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All right, introducing Alex Main.
He is from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR.net.
And he's the author of a couple of important studies here.
First of all, Collateral Damage of a Drug War, which is also co-authored with Annie Bird.
And Still Waiting for Just is also co-authored with Annie Bird.
And they are both at CEPR.net.
And these are about an atrocity committed under the authority of the American DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration, down in Honduras in 2012.
Welcome to the show, Alex.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Great to be on your show.
Very happy to have you here.
So, listen, I was just mentioning to you, I'll go ahead and mention it now that we're recording.
I never even heard of this story until I got a press release from Sam Husseini's group saying Alex Main is available for interviews about this important story.
And seems like a pretty important story.
I should have heard of it by now.
So maybe that's, you know, a subject in itself.
Was it just my ignorance or was there really a distinct lack of coverage of this story in American media compared to the importance of it?
Yeah, there wasn't enough coverage given really how scandalous this whole thing was.
And those reports that you cited, they were written back in August of 2012, the first one, Collateral Damage of a Drug War.
And I believe the second one was written in January of 2013.
And the quote-unquote big revelations of the joint Department of Justice, Department of State, Inspector General report that came out just a few days ago.
Well, you know, most of that was in our reports from five years ago.
And that information was out there.
And I'll just go over it really quickly for your listeners.
The basic story is there was a joint DEA Honduran police operation that was taking place in northeastern Honduras, a very remote area, sort of jungle and lagoons, inhabited primarily by indigenous people called the Miskito people.
And they were on a drug interdiction operation.
That is, they had cited through surveillance technology a plane that was coming up from Colombia or Venezuela with cocaine and that was going to drop it off in that region of northeastern Honduras.
And they sent in some choppers, helicopters with machine guns on them, and I believe approximately 50 agents, including 10 DEA agents, to intercept that cocaine.
And in the course of that operation, the story that first came out was that the heroic police agents were attacked while they were trying to intercept the cocaine on a river.
They were shot at by a boat full of drug traffickers and they shot back and they didn't see what was going on.
It was sort of the middle of the night in the fog of war and so on.
And following that incident, they got their cocaine, they got out of there and they said, yes, we had a firefight with some drug traffickers.
And later it was learned that four people had died and they didn't quite sound like drug traffickers.
The four people were two women, both reportedly pregnant, one teenager of 14 years of age and a young man who just left the military.
Those were the four people.
But the DEA stuck to their story that they were drug traffickers and that they were shot at.
We went into that remote region of Honduras.
We interviewed all the people involved, including officials.
We didn't have access to the DEA agents.
We didn't have access to the Honduran police agents, but we had access to plenty of local authorities, to eyewitnesses and to survivors of the incident.
And the story that we got was very, very different.
And it was that there was a water taxi.
And this is an area of Honduras where the roads aren't really functional and people travel by a water and they do so most of the time by taking water taxis.
And these are sort of big dugout canoes called pipantes where you can fit anywhere from 15 to 20 people and you travel for hours along the river.
And generally you travel at night and you travel at night because it's an incredibly hot place and you don't want to be under the blazing sun as you're traveling along the river.
And so that's what approximately 16 people, I believe it was 16 people, were traveling up the river.
They'd been traveling for some six hours and they were just getting home when helicopters appeared out of nowhere.
And before they knew it, they were being shot at.
And they were shot there in the middle of the river.
And four people ended up dying.
Four other people were injured.
And on top of all that, we learned from eyewitnesses that were there that the operation had gone into the local town, had beat up some of the people there, forced one individual who wanted to get to his mother who was stranded in the river in the boat and told the agent so and said, I have to get to my mother and that there are injured people out there.
And instead of doing that, he was forced to go and retrieve cocaine for them.
And he was sort of beat up in the process of that as well.
And in the meantime, there were injured and dead people in the river and the DEA agents, the Honduran police agents, didn't do anything.
What we discovered as well is that the DEA maintained that this was a Honduran led operation, that they were just playing an accompaniment role.
