Angry White Kid

Obama, Honduras and Hamas

In Russia on Tuesday, Obama stated that he supports the reinstatement of Manuel Zelaya, the overthrown president of Honduras, based on the following rationale:

America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies...We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not.

Then why does Obama not respect the right of the Palestinians to choose their own leaders when they elected Hamas? (This of course is a policy critique and does not delve into the matter of whether leaders are necessary to begin with.)

The Obama administration's stance on the coup in Honduras has been disgraceful. Today, Clinton even refused to call for Zelaya's reinstatement:

While Secretary Clinton reiterated the United States' condemnation of Mr. Zelaya's ouster, she stopped short of calling for his reinstatement, a departure from statements by President Obama earlier Tuesday and from the position taken by much of the international community.

When asked whether the United States viewed Mr. Zelaya's return as central to the restoration of democratic order, she said that she did not want to "prejudge" the talks before they began.

I have been traveling but hope to translate more documents on Honduras in the coming days. In the meantime, I suggest NarcoNews.com, HablaHonduras.com, and Tlaxcala.es.

Honduras: The futility of the coup

Honduras: The futility of the coup
By Atilio Borón
June 28, 2009
[Spanish original]
Translated by Scott Campbell

History is repeating itself and will very likely end in the same way.  The coup d’état in Honduras is a re-issue of that which was carried out in April 2002 in Venezuela and that which was aborted in the face of an explosive reaction from several regional governments in Bolivia last year.

A president violently kidnapped in the early morning by masked soldiers, following to the letter what is outlined for death squads in the Operations Manual of the CIA and the School of the Americas; a fake resignation letter released with the goal of fooling and demobilizing the population and which was immediately retransmitted to the entire world by CNN without confirming the veracity of the report beforehand; the reaction of the people who, aware of the operation, take to the streets bare-chested to stop the tanks and army vehicles and to demand the return of Zelaya to the presidency; the cutting of electricity to impede the functioning of the radio and television and to sow confusion and despondency.

As in Venezuela, while not quite jailing Hugo Chávez the coupists installed a new president: Pedro Francisco Carmona, who was popularly rebaptized as “the short-lived one.”  The one fulfilling this role in Honduras is the president of the unicameral congress of that country, Roberto Micheletti, who was sworn in this Sunday as the provisional leader and for who only a miracle will keep him from facing the same fate as his Venezuelan predecessor.

What happened in Honduras made manifest the resistance of traditional power structures to any attempt to deepen democratic life.  It was enough for President Zelaya to decide to call for a popular referendum - supported with the signatures of more than 400,000 citizens - about convoking in the future a Constitutional Assembly for the different regulating state institutions to mobilize to stop it, belying their supposed democratic character: the Congress ordered the dismissal of the president and a judgment of the Supreme Court validated the coup.  It was none other than this court which issued the order for the kidnapping and expulsion from the country of President Zelaya, embracing as it had done all week the seditious conduct of the armed forces.

Zelaya has not resigned nor has he requested political asylum in Costa Rica.  He was kidnapped and expatriated and the people have gone into the streets to defend their government.  The statements that succeeded in getting out of Honduras are clear in that sense, especially that of the world leader of Vía Campesina, Rafael Alegría.

The governments of the region have repudiated putchism and this same sentiment moved Barack Obama to say that Zelaya “is the only president of Honduras that I recognize and I want to make that very clear.”  The OAS has expressed itself in the same terms and in Argentina President Cristina Fernández stated that, “we are going to push for a meeting of Unasur, even though Honduras is not a part of that body, and we are going to demand to the OAS the respect for the institutionality and reappointment of Zelaya, as well as guarantees for his life, his physical integrity and that of his family, because this is fundamental, because it is an action involving democracy and all people.”

The brutality of the entire operation bears the indelible mark of the CIA and the School of the Americas: from the kidnapping of the president, sent in his pajamas to Costa Rica, and the unheard-of kidnapping and beating of three ambassadors of friendly countries: Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, who had been close to the residency of the Honduran Minister of Foreign Relations, Patricia Rodas, to express their countries’ solidarity, to the ostentatious display of force by the soldiers in the principal cities in the country with the clear aim of terrorizing the population.

In the late afternoon they imposed a curfew and there is strict censoring of the press, yet there has been no statement from the Inter-American Press Society (always attentive regarding the situation of the media in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador) condemning this assault on the freedom of the press.

