Clinton said the U.S. had to
support the coup to continue sending aid, but leading campaigners say the aid
is directly tied to political assassinations.
In April 2016, Hillary Clinton
was asked about her role in Honduras' 2009 coup by Democracy Now's Juan
González. The coup, which took place while Clinton was Secretary of State,
ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya and plunged the
country into chaos. Today, Honduras is one of the most violent countries on
earth, particularly for activists. On March 3, 2016, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous Lenca and a leading
human rights activist and environmentalist, was assassinated in Honduras.
Shortly before her death she singled
out Clinton for criticism, holding her accountable for legitimizing the
country's current political situation.
González posed his question
during a meeting between Clinton and the New York Daily News editorial board.
"Do you have any concerns about the role that you played in that
particular situation, not necessarily being in agreement with your top aides in
the State Department?" he asked her.
Here is a portion of Clinton's response:
Well, let me again try to put
this in context. The Legislature—or the national Legislature in Honduras and
the national judiciary actually followed the law in removing President Zelaya.
Now, I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it, but they had a
very strong argument that they had followed the Constitution and the legal
precedents. And as you know, they really undercut their argument by spiriting
him out of the country in his pajamas, where they sent, you know, the military
to, you know, take him out of his bed and get him out of the country. So this
was—this began as a very mixed and difficult situation.
If the United States
government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid, including
humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support
that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people. And that
triggers a legal necessity. There’s no way to get around it. So our assessment
was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if
we declare a coup and we immediately have to stop all aid for the people, but
we should slow walk and try to stop anything that the government could take
advantage of, without calling it a coup.
According to leading activists
in Honduras, this defense doesn't add up. Gaspar Sanchez is the coordinator for
sexual diversity and equal rights at the Civic Council of Popular and
Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, where Cáceres served as general
coordinator. According to Sanchez, “the financing that the government receives
from outside the country is money that ends up being used for assassinations in
Honduras. In recent months the assassinations of human rights and environmental
defenders has been conducted by the military and police themselves, because the
military and police are who are guarding the facilities where the companies
operate."
Former Honduran soldier First
Sergeant Rodrigo Cruz claims that Cáceres was named on a hit list for
U.S.-trained Honduran special forces months ahead of her death. Cruz made the
revelation to Guardian reporter Nina Lakhani, according to an article
published in late June.
In an interview with AlterNet,
Sanchez zeroed in on a notorious U.S.-backed fighting force, stating: “We know
that here in Honduras there is a military squad called the ‘Tigres’ who are
directly financed by the United States who are also those who have been
conducting operations in the Bajo Aguan region where our sister and brother
peasants are fighting for their land rights and where they are assassinating
and threatening people who do work to defend human rights.”
The Bajo Aguan region was
specifically referenced in a 2012 letter from Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and 93
fellow House members to Clinton, who was then Secretary of State. The letter
called on the State Department "to suspend U.S. assistance to the Honduran
military and police given the credible allegations of widespread, serious violations
of human rights attributed to the security forces.”
As for the military squad
cited by Sanchez, information about the Tigers can be gleaned directly from a
U.S. military website. A report
posted on the Army's official website, in 2015, explains that:
Green Berets, from the 7th
Special Forces Group (Airborne), hosted members of the Honduran Tigres, whose
name translates into "intelligence and special security response groups
units," during the final two weeks of February to mentor and coach them in
tactics and methods they will use to fight narcotics and human trafficking in
their country.
The curriculum, authored by
the detachment tasked with training the Tigres, called for a mixture of
training in marksmanship and urban combat, known commonly as close quarters
battle. Many periods of instruction focused on instilling fundamental
principles of close quarters battle and knowing how to execute them amidst the
chaos that is combat.
The report quotes Col.
Christopher Riga, commander of the 7th Special Forces Group, talking directly
to the Honduran trainees:
Here's what's most important;
the partnership. The partnership of you with us. I promise you at some point in
time, together, we'll be on target killing terrorists and drug traffickers
together. There's no greater partner that's accomplished more in a little over
two years than you. I can never say enough words to tell you how proud I am of
you, how proud I am of all of our guys, and the great partnership we will
maintain and the work we will do together for a secure and stable Honduras.
Elise Roberts, director of the
solidarity organization Witness for Peace-Midwest, U.S. says financing and
backing of such squads is typical of so-called aid. “We have not heard of any
significant counterexamples from our partners where U.S. or U.S.-led
multilateral ‘security’ or ‘development’ aid has had anything other than a
negative impact on our partners' work to achieve peace, justice and
dignity," said Roberts, "these being things that have been elusive
for vulnerable populations in post-coup Honduras, including human rights
defenders, journalists, and the Indigenous, campesin@, Garífuna, and LGBTQI
communities.”
“In contrast,” Roberts
continued, “we have heard hundreds of examples of destructive and unwanted
‘development’ projects being pushed through with the support of a militarized
security force, displacing people from their land, terrorizing them, and
assassinating them if they continue to resist.”
Leading campaigners argue that
the prerogative to continue U.S. aid does not justify the coup, but merely
compounds its injustices. “After the military and civic coup d’etat that we
lived through in 2009, the situation for Hondurans has been very grave, as we
saw the military come out into the streets to repress all of us who denounced
the coup d’etat,” said Sanchez. “There were assassinations and arrests of our
sisters and brothers. And what has most affected us as indigenous people after
the coup d’etat has been the handing over of our territories to huge
transnational corporations by this government.”
Sanchez’s observations are
buttressed by a recent
report from 54 Honduran social movements and civil society organizations
that concludes, “The coup d'etat in 2009 meant an imminent reversal of human
rights and a serious blow to the country's institutions.” The report adds: “There
a strong link between high levels of poverty and inequality and high rates of
violence and insecurity in the country, which remain among the highest in the
world.”
In light of these realities,
the call to halt U.S. military aid has become a key rallying cry of Honduran
social movements and their global supporters. On June 15, a global day of
action calling for justice for Berta Cáceres coalesced
around a key demand: end U.S. military aid to Honduras. The day of action
coincided with Rep. Hank Johnson's (D-GA) introduction of a congressional bill, named after Cáceres, aimed at halting
all military aid to Honduras until the country's human rights violations are
addressed. In July, campaigners with the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
will take this message on a People's
Caravan from the Republican to the Democratic National Convention,
accompanied by members of Cáceres' family.
According to Vicki Cervantes,
coordinator in North America for the Honduras Solidarity Network and member of
Chicago’s human rights group La Voz de los de Abajo, “It is important important
for Clinton to be held accountable and have to answer to her cynical policy at
the time of the coup and after the coup. Hundreds of people have been killed by
the state, police, the military and death squads over the past seven years.”
It remains to be seen whether
Clinton will respond to any of these criticisms on the campaign trail.
Sarah Lazare is a staff
writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, she coedited the
book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on
Twitter at @sarahlazare.
Michael Arria is an
associate editor at AlterNet and the author of Medium
Blue: The Politics of MSNBC. Follow @MichaelArria on Twitter.
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