Well, all of the witness statements that we heard made it quite clear that it was the Americans, the gringos that were leading the operation that were the ones in charge.
And then this is what was also revealed from interviews that Honduran investigators made of the Honduran police agents.
They said that they were under sort of the orders of the DEA agents that were on this mission.
So this is what we discovered.
And we tried to make a lot of noise about it at the time.
There were some press reports that emerged with the stories, but it quickly sort of disappeared.
There were some members of Congress that made complaints and so on.
And eventually, eventually, the inspector generals of Department of Justice and Department of State in May of 2014, so two years after the incident occurred, the incident occurred in May of 2012, decided to embark on a real investigation of what had happened.
And it took them three years in part, and they say this in report, in the report, because the DEA and also the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at the State Department were not cooperating with the investigation.
They would refuse to turn over emails and other information.
And so this is part of the reason why it took them so long to finish this big investigation.
It's a 424 page report.
Yeah, well, first of all, yeah, it does sound like from reading the Guardian article that it was your journalism, I assume, combined with others that got Congress to intervene here.
And it was only then, I guess, as you say, it took them a while.
But once they intervene, that was enough to get the inspector general to look at it.
And then, at least, certainly from reading the Guardian story, it sounds like the inspector general didn't really pull any punches.
He verified your version, you know, your reporting of what happened here virtually entirely, it sounds like.
No, that's correct.
And just to clarify, I'm not actually a journalist.
But, you know, no one else was really investigating this in depth.
And it really needed to be done.
What I do in my job is I look at some of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, and particularly in Central America, I look at U.S. security policy.
And what we've been seeing there for the last eight to 10 years is a really real ramping up of the drug war, a very militarized drug war, that instead of leading to more security in this area, and that should be the objective of security policy, has actually led to more violence.
And this has been a phenomenon that's been feeding in to all the migration that we're seeing from this region, that we're seeing from countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
These are countries where the drug war has intensified in recent years.
And this is one case, this is one example of where the drug war can go terribly, terribly wrong, when you have very militarized operations in communities that U.S. agents really don't know well at all, and where there's just really no accountability.
It's funny, isn't it?
Whose life counts and who doesn't, whatever.
It's so easy to say on one hand, well, whatever, collateral damage, got to stop them cocaine distributors or whatever.
Apparently that's the consensus.
And yet, sometimes a story like this can be a really big deal.
Remember when the missionaries got shot down?
Oh, I guess that was because they were white American missionaries that were mistaken for cocaine smugglers that time.
But imagine just for one second, yeah, the Honduran military shot and killed a family in a taxi cab in North Carolina who were going about their business.
But, you know, these things happen, whatever, screw them.
Anyway, that would be the biggest deal in the world, right?
That time that Honduras invaded America, we'd nuke them or something.
Well, it's worse than that, because imagine if that, you know, family out for a picnic somewhere in North Carolina was shot up by DEA agents.
And then afterwards, for two years, the DEA, under questioning from Congress, from the media and so on, said, oh, no, no, we know that these people were drug traffickers.
And also, we weren't really running this operation.
It was the local sheriff's office that was doing it.
And, you know, all of this turned out to be untrue.
Yeah, in the lower back and in the right arm.
And he's a substance farmer.
Substance farmer.
I'm going to get that right.
Subsistence.
He's a subsistence farmer and he can't do his work.
He says, I can't support my family.
And then they talk with the lady.
She was shot in the thigh and they show her crying and helpless.
These are poor Indians, as you say, back in the jungle somewhere.
They have no economy, no anything to support them except their own labor.
And now they don't have that because of this.
That's correct.
And, you know, that's the real injustice here as well, is that the survivors of this incident, a few of them have been wounded.
Others are orphans.
We count all of the other nine orphans from this incident, from the three adults that were killed.
And they're struggling.
They're really, really struggling to get by now.
And they have gotten very, very little help.
And they only got help after some members of Congress made a big stink, held up Honduran assistance, the entirety of Honduran assistance, millions of dollars, and said, get something to these families.
And eventually a mechanism was put into place to try to compensate them somewhat.
