Breaking news: Planned coup rumor
Proceso Digital, a online Honduran newspaper, reported today that Roberto Micheletti, president of Honduras' national congress, has met with President Mel Zelaya to discuss information of a planned golpe de estado (coup d'état) on September 15, the national independence day holiday.
Unlike the suggestions that have been made by some citizens, the rumored coup is not against the President, but rather, by the president in junction with the military.
Micheletti stated that the president has categorically denied this. He stated, "I want the Honduran public to be calm because at no time has a coup been planned, because President Manuel Zelaya has assured me of this".
La Tribuna, as of this moment, has only reported a second secret meeting this week between the two functionaries with speculation that it was to discuss the ALBA treaty and internal party elections. In another Tribuna article, Micheletti announced yesterday that ALBA will not be approved by the congress if it commits Honduras to any sort of military action or required submission of Honduras' interests to any other country. He again stated that the congress needs all of the documents.ALBA is a controversial treaty President Zelaya recently signed with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, along with Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Dominica, despite much objection from Honduran business leaders and congressmen. You can read more about it in my "Sold to the highest bidder - ALBA" article.
La Prensa reported President Zelaya's denial of the coup; however, La Prensa also reported yesterday that a secret meeting occurred last Tuesday between Zelaya and the military leaders, to which the media was not informed as is the normal custom. 'Off the record,' Military leader Romeo Vásquez denied that the meeting was to discuss anything other than policy. He could not explain why the media was not notified of the new meeting which was changed from the planned date and held behind closed doors.Photo: La Prensa
Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo, president of the Nacionalista party and presidential hopeful in the upcoming elections, has been direct in pointing out that he believes that Mel Zelaya has "planes continuista" (plans to continue his presidency even though the constitution of Honduras does not allow a second term).
A few days ago in Honudiario, Ramon Custodio, Commissioner of Human Rights, reported that the Honduran military is not prepared for any kind of coup.
Several times in the past months, Micheletti has made cryptic comments to the media about persons or groups who are trying to threaten democracy in Honduras. No names were ever mentioned.
So, is this all rumors and overreaction to secret meetings or is something in the works? Are the rumors politically motivated? Where there is smoke, there is fire? I don't know, but Honduras has a very finely tuned grapevine and as often as not, rumors prove to have at least some truth behind them.
September 18 update: The coup that wasn't
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11 comments:
50 years agg "El Comandante" told us he was not a communist, and we believed him. If Mel is meeting with the military to form a coup, it will not end well.
not at all likely. the honduran military has a deep anti-communist vein rooted in the teachings of the argentinian military schools. besides that honduras has very powerful groups that would cripple zelaya's government in a heatbeat. add to this that honduras is a key strategic country for the usa and you have a recipe for disaster -for mel- should he ever try something so stupid. if anything I would be more inclined to believe in a military action to support a constitutional decision to remove mel and allow the vice-president to finish mel's term. so, this is like a protracted case of diarreah, the country will have to suffer mel for another year and a half.
Won't happen. I asked an officer in the military for his opinion, and he said that in any case, the coup would be against Mel Zelaya - not 'for' him to continue in power, so Pepe is wrong about that. However, too many secret meetings does mean something is brewing behind the curtain.
Historically, the US would be the one to 'inspire' a coup and give the military support. I doubt the new ambassador - with his impressive resume and experience in Venezuela, Cuba and the Andes) is going to take any more of Zelaya's shenanigans. He has been strategically chosen so let's see what happens with diplomatic ties to the US in the next week or so.
By the way LG, have you ever read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins? It's an essential read for all Americans living in latin America and has fascinating back stories about coups and US intervention in Latin America.
Yeah....I heard about it, but it doesnt have any real value.
Things like this wont happen in Honduras before they happen in Venezuela.
We dont have coups since....hmmm the 70's? and a failed one in 1998 i think it was.
this president is flirting with the left, but no worries in a year and a half a new government will be installed and a whole new ballgame will begin...so no worries.
Thanks for all the reassurance from the people in the know! I'm really so grateful for the insight that you all give me.
Here we are, September 16th, and no coop in either direction happened. ;-)
Carol, I have not read that book, but I was just reading about it on Amazon. The reviews are quite mixed about its credibility, but it sounds fascinating to me and I've put it at the top of my wish list on Amazon!
Thanks so much for the recommendation and any others you care to give me. Do you recommend Perkins other book, The Secret History of the American Empire?
Errr, I must have been thinking chickens...that should have been coup.
