When former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton sat
down with the New York Daily News editorial board in April, she was asked
what must have been a surprising and unwelcome question. In the years since the
2009 coup in Honduras, there has been remarkably little scrutiny in the major
media of how Clinton’s State Department handled it, and she has had to answer
few questions about it.
But Juan González asked
why she resisted cutting off aid to the coup regime and instead brokered a
deal for new elections. Clinton controversially doubled
down on defending the coup, outrageously suggesting that the oligarchs and
generals who had forced President Manuel Zelaya out had a legal justification.
Worse, she suggested that Honduras emulate Plan Colombia: the U.S.-funded war
on drugs and guerrillas that sparked the biggest internal refugee crisis in the world
outside of Syria, involved the deliberate killing
of thousands of innocent civilians by Colombian armed forces, and fostered
death squads now poised
to stick around even as the country nears an end to its civil war.
Honduras also pops up in
Clinton’s memoir, “Hard Choices.” The paperback edition, published shortly
after she launched her presidential campaign, is roughly 100 pages shorter than
the original hardcover edition, but some of the abridgments seem rather
convenient. In her original account of the coup and its aftermath, which was
entirely deleted from the paperback, Clinton openly admits
to having intervened directly to prevent Zelaya from returning to office:
In the subsequent days [after
the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including
Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. 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’s
declassified emails shed light on her role in prolonging negotiations so
that elections would occur before Zelaya returned to office. In an email a week
after the coup, Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom Shannon
raises the possibility of former Costa Rican
President Oscar Arias serving as mediator. This enabled the U.S. to avoid working
through the Organization of American States (OAS), where most governments
insisted on restoring
Zelaya to the presidency and isolating the coup regime. A July 31 email
from Craig Kelly, Shannon’s deputy, makes it clear that this was indeed the
U.S.’ motive: “The OAS meeting today turned into a non-event — just as we
hoped. We want Arias out front. We will keep at it.”
When Zelaya attempted to
return to Honduras from exile, via the Nicaragua border on July 24, Clinton condemned it as
“reckless” and counterproductive “to the broader effort to restore democratic and
constitutional order.” And whereas the U.S. was quick to suspend aid following
Madagascar’s March 17, 2009 coup, it would take months before the State
Department would act in a similar fashion with Honduras. Notably, the U.S.
suspended Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) money three days after
Madagascar’s coup, but declined to hold up the more than $190 million of MCC
funds designated for Honduras. As secretary of state, Clinton chaired the MCC
board of directors at the time.
The split between the U.S. and
its neighbors widened when, on September 28, 2009, U.S. State Department
officials
blocked the OAS from adopting a resolution on Honduras that would have
refused to recognize Honduran elections without the prior restoration of the
country’s elected president. While Latin America — seeing the inherent danger
from the precedent of a successful military coup — demanded Zelaya’s “immediate
and unconditional” restoration, the U.S. pushed instead for a “national unity
government.” In Clinton’s telling, this was something she triumphantly
pressured regime head Roberto Micheletti into accepting. The question is why
this was the goal, instead of the restoration of democracy. Seen from another
angle, Clinton’s State Department collaborated with an illegal government that
had seized power through force. When Shannon made the administration’s true
intentions public on November 3, by telling CNN en Español
that Zelaya’s return to the presidency prior to the elections was not
necessary, the coup regime had all the leverage and Zelaya and his elected
government suddenly had none.
The November 2009 elections,
held under a coup government, were widely seen as illegitimate, and the OAS,
the European Union, and the Carter Center refused to send observers. Following
the elections, Honduras continued to be excluded from the OAS for
almost two years.
Most significantly, though,
the actions of Clinton and her State Department precipitated a new low point in
U.S.-Latin American relations. In a clear sign of rejection of U.S. regional
influence, all the countries in the Western Hemisphere formed a new group, the
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) — all of them, that
is, except for the U.S. and Canada, which were excluded.
If Clinton’s State Department
was concerned by the extent of this foreign diplomacy failure in what
Washington used to refer to as its “backyard,” their emails and diplomatic
cables do not hint at it. Rather, senior officials appeared to revel at having
gotten one over on Brazil and other governments that wanted to see Honduras’ democratic
government restored. Just after the November 2009 election results were
announced, Shannon emailed Clinton triumphantly, noting,
“The turnout [ … ] and the
clear rejection of [Zelaya’s] Liberal Party shows our approach was the right
one, and puts Brazil and others who would not recognize the election in an
impossible position.”
We can only assume that this
is the sort of diplomacy we could expect from a Clinton presidency. Her
feelings on military force are already
well known, and are of course even more harmful to the interests of both
the U.S. and the true “international community.” But Clintonian diplomacy might
also further isolate the U.S. from its neighbors and even from some historic
allies.
This article originally
appeared on The Hill.
Dan Beeton is International
Communications Director, and Ming Chun Tang is a researcher and analyst, at the
Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
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