It’s not too much to remember that the Honduran armed forces were completely restructured and “re-educated” during the ‘80s when the U.S. ambassador in Honduras was none other than John Negroponte, whose “diplomatic” career brought him to cover destinations as different as Vietnam, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq and later, to become the head of the intelligence super-agency as the Director of National Intelligence.

From Tegucigalpa he personally monitored the terrorist operations carried out against the Sandinista government and promoted the creation of a death squad better know as Battalion 316, which kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of people inside of Honduras while in his reports to Washington denied that there were human rights violations in the country.

At the time, U.S. Senator John Kerry showed that the State Department had paid $800,000 to four air cargo companies belonging to Colombian narcotraffickers to transport weapons to groups that Negroponte organized and backed in Honduras. The pilots testified under oath, confirming Kerry’s statements.

The U.S. media reported that Negroponte was linked to drugs and arms trafficking between 1981 and 1985 with the goal of arming death squads, but this did not slow down his career.  These armed forces are the ones who today deposed Zelaya.  But the correlation of forces on the internal and international level is so unfavorable that the defeat of the coupists is only a question of (very little) time.

Atilio Borón is an Argentinean author and sociologist.

Photo by rbreve.

Honduran coup faltering? And how could the U.S. not know?

More news from and about Honduras.

Two Military Battalions Turn Against Honduras Coup Regime
by Al Giordano

Community Radio “Es Lo de Menos” was the first to report that the Fourth Infantry Battalion has rebelled from the military coup regime in Honduras. The radio station adds that “it seems” (“al parecer,” in the original Spanish) that the Tenth Infantry Battalion has also broken from the coup.

Rafael Alegria, leader of Via Campesina, the country’s largest social organization, one that has successfully blockaded the nation’s highways before to force government concessions, tells Alba TV:

“The popular resistance is rising up throughout the country. All the highways in the country are blockaded…. The Fourth Infantry Battallion… is no longer following the orders of Roberto Micheletti.”

Angel Alvarado of Honduras’ Popular Union Bloc tells Radio Mundial:

"Two infantry battalions of the Honduran Army have risen up against the illegitimate government of Roberto Micheletti in Honduras. They are the Fourth Infantry Battalion in the city of Tela and the Tenth Infantry Battalion in La Ceiba (the second largest city in Honduras), both located in the state of Atlántida."

Honduras: Is it Written?
By Jos Steinsleger

"Throughout the top and to the right," Zelaya began to distance himself from the beautiful people.  And he made the great mistake of asking himself why, if in the tourism brochures, Honduras is compared to Switzerland, the per capita income of a Honduran is $2,793 a year while for a Swiss it is $53,352.Zelaya reached the obvious conclusion: seven million Swiss, seven million Hondurans.  Honduras isn't Switzerland.  What if we were to make a socially integrated republic, in tune with the great Latin American integration projects underway?

A Few Thoughts on the Coup in Honduras
By Jeremy Scahill

While the US has issued heavily-qualified statements critical of the coup—in the aftermath of the events in Honduras—the US could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down. The US ties to the Honduran military and political establishment run far too deep for all of this to have gone down without at least tacit support or the turning of a blind eye by some US political or military official(s).

And for those who read Spanish, a great source of information is HablaHonduras. They are reporting that one worker from the telecommunications company Hondutel was hit and killed by a military vehicle as the army forcefully took over the company.  Video of that incident is below.

Obama gets a settlement

Obama's efforts to scold Israel into stopping its illegal settlements in the West Bank seems to be yielding fruit.  In the opposite direction of course.  Maan News reports that:

Israeli settlers established a new illegal West Bank outpost on Thursday, dedicating it partly to US President Barack Obama.

The settlers, calling themselves the "Land of Israel Loyalists," named the outpost Oz Yehonatan, near Binyamin, but were calling part of it the "Obama Hut," according to the Israeli news agency Ynet.

And according to a report from Israel's Arutz Sheva news agency, the outpost was named "in recognition of the president’s actions, which have led to a dramatic increase in the number of outposts being built throughout Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]."

Given Obama's speech yesterday where he merely called for current settlement construction to stop - saying nothing about the almost 500,000 Israeli colonists already living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem* - this is the type of progress we can expect from Barack "More of the Same" Obama.  Which itself is all that can be expected.

* Or apartheid, or the nakba, or Jim Crow laws inside Israel, or Israel's nuclear weapons, or international law, or the massacre in Gaza, or the continuing murders of non-violent anti-wall protesters etc., etc., etc.

Catastrophe: 61 years and counting

A scene from the nakba.

