Fighting drug traffickers is his major claim

Meanwhile...

 

Isn't it time we brought the South on board?

I mean South America. And Central America.  We take the water from the rivers that flow south.  We enter trade agreements that stifle their economies. We deport their people when they try to reach the land of plenty and do what we can to discourage them from even trying.

Honduras is threatening to ditch a bilateral extradition treaty, furthering a pattern of snubs delivered against the United States by an array of Latin American leaders.

Anti-American rhetoric has been on the rise in the region.

[...]

Honduran President Xiomara Castro ordered her government to drop the U.S.-Honduras extradition treaty after U.S. Ambassador Laura Dogu expressed concern over Honduran military officials meeting with Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, a prominent member of President Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle.

[...]

Padrino is under indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly running a drug trafficking operation through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

[...]

Castro’s saber-rattling follows a week of heightened U.S.-Mexico tensions, with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declaring his relationship with the U.S. embassy on “pause” after Ambassador Ken Salazar said a judicial reform proposal “represents a risk for the functioning of Mexico’s democracy, and the integration of the American, Mexican and Canadian economies.”

  The Hill

"Saber rattling?" I hardly think that qualifies as saber rattling.

Seeking distance from the United States is ideologically consistent for regional leaders like Castro, López Obrador and others like Colombian President Gustavo Petro, all of whom to some extent embrace the historical vision of the United States as a post-colonial interventionist power in Latin America.

Historical vision? How about the historical reality?

Castro’s motivations could be more personal than historical.

In 2009, Castro’s husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was ousted as president of Honduras in a coup.

While the Obama administration was critical of the coup itself, the United States quickly moved to recognize a post-coup swift election that much of Latin America saw as de facto support for the coup.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the president who won that election, and Juan Orlando Hernández, his successor, both have direct links to the multinational drug trade. Hernández is serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking in the United States. Lobo’s son Fabio is serving a 24-year sentence, and Lobo had related corruption charges dismissed in Honduras this year but has been under U.S. sanctions for his alleged corruption since 2021.

It does seem a little odd to recognize drug traffic-linked people while complaining about their relationships with other countries' drug traffickers.

“Revenge was inevitable, as the U.S. abandoned [Zelaya] after the coup. Now, with his wife in power, they’re back with a vengeance, exposing the shortsightedness of U.S. policy during the Lobo and Hernandez years.”

[...]

Castro’s first big play on the global scene was to recognize communist China in 2023, dropping a longstanding diplomatic relationship with Taiwan.

China’s interest in Latin America is multifaceted — political and security interests are intertwined, if not secondary, to economic interests both in Latin America as a market and provider of raw materials, and as a gateway to the U.S. market.

Also short-sighted of the US to have been fucking around in and fucking up Latin American affairs for decades now.

China is not the only major power looking to Latin America, a region that’s rarely a high U.S. foreign policy priority under either Democratic or Republican administrations.

Putting it mildly.

“Our future is tied to this region, and we have seen in recent years all these nefarious actors, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, gaining a foothold. And we have to be able to counter that,” said [Eddy Acevedo, chief of staff and senior adviser on national security and foreign policy at the Wilson Center.]

Yeah, like maybe making Latin America a priority.  And maybe promoting more feminist ideas and less machismo.

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

Finally, a sensible approach to migration

Mexico and the United States on Wednesday announced a joint plan to send development and agricultural aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to alleviate the root causes of migration from those countries.

Under the plan, dubbed “Sembrando Oportunidades,” or “Planting Opportunities,” both countries will work through their own agencies, the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation (Amexcid) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to address irregular migration from northern Central America.

USAID said in a press release that the two agencies will "plan to coordinate our development resources and expertise to help citizens of northern Central America build prosperous futures in their home communities."

The efforts are set to begin in Honduras, where the agencies will "plan to provide youth with skills and experience that can lead to long-term employment, reducing the risk of irregular migration," Amexcid said in a press release.

[...]

"Both Mexico and the United States have committed resources to this effort and both agencies have begun to coordinate."

  The Hill

While I applaud the approach, I don't imagine it will be nearly enough, and I hope they have some mechanism in place to combat the corruption that will inevitably divert funds to administrators.

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

Why make sense when you can stir up a shitstorm?

The United States is cutting off aid to the "Northern Triangle," otherwise known as the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the State Department told CNN Saturday, one day after President Donald Trump said they had "set up" migrant caravans for entry into the United States.

  CNN

Or, via Fox:

I guess she feels like a fool now.  (She is one.)

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

No refuge here

June 11, 2018

Donald Trump’s administration announced on Monday that it would order US immigration courts to stop granting asylum to victims of domestic abuse and gang violence who come to the country seeking safety.

[...]

[AG Jeff]Sessions signaled that the shift was imminent while addressing an annual training conference for the hundreds of US immigration judges on Monday. “Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems, even all serious problems, that people face every day all over the world,” he told the group.

[...]