But we've calculated that only about $15,000 has made it to these people.
We're talking about over a couple dozen people that have been directly affected by this economically and others that are injured and that haven't received adequate treatment.
Another individual, a boy, was shot in the hand.
His hand is no longer functional.
He couldn't afford the operation he needed to make it functional.
So that's right.
The DA went in there.
They led this operation.
They gave the orders.
At one point, they ordered a machine gunner to shoot at the boat that was full of passengers who were not drug traffickers, who had nothing to do with drug trafficking, who all had a legitimate reason to be on the boat.
They were not going to be on that river.
They were traveling with a lot of their personal belongings, trying to get back home.
They were innocent bystanders.
Clearly, the DA mission believed that they were some kind of a threat.
And I think that had a lot to do with the fact that they had no idea what this region was about.
They had no idea that you have water taxis going up and down the rivers in this region at all times during the night.
So they saw a boat out there, and they were like, oh, boy, these must be drug traffickers.
We better shoot them up.
Well, yeah, and it sounds like would you concede that at least the taxi was in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Or how far was the cocaine drop from where they were driving?
I mean, I'm not saying that's good enough or anything, but that does seem to be what was going on, right?
There was this accidental convergence of people on this spot together at one time, and assumptions were made.
That's right.
Assumptions were made very, very quickly.
Let's remember that the DA team that was there, it's called the FAST team.
That team was created in Afghanistan and to deal with drug trafficking there.
Now, the thing about Afghanistan that's a little bit different from Honduras is that Afghanistan is in a real state of war.
And essentially, these DA missions in Afghanistan were combat missions and where they believed they could be shot at at any time and were in extremely threatening situations.
So they projected this sort of Afghanistan combat context onto the operations that they were carrying out in the northeast of Honduras, where sure, there are threats, but it's not Afghanistan.
Right.
And what's most important there is the rules of engagement, right?
And the whole we just we just saw the reports of this, I get lost in all the technicalities, but where they just recently classified Somalia and Yemen as full fledged war zones, quote unquote, on the order of Afghanistan and western Iraq, eastern Syria, whereas before they had not been.
And that's a matter of the loosening of the rules of engagement and obviously raises the question of how many Afghans have been slaughtered in similar situations.
You know, guys in helicopters saying, hey, look, there's a group of people standing around near some poppies.
Blast them.
Yeah, well, we'll never know about Afghanistan.
And I'm sure many people have been killed in Honduras.
We know there are plenty of extrajudicial executions that take place all the time there.
But this case just really, really stands out because these folks, like you said, they're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But they were they were completely innocent.
They weren't from gangs.
You know, they weren't.
They were just going about their business.
And it would have been one thing if the D.A. had sort of fessed up and said, oh, we made a mistake.
But rather than that, they, first of all, hid behind the idea that they weren't leading the operation, which they were.
And that was confirmed by the inspector general's report.
They were leading the operation.
They did give orders to a machine gunner to fire on the passenger boat.
And second of all, there was no evidence that they had been shot at.
In fact, there's an aerial surveillance video that was studied very, very carefully by the inspector general's that was also studied by investigators within the State Department.
All of them concluded there was no evidence at all that anyone from the passenger boat shot at the counter narcotics operation.
Rather, all they see is the passenger boat being lit up first by a set of agents, Honduran and D.A. agent.
The D.A. agent says he never fired.
It's very difficult to say whether he did or not.
The Honduran agent certainly did.
They fired and shot at the passenger boat.
And then you had the machine gunner on one of the helicopters firing down at one of the boats.
And the other thing that sort of stands out to us here is what in the hell is a helicopter with a machine gun doing in a civilian police operation?
How does that happen?
Again, this is not a country that's in a state of war.
Why do you have helicopters going in there with agents armed with automatic weapons and with high caliber machine guns attached to these helicopters?
Why is that even happening in the first place in an area that's not a war zone?
Well, good question.
So let's rewind it a little bit.
I think I don't want to spend too much time on it because time is short.