Today around the world Palestinians commemorate the nakba (catastrophe) of the 1948 establishment of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of 75% of the indigenous Palestinian population from their lands and homes.

Sixty-one years later the Palestinian population is dispersed around the globe, forbidden by Israel to return to their homes.  Millions live in the refugee camps of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.  Millions more live in camps or homes under occupation in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.  And more than a million live as third-class citizens under an openly racist, apartheid regime in the land they were born - now called Israel.

While Hamas and Fatah squabble over who gets to be the Palestinian facilitator of Israel's occupation, dictatorial Arab regimes count their U.S. dollars, and Israel continues the nakba backed by the U.S. and Europe.

Civil society, the only place where power truly resides, must continue to act.  BOYCOTT. DIVESTMENT. SANCTIONS.

Book review: "Descent into Chaos" by Ahmed Rashid

Until final papers are finished, I won't have time to blog. But I figured I'd post this response I wrote for a class to Ahmed Rashid's book, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.  It's timely, given what's happening in Pakistan and Obama's war-escalation plan for Afghanistan. As well, I couldn't find a single critical review of the book, which is troubling, especially as there is so little material out about the topic thereby giving Rashid's view more weight than it likely should have.

I had two main reactions to Rashid's book. One was frustration and the other was appreciation.  My frustration extended largely from his liberal viewpoint that the war on Afghanistan was a just war and could've gone swimmingly "if only" the various players had made the correct decisions and taken the appropriate actions. His main argument appeared to be that occupation (though he argued that it wasn't) and nation-building can be done successfully "if only" everyone is up front, genuine and on the level.  This strikes me as a painfully naïve way of interpreting world events and prescribing solutions.  Just as he tried to contextualize Afghanistan with other countries in Central Asia, the U.S. invasion and occupation needs to be contextualized within a discussion of hegemony and capitalism.  After the scores of countries the U.S. has invaded, I'm shocked people still think the U.S. actually cares about the Afghan, Iraqi, Guatemalan, Filipino etc., etc. people, and that the "if only" argument is still used.

My other frustration was that there was much that seemed to be missing from the book.  There was not much of a discussion of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, what they thought, how they formed, why they were bad. It was just assumed that they were bad and needed no discussion.  I think labeling something as bad and worthy of being opposed without much discussion is dangerous, even if the label is appropriate.  I was also troubled by his other labeling of things.  He doesn't discuss what jihad means, but again it's taken to be bad. He claims "talib" means "religious student" and "madrassa" means "religious school" when both just mean student and school.  He doesn't explain his definition of Islamic "extremism" or "fundamentalism".  Finally, in the first three chapters (I stopped after that) I counted 16 claims that I felt warranted footnotes where none existed. It all seemed very attuned to inaccurate Western conceptions and instead of using his book as an opportunity to deconstruct them, he reinforces them, which is unfortunate.

However, I'm still glad that I read the book. I learned much about the area and it is certainly extremely topical.  Now hearing about how the Taliban is operating in the Swat Valley makes a lot more sense.  It also provoked some thinking about, well, what is the solution, what should be done? From my perspective, I oppose the US/European occupation, I think Karzai's an inept puppet, I certainly am not a fan of the Taliban or warlords.  I know nothing about Afghanistan's civil society.  Do I even know enough to have an opinion?  It got me thinking and I appreciate that.

Plan Mexico and the politics of fear

A friend recently asked what I thought of a Stratfor article about kidnapping in Mexico.  In particular he asked if Mexico is being focused on to take heat off Colombia and target Mexican social movements. As the House of Representatives just approved $300 million in military aid to Mexico, it's especially relevant. On March 11, Friends of Brad Will is organizing a caravan to D.C. to press Congress on stopping Plan Mexico.  Below is my answer, in article-esque form.

On a topical level, I am not very familiar with the kidnapping situation in Mexico.  I also found it amusing (though not surprising) how little the authors touch on the infiltration of the drug cartels into all levels of government.  But I do agree with you that this fits well with the increasing rhetoric we see coming from the administration regarding violence in Mexico. In my view, it's all circular.  Drugs come through Mexico for U.S. consumers. The cartels use this money to buy U.S. weapons, among other things. Cartels splinter due to the arrest or killing of leaders, due to the money involved, or due to new players in the game. This increases cartel-on-cartel violence. Add to the mix Calderon's "drug war", and you have cartels, cops, and soldiers all killing each other, leading to more than 6,000 homicides in 2008. Of course the drug business itself isn't effected because the police, military and civil administration on all levels are either so corrupt or so inept that all they do is tragically increase the body count.

