The Honduran meltdown: Made in USA
The Honduran meltdown: Made in USA
Six years after the coup in Honduras, it's time for another history lesson.
28 Jun 2015 09:00 GMT
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
@MariaBelen_Fdez
In May 2005, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick appeared at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington to rally support for CAFTA, a free trade agreement between the US, the Central American countries, and the Dominican Republic.
In his remarks, Zoellick played up the notion that, for Central America and the DR, the agreement would "strengthen democracy through economic growth and open societies based on the rule of law", while also entailing various perks for the gringos; a T-shirt reading "Made in Honduras", he enthused, would likely contain over 60 percent US content.
The deputy secretary and future president of the World Bank went as far as to assert that, "In many ways, CAFTA is the logical culmination of 20 years of democratic and social progress in Central America, nurtured and encouraged by the United States."Never mind that, 20-some years ago, the United States was nurturing things like Battalion 3-16, described by the Baltimore Sun as a "CIA-trained military unit that terrorised Honduras for much of the 1980s".
Anything but the communists
To be sure, much of Honduras' contemporary plight - while perhaps appearing on the surface, like Zoellick's T-shirt, to be a domestic creation - is in fact Made in USA.
More:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/06/honduran-meltdown-usa-150628064420182.html
LA forum:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/110841837