Читать книгу Who Killed Berta Cáceres? - Nina Lakhani - Страница 12
ОглавлениеToncontín Airport, Tegucigalpa: 5 July 2009
Berta stood arm in arm with Miriam Miranda among the crowd waiting that Sunday afternoon to welcome back Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya. It had been exactly a week since an elite military unit bundled the Honduran president onto a military plane bound for Costa Rica, after having kicked in the front door of his private residence in leafy Tres Caminos.1 It was 6 a.m., and Zelaya was ordered to come downstairs holding his hands high, like a common criminal. ‘Shoot me,’ he dared them, still in his pyjamas, ‘if your orders are to kill me.’ Instead he was flown fifty miles north-west to the Palmerola military airport, which is also where the US war on drugs mission is headquartered. The deposed president stared out of the window at hundreds of battle-ready soldiers as the plane refuelled. The lights were out, the internet was down, radio and television sets stood silent, and church doors were closed.
Zelaya had been warned that a coup could be imminent, but he wouldn’t believe it. ‘You’re living in the Jurassic period,’ he told advisers. ‘This is the twenty-first century, the world wouldn’t allow it.’ But he was wrong. Zelaya was ousted in an old-fashioned coup d’état plotted by a powerful cabal of ultra-right business, political, religious and military players. It was still dark when the plane left for Costa Rica.
A week later, Zelaya was heading back to Honduras after crisis talks with the UN and Latin American heads of state. Berta and Miriam were anxious. The Garifuna contingent were drumming loudly and the air was thick with ceremonial smoke; the atmosphere was charged.
Zelaya thought it safe to return, but the coup plotters had other ideas. Congress had produced a fake resignation letter hours after Zelaya was deposed. The Supreme Court issued a secret arrest warrant based on trumped-up charges and named Congress leader Roberto Micheletti as his replacement, while on television Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez warned that Zelaya’s return could trigger a bloodbath.2 Ironically, in a country so long ruled by military governments, the armed forces had been the last democratic pillar standing until the generals also flipped. After that, it was left to ordinary people to flood into the streets, demanding democracy be restored and Zelaya allowed to serve the final six months of his term. As tension built, security forces surrounded the airport.
Word spread that Zelaya’s plane was approaching. A small section of the crowd ran past cordons towards the runway, where soldiers and army trucks were stationed to prevent the plane from touching down. Suddenly there were gunshots, followed by screams. Isis Obed Murillo Mencías, a nineteen-year-old grocery clerk, had been shot in the back of the head. He was the first victim of the coup.3 Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, was in the crowd and called the military chief, Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, pleading for the gunfire to stop. ‘Are you going to shoot down Mel’s plane?’ she asked. ‘No,’ said Vásquez, ‘he’s not an enemy of Honduras. This is a political crisis; your husband is my friend.’ He explained he would not let the plane land because to do so would mean arresting Zelaya. ‘I won’t humiliate him and risk chaos,’ he told Xiomara, and hung up. Sparing her husband’s life was a modern twist on what was an old-school Latin American coup.
After the fatal gunfire, it was announced that a military curfew would start in an hour. Anyone on the streets after 6 p.m. would face arrest. Berta and Miranda watched Zelaya’s plane swerve up and away and embraced each other tearfully. The last time they’d been together at Toncontín airport, it was to welcome Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president. A week, they say, is a long time in politics and now Berta wondered if she would still stand for the vice-presidency if Zelaya wasn’t allowed back before the November elections.
‘We cried because we knew what this meant,’ Miriam told me years later. ‘Until then, we could still hope democracy would be restored. But when the plane wasn’t allowed to land, we knew the only option was resistance, which meant social movements would be repressed and leaders like us targeted. It was never about Mel or any political party, it was about fighting to restore the rule of law. We cried because at that moment we understood that it was going to be a long, hard struggle, and we were right. Berta is dead, and the struggle continues.’