Meanwhile, neo-liberalism continues, exacerbating poverty.  Paired with the corruption, impunity and violence of the state, that inevitably leads to protests and rebellions.  The successes of popular movements in places like Oaxaca and Atenco, paired with the ability of armed groups like the EPR to strike the state's infrastructure at will, certainly is causing the Mexican government a lot of distress.  This is especially the case as now more than ever movements in various states, such as Oaxaca, Morelos, Michoacan, Chiapas, Guerrero, DF, etc., are finding common cause with one another and are refusing to resort to electoral politics as a remedy.  And although I'm too cynical to put much stock in it, anywhere you go in Mexico you'll hear talk about something big happening in 2010.

Of course, not only is the Mexican government concerned about this, but the U.S., too.  Mexico is too good of a client to lose. So in response they rolled out the Merida Initiative, or Plan Mexico. This is a $1.6 billion package to Mexico, with a small amount of it going to countries in Central America.  Much of it will go to equipping and training the Mexican military and police forces - who are not only corrupt, but implicated repeatedly in severe human rights abuse cases. Plan Mexico fulfills several objectives: it reasserts U.S. hegemony over Mexico and Central America lost due to the war on Iraq, it gives Calderon the tools to deal with social movements, and since no actual money is leaving the U.S., only "services," it's a nice boon to U.S. corporations.  All of this without having to face the fact that U.S. drug consumption and U.S. weaponry is largely what is causing the violence and U.S. neo-liberal policies are largely what's causing the poverty that leads to social movements or social crimes.

Since Plan Mexico has to be approved yearly (it runs over three years), and since it is $1.6 billion, and since Plan Colombia has been such a failure (at least in terms of its stated goals), fearmongering about a violent Mexico such as this article does is necessary.  It plays right into the hands of the military industrial complex and U.S. efforts to keep the Monroe Doctrine going in the 21st century.

It's just another attempt to keep reality from interfering with their plans. You're much more likely to be extorted by a cop in Mexico than a kidnapper.  Of course the occasional randomness and brutality of it make it a particularly disturbing crime, but to the average visitor or the average Mexican, it's not a prominent concern.

NYU administration thuggishly breaks occupation

Continuous updates on Twitter.

Today New York University has shown its true face more than ever. Claiming to be a "private university in the public service," it is clearly not even in the service of those students whose tuitions allow it to exist.

Earlier today, NYU cut power to all outlets in the occupied space and turned off the wireless internet.  Obviously this was an attempt to silence and intimidate the occupiers who have broad-based support.

Then, NYU said it would negotiate and instead detained and suspended the student negotiators when they showed up.  Security has now broken through the barricade and people are being detained and suspended.

Instead of dialog and negotiation, the NYU administration has shown they prefer the authoritarian, dissent-quashing, dictator route. It is a true reflection of how they run their university. Nothing but thugs with suits on, interested in getting rich under the guise of "education."

Be prepared to defend any individual or group that is targeted academically or legally for their role in the occupation. Widespread support for the occupation and its demands will not be extinguished by NYU's hypocritical, tyrannical behavior.

Come out to 60 Washington Square South if you can.

Email NYU Administrators. Demand amnesty and no suspensions:

NYU President John Sexton: john.sexton@nyu.edu

John Beckman, NYU Spokesperson: jhb5@nyu.edu

Office of the Provost: provost@nyu.edu

Office of the Vice President: evp@nyu.edu

Protest outside occupied NYU building attacked

As the administration threatened to declare the students occupying the Kimmel Center at New York University as trespassers and subject to expulsion or arrest as of 1 AM Friday morning, a crowd of 500 people gathered outside to support the occupation.

Around midnight the crowd took the street in front of Kimmel. The police responded by firing pepper spray. A few injuries have been reported but no arrests.

Please continue to spread the word. Contact NYU. They state they will not grant amnesty. Amnesty for those taking part of the occupation is non-negotiable.

NYU refuses to negotiate

And they're also not letting security eat.

The only offer NYU has come up with in the face of the Kimmel Center occupation was that they'd agree to negotiations at 5PM today, but only if students left Kimmel by 4PM. Since it's after 4PM and the occupation is still going, you can guess what the students' response was.

At 5PM there will be a press conference in front of Kimmel Center. Come out and/or spread the word.

There's also now a sample letter and adminstration email addresses for people to use to express their support for the occupation and its demands.