Hillary’s Role in Honduran Coup Sunk US Relations With Latin America to a New Low

[Judi Lynn]

June 1, 2016
Hillary’s Role in Honduran Coup Sunk US Relations With Latin America to a New Low

by Dan Beeton – Ming Chun Tang

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with the New York Daily News editorial board in April, she was asked what must have been a surprising and unwelcome question. In the years since the 2009 coup in Honduras, there has been remarkably little scrutiny in the major media of how Clinton’s State Department handled it, and she has had to answer few questions about it.

But Juan González asked why she resisted cutting off aid to the coup regime and instead brokered a deal for new elections. Clinton controversially doubled down on defending the coup, outrageously suggesting that the oligarchs and generals who had forced President Manuel Zelaya out had a legal justification. Worse, she suggested that Honduras emulate Plan Colombia: the U.S.-funded war on drugs and guerrillas that sparked the biggest internal refugee crisis in the world outside of Syria, involved the deliberate killing of thousands of innocent civilians by Colombian armed forces, and fostered death squads now poised to stick around even as the country nears an end to its civil war.

Honduras also pops up in Clinton’s memoir, “Hard Choices.” The paperback edition, published shortly after she launched her presidential campaign, is roughly 100 pages shorter than the original hardcover edition, but some of the abridgments seem rather convenient. In her original account of the coup and its aftermath, which was entirely deleted from the paperback, Clinton openly admits to having intervened directly to prevent Zelaya from returning to office:

In the subsequent days (after the coup) I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/01/hillarys-role-in-honduran-coup-sunk-us-relations-with-latin-america-to-a-new-low/

[Herman4747]

1. Another Excellent, Noteworthy Post, Judi Lynn.

We Democrats can do much better than Hillary, damn it!

[left-of-center2012]

2. So the end justifies the means?

"... outrageously suggesting that the oligarchs and generals who had forced President Manuel Zelaya out had a legal justification"