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Embedded NYT Reporter Boosts US War in Honduras (and Why We Shouldn’t Listen)

By Dawn Paley | Upside Down World | May 9, 2012

Sunday’s edition of the New York Times featured a front page story by Thom Shanker about how the US is waging an “Iraq-style” war on drugs in Honduras.

Shanker, a former Senior Writer in Residence with the Centre for New America Security (which the WSJ called a “farm team” for Obama’s national security advisors), has also been the NYT’s Pentagon correspondent, was embedded in Afghanistan, and has reported from Iraq.

The piece, which ran online as US carries lessons of Iraq into Honduras drug war is your classic bit of embedded journalism. The dateline is a U.S. military base (ahem, forward operating location), the sources are soldiers and marines, and the Hondurans — which are included in photos only — are soldiers.

Hey, world, the U.S. is at war with the bad guys in Honduras! Is the gist of the article, but Shanker’s pro-establishment/embedded bias does little to give readers an informed perspective about what is actually taking place in the Central America.

First off, Shanker does his best to set the story up as being all about drugs, even though it is common knowledge that U.S. militarization doesn’t decrease drug production or trafficking. “Forty years of increasingly violent efforts to stamp out the drug trade haven’t worked,” reads a recent piece in Foreign Policy magazine.

Then Shanker slips into a description that is perhaps a little more indicative of the U.S. role in Honduras:

This new offensive, emerging just as the United States military winds down its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and is moving to confront emerging threats, also showcases the nation’s new way of war: small-footprint missions with limited numbers of troops, partnerships with foreign military and police forces that take the lead in security operations, and narrowly defined goals, whether aimed at insurgents, terrorists or criminal groups that threaten American interests.

Is this about drugs, or is it about securing U.S. sweatshops in Honduras? Is it about drugs, or is it about seeing the entire population of Honduras as a latent “criminal” group that could, at any moment, become “illegal” immigrants? Is it about drugs, or is it about controlling insurgents (aka rebels or revolutionaries), namely the members of a massive popular movement that has risen up since the illegal coup d’etat in Honduras in 2009?

You’d be forgiven for reading this piece and not knowing about the coup: Shanker left out that, ahem, little detail in his piece. The U.S. media don’t like to talk about how the coup, carried out by the Honduran army and supported by Honduras’ tiny transnational elite, has sparked a massive popular movement all across the country. But acknowledging that there is a huge (and generally peaceful) popular movement in Honduras makes war boosterism more complicated. Better to stick to the fighting drugs and bad guys, you know the quasi criminal terrorist line…

The re-militarization of Honduras isn’t just about Honduras — it is about the entire region.

Shankar mentions that US anti-drug teams developed in Afghanistan are now active in Honduras to “plan interdiction missions in Central America.” He makes passing reference to how Honduras was used for staging the war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but leaves out the fact that Honduras was also the staging area for the 1954 CIA backed coup in Guatemala, and for US backed wars against the FMLN in El Salvador later on (and on, and on). Looks like the bad old days of the “USS Honduras” are coming back in a big way – this, in a country that already has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

The fact that the New York Times is sending embedded journalists to Central America is gross. Instead of talking to, um, Hondurans, Shanker quotes the Council on Hemispheric Affairs* as a sort of “critical” voice. Check this quote, from Larry Binns of the COHA:

“We know from the Reagan years that the infrastructure of the country of Honduras — both its governance machinery as well as its security forces — simply is not strong enough, is not corruption-proof enough, is not anti-venal enough to be a bastion of democracy.”

The Reagan years!? Excuse me? What about the freaking military coup during Obama’s administration? Sigh.

The implication that what the US did/learned in Iraq was a success alone is obviously beyond problematic for reasons that others can explain far better than I.

Finally, Shanker ends off paraphrasing a money quote from an ex-Navy SEAL, writing “There are ‘insidious’ parallels between regional criminal organizations and terror networks.” I can’t bring myself to unpack this here, but the immediate implication (more war) is obvious, no matter how you understand the world.

Anyhow, some folks might argue that this piece is useful because it reveals the US mission in Honduras. I don’t agree — I think this piece is useful to the Pentagon and the US elite. There’s so little factual, contextual or historical information in here that this piece is near useless even for a critical reader.