Making Friends, Losing Friends
Mel Zelaya, wearing his trademark cowboy boots and white sombrero, was inaugurated on 27 January 2006 inside a packed-out national stadium, twenty-five years after the end of military rule. The fifty-three-year-old landowner had beaten National Party veteran Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo Sosa by promising a new kind of Liberal government, centred on transparency and citizen participation. At the inauguration he announced an end to open pit mining, a new reforestation programme, help for small businesses, and energy reform to cut dependence on fossil fuels. The rousing speech left his grassroots supporters enthused, his rivals confounded, and the economic elites reassured by warm words from Carlos Flores Facussé, the business-friendly former president and political dealmaker. Zelaya thanked God, Cardinal Rodríguez, indigenous communities and the new president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, before leaving feeling pretty pleased with himself.
Zelaya was still basking in the glow when US ambassador Charles Ford called to invite him to lunch at the embassy.4 After a couple of hours of diplomatic chitchat in Spanish,5 Ford gave Zelaya a sealed white envelope. ‘He said not to open it until I got back to the Casa Presidencial,’ Zelaya told me at the Libre HQ more than a decade later (it’s a story I’d already heard, one he’s often recounted over the years). According to Zelaya, the envelope contained a list of nine ministries, the important ones like defence, security, foreign affairs and finance, each alongside three names of potential ministers whom the US would find acceptable.6 ‘He gave me three options for each ministry, letting me pick one was the democratic part … In Honduras, a recommendation by the US is a thinly veiled order.’ I asked Zelaya what he had done with the list. ‘I threw it away.’ Whether fully or partly true, this incident was the beginning of the end of Zelaya’s relationship with Ford.7
Two years later, Ford sent a notably hostile cable. ‘Zelaya remains very much a rebellious teenager, anxious to show his lack of respect for authority figures … There also exists a sinister Zelaya, surrounded by a few close advisers with ties to both Venezuela and Cuba and organized crime.’ He continued,
Unlike most other Honduran leaders in recent times, Zelaya’s view of a trip to the big city means Tegucigalpa and not Miami or New Orleans … I have found Zelaya’s real views of the United States hidden not too very deeply below the surface. In a word, he is not a friend. His views are shaped not by ideology or personal ambitions but by an old-fashioned nationalism where he holds the United States accountable for Honduras’ current state of poverty and dependency … The last year and a half of the Zelaya Administration will be, in my view, extraordinarily difficult for our bilateral relationship … Honduran institutions and friendly governments will need to be prepared to act privately and in public to help move Honduras forward.
Just over a year later, Zelaya was deposed. What had gone wrong?
The two most popular theories on the coup are that it was to prevent Zelaya from amending the constitution in order to stay in power, and that it was orchestrated by the US, who feared he was going rogue and could become the next Hugo Chávez. The truth is more straightforward: it was about protecting the wealth and privilege enjoyed by the country’s elites. ‘The coup reminded us that the Honduran oligarchy won’t tolerate even minor reforms if these changes affect their profits,’ said sociologist Eugenio Sosa.
Or, as the former finance minister Hugo Noé Pino put it: ‘The economic elites claimed Honduras was moving towards twenty-first-century socialism, but Zelaya’s fiscal policies were modest, never radical. What they actually feared was losing their absolute grip over the country, that a few state contracts and concessions could slip out of their hands.’ This is perhaps what the US, too, feared most – losing its absolute influence over a country it had dominated economically and politically for over a century. And what could be worse than losing it to the number one enemy, Hugo Chávez?
But Zelaya’s alleged transformation from capitalist landowner to socialist was unlikely, and untrue.8 At best he shifted somewhat to the left, partly because a close circle of progressive advisers encouraged him to listen to and form alliances with civil society groups and Chávez, and partly because the US and its Honduran allies refused to concede on a single issue.
