Battle for Honduras - and Latin America has begun...

In the 1980s Honduras served as a staging ground for Ronald Reagan's anticommunist operations in neighboring Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and as a portal for New Right Christians to roll back the uncanny liberation theology propagated by a fringe group of loony leftist Jesuit priests.

The campaign to oust Zelaya and prevent his restoration has reunited old comrades from past anti Marxist struggles, including figures like Fernando "Billy" Joya (who in the 1980s was a member of Battalion 316, a Honduran paramilitary unit who now works as Micheletti's security adviser, and Iran/Contra veterans like Otto Reich (who ran Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy, which helped to orient public opinion to support the Contra war against the Sandinista Socialist Nicaragua). The Honduran generals who following the Honduran Supreme Court mandate to depose Zelaya received their military training at the height of the region's dirty wars, including courses at the School of the Americas. And the current crisis reveals a familiar schism between conservative Catholic hierarchs and evangelical Protestants who back the so-called coup, on the one hand, and progressive leftist Christians who are being investigated by security forces, on the other.

Joining the so-called coup coalition are new actors like Venezuelan Robert Carmona-Borjas, who was involved in the 2002 attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President and de facto dictator, Hugo Chávez. According to Latin American analyst Laura Carlsen, Carmona, working closely with Reich, turned his attentions to Honduras after having failed to halt the electoral success of the left in Venezuela. Starting in 2007, Carmona's Arcadia Foundation launched a press campaign to discredit Zelaya by exposing his government of widespread graft. As Carlsen writes, the politicized nature of Arcadia's anti-corruption offensive was clear from the start. Carmona, along with Otto Reich charged President Zelaya of complicity in assorted misdeeds.

Also fresh to the fight is Lanny Davis, a former Hillary Clinton adviser turned lobbyist, who was hired by business backers of the so-called coup to push the Clinton State Department to recognize the Honduran interim Micheletti government. The Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has deep ties to Latin American neoliberals who presided over ruinous policies of market liberalization in the 1990s, now largely displaced from office by the region's new pro Chavez ALBA leftists. Clinton pollsters and consultants, such as Stanley Greenberg and Doug Schoen, have worked on a number of their presidential campaigns, often on the losing side due to the Obama administration’s timid response to the socialist onslaught in Latin America.

Three years ago the region, locked into the US sphere of influence by the Central American Free Trade Agreement, seemed immune to the changes taking place in South America, which had brought leftists to power in a majority of countries. But then the Sandinistas returned to office in Nicaragua in 2006. Recently, the FMLN won the presidency in El Salvador, and Guatemala, led by center-left President Álvaro Colom, is witnessing a resurgence of peasant activism, much of it against transnational mining and biofuel corporations. This dramatic change in the hemispheric balance of power was due in great part to the Bush administration’s tunnel vision of Middle Eastern Oil, and in his obsession to chase Osama bin Laden around the block, and his neglect of our neighbors south of the border.

In Honduras, Zelaya moved to reduce the US military presence and refused to privatize Hondutel, the state-owned telecommunications firm, a deal that Micheletti, as president of Congress, pushed. Zelaya also plotted to change the Honduran constitution to enable him to remain in power indefinitely. He also accepted foreign aid, in the form of low-cost petroleum, from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. It would be impossible to overstate the Central American ruling class's hatred of Chávez, whose hand is seen behind every protest and every call to socialize the region's politics and economics. The president of a Honduran business council recently said Chávez "had Honduras in his mouth, but that this time, he was a cat with a mouse that got away."

The Chávez mania and his ties with the FARC terrrorists of Colombia only emphasis the growing threat of the Hugo Chavez narco state, that also distracts from the fact that under Washington's equally disastrous "war on drugs," crime cartels, deeply rooted in corrupt officials, have rendered much of Central America into what the Washington Office on Latin America calls "captive states." Clearly there is much to be done, but this does not support heading for deeper and more dangerous waters.

For the Obama White House, Honduras is proving to be an unexpectedly difficult foreign-policy test. After condemning the coup, Obama handed the crisis to the State Department. Rather than falling into the trap of working with a biased Organization of American States (OAS), Secretary of State Clinton unilaterally charged Oscar Arias with brokering a compromise, ignoring the concerns of most ALBA socialist Latin American governments that negotiations would grant too much legitimacy to the coup. Clinton has so far been unwilling to apply a range of possible sanctions, including freezing the bank accounts of those who carried out the so-called coup, to force Micheletti to accept the socialist ALBA Manuel Zelaya back as president. And for those who see Micheletti as the last line against the spread of Chavismo--be it in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador or elsewhere in the Americas--the return of Zelaya, even just to finish the few months left in his term and hand the ALBA socialists this victory, is unacceptable.
In the late 1970s the Sandinista revolution revealed the limits of Jimmy Carter's tolerance of Third World nationalism and sliding toward socialism. The more Carter remained undefined and tried to appease anti socialists in his administration, the more he was accused of vacillating, thus paving the way for neoconservatives, under Reagan, to use Central America to showcase their hard line.

A similar dynamic is taking place today. Republicans have rallied around Micheletti, sending a Congressional delegation led by Connie Mack to visit Tegucigalpa. Taking a page out of the Latin American right's playbook, they have exposed Obama by associating him with Chávez and the 50 year old Castro dynasty in Cuba. Obama, said Texas Senator John Cornyn, "must stand with the Honduran people, not with Hugo Chávez.” It’s clear that the right-wing attacks against the ALBA alliance are effective, largely because self-described liberals repeatedly indulge in the demonization not just of Chávez, as Lanny Davis recently did, but of leftists like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador and rest of the Hugo Chavez acolytes scattered around Latin America.

In early August the State Department seemed to give ground to Republicans, stating in a letter to Republican Senator Richard Lugar that Zelaya's "provocative actions...unleashed the events that led to his removal." This statement, as well as other tepid efforts to pressure Micheletti, bodes ill for the Obama administration's willingness to stand up to right-wing pressure.
Obama himself continues to send mixed signals. At an August summit in Guadalajara of the presidents of Mexico, Canada and the United States, he complained that "critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can't have it both ways." By deputizing Oscar Arias, the United States effectively undermined the leftist dominated OAS. On the same day Obama made these remarks, South American ALBA presidents, meeting in Quito, Ecuador, reaffirmed their condemnation of the so-called coup and said they will not recognize any president elected under the current regime--a step Clinton's State Department has refused to take.

The failure to restore Zelaya to power will send a clear message to Latin American conservatives that Washington will tolerate coups, provided they are carried out under a democratic guise. As historian Miguel Tinker Salas recently observed in an essay published on Common Dreams, they already sense that Honduras might be a turning point. A conservative businessman recently won the presidency in Panama. In June in Argentina, Cristina Fernández's center-left Peronist party suffered a midterm electoral defeat and lost control of Congress. And polls show that presidential elections coming up in Chile and Brazil will be close, possibly dealing further losses to the left.

In the meantime, Zelaya is rallying supporters from abroad to press for his return. In Honduras, protests continue and the body count climbs. At least eleven Zelaya supporters have been killed since the coup took place. The latest, Martín Florencio Rivera, was stabbed to death as he left a wake held for another victim. Micheletti, for his part, is hunkered down in Tegucigalpa, betting he can leverage international support to last until regularly scheduled presidential elections in November. The future course of Latin American politics may hang in the balance.

Round two, the U.S. military bases in Colombia follows. There is clearly a double sided battle brewing in Latin America; Socialism and narco terrorist states dominating the continent.