Critics argue the secretary of
state's efforts paved the way for the violence still plaguing Honduras
Those who want to know what
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said about Honduras' 2009 coup
in her autobiography shouldn't bother with the paperback version.
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.
In June 2009, Zelaya was
overthrown by the Honduran military, ushered out of the presidential palace at gunpoint wearing
only his pajamas. 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 -- a position she
detailed in the hardcover edition of Hard Choices, published in 2014.
Days after the coup, she
wrote, she teamed up with Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa to come
up with a response.
"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.
But that paragraph --
indeed, the entire two-page discussion of the Honduran coup -- disappeared
from the paperback edition. In the paperback version, the chapter on Latin
America ends abruptly after a look at the debate over whether Cuba should be
included in the Organization of American States.
It's a striking omission,
given that Zelaya was overthrown just three weeks after Clinton's visit to
Honduras for the OAS meeting at which Cuba's membership was debated, which she
recounts as the penultimate anecdote of the Latin America chapter.
When asked about the edit, a
Clinton spokeswoman pointed The Huffington Post to the front flap of the
paperback edition, which notes generally that the text has been trimmed.
"A limited number of
sections from the hardcover edition have been cut to accommodate a shorter
length for this edition. Those sections remain available in the ebook
edition," it says.
The omission, previously noted
by writers including Belen Fernandez and Greg Grandin, seems more
problematic since Cáceres' death last week. The high-profile activist was well
known for opposing
construction of the Agua Zarca Dam, which would have forced indigenous
Lenca people to leave land they consider sacred. She was killed by
unidentified gunmen after receiving a series of threats.
In the hardcover edition of
her memoir, Clinton trumpets the resolution of the coup through a new round of
elections as a triumph for regional diplomacy.
Honduras plunged into a period
of extreme violence after the coup, as the de facto government suppressed
protests with force. Even after a new elected president took office in
early 2010, drug
cartels exploited the confusion to solidify their control over
trafficking routes to the U.S., and political violence made activism a
deadly enterprise.
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."
Cáceres herself cast
blame on Clinton for legitimizing the coup after the fact by supporting new
elections instead of pressing to restore the Zelaya administration, according
to a 2014 video interview unearthed by New York University historian Greg
Grandin.
"We were fighting a coup
d'etat that we couldn't overcome," Cáceres said. "Those who overthrew
the government are still there." She contended that in Hard Choices,
Clinton was "practically saying what was going to happen in Honduras. This
demonstrates a bad North American interference in our country."
Grandin, who wrote about Clinton's response to the 2009 coup in The
Nation last week, told HuffPost that her work on Honduras should be a campaign
issue and that the assassination of Cáceres should force a "reckoning with
history."
"They legitimated this
coup regime," Grandin said. "The U.S. could have adopted a real
multilateral position and joined with Brazil, for instance, in demanding the
restoration of Zelaya."
Instead, the U.S. opted to
sideline Zelaya and back elections that brought in a conservative government.
"That's fairly clear between her emails and her own concession in Hard
Choices. She took credit for that. Before she was called on it, she was holding
it up as a signature achievement," he said.
The emails to which Grandin
referred were made public last year and show that Clinton sought to avoid discussing the resolution of the
Honduran coup at the
OAS, where many regional
governments supported Zelaya's restoration, and instead pressed for the
mediation she helped arrange in Costa Rica.
Clinton's director of Hispanic
media, Jorge Silva, dismissed such criticism as "nonsense," according to Latino USA. Silva said that "Hillary
Clinton engaged in active diplomacy that resolved a constitutional crisis and
paved the way for legitimate democratic elections."
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