as well.
It's called Will Congress Act to Stop U.S. Support for Honduras' Death Squad Regime?
Well, before we get to why Congress would do anything about anything, what is all this about American support?
There was a coup back in 2009 against the government there, but I think I remember Barack Obama denounced it, no?
Well, he did actually denounce the coup, but never called for the reinstatement of the democratically elected president.
And, in fact, for those who didn't follow the events closely, the one indicator of which side they were on, and there were many, which side the U.S. government was on, is that the president, the elected president who was overthrown, President Mel Zelaya, came to Washington, D.C. three times after he was overthrown, and President Obama wouldn't even meet with him once, not even shake his hand for two minutes.
And that was because he didn't want to send any really mixed signals to the coup government.
And he, and of course everybody in all the foreign ministries and everyone in Latin America understood this very well, that they were really on the side of the coup.
In fact, Zelaya himself later said that the U.S. was involved in the actual coup itself.
Zelaya, he was the coupee.
Yeah, he was the president who was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country.
And of course in November of 2009, the coup government held an election, and of course the Organization of American States and the European Union and all the Latin American countries all saw this election as illegitimate because, you know, you didn't have a, I mean, the press had been attacked and closed down, the opposition press.
The people had been arrested by the thousands, and there was just no conditions for free elections under this government.
And so the United States was pretty much alone in the hemisphere in saying that this was a legitimate election and supporting it.
And now other than Zelaya's claim, is there any independent evidence that the Americans were behind the thing or were working with the coup plotters before it happened?
Well, you don't have direct evidence because nobody bothered to investigate it.
But if you look at all the things that the Obama administration did to help the coup government once it was there and help it legitimize itself, I think it is pretty likely that they were involved.
Yeah.
Well, I sure wouldn't doubt it.
I was just wondering what's the best case that can be made is all.
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't really matter in the sense that, you know, if they didn't actually help in the planning or the execution of it, they did the important work, which was to help this coup government survive and legitimate itself through these elections and, of course, supporting them with military and police aid and everything else.
All right.
Now, before we get too far into the dictatorship, as described in your article here, can you tell us a little bit about Zelaya and what was so bad about him?
I mean, there are a lot of social democrats, so to speak, elected in Latin America these days.
But was he seeking an inordinate amount of independence from the empire or something?
Well, I think, you know, this is kind of a crime of opportunity.
I mean, the United States government has a very kind of Cold War view of Latin America.
It really opposes the State Department, all of the left government, you know, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Uruguay, even Brazil.
They have been involved in trying to weaken the Workers' Party government there, too.
But they can't really, you know, they take different stances publicly, depending on what is politically feasible.
So the Honduras was just weak enough, and Zelaya was just weak enough, and they had the alliance with the military, you know, officers trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, and the tight connections so that they could pull this off.
But there's no doubt in my mind that they would get rid of any of the left governments in Latin America if they could.
So it's just a question of preying upon the weaker ones.
The same is true in Haiti when the U.S. did that, they did in broad daylight, overthrew the government of the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004.
Well, now the Democrats are probably just trying to protect us from cocaine business and that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah.
They didn't use that excuse for Honduras.
I mean, like I said, they pretended that they were kind of against the coup, and then they manipulated everything so that he couldn't get back, the president couldn't get back to power.
And, you know, they did, Zelaya, I mean, they didn't like him because he was just part of the left, you know, in Latin America.
I mean, he wasn't any closer to Venezuela than Brazil or Argentina or anybody else is.
But again, he was a target because he was weaker.
And he did do things they didn't like, you know, raise the minimum wage a lot and supported land reform.
And I think also the thing they were most worried about, you know, is he did run on a program of trying to create a new constitution because the Honduran constitution was created under the military dictatorship.
And so he wanted a more democratic constitution, and that was what people voted for.
You know, like, for instance, in the United States, we get to elect members of Congress by district, you know, where you live, and they don't have that in Honduras.
And so those were the kind of reforms that they wanted to have, democratization.
And so they were worried about a constitutional process because one of the things that would come up would be the U.S. military base there, and that's not very popular.
You know, Ecuador got rid of, the Ecuadorian government got rid of their U.S. military base there when the left government of Rafael Correa was elected.
And so I think that's a big part of the U.S. interest there, although I think they would try to keep Honduras within their orbit in any case.
Right, well, yeah, as much as they can with any of these states this whole time.
For the last 200 years, right, they want as much influence as they can.
They can see nothing unless they absolutely have to.
And, in fact, I was trying to remember, you know, I was a kid at the time, so what I know is just what I've read and that kind of thing about the 80s wars.
But I guess I don't really know about the government of Honduras in the 1980s.
I have to assume it was already a fascist puppet dictatorship of the U.S. because I know that they were using it as a base to wage their filthy, dirty wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
No, that's exactly right, and there were kidnappings and disappearances and death squads then.
It wasn't on the scale, of course, that you had in El Salvador or Guatemala, but it was, or the violence that you had when they were, you know, in Nicaragua because they were trying to overthrow the left government.
