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On Coup Anniversary, Examining the US Role in Honduras
Today marks seven years since the coup d'etat in Honduras - the day that former President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by the Honduran army and then flown out of the country from an air field controlled by the U.S. military. That event sent shockwaves through the region and the world and was denounced by the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the European Union. Honduras was suspended temporarily from the OAS.
Jun 28, 2016
Today marks seven years since the coup d'etat in Honduras - the day that former President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by the Honduran army and then flown out of the country from an airfield controlled by the U.S. military. That event sent shockwaves through the region and the world and was denounced by the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the European Union. Honduras was suspended temporarily from the OAS.
Observers and experts warned that if Zelaya was not restored to office and the forces behind the coup were allowed to proceed without any accountability, it would be disastrous for Honduras and the region. Some feared widespread human rights violations and targeting of political opposition, harkening back to a time of CIA-trained death squads and disappearances when Honduras was a front in the U.S.'s covert war against liberation movements in neighboring countries.
Seven years and hundreds of lives later, those predictions have proven true. Opponents of the coup regime, leaders of the resistance, land rights activists, journalists, and human rights lawyers have been killed in the wake of the coup. Among the most recent tragic examples is that of Berta Caceres, a fearless, committed, and exuberant advocate for the Lenca people against the construction of a dam project at Rio Blanco. Berta was shot and killed in her home on March 3, 2016.
Three years before her death, she acknowledged the danger she faced:
The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top. I want to live, there are many things I still want to do in this world but I have never once considered giving up fighting for our territory, for a life with dignity, because our fight is legitimate. I take lots of care but in the end, in this country where there is total impunity I am vulnerable... When they want to kill me, they will do it.
Three months after her murder, a former Honduran soldier confirmed for The Guardian the existence of the hitlist, with Caceres' name on it, in the possession of a unit trained by U.S. special forces.
The U.S. has historically played a heavy-handed role in Honduras, which became an outpost from which it conducted covert action in the region during the Cold War, with disastrous results for human rights defenders and activists there. To date, there has been no real accountability for the role the U.S. played in Honduras in training and arming security forces who committed unspeakable violence against political opponents. Likewise, on the Honduran side of the equation, there has been little accountability over the years. Indeed, at least one confirmed member of Battalion 3-16, a notorious death squad trained by the CIA in the '80s, was active in the political intrigue after the 2009 coup.
Not that there weren't efforts at the time to hold the U.S. government accountable for its role in the region. Organizations like CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) were working to raise these concerns and stop economic, political and military intervention as early as 1980. The Center for Constitutional Rights, representing members of Congress and victims of human rights violations in the region, sought to bring these disastrous and harmful policies to light in court in cases like Crocket v. Reagan, challenging the administration's undeclared war in El Salvador, and Sanchez-Espinoza v. Reagan, which took aim at U.S. officials' complicity in murder, torture, rape and other human rights violations in Nicaragua. Dellums v. Smith sought to compel an investigation into credible allegations of illegality in the administration's conduct in Nicaragua, and some believe the case led to revelations about the sale of arms to Iran to fund support for the contras, who were largely trained from inside Honduras.
Then, there was the judgment of the International Court of Justice in a case brought by Nicaragua, which found the U.S. guilty of violating international law for its mining of Nicaragua's harbors and supporting and arming the contras. The court ordered the U.S. to pay reparations to Nicaragua. The U.S. ignored both the judgment and calls by the international community to comply with it.
Fast forward to Honduras after the 2009 coup: Here, the U.S. government helped to undermine democracy and the strong resistance that formed in the wake of the coup when it worked against the restoration of the democratically-elected president and pushed for the recognition of an election that was boycotted by respected election observers who saw no possibility of a free and fair process in the circumstances at the time. The U.S. was the first country to restore relations with Honduras after the controversial election officially and pushed others to normalize relations with the post-coup regime as well. Consistent with its long-standing modus operandi, the U.S. continued to provide aid and military training and support while expanding its base of operations there.
In doing so, the U.S. government has helped to seal the fate of hundreds of resistance activists, journalists, campesinos, and, yes, Berta Caceres. However, Honduran and U.S. human rights activists and organizations working across national lines have sought to keep speaking truth to the power on all sides of the equation by amplifying the struggle and stories from Honduras and the impact of the U.S. on events inside. CCR has again been part of these diverse efforts by representing family members of a youth killed by the Honduran military in a case against an engineer of the coup and de facto president Robert Michelletti, representing the alternative true commission in efforts to gain access to information about the coup from the U.S. government through FOIA requests, the submission of a complaint to the International Criminal Court, and joining with others in pushing for an end to the exploitive, extractive and self-serving policies of the U.S. in Honduras.
Last week, U.S. Representative Hank Johnson introduced unprecedented legislation to stop U.S. aid to Honduras. The Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act would suspend U.S. support for military operations, equipment, and training until the Honduran government investigates credible reports of human rights violations. The legislation is an important and necessary step and should be supported.