;-D
Why aren't English words spelled as they sound like they are in Spanish?!
The Facts Behind the 'Confessions'
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, February 27, 2006; Page A15
Last week I appeared on a radio show with an author named John Perkins. This man is a frothing conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense, and yet his book, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," is a runaway bestseller. So now, out of concern for thousands of sufferers across this great nation, I offer up a Perkins antidote. If you see someone reading him, I want you to be prudent, approach cautiously and wait until the victim's fevers cool. Then administer these arguments.
The world, says Perkins, is governed by a shadowy "corporatocracy," an invisible empire of wealth and greed that deploys a combination of bribes, assassins and seductive women to enslave the poorest countries. Perkins served this empire as an "economic hit man," a consultant who bamboozled unsuspecting Asians and Latin Americans into borrowing too much, so puncturing their sovereignty. The loans financed lucrative contracts for American construction firms. Needless to say, Perkins is certain that they did not help poor people.
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Perkins speaks with a beguiling purr, and you can see why he's greeted with standing ovations at bookstores across the country. Besides working as an economic consultant, he's written books about Latin American shamans, including one called "The World Is as You Dream It." But his account of international finance is itself largely a dream. Even if you believe the stories of seducers and assassins, which other journalists have questioned, Perkins's basic contentions are flat wrong. Sure, developing countries (like rich countries) borrow too much sometimes. But the poor don't always lose. Nor are corporations all-powerful.
Perkins likes to invoke Indonesia, the scene of his first hit-man assignment. The way he tells it, the development economists who persuaded Indonesia to borrow money around 1970 were peddling a ludicrous idea -- that Indonesia's economy could spring from the dark age to the modern age in a mere generation. Well, Indonesia's infant mortality and adult illiteracy rates each fell by two-thirds over the next three decades, and life expectancy shot up by 19 years. If the corporatocracy was trying to lay Indonesia low, this was a funny way of doing it.
The same point holds for the developing world generally. The adult illiteracy rate in the poor world was halved between 1970 and 2000, and since 1980 the number of people living on less than $1 a day has fallen by about 200 million, even as the world's population has expanded rapidly. That is a stunning achievement given that the ranks of the poor had previously been swelling steadily, at least since 1820.
The poor have made these gains because Perkins's second contention is equally wrong: The corporatocracy is neither evil nor omnipotent. Survey after survey has shown that the multinational companies vilified by Perkins pay better wages than their local rivals in poor countries: One study of 20,000 Indonesian manufacturing plants found that the average pay in foreign-owned factories was 50 percent higher than in local ones -- and also that foreign competition pushed local wages upward. As Martin Wolf remarks in his book, "Why Globalization Works," multinational firms induce a race to the top more than a race to the bottom.
Perkins likes to say that of the world's 100 biggest economies, 51 are companies. This old chestnut is based on a fallacious comparison of companies' sales to countries' gross domestic product: Whereas GDP measures the amount of value added in an economy, sales lump together a firm's value-added with inputs bought in from suppliers. According to an apples-to-apples comparison done by the United Nations, just two of the world's top 50 economies were companies in the year 2000. Of the top 100 economies, 29 were companies.
That may still sound like a lot, but remember that companies compete against each other. In the world as Perkins dreams it, the top 100 or so firms are joined in a shadowy conspiracy. But the reality is that Exxon Mobil schemes to undermine BP and Shell, and General Electric plots against Siemens and Hitachi. Countries don't face a united corporatocracy. They play firms off against each other.
Besides, power is not the same as sales figures. Governments force citizens to pay taxes; firms can't force customers to do anything. Governments put citizens behind bars; citizens can use consumer power to put companies out of business. Governments have a monopoly on the right to impose laws, including laws that constrain corporate behavior; the fact that firms spend vast sums on lobbying is proof not only of their strength but also of their vulnerability. Of course, sometimes the lobbyists succeed. But over the past couple of decades, the scope of environmental, health and safety laws has generally expanded.
Perkins has tapped into a widespread fear. Thanks to the Bush administration, the mere mention of Halliburton is enough to prove the anti-corporate case to many bookshop audiences. But the truth is that corporations do not rule the world, and intensifying global competition has rendered them more vulnerable. Since the mid-1970s, when Perkins was touring the world as a hit man, fully half of the top 100 American industrial corporations have disappeared from that list. So what is this corporatocracy that Perkins fears? Is it the failing General Motors? Or vanished international banks such as S.G. Warburg? Or is it perhaps Chas. T. Main, Perkins's own employer in his hit-man days, which was swallowed up by a rival years ago?
