...in both corporate and alternative media. It took me a long time--a couple of years, actually, and not really until the Clinton email revelations--to conclude that the overthrow of Honduran democracy was Clinton's doing, not Obama's. I'm at the 99% point about this. I'm pretty sure of it.
The coup occurred in June 2009, only six months into Obama's term. His initial instinct about it was to say publicly that it was a "military coup" (which it was) and which would have trigged a required legal cutoff of U.S. funds to the coup regime. But after that Obama went silent. He was totally preoccupied, I think, with the global financial meltdown, inherited from the Bush junta, and two clusterfuck wars, inherited from the Bush junta. That would be enough to put ANY leader under water. I think he stopped worrying about Honduras and let his new Secretary of State handle it. I think he may have also required that President Mel Zelaya's life be protected and that there be an election as soon as possible. Then he went back to the THREE enormous problems that required all of his attention and then some.
Clinton continued funding the coup regime. And Clinton's emails reveal that she was dead set against the elected president of Honduras being restored to his rightful office. I do not think that Obama was privy to this Clinton intention. I may be wrong. I admit he's a hard man to read. But I think that this was the kind of thing that Clinton set up her private email server to DO, to keep Obama in the dark about certain things (for instance, her continuing to use Sydney Blumenthal as a consultant, when Obama had forbidden it).
Instead of doing what ALL of Latin America demanded at the time--restoration of Zelaya as president--she pressured the coup regime to hold an election. The trouble was that no reputable election monitoring group on earth would touch it. They all refused. Martial law had been declared. Leftists were being murdered. The conditions for an honest election did not exist. But she held an election anyway, with the U.S. State Department in charge of it. She used outfits like John McCain's International Republican Institute (he had telecommunications interests in Honduras) to pretend to be monitoring the election. The fascists won, of course.
And emboldened by Clinton's support, the rightwing death squad activity escalated, and is on going to this day--with the recent result (this March) of the murder of Berta Caceres, a well-known, indigenous, pro-democracy activist and environmentalist, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. She is only one of many who have been murdered, many of the victims being women, who have been notably visible as leaders of peaceful resistance. Gays have also been targeted. And many rapes and other acts of brutality have occurred.
Yes, "the buck stops there" at Obama. But I don't think he wanted it. I think he was distracted and not kept in the loop. I'm not an Obama apologist. I'd say it if I thought he was responsible. I don't think he was. Also, I don't think Clinton designed the coup. I think it was a Bush junta plan, perhaps intended as a 'time bomb' to undermine Obama's stated intention of improving U.S./Latin America relations (which were terrible under the Bush junta). Clinton took the opportunity to feather some nests for her allies and donors, and caused a very serious rift between LatAm leaders and Obama, which he has only recently addressed with his trip to Cuba and support for the Colombia/FARC peace talks.
I don't pretend to understand the insider politics of the Obama administration--why he would let something so terrible as the Honduran coup interfere with his stated goals, why he didn't fire her immediately and so forth. I simply don't know. Maybe he had constraints on him (CIA? Pentagon? Pentagon wanted to expand in Honduras--Zelaya was against it). Or maybe he just failed in a presidential duty, or was so ambivalent about it that Clinton felt free to take the initiative.
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