Crooked Hillary and the Rape of Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

3. Hillary Is Being Misleading About Her Role in the Honduras Coup

Hillary Is Being Misleading About Her Role in the Honduras Coup

When Clinton was secretary of state the U.S. helped overthrow Honduras' elected government. Today the country is in chaos.

By Ben Norton / Salon
April 15, 2016

Hillary Clinton may have foreign policy experience, but it is experience comprised of disaster after disaster.

In an interview with the New York Daily News, journalist Juan González asked the presidential candidate about her role in the coup in Honduras. In 2009, the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected government of President Manuel Zelaya. The populist left-wing leader was woken up in the middle of the night, kidnapped and whisked away from his own country.

The international community immediately condemned the coup. The U.S. response was quite different. The Obama administration, and particularly the State Department under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, defended the coup.

Clinton, a committed hawk and firm believer in U.S. empire, played a uniquely hands-on role in the coup, just as she did in the equally disastrous war in Libya.

Emails released from Clinton’s time as the secretary of state show that some of her top aides urged her to dub the putsch a military coup and to cut off U.S. aid. She refused to do so.

. . .

“It’s not just like there are randomly violent people down there. This is a U.S.-supported regime.”

Today, Clinton is likely aware of how bad this all looks. She went so far as to excise evidence of it from the paperback version of her memoir.

The journalist who posed the questions to Cinton, Juan González, referred to her Honduras policy as “a Latin American crime story.” (This did not stop the Daily News from endorsing Clinton, however — after it grilled her competitor Bernie Sanders.)

More:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/hillary-being-misleading-about-her-role-honduras-coup

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Hard choices: Hillary Clinton admits role in Honduran coup aftermath


Clinton’s embrace of far-right narrative on Latin America is part of electoral strategy


September 29, 2014 6:00AM ET
by Mark Weisbrot -

In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a review of Henry Kissinger’s latest book, “World Order,” to lay out her vision for “sustaining America’s leadership in the world.” In the midst of numerous global crises, she called for return to a foreign policy with purpose, strategy and pragmatism. She also highlighted some of these policy choices in her memoir “Hard Choices” and how they contributed to the challenges that Barack Obama’s administration now faces.

The chapter on Latin America, particularly the section on Honduras, a major source of the child migrants currently pouring into the United States, has gone largely unnoticed. In letters to Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, more than 100 members of Congress have repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in Honduras, especially since the 2009 military coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-backed post-coup government “rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries,” opening the door for further “violence and anarchy.”

The homicide rate in Honduras, already the highest in the world, increased by 50 percent from 2008 to 2011; political repression, the murder of opposition political candidates, peasant organizers and LGBT activists increased and continue to this day. Femicides skyrocketed. The violence and insecurity were exacerbated by a generalized institutional collapse. Drug-related violence has worsened amid allegations of rampant corruption in Honduras’ police and government. While the gangs are responsible for much of the violence, Honduran security forces have engaged in a wave of killings and other human rights crimes with impunity.

Despite this, however, both under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department’s response to the violence and military and police impunity has largely been silence, along with continued U.S. aid to Honduran security forces. In “Hard Choices,” Clinton describes her role in the aftermath of the coup that brought about this dire situation. Her firsthand account is significant both for the confession of an important truth and for a crucial false testimony.

More:
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/hillary-clinton-honduraslatinamericaforeignpolicy.html