Turns out it's Hard to Ignore a Coup

First, it was Dana Frank's Op-Ed in the New York Times, a piece still drawing strong reactions in Honduras.

A concerted effort followed to publish non sequiturs by diplomats not precisely refuting her analysis-- since that is not actually possible-- but blowing smoke about, for example, alleged advances in human rights law. Frank's strong statement (in agreement with human rights organizations in Honduras) opposing increased US security aid to Honduras, because it is used against the people, also drew support from a former US ambassador to El Salvador with experience in Honduras, Robert White, whose letter to the New York Times was not printed along with the two opposed to Frank. But you can read Ambassador White's letter in full at quotha, where he concludes that

Instead of using the leverage provided by a unanimous vote of the Organization of American States to restore constitutional government to Honduras, the Department of State fumbled its responsibilities and propped up the coup regime long enough for it to survive and taint the 2009 presidential election.

Then late last week, NPR broadcast an extraordinary two part story by Annie Murphy, a fellow in the Investigative Reporting Program at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Part one, called "In Honduras, Police Accused of Corruption, Killings", does an excellent job of sketching out the disaster caused by police impunity and corruption, without falling into the easy narrative of assigning the cause to drug trafficking alone. In a major departure from too much of the English language reporting, she allows Berta Oliva of COFADEH to make the case of human rights activists in Honduras against US security aid:

"We've asked the U.S. to stop giving aid to security forces here, and we're going to keep asking them to stop."

But it is part two that has the most extraordinary news, although it would be easy to miss the fact that it is news.

Called "'Who rules in Honduras?' Coup's Legacy of Violence", the second segment of Murphy's report economically describes the events of the coup, and the aftermath in which lobbyists managed to get US government opinion turned against returning the democratically elected president to office to complete his term, and towards the spurious solution of conducting elections (under a de facto regime, without international observation, and after months of violent repression and suspensions of civil rights).

Murphy gets unlikely people on the record supporting the critique of US reaction to the coup, and identifying it as having on-going impacts that neither the Lobo Sosa government nor the US want to recognize. As she writes,

Many [in Honduras] say the outcome of the coup is what pushed Honduras to where it is today: the world's most violent nation, according to the U.N.

Murphy also quotes include former ambassador to Honduras Cresencio Arcos, and Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst. Armstrong describes the US reaction to the coup from the perspective of a senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is quoted saying

when you look at what was actually happening in Honduras, [Zelaya] really was a continuation of a halting but definitely forward-moving consolidation of democracy.

The thing that made us sit up and take notice, though, was what Murphy records from Rafael Callejas, president of Honduras from 1990 to 1994. Governing from the Partido Nacional, Callejas might be expected to support the arguments of the current administration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Instead, he argues that Zelaya was "too brash"

but says illegally ousting him has had huge repercussions.

"We're in a crisis. We went back 20 years. We lost again the issue of democracy," Callejas says. "Who rules in Honduras now? Really? Who rules? The people? The system? Or strength? I mean, that's the question that has to be solved."

That's news. When former Honduran presidents of the same party that gained power in the 2009 election says "We lost again the issue of democracy", that's news.

Unfortunately, no one now seems to be concerned to help Honduras regain the two decades of progress toward "consolidation of democracy".

To do that, you first have to admit what happened: and the US, the one country with the influence and resources to make a difference, has tied itself to the claim that Lobo Sosa presides over a government of "unity and reconciliation" that is improving human rights and cleaning up the security forces.

Reports like those by Murphy, and the refusal of scholars like Frank to be silenced, are critical to challenging that storyline.

How you know you hit a nerve: Honduras edition

Answer: when the Honduran Ambassador to the US, Jorge Hernandez Alcerro, writes to the New York Times to object.

I am talking, of course, about Dana Frank's powerful New York Times op ed, laying out bluntly the argument that, since the coup in 2009, Honduras has been in a state of disarray.

The response from the Ambassador was published February 5. It makes two main arguments:

(1) questioning the 2009 election is

"offensive to the 56.6 percent of Hondurans who voted for President Porfirio Lobo in the last election. More than 4,600 international and domestic observers closely supervised the electoral process. The other four Honduran political parties recognized President Lobo’s election, have been integrated into the sitting national reconciliation and unity government, and are represented in Congress."

While this is a comforting claim for the US backed government that took power in early 2010, the facts say otherwise. The "observers" mentioned were not the independent, neutral, guarantors of free elections that are normally required. The UN withdrew its technical support. The OAS refused to send observers, and no other respected international body did either. Reporting at the time noted bias on the part of these supposed observers, who, among other things, denied the violence that took place on election day itself.

The cited vote total of 56.6%, obscures the fact that voter turnout was under 50%, a steep decline from the previous presidential election, despite early inflated participation claims promoted egregiously by the US in early congratulatory messages. Even CNN managed to publish a correction with some analysis of what this meant for the legitimacy of the new government (although they rounded voter turnout up to 50%).