“The asylum system is being abused to the detriment of the rule of law, sound public policy and public safety ... now we all know that many of those crossing our border illegally are leaving difficult and dangerous situations. And we understand all are due proper respect and the proper legal process. But we cannot abandon legal discipline and sound legal concepts,” Sessions said in the address.

[...]

Sessions wrote in a ruling on Monday that survivors of “private” crimes were not eligible for asylum.

“Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum,” Sessions wrote in his 31-page decision.

  Guardian

January 13, 2019

Several days after Nelson Espinal slipped across the US southern border, he called his family back in Honduras from inside a US detention center.

“Tell Mom not to worry – I’m applying for asylum,” Espinal, 28, told his sister Patricia, who recounted the December phone call with tears streaming down her sun-scarred cheeks. “We must pray to God that they give it to me. I told them I can’t go back to Honduras because if I go back, they’re going to kill me.”

Espinal had made the 4,900km journey with several thousand others who joined the migrant caravan in October in the hopes of starting a new life.

Within weeks of reaching the US, however, he was deported back to his gang-infested neighborhood in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa – and the death threats that had prompted him to flee.

He resolved to try his luck again in the new year: head north, save his life and find a way to help his family and provide for his seven-year-old son.

But just over a week after his return, Nelson was shot dead on the street outside his home on 18 December 2018.

[...]

In cities across Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, gangs terrorize residents into submission and recruit young people by force or coercion, promising “work” for youths who have little prospect of finding formal employment – and threatening death for those who refuse.

[...]

Espinal lived with his parents, four sisters and son in a rough shack in the José Ángel Ulloa neighborhood.

[...]

According to Migdonia Ayestas, director of the Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University in Honduras, more than 70 migrants have been murdered upon returning to the country in recent years.

[...]

Due to the government shutdown, the Guardian was unable to reach US Customs and Border Protection for comment.

  Guardian

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

Caravan report

click graphic for reporting

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

The caravan of refugees has reached the Mexican border

https://twitter.com/AC360/status/1053450514778603522





Disgusting pig.

He's been throwing around the word "baby" again a lot lately.  "I'm not a baby."  "Now I say they're babies."  I wonder if it has anything to do with this:

Even more likely, this. He hates Joe Scarborough:

The baby issue:

Madman at the helm

Four days ago:



Three days ago:



Two days ago:

Today:



So we can stop worrying about dangerous Caravans of Hondurans?  What happened yesterday?

UPDATE:

Some important background on the caravan from Honduras, as well as the US-Mexico joint operations to curtail immigration.

The Killing of Berta Cáceres

Democracy Now has a segment about "a new investigation that reveals further ties between [environmental activist] Berta Cáceres’s killing, Honduran military intelligence, and the United States."

Amy Goodman interviews freelance journalist Nina Lakhani whose article "Berta Cáceres’s Court Papers Show Murder Suspects’ Links to U.S.-trained Elite Troops" was published in the Guardian.

Last year, the Guardian reported that a former Honduran soldier said he had seen Cáceres’s name on a hitlist that was passed to US-trained units.

[...]

[He] deserted after Cáceres’s murder and remains in hiding. The whereabouts of his former colleagues is unknown.

  Guardian

Hey, we just train 'em. We don't tell 'em what to do, right?

Cáceres was shot dead a year ago while supposedly under state protection after receiving death threats over her opposition to a hydroelectric dam.

The murder of Cáceres, winner of the prestigious Goldman environmental prize in 2015, prompted international outcry and calls for the US to revoke military aid to Honduras, a key ally in its war on drugs.

Eight men have been arrested in connection with the murder, including one serving and two retired military officers.

So far, so what? Nothing says the US was actually involved.

American experts have been involved in the investigation from the start, according to the US embassy in Tegucigalpa.

OK, now that is suspicious. Why are we involved in the investigation?

Senator Ben Cardin, ranking member of the Senate foreign relations committee, said US support should not be unconditional: “It is essential that we not only strengthen our commitment to improving the rule of law in Honduras, but we must also demand greater accountability for human rights violations and attacks against civil society.”

The U.S. should be "improving the rule of law in Honduras?" Yeah, I'm not buying it.

In recent years, US support has focused on Honduras’s special forces units, originally created as a counterinsurgency force during the 1980s “dirty war”.

[...]

Violence against social activists has surged since a military backed coup d’état ousted populist president Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Since then at least 124 land and environmental campaigners have been killed.

[...]

Extrajudicial killings by the security forces and widespread impunity are among the most serious human rights violations in Honduras, according to the US state department.

Nevertheless, the US is the main provider of military and police support to Honduras, and last year approved $18m of aid.

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

Tim Kaine's "Communist Connection"

A STORY PUBLISHED this week by the Daily Beast about the nine months Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine spent working as a volunteer in a Jesuit community in Honduras in 1980-1981 has been making the conservative rounds. The Beast’s tabloid headline is a cheap exercise in red-baiting: “Tim Kaine’s Time with a Marxist Priest.”

[...]

The scandal that the Beast claims “may cause trouble” for Kaine is that he once met Fr. [James] Carney, 35 years ago.

[...]