Oil
At the top of Zelaya’s presidential to-do list was energy.9 He convened a meeting with the Honduran who’s who of oil requesting them to abandon or reduce the ‘fuel formula’, a shady tariff which enabled industrialists (distributors, importers, petrol station dealerships) to fix prices and overcharge the state by 4 or 5 Lempiras per gallon. No deal, we won’t give up a penny, came the response. Soon after, Mel opened a bidding war and approached Chávez about buying cheap oil from Venezuela, which was already extending its net across Latin America through the Petrocaribe agreement.10 Zelaya’s search for cheaper oil started a political war. Ford warned Zelaya that the proposed deal with Chávez ‘was changing the rules of the game’ and could jeopardize a pending US aid package. Business leaders, those with oil interests and others, also warned against picking a fight with the US, the country’s principal trading partner. But Zelaya is visceral and combative by nature, and his mind was made up. Soon after, in June 2006, Zelaya met with President George W. Bush.
Bush presided over a two-hour meeting at the Oval Office, also attended by Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ford. I’ve heard several versions regarding the exact words that were uttered at that meeting. Arístides Mejía, then defence minister, remembers it as follows: ‘Look, Mr President,’ said Bush, ‘I know you’ve got an oil problem but listen to me, my family is in the oil business, so I know what I’m talking about, the market sets the price. Chávez can’t give you a better price, he’s just going to bring you problems.’
He went on about Chávez for ten minutes or so, according to Mejía, before finishing in Spanish with ‘Cuidado con Chávez’ (Careful with Chávez). Mel responded smoothly: ‘Mira, señor presidente, a famous French philosopher once said that great men are measured by the problems they solve. But Chávez is a small problem, there’s no need to spend so much time worrying about him.’ Bush smiled and the tension was broken. ‘Who’s the French thinker you pulled out of the bag?’ Mejía asked after the meeting. ‘No idea, I made him up,’ said Zelaya. Honduras joined Petrocaribe in December 2007.11
Zelaya’s allies were more perturbed about joining Chávez’s other regional trade project, ALBA.12 He signed up anyway, with Chávez at his side, promising cheap oil for a hundred years and free tractors for campesinos to boost food production. Love him or hate him, Chávez had a flair for name-calling, and he took the opportunity to rub up the country’s businessmen and media moguls, calling them pitiyanquis. The catchy insult made headlines, as did calling Cardinal Rodríguez a parrot of the empire. Yet despite the anti-US posturing and public displays of affection, Chávez and Zelaya were not especially close, personally or politically. ‘Chávez was a military man who never took Mel seriously, saw him as a cowboy in politician’s clothes,’ said the academic Víctor Meza, Zelaya’s interior minister. ‘The relationship was pragmatic and opportunistic, never ideologically driven,’ said economist Hugo Noé Pino. ‘Both were populists and provocateurs, but that’s where the similarity ends.’
Berta backed Zelaya’s alliance with Petrocaribe and ALBA, and respected Chávez, though she was privately very critical of the imposition of energy and petrol projects on indigenous territories in Venezuela. ‘My mum didn’t blindly follow. She taught us never to idealize anyone, including her,’ said daughter Bertita. Still, the Comandante Chávez was for a while Berta’s online profile picture.
Energy
In 2006, ENEE, the national electricity company, was on the verge of bankruptcy after years of mismanagement, corruption and perverse contracts favouring a tiny handful of suppliers and distributors. Prices were high, defaults mounting, and blackouts long and frequent.13 The energy matrix was dominated by oil- and coal-fired plants controlled by two of the country’s richest industrialists: Fredy Násser, son-in-law of Miguel Facussé, and Schucry Kafie. They boasted lucrative contracts, negotiated in the early 1990s during a regional energy crisis, in which ENEE paid fixed prices and remained responsible for repairs and maintenance. The energy magnates were furious when these and other inflated contracts were sent to Congress for revision.14 But ENEE was haemorrhaging money, so in 2007 Zelaya sent in the big guns, the defence and finance ministers, to stop the rot. (The finance aspect makes sense, but deploying the armed forces seems like a retrograde step in a fragile democracy.)15 Mejía asked General Romeo Vásquez to put together a management team to run ENEE. Two of its members are important to Berta’s story.