But I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the listeners of this show are aware of the military pseudo constitutional coup d'etat in Honduras in 2009 and Hillary Clinton's role in helping to solidify it, which she bragged about in the first version of her book before she changed it for the paperback and all that.
We've covered that a lot on the show.
But so there's a lot of I guess from my point of view, a lot of chatter and rumors and headlines and things that would seem to indicate that there's been a real change there in terms of the drug cartels and amount of their power and influence in Honduras as compared to before.
And then, of course, there's also the other subject of the murders of activists and journalists and people who are trying to oppose the government there, which I don't know how much that's related to the drug war and how much that's related to other crimes against their property rights and this kind of thing.
Well, Scott, it does become related to the drug war because what we've seen in Honduras over the last few years is the militarization of law enforcement and law enforcement growing more and more violent, more and more repressive, unleashed essentially with no accountability.
And part of the pretext there is that, oh, we have to go after the organized crime.
You know, essentially we need sort of a martial law in Honduras because this is such a big problem.
And U.S. security assistance is backing all that.
In fact, it's been greatly increased over the last few years.
You remember this big wave of child migrants that took place back in 2014 where you had tons of child migrants to the borders.
They were coming from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador.
The main reasons were economic and the levels of violence there.
Well, the Obama White House at the time came up with a big plan to respond to that.
By providing a billion dollars a year in assistance, supposedly focused on development assistance.
What we discovered is that a great deal of that assistance, in fact, the majority was security assistance.
Hundreds of millions of dollars going into this tiny region that is Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and pumping up the law enforcement there.
Again, law enforcement that has really very little accountability of any kind, that is heavily infiltrated.
And let me just share one interesting fact that you also won't read in the papers generally.
Which is that the head of security in Honduras, the head of the whole operation there, is a known drug trafficker at this point.
And we know that.
How do we know that?
Because a DA informant let us know in the course of a trial that had nothing to do with Honduras.
But it came into the scope of the trial and he discussed the fact that this individual was someone who worked with drug traffickers.
Paid off other agents in order to allow shipments to come through Honduras.
Does that mean then that the DEA's role is just eliminating the competition and keeping prices high for the people involved in the government?
Well, one has to wonder because clearly the government, the Honduran government, is getting a lot of support from the US.
Clearly at the same time there are a lot of senior officials in that government that have some form of involvement in drug trafficking operations.
How was it before though?
How much different was it when before Zelaya got overthrown there?
Well, the big difference, certainly this was happening before.
You know, under Zelaya and under previous presidencies.
But what happened with the coup that occurred in 2009 is that you had a real, real breakdown, a real institutional breakdown.
You know, at that point when you start to basically ignore the country's constitution and just plow ahead with a political program that is not supported by the population.
And where you have a context where people take to the streets and the police and the military are deployed in order to repress the demonstrations that are taking place.
You have what we saw in Honduras is the beginning of a pattern of repression that took place, targeting many civil society activists in that country.
And also increased militarization.
Under the Honduran constitution it was forbidden to deploy the military for law enforcement purposes.
Well that began after the coup and it hasn't stopped since.
And in fact you now have a force, the military police, which is a military force.
They are military units that are in the military police.
They are not civilian law enforcement.
And they are several thousand, heavily deployed around the country, using military methods to carry out law enforcement.
And that leads as well to more violence.
And certainly, you know, when you have real lack of accountability, when you have as well a judiciary that's not at all independent from the central government there.
You're going to see lots of cases where the drug trafficking, the corruption that is taking place within the government, where you have senior officials that are involved, is essentially protected.
There's nothing that really can be done to deal with it.
And that's what we're seeing today in Honduras.
I keep hearing people say, oh come on, there are nothing in those emails anyway.
The only scandal is that she had the emails on the wrong server.
Which is the only reason they were on the wrong server is because she wanted to be able to hide them from us in the first place.
And they say, they admit, they claim, it's official that there are 30,000 that nobody's ever seen.
That she swears are just about yoga with her daughter and this and that.
And yet in the emails that were released there's all these stories.