Confessions -- or Fantasies -- of an Economic Hit Man?
Purported links to National Security Agency appear dubious
Washington -- John Perkins’ popular, but misleading, book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is being released in paperback. Perkins claims that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) recruited him to be an “economic hit man,” who deliberately entrapped foreign countries in unmanageable amounts of debt so they would be beholden to the United States. This appears to be a total fabrication. To the contrary, the U.S. government has led a recent initiative to cancel the debt of many heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC).
THE PERKINS ALLEGATIONS
In the book, Perkins says a mysterious woman named Claudine Martin at the Charles T. Main engineering company, where he worked as chief economist, told him he was to become an “economic hit man” and what that entailed:
“First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other U.S. companies … through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other U.S. contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.” (p. 15)
Perkins claims that all this was done at the behest of the NSA, although he offers no evidence that this was the case. Nowhere in his book does he claim that anyone at the NSA gave him any written or verbal directions.
Perkins’ account that he interviewed for a job with the NSA in 1968 seems credible. He says he was trying to avoid being drafted during the war in Vietnam, and that a close friend of his father-in-law worked at the NSA, told him that NSA employees received draft deferments and set up an interview for him. Perkins says he received a job offer from NSA but decided instead to join the Peace Corps, which also made him eligible for a draft deferment, and was more to his liking.
At this point, Perkins’ narrative appears to begin to depart from reality. He claims that the NSA approved of his joining the Peace Corps and had a hand in his being hired at the end of his Peace Corps duty by the Charles T. Main engineering company – all of this supposedly communicated silently, without even a wink or a nod.
Perkins is apparently not aware that the National Security Agency is a cryptological (codemaking and codebreaking) organization, not an economic organization, it is restricted by law to two missions:
* Information Assurance: protecting U.S. government communications systems from harm; and
* Foreign Signals Intelligence: collecting communications and signals intelligence on foreign entities.
Neither of these missions involves anything remotely resembling placing economists at private companies in order to increase the debt of foreign countries.
Throughout the book, it is clear that Perkins felt that he was betraying his conscience by working as an economist facilitating large engineering and construction projects in Third World countries. He is much more comfortable working with indigenous peoples, helping to preserve their cultures with small-scale economic projects, as he did in the Peace Corps and as he has done more recently. But there seems to be no reason to believe that the National Security Agency or any other agency of the U.S. government, except the Peace Corps, played a role in his personal drama.
Perkins revealed his fondness for conspiracy theories during a January 10 presentation at a bookstore in Washington. At one point, he claimed, falsely, that the U.S. government had been involved in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., former Beatle John Lennon, and several unnamed U.S. senators who had died in plane crashes.
In response to a question about the September 11, 2001, attacks, he cautioned that although he did not know much about this subject he thought that if a bank had been robbed, the police would investigate the possibility that it had been an “inside job,” implying that the U.S. government may have been involved in the 9/11 attacks. He also recommended a Web site that puts forward the false claim that no plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
He said he found it hard to believe that the September 11 attacks had been planned by a man in a cave with a walkie-talkie – a formulation frequently used by those who wish to absolve al-Qaida of responsibility for the attacks. (For discussion, see “Al Qaeda and September 11th.”)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which Perkins says has been translated into some 20 languages, is popular because it is an exciting, first-person, cloak-and-dagger tale that plays to popular images about alleged U.S. economic exploitation of Third World countries. Perkins raises legitimate questions about the impacts of economic growth and modernization on developing countries and indigenous peoples. But his claim that he was acting as an “economic hit man” at the behest of the NSA appears to be a total fantasy.
U.S. GOVERNMENT FAVORS DEBT RELIEF
Contrary to Perkins’ assertions, U.S. government policy seeks to reduce the debt burden for the most heavily indebted poor countries.
In 2004, President Bush called for a cancellation of official debt for the world’s poorest countries. A year later, at the Gleneagles summit in July 2005, the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) agreed to pursue actions to write off the official debt of the world’s poorest 18 countries, and to forgive $17 billion of Nigeria’s debt, in the biggest debt cancellation ever. (See G8 Summit 2005, Gleneagles, Scotland.)
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Under Secretary for International Affairs, Timothy Adams, described the program in September 2005:
“Under the plan, 18 HIPC countries will be immediately eligible for … debt forgiveness: Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. The remaining HIPCs will also become eligible as they reach their HIPC Completion Point.