Julián Pacheco Tinoco, then a colonel and head of military protocol, was assigned to manage human resources at ENEE. An SOA-trained counterinsurgency and intelligence specialist, Pacheco went on to become security minister under Juan Orlando Hernández (president since 2014), with overall responsibility for policing COPINH protests against Agua Zarca and for providing protection to Berta,16 as well as to hundreds of other threatened defenders and journalists – a position he held when she was killed. Pacheco was named in at least two separate US drug trafficking cases involving Los Cachiros, the criminal group which thrived in the department of Colón during his time as regional commander. He was also targeted in a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation, alongside Juan Orlando Hernández, into ‘large-scale drug trafficking and money laundering activities relating to the importation of cocaine into the United States’ dating back to 2013,17 according to court documents unsealed in 2019. Pacheco has never been indicted and has denied any wrongdoing.
The other relevant character was Roberto David Castillo Mejía, a second lieutenant in the Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Department, who in 2004 graduated from the prestigious US military academy West Point with a degree in electrical engineering. Castillo was assigned as head of operations at ENEE’s Tegucigalpa electricity dispatch centre. He so impressed his employers that in January 2008, when the rest of the military intervention team left after having apparently rescued ENEE from collapse, he stayed on to work with the newly appointed director, Rixi Moncada.18 Arístides Mejía said Moncada asked for Castillo to stay on; Moncada claimed it was the other way around. What’s clear is that Castillo was looking for a way out of the army, reluctant to serve the full eight years agreed in return for the West Point subsidy. Castillo was formally hired in January 2008 as management control coordinator, a fancy title for technical expert. Over the next twenty months, until September 2009, Castillo improperly claimed salaries from both ENEE and the armed forces, profiting by 212,986 Lempiras (around $9,000), according to a government audit. He was also rebuked for selling office supplies and computer accessories from his company, Digital Communications SA,19 to the armed forces at inflated prices in 2007 and 2008, and ordered to repay 270,568 Lempiras (around $11,000). The sales violated state contracting rules, and auditors were not fooled by his name having been removed from the company just before the sales. I spoke to an old army friend I’ll call Adrián, another graduate officer who, like Castillo, felt uncomfortable in the military environment. Adrián claimed that Castillo offered him a 10 per cent cut if he helped secure similarly overpriced sales. ‘I asked him why not just lower prices, win the contracts fairly, and not pay bribes, but he just laughed.’
In October 2007, David Castillo travelled to Brazil with ENEE to open negotiations with Constructora Norberto Odebrecht to finance and build two new mega dams, Los Llanitos and Jicatuyo, on the Ulúa River. This is the country’s most important waterway, flowing 400 km north to the Caribbean and connecting to the Gualcarque in Río Blanco. The contract was signed in January 2009 by Moncada and Zelaya, and modified a year later, post-coup, at an ENEE board meeting attended by Castillo.
Odebrecht is a subsidiary of Odebrecht SA, the region’s largest construction conglomerate, which in 2016 admitted to spending hundreds of millions of dollars in corrupt payments to foreign political parties, campaign funds and politicians, in order to grease the wheels of public works projects such as gas pipelines, airport terminals and hydro-electric dams.20 In the biggest corruption scandal ever uncovered in Latin America, executives eventually admitted paying bribes in over half the countries on the continent, as well as in Angola and Mozambique, among others, and in a leniency deal agreed to pay $2.6bn in fines to US, Swiss and Brazilian authorities. In Honduras, prosecutors announced in early 2018 that several officials, from three administrations (presidents Zelaya, Micheletti and Lobo), were under investigation for possible Odebrecht-linked corruption. By mid-2019, no charges had been brought, but the case remained open.