Then there is that thing about all the political parties recognizing the election-- and getting their share of the spoils. So career politicians are happy. What happens when a large proportion of the people do not feel represented by any political party, when they witness this kind of spoils system? You get loss of faith in any political party, and in governance generally.

(2) Calling for an end of US aid being used to militarize policing in Honduras would undercut the supposed successes Honduras is achieving in addressing crime, here reduced to drug trafficking.

What is perhaps most astonishing about the response-- apart from the strength of the attack, which reveals the way a real critique bites-- is this sentence:

The independent Office of the National Prosecutor for Human Rights has been investigating and prosecuting the alleged human rights violations.

That "alleged" is worth a million dollars on its own. Anyone paying attention knows that human rights complaints made in Honduras are routinely not investigated, and that the occupants of government offices created to theoretically promote Human Rights are over-ruled in security decisions and ignored when they caution against the erosion of civil rights. They complain about lack of resources. The ambassador follows this sentence with a nonsequitur about passing laws against child labor and human trafficking, and establishing a "committee against torture". But the human rights problem is much simpler and less exotic than that: it is a priest being beaten up on the side of the road; a peasant leader being assassinated; a LGBT activist being killed.

Then there's the letter by former US ambassador to Honduras (1996-1999), James Creagan. Again, he counter factually blesses the 2009 election process as "free and fair". I think most observers would say suspension of the rights of free speech and assembly, assault on a presidential candidate, and the lack of unbiased observers mean even if you want to accept the results of this election, the process was hardly "free", and arguably not "fair".

But this is not about truth. Creagan also writes that:

Honduras faced political and institutional stalemate after the removal of President José Manuel Zelaya in June 2009. Far from making a “mess,” the skilled diplomats under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton deftly worked for the only way out of a descent into armed clashes — democratic elections.

How wonderfully revisionist. The "removal" of President Zelaya was of course not a neutral surgical procedure: it was a coup. The "stalemate" could have been broken if the US diplomats had not kept propping up the confidence of the deluded Micheletti regime. "Skilled" and "deft" are the opposite of the words that would honestly characterize the State Department role: clumsy and clueless are rather more to the point.

And finally, finally, we have an admission: the US wasn't trying to reinstate the legally elected president of the country, and restore the rule of law. It was trying to avoid "a descent into armed clashes".

Too bad no one in the State Department noticed that the armed clashes had already happened. Only the victims were not politicians and the wealthy: they were school teachers and students.

Whitewashing things in 2009 is one thing. Continuing to assert, in the face of all evidence, that the breach opened in June 2009 was healed by the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa is insane.

And while watching a clear-eyed scholar be put to the rack is not enjoyable, it shows that the critique hurt. And, as a wise Honduran colleague notes, the more they react to the original op ed piece, the more exposure it gets, including within Honduras, where El Heraldo's story on the "diplomatic offensive" helpfully links to the original piece, in case any reader had not seen it already.

Dana Frank Tells it Like it is in Honduras

...in the New York Times.

Frank is among a group of scholars specializing in Honduras who have tried to get the mainstream English language media to cover what is actually happening in Honduras, during and after the coup d'etat of 2009. Even when the coup itself was fresh, we found little interest by US media in a complex story that didn't fit existing simple narratives.

As the US role in Honduras slipped from an initial stance that seemed strongly to oppose the breakdown in the rule of law, to more ambiguous statements that treated the legally elected president and self-appointed dictator as equal parties who should negotiate a settlement, to the final position of claiming an election held under a de facto regime engaging in repression of free speech and assembly was somehow a path back to legitimacy, US media showed ever less interest in publishing work that critiqued the US role.

So it is a landmark event to see such a prominent news outlet publish these words:

Mr. Lobo’s government is, in fact, a child of the coup. It retains most of the military figures who perpetrated the coup, and no one has gone to jail for starting it... the Lobo government cannot reform itself.

There is much more of substance in this extraordinary Op-ed. Among the most important: a summary of little publicized congressional actions within the last year taken once congress members understood what has happened and is happening in Honduras. To quote Frank:

Last May, 87 members signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calling for a suspension of military and police aid to Honduras. Representative Howard L. Berman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to her on Nov. 28, asking whether the United States was arming a dangerous regime. And in December, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others obtained conditions on a small portion of the 2012 police and military aid appropriated for Honduras.

These actions are important because they shine light on the actors who need to be held responsible for the situation in Honduras today. Frank deserves immense credit for tenacity in bringing these issues to the attention of policy makers and the public through her tireless work. We can hope that this NY Times piece sets a target that other media start to emulate.

For the record: Frank is a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the author of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America. Honduras represents only a small part of her impressive publication record, focused on labor history. She has contributed multiple articles of The Nation describing the political and economic forces that led to the Honduran coup, and the effects it has had.