Eric Zuesse

The murder in Honduras on March 3rd of the global prize-winning environmental activist Berta Cáceres is one of the current achievements (though indirect) of Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s decision in 2009 to allow the newly-installed coup-regime in that country to solidify and remain in power.

As the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton resisted and ultimately overcame the virtually unanimous efforts of other Western Hemispheric and European leaders to oust the coup-regime. She was backed-up in this retrograde decision by U.S. President Barack Obama. Without her efforts, and President Obama’s passive acceptance of her decision, the coup-installed regime wouldn’t have remained in power, and the freely elected President would have been restored to power to complete his term.

The results of this for both the U.S. and Honduras have been disastrous: the world’s highest murder-rate, soaring drug-trafficking, and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Honduran children who don’t want to spend their lives drug-trafficking, and who have left Honduras because the gangs kill children who refuse. Then, U.S. Republicans, whose representatives in Congress were passionate supporters of the coup-installed regime, complain about the influx of those children into the U.S. and demand they be sent back to die there.

The democratically elected progressive President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by Honduras’s aristocracy, in a coup on 28 June 2009, organized by that country’s nearly dozen aristocratic families, whose suffocating control over Honduras was being threatened by the entirely lawful and progressive democratic policies and actions by Zelayas’s government, including land-reform and workers’ rights — two things that aristocracies everywhere oppose.

The key to whether or not the coup-regime would remain, or else Zelaya restored to complete his term, was whether or not the U.S. Government would allow financial aid to the Honduran Government to continue. This hinged on whether or not the term “coup” was to be applied to the overthrow. Here is what the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras wrote to the State Department about that:

From: Ambassador Hugo Llorens, U.S. Embassy, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 24 July 2009.

To: Secretary of State, White House, and National Security Council.

“SUBJECT: TFHO1: OPEN AND SHUT: THE CASE OF THE HONDURAN COUP”

This lengthy message from the Ambassador closed:

“The actions of June 28 can only be considered a coup d’etat by the legislative branch, with the support of the judicial branch and the military, against the executive branch. It bears mentioning that, whereas the resolution adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect was to remove the entire executive branch. Both of these actions clearly exceeded Congress’s authority. … No matter what the merits of the case against Zelaya, his forced removal by the military was clearly illegal, and [puppett-leader Roberto] Micheletti’s ascendance as ‘interim president’ was totally illegitimate.”

Secretary of State Clinton ignored that clear pleading, from her Ambassador.

On March 4th, Britain’s Guardian headlined, “Murder of activist Berta Cáceres sparks violent clashes in Honduras,” and reported that, “Students clashed with riot police Thursday night amid anger over failure to protect a high-profile campaigner who had repeatedly received threats on her life.”

People ask, “What did Hillary Clinton achieve as the U.S. Secretary of State?” and here is one solid answer to that question. For more details on it, explaining how and why she did this, and why the Republicans haven’t raised a ruckus about her policy there as they’ve been doing about “the Benghazi incident,” the full answer is here, but a summary of it is this: The Republicans in Congress were virtually united in supporting, passionately and ideologically, the coup-regime, because their Party has always opposed, in principle, land-reform, and criminal-justice reform, in aristocratically controlled countries — it’s a ‘free-market issue’ to them: their belief is that it’s God’s will that only around a dozen people own virtually all the land and control virtually all the corporations in Honduras. To them, the killing of people who lead demonstrations for land-reform etc. is good, not bad. See more about this in the fully documented article that I’ve written on it.

And this is the reason why Hillary Clinton, like Barack Obama, can with impunity perpetrate Republican-supported horrors and pay no political (much less prosecutory) price for it — because neither the Republicans nor their fellow ‘Democrats’ will publicize nor pursue such a horror. America has thus itself become a two-party, one-aristocracy, dictatorship, and the voters had better come to know about it fast, because otherwise, the next President will be elected by an ignorant public, who have been deceived and manipulated by America’s aristocracy, which controls both Parties.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.