Another momentous event is the Border Convergence organized by SOA Watch that will be held October 7-10, 2016 in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico. CCR, along with many other organizations, is endorsing this event, which looks critically at the impact of U.S. policies in the region that exacerbate repression and economic crisis on the one hand and the xenophobic immigration laws and policies encountered by migrants and refugees in the U.S. on the other. It is a way of highlighting the absurdity of decrying immigration and blaming migrants and refugees for fleeing situations we helped create and, worse, benefit from.
While there is much to be done, and hearts are still heavy with the loss of Berta and so many others, these and other efforts are cause for hope in an otherwise very dark time.
To show your support for the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, click here.
To support the Border Convergence, click here.
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School of Assassins Faces Protest, Congressional De-Funding
Nov 20, 2013
November 22-24, 2013: Shut Down the School of AssassinsThe School of the Americas is the Pentagon's flagship training school for Latin American militaries. The SOA has trained hundreds ...
The US Army School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia is a notorious training operation for Latin American officers and soldiers. It's associated with some of the worst dictatorships and human rights violators in the hemisphere. For over 20 years, the grassroots School of Americas Watch (SOA Watch) has grown into one of the most dynamic, multi-generational, cross-continental movements against militarism in the Americas.
This weekend, November 22-24, will see thousands gather for a massive rally at Ft. Benning in the ongoing campaign to shut down the school. Vans from colleges and universities will make the trek with students who've studied the grim history of U.S.-sponsored military coups and U.S.-friendly dictators, many of whom got their inspiration and training at the SOA (now renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC).
Among the more infamous SOA graduates are Gen. Jose Rios Montt, who was convicted May 10th of committing genocide between March 1982 and August 1983 during his Guatemalan military dictatorship; death squad leader Otto Perez Molina who under Rios Montt directed massacres of Maya people, and who recently maneuvered Guatemala's high court to reverse Rios Montt's conviction; Gen. Manual Noreiga of Panama, who moved from dictatorship via SOA to the BOP (Federal Bureau of Prisons that is) on drug charges; Roberto D'Abuisson, leader of El Salvador's death squads in the 1980s; and Gen. Hugo Banzar Suarez of Bolivia who seized power in 1971 and who jailed, disappeared and assassinated suspected political opponents for eight years. SOA graduates led military coups in Venezuela in 2002 and the 2009 coup in Honduras.
For more background, "Somos Una America" -- a new documentary that focuses on the campaign against the Pentagon mindset that promotes U.S. domination and 'military solutions' in the Western Hemisphere -- is available online for free (visit: soaw.org/somos).
This past April, the SOA Watch campaign won a long-sought court victory over the U.S. government's refusal to release the names of the trainers at the SOA/WHINSEC. Federal Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton in Calif. ruled that the Pentagon has no grounds for refusing to release these names. President Obama has OKed the Justice Department's appeal of this ruling, protecting the Pentagon's effort to keep the information secret. As SOA Watch points out, this is because instructors there have coached "torturers, death squads and military dictators throughout the Americas." The president's decision to appeal puts the lie to his claim that his administration would be the most transparent in history. And you thought after his persecution of whistle blowers Julian Assange, Pfc. Manning and Edward Snowden that Obama could not get more cynical.
Teaching Torture the World Over
The SOA burst into the news in 1996, when the Pentagon released copies of its torture training manuals. The Sept. 21, 1996 Washington Post, in "U.S. Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture; Manuals Used 1982-91, Pentagon Reveals" by Dana Priest, notes that the manuals promote the use of "fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum." By 1996, 60,000 military and police officers had been through SOA training.
The torture manuals were distributed to thousands of military officers from eleven South and Central American countries, although the actions advocated in them violated U.S. Army law at the time. The Pentagon ordered the manuals destroyed, but only a few thousand were ever recovered. They have doubtlessly been reproduced and employed by militaries and counterinsurgency forces the world over. U.S. military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan appear to be direct beneficiaries, considering the torture regimes conducted at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq (2004) and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Afghanistan has become a torture regime too -- first under U.S. forces and now by their Afghan trainees (See "U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes," NY Times, Apr. 16, 2013, and "Government Panel in Afghanistan Confirms Widespread Torture of Detainees," Jan. 21, 2013).
Demands to abolish the SOA/WHINSEC now come from across the political spectrum. From the point of view of the victims, more than 300 human rights defenders have employed nonviolent direct action at the base, and as a result have collectively spent over 100 years in prison and served additional years probation. (Disclaimer: I did 6 months in the Duluth prison camp for trespassing at SOA back in 2006. My cellie R.J., who was doing eight years, put me straight when he announced, "I see him doing his exercises, his yoga. He's just here for an oil change.") From officialdom, the Latin American Military Training Review Act of 2013, H.R. 2989, would suspend operations at the school. It also mandates an investigation into SOA's connection with abuses of human rights. It's got 40 co-sponsors but needs more.
If you're not heading down to the Georgia for the rally, at least push your Congressional Rep's to join the shutdown effort.
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