Surviving Capitalism (Not) : In Honduras, a Mess Made in the U.S.

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, February 3, 2012

In Honduras, a Mess Made in the U.S.

Click here to access article by Dana Frank from the NY Times.

It's time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras has become. Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part the State Department’s making.

I was quite surprised to find this piece run in the Empire's "newspaper of record". Because I receive almost daily postings of reports from human right organizations about atrocities occurring in Central America committed by US backed regimes and US and Canadian corporations, I am well aware of such incidents. But notice that this is not an editorial from a NY Times commentator, but it is run as an opinion piece written by a U. of California professor.

Actually, I disagree with the professor in one respect: US foreign policies are not seen as a disaster from the point of view of the political operatives of the One Percent. They see it as a victory. The installation of the compliant regime in Honduras is just business as usual--the same as the installations of client states all over the world, the latest being Libya.

I do not follow closely media coverage by the NY Times, so I was curious if they had run much coverage of the atrocities in Honduras. Checking their index, I found rather little. By googling Honduras I found quite a bit, but mostly from obscure sources.