“There’s some serious questions here,” [the right wing] Catholic Vote’s spokesman told The Beast, speaking about the one meeting Kaine had with Carney.

[...]

After years spent among the poor and oppressed in Latin America, Carney renounced his U.S. citizenship and joined the armed guerrilla struggle against U.S.-backed death squads and governments. He also left the Jesuits because, he explained, the order would not condone his involvement in an armed struggle. Whatever one thinks of that decision, Carney sacrificed his privilege and status to join the people he was ministering to as a priest. In the eyes of the Reagan administration, that made him a terrorist. In the eyes of the peasants and revolutionaries Carney joined in struggle, he was a hero.

[...]

What is entirely absent from Catholic Vote’s [accusations] is the context of what was happening in Latin America during the 1980s — particularly to Catholics. Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was assassinated by graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas as he performed mass. Catholic nuns and laywomen, including four from the U.S., were raped and murdered. Jesuit priests were executed by death squads. The U.S.-backed Honduran Army’s secret police unit, Battalion 316, committed systematic massacres — all while John Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. Negroponte was very close to 316’s commander, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, and met with him frequently.

[...]

And what became of Father Carney?

He was thrown from a helicopter in 1983.  A whistleblower who deserted Battalion 316 [...] asserted that “Álvarez Martínez gave the order for Carney’s execution in the presence of a CIA officer, known as ‘Mister Mike.’” The Los Angeles Times reported that Negroponte failed to report a “U.S.-backed operation that resulted in the execution of nine prisoners and the disappearance of an American priest.” The year Carney was murdered, Negroponte praised Gen. Álvarez Martínez’s “dedication to democracy.”

[...]

[Hillary Clinton] engaged in the same kind of red baiting against Bernie Sanders over comments Sanders made about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who fought the Contra death squads passionately supported by Clinton’s endorser Negroponte.

Awkward.

  Jeremy Scahill

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

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.

Cleaning Up Clinton

Clinton's role in the aftermath of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's ouster has come under greater scrutiny since the March 3 assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres. Critics argue that the U.S. push for new elections in the months after the coup helped legitimize the actions of the Honduran military, destabilize the country and pave the way for the extreme violence that followed. Killings of activists like Cáceres and others have become devastatingly common. But the account Clinton offered of her response to the coup in her memoir Hard Choices was omitted from last year's paperback edition.

[...]

Months of protests against the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti followed. While virtually all Latin American governments condemned the coup and called for Zelaya's restoration, Clinton and the U.S. pushed for elections to bring in a new government.

[...]

Zelaya was overthrown just three weeks after Clinton's visit to Honduras for the OAS meeting at which Cuba's membership was debated.

[...]

"We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future," Clinton wrote [in the 2014 hardcover edition of Hard Choices].

  Huffington Post

We do a lot of that. Why doesn't the world thank us?

[I]ndeed, the entire two-page discussion of the Honduran coup  [...] disappeared from the paperback edition.

[...]

"Before she was called on it, she was holding it up as a signature achievement," [writer Greg Grandin] said.

[...]

More than 100 environmental and land rights activists like Cáceres were killed in Honduras from 2010 to 2015, according to the British organization Global Witness. The country became the homicide capital of the world for several years, with a murder rate topping 90 per 100,000 at its peak in 2011, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

[...]

"Hillary [Clinton] and the State Department only wanted the kind of 'stability' that was convenient for them regardless of what was happening on the ground,” Cáceres' nephew Silvio Carrillo said in an email to HuffPost. "This has not changed today and it is the reason you now have had governments operating with impunity."

Asked about the omission of the coup passage from Clinton's memoir, Carrillo accused her of "attempting to scrub away the blood she's helped to spill along with the Department of Defense and the Department of State."

Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But [Berta] Cáceres [herself had said]: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”

The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest.

[...]

We still don’t have a clear idea of the events surrounding Cáceres’s murder. There is one witness, Gustavo Castro, a Mexican national, activist, and journalist, who was with Cáceres when gunmen burst into her bedroom. Berta died in his arms. Castro was himself shot twice, but survived by playing dead.

The Honduran government—that “unity government” Clinton is proud of—has Castro in lockdown, refusing him contact with the outside world.

  The Nation

I suspect he will not survive.

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

Meanwhile, in the "War on Drugs"

Honduras has become the newest front in the US war on drugs in Latin America. The US has provided financial support for both the police and the military there in spite of its deep corruption issues.

Furthermore, members of both institutions have been linked to a range of killings. Political dissidents, human rights workers and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community have all been killed at alarming rates.

[...]

The US has a long and controversial history in Honduras. In the 1980s, the US built a base there and trained an elite Honduran military unit. That unit went on to carry out tortures, kidnappings and killings.

[...]

In May, a mission in the Moskitia region, which was led by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), left four innocent civilians killed and four others wounded. It was followed by two more incidents where a US DEA agent shot and killed an alleged drug trafficker. Local communities have demanded a thorough investigation but so far nothing has been done.
  

That surprises you, doesn't it. Al Jazeera reports on the situation.