Berta first met Zelaya in the mid-1990s when he was director of the social development fund (FHIS), working closely with Doña Austra, La Esperanza’s first female mayor at the time.21 (Austra was a card-carrying Liberal until the coup, after which she stopped backing the party.) Berta’s brother, Gustavo Cáceres, was minister for youth in Zelaya’s government. I never asked Berta if she voted for Zelaya. Berta and Salvador advised him after the coup, but she was hardly a Zelayista.
Zelaya’s negotiations with Brazil irked the energy and construction magnates, as well as community groups like Berta’s COPINH and Miriam’s OFRANEH who objected to yet more projects being imposed on indigenous and rural lands without free, prior and informed consent. In contrast, the working poor applauded Zelaya’s decision to raise the minimum wage by 60 per cent, to $289 in urban areas, to cover the cost of the canasta básica, or basket of staple goods. But this move infuriated the business sector. Adolfo Facussé, the bullish business figurehead, accused the president of imposing communist policies in order to create economic chaos and justify tax increases. ‘The private sector will resist,’ he warned.
I myself first met Zelaya in mid-2017, at party headquarters in Tegucigalpa, where he was coordinating the campaign for the forthcoming elections. It was late, after 9 p.m., and he started the interview disconcertingly: ‘Your blouse needs ironing,’ he said, rubbing the ever so slightly creased fabric between his thumb and index finger. A typical example of everyday machismo in Honduras, or an attempt to put me off? Probably a bit of both.
Zelaya said that it was during his time as director of the FHIS that he realized that capitalism had turned the country’s genuine landowners – the natives and Afro-Hondurans – into its poorest people. ‘I dedicated my presidency to governing for the majority but not by taking away from the minority; they did very well in my time.’
Standing for Vice-President
In a deeply polarized society like Honduras, where everyone picks sides, Berta rejected party politics and regarded the country’s two-party system as fundamentally corrupt. The transition from military rule to democracy had generated power-and wealth-sharing pacts between the two parties, or at least its uppermost cliques. In practice this meant that whoever won at the ballot box, politics continued to serve the interests of the country’s economic elites. Why? Because campaign finances and political careers depend on the same powerful families, who, despite superficial differences, are bound together by the shared political project of making money.
In such a context, how did Berta find herself standing for vice-president? The best person to tell this story is Carlos H. Reyes, a burly, forthright man with an infectious laugh and shiny bald head, whom I interviewed over breakfast in his glorious back garden. Reyes, born in 1940, is the straight-talking leader of what’s widely considered the country’s most principled and belligerent union, STIBYS, representing the workers in beer and soft drinks factories. In 2009, Reyes was nominated by the Bloque Popular to stand for president, with Berta, Carlos Amaya (son of the revolutionary writer Ramon Amaya) and teacher Maribel Hernández as his running mates.22 The objective was to break the bipartisan system and open up spaces to new leaders from outside what they regarded as the cesspit of party politics. The Bloque Popular took off in Tegucigalpa at the end of the 1990s as an attempt to halt the privatization juggernaut circling round public services like ENEE, egged on by the IMF and World Bank. Similar blocs or alliances between unions, campesino and indigenous groups, students and teachers sprang up across the country, organizing huge rallies which were frequently met with force.23 Reyes recalled one particularly thuggish encounter back around August 2004, when thousands marched on Congress, blocking the four entrances into the capital. ‘The army surrounded us, but Berta stood up to them face to face. That kid [cipote] never backed down, not once in the twenty years I knew her,’ he said. Berta was reluctant to stand at first. Back then she wasn’t as well known as Salvador Zúñiga, who was the face of COPINH at home while she focused on international work. She accepted the nomination after touring the country, consulting communities: it emerged that people wanted genuine representation, not empty campaign promises, and they wanted deep, genuine, lasting change. They believed Berta could help make that happen.24
The Cuarta Urna: Dictator or Democrat?