Such as this one by you at Common Dreams.
The Hillary Clinton emails and the Honduran coup where you talk about Anne-Marie Slaughter.
I like the idea of her as Bambi here with the doe eyes and the good intentions.
Miss Clinton, aren't we going to do something?
And then Hillary smacks her down.
No, we're not.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, in that case, Anne-Marie Slaughter, you know, I don't know how much of a Bambi she is.
What she was seeing was that because the U.S. was clearly not doing what they could to try to reverse the coup that took place in Honduras.
The rest of the region was getting discouraged and was like, well, you know, we wanted to give Obama a chance.
And, you know, he claimed to have all sorts of intentions to repair relations with the region and sort of stop with the kind of aggressive intervention and sort of wrong-headed policies throughout the region that we'd seen before.
And, well, this kind of shows that that's not the case.
The U.S. is supporting a coup because they believe that the folks behind the coup are more aligned with their interests than the people that were taken out by the coup.
And Anne-Marie Slaughter saw that governments around the region were shaking their heads and were like, this isn't going to work for us.
And, of course, the whole joke there being everybody knows what a joke it is.
All these people, Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter and all these Dickensian characters with their wars.
And they should know that she was a major part of mongering the war in Libya in 2011 and that kind of thing.
So that was what I thought was ironic in the first place was her being the voice of caution here when usually she's the first one to throw caution to the wind.
Sure.
I mean, simply because Anne-Marie Slaughter identified the reality, which is that what the U.S. was doing with Honduras was disastrous for its relations in the rest of the region.
Not for them, for America's interests only.
That's right.
Another thing I want to just throw in here, too, because it's in your article and it's worth mentioning, because people don't make the correlation all the time.
The WikiLeaks this and the WikiLeaks that.
That means the stuff that was liberated by Chelsea Manning.
State Department cables, the Iraq and Afghan war logs.
And those State Department cables and, of course, the Guantanamo files, too.
But those State Department cables are the basis of 50,000 important news stories in the world.
There's nobody even counting how many news stories have, as the WikiLeaks reveal, in them somewhere.
And that's a huge part of this, too, from Slaughter and from her other aides in the communication with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time about what was going on in Honduras.
And what we know is because of Chelsea Manning.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I'm glad you mentioned that.
This is something we've looked at a lot.
There's a book out there, if I can do a little bit of promoting.
There's a book called The WikiLeaks Files, as a good introduction by Julian Assange.
And it has two chapters on Latin America and what the State Department cables, again, that were released by Chelsea Manning, show you about U.S. policy in that region over the last 10 years or so, and how essentially we're still kind of fighting the Cold War there.
So those are the two chapters about Latin America, focused on Venezuela on the one hand, and then on the rest of Latin America.
And on Venezuela, because you have so many cables on Venezuela, really more proportional to the population of any country than any other country in Latin America.
I have that book, but I have not had the chance to read it cover to cover, I'll tell you that.
But yeah, I should one day, the proverbial one day, because there's definitely a lot to learn there.
Listen, I have your studies here, Collateral Damage of a Drug War and Still Waiting for Justice, both at CEPR, that's the Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR.net.
What else should we be reading here, Alex?
Well, if you go to our webpage, there's an issues section.
If you're interested in U.S. policy in Latin America, we have plenty of food for thought there on many Latin American countries, particularly on Honduras over the last, you know, eight years, ever since the coup d'etat that took place there in 2009.
Oh, good.
And see, here's one by Mark Weisbrot, and I was about to say to the audience, if you want to learn more about the coup of 2009, you can search my archives for my previous interviews with Mark Weisbrot about this subject.
So there you go.
Good to see you guys are working together there.
All right, well, listen, thank you very much for your time, Alex.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Alex Main.
Check him out at CEPR.net, and he's got a whole archive over at CommonDreams.org as well.
He is Senior Associate for International Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
I'm Scott Horton.
I got 4,500 or almost interviews for you at ScottHorton.org.
And check out the stuff at LibertarianInstitute.org.
You can follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
Thanks.
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