“The total amount forgiven for the 18 HIPC completion point countries will be $40 billion in nominal terms …. The full application of the cancellation of existing debt repayments could amount to as much as $60 billion as countries complete the process.”
PERKINS’ OTHER INTERESTS
Perkins has written several other books, which include:
* Psychonavigation: “first hand accounts of how diverse tribal cultures travel beyond time and space by means of visions and dream wanderings;”
* Shapeshifting: “shamanistic techniques for global and personal transformation;” and
* The World Is As You Dream It: “shamanistic techniques from the Amazon and Andes.”
As to whether Perkins was acting at the behest of the U.S. government, the world is not “as he dreams it.”
LG, No, I haven't read The Secret History of the American Empire yet, but I will definitely order it tonight. ,)
Mane...... are you trying to imply that corporations don't rule the world in conjunction with corrupt governments? What's with your anti-Perkins comments? His book wasn't on the bestseller list for nothing. To imply that his book is a bunch of comspiracy theories is to deny the realities of Latin America and the 3rd World. Anybody that has lived in Latin America in the past 100 years knows that the mix between 'La Empresa Privada' and Corrupt Government bureaucrats has created a volatile instability in the entire region.
Did this happen using invisible men? On the contrary, people like Perkins facilitated deals and mobilized the necessary elements to get the agenda in place. I know for a fact that 2 of the chapters in the book are real. They were well-known even before the book was published, so to deny them would be ridiculous.
To copy and paste random internet articles without having any knowledge of the inner workings of 3rd world governments is to deny that reality exists. Sure, why don't you go ahead and base your opinion on a biased survey. Let's see how far you get proving your point. Your skepticism astounds me when you have clearly fallen for the survey bait of the same corporations that Perkins denounces....... Good Luck with that. In the meantime, read a newspaper from this region and you'll see that you're mistaken.
carol I have far more understanding of the inner workings in latin america than you could imagine and it comes from being in the middle of events or knowing people who have been in the middle of the events.
the idea that corporations are behind latin america's current political turnmoil is living in the past. the last time a corporation played a big role in a political issue in latin america was then IT & T was involved in the coup against allende in chile back in the seventies. in honduras it was the banana companies in the seventies. the relationships are different in each country and we cannot lump them together in this charade from the conspiracy theorists who place blame for everything solely at the door of the united states. not that america is a holy place with absolute cleanliness but there is more than meet the eye.
perkins is just one of the many charlatans who have parlayed their made-up storied into millions. unfortunately we live in an era of mental laziness and the public accepts the daily propaganda pills either from the right or from the left. nobody seems to research things any more and this has opened the door for this peddlers who pass thesis for science and subjective commentary for facts and this is from all sides of the political spectrum. also, propaganda is not all lies, is a mix of truth distorted with lies. perkins like others do present some factual events but surround those events with speculation and conjecture without qualifying which is which and that, is intellectually dishonest but hey, I guess everything goes when chasing a buck.
let's concentrate on honduras: if the argument that the "empresa privada" is in control of the country were true then how do you explain the creation of 14 months of salary? the recent unanimous approval of the increase in the retirement and pensions ceiling from 18 to 35 years? nevermind the idiotic actions of the president putting on the line the most important relationship for the country? no carol, in honduras there are less than 400 individuals who control the country and their power comes from different sources such as unions, political office, industry and the church. foreing influence do exist but the days of effective political activism by foreign corporations is gone.
the current crisis in honduras does have roots in our history but that history did not begin with the banana companies or the vaccaro brothers. the roots go back to an elitist and corrupt empire that conquered us: spain. it's no wonder that spain only recently has been able to reach economic, social and political development that brings it closer to the developed countries in europe. the elitist mentality, the thomist ideology planted by the catholic church and an open laziness in the mindset of hondurans mix together in the cauldron of misery. compare costa rica and honduras and you will see two countries with similar histories but significant differences in their historical outcome. even little el salvador has left us behind. the key problem for honduras was not to have a dictator who like pinochet, stroessner and others provided a buffer zone to the hacienda way of thinking and doing things which has turned honduras into a cow that is slaughtered in chaos by different segments of our society in the fear that the cow could one day disappear.....
Carol, Mane, thanks for the discussions pro and con Perkins and his book. Some of the things he says sound pretty far fetched but I look forward to reading the book.
I hope that it will give me a better understanding of the aid situation.
I love hearing from both of you! I feel that I learn so much from your comments. Oh, and any book recommendations from you, Mane, would be appreciated as well.
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