The first legislation Zelaya sent to Congress was a citizen participation law. This envisaged a Cuarta Urna, or fourth ballot box, at the November 2009 general elections, enabling voters to decide whether a National Constituent Assembly should be convened to amend the 1982 Constitution.25 The Bloque Popular saw the Cuarta Urna as the opportunity for change. Here, finally, was the chance to create a constitution which recognized the country’s diverse cultural and ethnic groupings, as in Ecuador and Bolivia. They believed this could open up democratic spaces for genuine community participation and the redistribution of power. It was the Cuarta Urna that convinced Berta that Zelaya was sincere about constructing a new, fairer, more equal Honduras through a social pact between the state and the mass of ordinary people.
But to the country’s elites, who had no interest in sharing anything, the Cuarta Urna represented a ticking time bomb. As a sop to their concerns, a popular non-binding vote was scheduled for Sunday 28 June to determine whether or not the Urna would be introduced six months later, concurrent with the general elections.
However, with just over six months left of his term, Zelaya had no friends in high places, and the yes–no vote was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and outlawed by Congress a few days before it was scheduled. In response, Zelaya ordered army chief General Vásquez to provide logistical support to distribute the ballot boxes. He refused. Zelaya sacked him on Tuesday 24 June, which prompted the commanders and defence minister to resign in protest. A few hours later, troops descended from their barracks into cities across the country. Vásquez was soon reinstated by the Supreme Court justices, who ruled their decision could not be challenged. The electoral tribunal judges likewise declared the consultation illegal and, together with the Attorney General’s Office, confiscated all the ballots and locked them inside the Hernán Acosta Mejía airbase. ‘There’s a coup under way,’ Salvador Zúñiga warned Zelaya, but the president refused to believe it. Instead Zelaya led a group of supporters to the base and seized the confiscated ballots, ordering all hands on deck to ensure the materials were delivered and the vote went ahead. It was frenetic.
The first plan to get rid of Zelaya, hatched in Congress, involved mustering a political consensus to declare him mentally unfit for power. When US Ambassador Hugo Llorens cottoned on to this strategy,26 he called Roberto Micheletti, Carlos Flores and other powerbrokers to make clear it was unconstitutional, and the US would not support it. ‘Llorens tried to stop them, but they stopped returning his calls,’ said Víctor Meza, the softly spoken former interior minister. ‘Them’ meant the economic elites, who in the weeks leading up to the Cuarta Urna were busy trying to raise money to finance the coup, and persuading high-ranking judges, politicians, prosecutors and the clergy to play their part in time for the grand finale.
While Micheletti was no coup mastermind,27 he played an important role as president of Congress in aligning the right-wing section of the Liberal Party with the opposition Nationalists to execute it. The coup made him the most powerful man in Honduras for seven months, during which he defended it like a Cold War victory. Former president Carlos Flores, who helped Zelaya win the presidency, admits orchestrating a campaign against Zelaya in the run-up to the coup, and also a campaign to stop his return to the country, yet denies any direct involvement in the coup! A private jet belonging to his uncle Miguel Facussé was used to fly Zelaya’s foreign minister Patricia Rodas out of the country on 28 June, though without his knowledge, Facussé claimed.
General Vásquez had refused to participate in the ‘mentally unfit’ plot – so what changed his mind?
I interviewed him at the end of 2018 at his gated mansion on the south-westerly edge of the capital.28 It was here, Vásquez said, that he invited Zelaya, nine days before the coup, to explain his intentions and resolve the Cuarta Urna crisis. But Zelaya came accompanied by his so-called political rival Pepe Lobo, and the evening ended in stalemate. ‘Mel said, “It’s just a poll.” Pepe said, “You want to stay in power.” Mel said, “No, I just want change,” and it went on like this.’ According to Vásquez, Zelaya was more upset by the idea that his own vice-president, Elvin Santos,29 could be the next ruler than by the looming constitutional crisis. It was just a poll, a non-binding poll, I reminded him. ‘You say that, but this little poll had turned everyone against Mel: politicians, and not just the National Party, half of his own party, Church leaders, businessmen, everyone came to this house asking me to find a solution,’ Vásquez told me. ‘The empresarios, the business people, were scared of twenty-first-century socialism. They wanted me to solve the problem with a military coup and restore order to the country, but I said no, even after he sacked me, because I’m not ambitious and Mel was my friend. But when he insulted the armed forces during a television interview, that was too much, we were angry, and the Supreme Court saw an opportunity. Until then, they were all too scared to make a move.’
