Lobo's Secret Pact Redux

Remember Roger Noriega's alarmist article on Fox about Porfirio Lobo Sosa's supposed "Secret Pact" with Hugo Chavez?

We first addressed it here.

Now, El Heraldo has published the text of what purports to be a diplomatic cable from the Venezuelan Embassy in Honduras back to Venezuela, detailing a meeting between Ariel Vargas, the Embassy's chargé d'affaires, and Porfirio Lobo Sosa in mid May of this year.

This should be the same cable Noriega refers to in his article, as we cannot imagine there are two diplomatic summaries of that meeting. Its content, as we suspected, bears no resemblance to what Roger Noriega says it said.

I would translate the cable for you, but it's long.

So, here are the interesting things Vargas reports Lobo Sosa telling him. They aren't Noriega's fantasies, but then, we all knew that, right?

The cable does not, as Noriega alleges, have Lobo Sosa "pledging his loyalty to Chavez". There's no description of Lobo Sosa as a "fervent revolutionary."

Lobo Sosa initiated the meeting, according to Vargas, after failing to reach Chavez by phone. He wanted to accelerate the negotiations with Chavez and Colombian President Santos and had some points he wanted to raise with respect to Zelaya's four demands.

Lobo Sosa noted the precarious political position of his government. This should come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog on a regular basis. Lobo Sosa has little traction, even in his own party.

Vargas says Lobo Sosa's strategy is not to come between opposing forces in Honduras, but to mediate between them, bringing elements of both sides forward in negotiated solutions.

As any realist knows, a Constituent Assembly is impossible given current politics in Honduras. It cannot happen without a major change in political opinion.

Vargas reports that Lobo Sosa says as much. Vargas reports that Lobo Sosa also says, to the extent that he can, he will work tactfully to change that opinion. However, he insisted that commitment to hold a Constituent Assembly could not be part of the Cartagena Agreement.

Lobo Sosa did not, as Noreiga claims, "say that he needed help neutralizing opposition within his own Nationalist Party and the Catholic Church."

What he did say is that both he and Chavez needed to work to build support for a Constituent Assembly with both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Honduras.

In response to Ecuador's demand that the authors of the coup be punished, Lobo Sosa noted that he had been called on the carpet by Congress (many members among the authors of the coup) when, traveling in Europe, he simply referred to the June 2009 coup as a coup.

Vargas reports that Lobo Sosa then joked that if he signed such an agreement, Chavez would quickly be receiving him in Venezuela as they would throw him out of Honduras as they had Zelaya.

The cable, in short, is a frank discussion of the four points Zelaya had proposed: what was, and was not, politically possible for Lobo Sosa.

Lobo Sosa, it appears, had not "posed as a fellow revolutionary", though Noriega was right that he did ask for Chavez's patience.

It was not the military's backing Lobo Sosa said he would lose if he called it a coup, but rather Congress's.

So where does Noriega's fantasy of Lobo Sosa the revolutionary come from? we suggest three sources: first, anyone negotiating with Zelaya was betraying the right wing. The suspicion that Lobo Sosa shares a desire to change the constitution to allow the possibility of staying in power is there to be mobilized against him, as it now is against any Honduran president.

Second, anyone talking to Hugo Chavez.... well, we all KNOW what that means, comrade.

Finally, and this is the peculiarly Honduran piece: Lobo Sosa, after all, went to school in the Soviet Union. It seems for some people, no amount of right wing conversion can entirely clear up a mis-spent youth.

What's In The Kool-Aid?

Roger Noriega has a good conservative pedigree.

He was ambassador to the OAS from 2001-2003, and then worked as an Asssistant Seccretary of State in the State Department from 2003-2005. Now he's a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and managing director of Vision America LLC, a lobbying firm. As a lobbyist, he has to place press op-ed opinion pieces for clients from time to time. I have to assume his latest on Fox News is placement for a client, because if he believes it, he should have his beverage of choice analyzed for hallucinogens.

Noriega's piece posits a secret meeting in mid-May between Porfirio Lobo Sosa and Ariel Vargas, representing Hugo Chavez, at Lobo Sosa's suburban home in Tegucigalpa.

The purpose of the meeting? Noriega claims that sources within the Venezuelan government told him Lobo Sosa did his best to convince Chavez's representative that he was still a "fervent revolutionary", and sought to enlist Chavez's patience and help with neutralizing the National Party and the Catholic Church so that he could bring in sweeping constitutional changes "that will allow the people to sweep out the old order."

Kind of reminds me of the whisper campaign against Lobo Sosa in the fall 2009 elections, reminding us he went to college in the former Soviet Union.

Ariel Vargas was the chargé d'affaires for the Venezuelan embassy in Honduras during the 2009 coup and defied Micheletti's expulsion order remaining locked in the embassy.

Noriega goes on to say that Chavez is now pouring millions of dollars into the FNRP to help it become a political party, bypassing Lobo Sosa and the Honduran military, which he would have us believe is the only institution in Honduras backing Lobo Sosa.

So why is Chavez doing this?

Noriega claims that Chavez is using Honduras to place drugs into Mexico and the US, as part of a plan to destabilize the US and Mexico. There are serious studies of drug circulation from South America through Honduras: this is not a contribution to that research.

And what conspiracy would be complete without an allegation that terrorists in Venezuela-- specifically, Hezbollah-- have been seeking information about sneaking across the US border undetected, a goal that somehow will be advanced if Honduras goes all 21st century socialist again under Lobo Sosa.

Noriega's article would be ludicrous, if it didn't echo the tone-- if not the specifics-- of right wing elements in Honduras displeased that Lobo Sosa negotiated with Manuel Zelaya at all. But only in a right wing fantasy-- that is, nightmare-- can Porfirio Lobo Sosa be recast as avid revolutionary.