Hillary's Honduras Role

On June 28, 2009, soldiers raided then-President Manuel Zelaya’s home before dawn, arrested him in his pajamas at gunpoint, and forced him on a plane to Costa Rica. Since then, the board pointed out, the country has seen a spike in violence and a massive wave of child migration to the United States. Leaked State Department cables revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Honduras pleaded with Clinton to call what happened in Honduras a military coup, as did members of Congress. But she refused, and worked instead to broker a deal that elected a new government that was much friendlier to multinational corporations and the U.S. military.

  Think Progress

To be fair, this is not a Hillary only stance. She happened to be the point man. She was not working at cross-purposes with the executive. We did have a president in 2009.

Clinton told the NY Daily News on Monday that the Honduran government “followed the law” in ousting its president and said, “I think in retrospect we managed a very difficult situation without bloodshed.”

[...]

But at the time, the U.S. embassy in Honduras wrote that “there is no doubt” that what happened was “an illegal and unconstitutional coup.” The Embassy cable also emphasizes that the Honduran “Congress and the judiciary removed Zelaya on the basis of a hasty, ad-hoc, extralegal, secret, 48-hour process” and called their reasons for doing so “mere supposition or ex-post rationalizations of a patently illegal act.”

[...]

Following the coup, Honduras became the homicide capital of the world and led the globe in murders of environmental activists. The International Trade Union Confederation also documented nearly 60 murders of agricultural workers, and Reporters Without Borders has counted more than two dozen journalists killed since the coup, and noted that almost all of these murders have gone unpunished.

[...]

In the months after the coup, violence and impunity proliferated. The State Department’s own human rights report from the year after the coup cited the following:

Unlawful killings by police and government agents, which the government took some steps to prosecute; arbitrary and summary killings committed by vigilantes and former members of the security forces; harsh prison conditions; violence against detainees; corruption and impunity within the security forces; lengthy pretrial detention and failure to provide due process of law; politicization, corruption, and institutional weakness of the judiciary; corruption in the legislative and executive branches; government restrictions on the recognition of some civil society groups; violence and discrimination against women; child prostitution and abuse; trafficking in persons; discrimination against indigenous communities; violence and discrimination against persons based on sexual orientation; ineffective enforcement of labor laws; and child labor.

[...]

[T]he harm caused by the coup continues to this day.

[...]

[A]s an example, the Honduran government ousting the majority of its Supreme Court in 2012, removing only the justices who voted against allowing corporations to set up autonomous “charter cities.”

[...]

Clinton also claimed in this week’s interview that she avoided designating Zelaya’s ouster a coup because doing so would have cut off humanitarian aid to struggling Hondurans.

Yet foreign policy and foreign aid experts, including Mark Weisbrot with the Center for Economic Policy Research, told ThinkProgress, “That’s just not true.”

“There is an exception for humanitarian aid,” he explained.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.