On Saturday 27 June the mansion was full of ambassadors, congressmen, functionaries, commanders, dealing with the crisis, according to Vásquez. At 11 p.m., sitting in the formal lounge on spotless cream sofas, Vásquez and his commanders made the decision.30 ‘I felt very bad, we were good friends, like brothers, but there was no other option to avoid a huge crisis, perhaps even civil war. It was only a poll, but it had set all the people against one another.’ Any regrets? I asked at the end of the interview.
‘The truth is, Mel wanted to stay in power. In 2008 Chávez told me, soldier to soldier … and my intelligence sources in Venezuela confirmed it, that Chávez saw Honduras as the gateway to Central America for his Bolivarian political project.’ Even if true, that doesn’t mean Chávez would have got his way.
Uncle Sam
The soldiers deployed to execute the coup were from the 1st Battalion, with which US special forces were conducting a training operation. Zelaya had told me that he saw US soldiers milling about at Palmerola as the plane refuelled. Did the Pentagon know, and if so, were they in on it? I asked Vásquez. No, he said, they weren’t. US military and diplomatic bigwigs were at a party that Saturday night, so had no idea about the final plans.
Víctor Meza, the former interior minister and public policy wonk, posed an interesting question when we spoke: ‘What possible interest could the US have had in organizing a coup against a government with only six months left in power, when they were fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I don’t think they organized it, but they certainly took advantage of it,’ he concluded.
Shortly after Zelaya was marched out in his pyjamas, Barack Obama called the coup a coup. ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,’ he said. ‘It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition, rather than democratic election.’
His unequivocal condemnation buoyed social leaders like Berta and Carlos H. Reyes as they secretly gathered in safe houses to organize demos and talk strategy. The coup plotters grew nervous. Could the North American president possibly champion a Chávez lackey over us, their closest and most loyal allies in the region? The illusion didn’t last long: an old-school military putsch to effect leadership change was exactly what happened. That is, Hillary Clinton happened.
‘We do not think that this has evolved into a coup,’ Clinton told reporters on 29 June 2009. This statement was designed, according to the official line, to prevent suspending US aid to needy Hondurans (US law bans aid to any country whose leader has been toppled by a military coup). ‘If we were able to get to a … status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome,’ Clinton added.
The plotters breathed a collective sigh of relief.
What Clinton really meant was a restoration of the status quo ante, the old order that existed before Zelaya upset the apple cart. She wanted him replaced with a president she liked better, as she explained in her memoir Hard Choices: ‘We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.’
Yet the US embassy was explicit in its definition of the event. In a July 2009 cable, entitled ‘Open and shut: the case of the Honduran coup’, Ambassador Llorens said that while Zelaya might have ‘committed illegalities’ and ‘even violated the constitution’, for his team there was ‘no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the executive branch … Micheletti’s ascendance as “interim president” was totally illegitimate.’
Despite Llorens’s immediate and unequivocal assessment, the State Department was only interested in two things: negotiations and new elections. The coup vanished from the discourse.
Meza thinks the flip was most likely the result of hardball lobbying and scaremongering by ultra-right Honduran political and business leaders, ex-ambassador Ford, oil companies and other transnationals unhappy with Zelaya’s reforms, along with the Cold War neocons operating around the Pentagon and State Department. Former Bush adviser Roger Noriega was hired by the coup plotters to impart his world view that Honduras was ‘ground zero’ with regard to the spread of Chavista authoritarianism under the façade of democracy. In Hard Choices