The U.S. was trying to overthrow the left government there.
But it was still pretty bad, and a lot of the actors that you see now are remnants or actually were involved in the 1980s, and that is why I wrote about, when I wrote this column, I suggested that Obama's legacy could be similar to Reagan's, that is, the death squad government in Central America, in this case, Honduras.
All right, now, can you tell us about this crime that the article starts out with about these young men walking down the street and being murdered and all the different indications about what was really going on there, who the victims were, and what was the motive, etc.?
It seems pretty important.
Well, in this case, this one was just, you know, there were over 150 complaints of death squad, formal complaints of death squad killings in Honduras recently, and everybody seems to agree, except for the government, that the government is involved in these killings.
And this one just happened to be caught on videotape because there was a warehouse security camera, and so it showed the whole thing, these cars pulling up.
And a very professional operation, you know, with people with AK-47s, masks, bulletproof vests, very well trained.
You can see they do the whole thing in less than 40 seconds.
They've got two teams that, you know, operate in a very coordinated manner.
And so that's why most people think this was, you know, linked to the security forces.
And who were the victims?
We don't really know much about them.
They're 18, 20 years old.
They were students.
Don't know why they killed them.
They could have suspected them.
Some of the killings are what they call social cleansing.
They're killing people who are suspected members of gangs because you do have serious gangs and violence.
And so, you know, but they also are killing people who are political.
They're killing lawyers and human rights activists, mayoral candidates of the left party, for example.
And so the whole violence and impunity is very effective in intimidating political activity, and I think that's one of the reasons they're using it.
So there is a spillover between the killings that are just, I shouldn't say just.
I mean, they're horrible human rights violations to kill people without a trial.
But some of these killings by the security forces and their death squad are not directed at political opponents of the government.
They're directed at people they just want to kill for other reasons.
And then you have the political killings, but the whole thing, there's a lot of spillover and overlap because the enormous amount of murder, not to mention the homicide rate generally, just really makes it more difficult for anybody to speak out against the government or to organize politically for the elections that will occur this November.
And now, are they just killing innocent people too?
It sounds like some of this is assassinations, even targeted killings against local criminals, that kind of thing.
But then also some of it sounds like it's just outright terrorism to make everybody afraid to cross these guys in any way.
Yeah, I think it is.
But it is.
They are targeting.
I mean, they're targeting either people they want dead for other reasons or people that are politically active.
Let's see, you say there are elections scheduled for later this year.
Is there any expectation that they'll be fair at all, or is the whole thing just going to be another sham?
Well, that's the struggle right now, and that's one of the reasons you do see, and we've tried to make an issue out of this, because the Congress in the United States does have some say in foreign policy, and one of the things they can do is cut off police and military aid, and they have cut some to Honduras, but it's an ongoing struggle because the State Department, the Obama administration, doesn't want to do this, and they claim that they're not in violation of the law, although there is a law called the Leahy Law, after Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont, which says that the United States is not allowed to provide military or police aid to units that have been involved in gross human rights violations.
Is that the same one that says if they've been involved in a coup?
Because I know somebody was invoking a rule like that over Mali, and that was why you had to get the French back.
Right.
No, that's a different one.
And yeah, they had to cut off some aid to Honduras during the coup, but not most of it, actually.
So that's the situation now.
There's a struggle in Congress, and of course I would encourage your listeners, if they talk to or know who their member of Congress is, this would be a good time to ask them to weigh in on this, because there will be some effort by the Congress, especially in the Senate, but also there are a lot of Democratic House members who have signed on and have been complaining about U.S. support for these human rights violations.
And so just as in the 1980s, there is some struggle here in the United States over support for these policies from our government.
And now, do they have any other excuses for their military base?
Is it just the one base there, and do they have any other excuses besides cocaine traffic?
No, that's a good question.
I think they would justify it in terms of the war on drugs.
I mean, a lot of drugs do pass through Honduras.
That is one of the reasons for the violence that isn't perpetrated by the government.
And so that is their main reason, their main justification for having military bases in Latin America.
But they're running into more and more resistance because you now have so many independent left governments, and none of them want these bases in Latin America and in South America especially, where most of the whole continent is run by left governments.
The military bases are a thorn in their side.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Mark.
I know very little about Latin America, so it's always nice to learn something good.
Well, thanks for covering this.
I'm glad you are.
I sure appreciate it.
And on behalf of the guys at AntiWar.com, I'm sure they appreciate permission to rerun this thing too.
Thank you.
Hopefully we'll build up a whole archive there.
And I'm sorry, would you say your last name for me so I don't screw it up?
Sure.
It's Weisbrot, and you can find information on all this at CEPR.net.
It's Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR.net.
Okay, great.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
That is Mark Weisbrot, CEPR.net.
And I have here at The Guardian what that stands for.
That's the Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR.net.
And you can find his articles at theguardian.co.uk.
This latest one, it's at AntiWar.com today as well.
It's Will Congress Act to Stop U.S. Support for Honduras' Death Squad Regime?
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