In 2009 the Obama administration encouraged a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel
Zelaya. This fact is not in dispute. Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s Secretary of State, admitted as much in a 2014 interview.
Together Obama and Clinton helped to install a right-wing dictatorship that continues to rule over the Honduran people to this day. Not only has this dictatorship overrun the civil rights of the Honduran people, it works hand-in-glove with the drug cartels terrorizing all of Central America.
Those cartels use local gangs of enforcers to extort protection money from poor and middle-class business owners, often driving them out of business and killing anyone refusing to cooperate. These gangs, operating with the
silent approval of government leaders, are the primary cause of Honduras’ skyrocketing murder rate.
So, guess what. The U.S. bears the lion share of responsibility for the problems facing Honduras today.
If this is not familiar to you, please take a few minutes to watch two video
explanations. The first features Lucy Pagoada, an Honduran immigrant explaining the situation in her native country, and why she fled to the United States.
The second is an episode of On Contact with Chris Hedges. He interviews Professor Dana Frank, author of the book The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror and the United States in the
Aftermath of the Coup. She poignantly explains America’s role in transforming Honduras into a failed state.
Now, President Trump is threatening to close America’s southern border. He refuses to receive any more applicants for asylum and is ending all foreign aid to Honduras, Guatemala and San Salvador (two additional nations where the U.S. has meddled with disastrous effect).
So, let me get this straight. First, we intervene in these nation’s internal affairs. We help to overthrow the Honduran government and install a corrupt dictatorship.
Then we support that dictatorship even as it enriches itself at the people’s
expense by allying itself with violent drug cartels. We stand by and watch as the dictators’ neo-liberal economic policies exacerbate poverty, unemployment and violent crime because those policies benefit U.S. corporate interests.
Then when the poorest of the poor flee for their lives, seeking asylum and a better life in the U.S., our esteemed president stigmatizes them as criminals, rapists, the “worst of the worst.”
He takes away their children, locks them into cages, loses hundreds if not thousands of those children due to poor record keeping, and closes the
border. For the coup de’grace he orders border patrol agents to shoot these helpless, refugee families with tear gas and rubber bullets.
All the while, President Trump continues his xenophobic rants insisting that this southern “invasion” – vast weaponized caravans of brown invaders intent on destroying the American way of life – is THE greatest national security threat facing our country today.
And many Americans listen. Too many are persuaded.
They are persuaded because they have never bothered to follow the news. They are persuaded because don’t know anything about our history of
Central American interventions.
Worse yet, they don’t care to learn.
They are too busy gulping down the poisonous swill of U.S. exceptionalism to hear the cries of innocent Hondurans crushed beneath the colossus of American geopolitical power.
We are witnessing a textbook definition of oppression unfolding before our eyes. It is more than a national disgrace; it is wickedness incarnate.
America is the beast risen from the abyss.