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May 10, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Charter Cities in Honduras: A Proposal to Expand Canadian Colonialism

By Dawn Paley | The Media Co-op | April 26, 2012
Protest against charter cities proposal in Honduras. Banner reads: Model Cities: Expulsion of Garifuna People from Honduras. Photo G. Trucchi.
Protest against charter cities proposal in Honduras. Banner reads: Model Cities: Expulsion of Garifuna People from Honduras. Photo G. Trucchi.

The Globe and Mail really outdid themselves today. With the help of a writer named Jeremy Torobin, they took their journalism to the level of the commentary they once specialized in courtesy of Christy Blatchford (who is now at the National Post).

The article in question is called “How ‘charter cities’ could lift the global economy.” Hint: replace “charter city” with “colony” and you’re 99 per cent of the way to understanding the concept.

Torobin relies on a report by the Macdonald Laurier Institute (MLI), a 16-page document filled with sweeping generalizations and assertions, backed up by 10 piddly footnotes. But don’t worry, because as Torobin deftly points out:

The authors back up their arguments with research, such as a statistic that people who move to places with better rules than in the ones they’ve left behind can earn wages which are three to seven times higher.

Whoa, wait a sec, hang on… They back their arguments up with research and a statistic!? ZOMG.

Upon closer inspection, the report isn’t peer reviewed, and a disclaimer from MLI assures readers that the authors have worked independently and are solely responsible for the content. Oh, and the authors are both involved in a “non-profit” pushing the idea of new urban colonies (ahem, charter cities) all around the world.

Doesn’t stop Torobin from presenting the conclusions in the report, which he calls “intriguing,” as fact. He writes:

Prof. Romer was in Ottawa Wednesday pushing his concept of “charter cities,” essentially locales created from scratch in the developing world where reform-minded people could migrate and be governed under a broad set of evenly applied rules that, in theory, could remake norms across the country. If it worked, the “political risk” that is the chief impediment to foreign investment in so many poor countries would be significantly reduced, paving the way for money to pour in. Also, in theory, similar charter cities would start to pop up as people see what’s gone on in the first one and want to replicate it. Eventually, entire regions could be adopting new rules and norms established in the initial charter cities, dramatically improving the quality of more and more people’s lives.

Yes, that’s right. One urban colony (charter city) at at time, entire countries could be re-made into urban oases based on rules and foreign direct investment. But wait, it gets better.

According to Paul Romer and his pal Brandon Fuller, the NYU urbanization academics and colony boosters who penned the report, Canada is especially well suited to run a new colony, ahem, charter city in Honduras. The idea has been approved by Honduras’ congress (which, it is worth remembering, came about via illegitimate elections following a coup d’etat in 2009), and is known there as a “special economic region” or RED. Back to the report:

The RCMP, perhaps in partnership with another respected policing authority such as the Carabineros de Chile, could greatly enhance security and quality of life in the RED by establishing a presence in the zone – training police officers and holding officers accountable for modern standards of service and conduct in policing.

Yea, you read that right. Sorry if you just lost your lunch. The idea here is to bring in two national police forces whose origins are in the decimation and repression of Indigenous peoples and put them to work in a new colony.

I can’t bring myself to go into more detail about this pathetically colonial initiative. It’s all there. Read the report yourself (if you have the urge to get angry and scoff at the same time).

As for the Globe’s pitiful attempt at “journalism” on this one, after following along on this colonial fairy tale Torobin takes the time to note “Cynics might dismiss the whole concept as a starry-eyed mix of idealism, paternalism, even imperialism.” True to the tradition of Blatchfordian-Canadian-colonialist journalism, he doesn’t appear to have spoken to a critic, or even played devil’s advocate for a moment to understand what could possibly be wrong with this proposal.

I think it could be argued that this initiative has more to do with controlling migration and resistance movements than anything else. Miriam Miranda, a Garifuna leader, said recently of RED that “it is difficult to get information, but it is evident that we’re faced with the maximum expression of the loss of sovereignty.”

There’s another obvious colonial connection to this, which is this idea of tierra nullius, which would be applied to set up the first of these charter cities near Trujillo, ancestral & present day territory of the Garifuna people. I visited Trujillo and wrote about Randy Jorgensen’s housing projects marketed to Canadian retirees there a few years ago.

I look forward to more critical analysis of this proposal, but I have no illusions of finding it in the mainstream media. After all, it is already clear the old media dinosaurs want us all to go extinct along with them.

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April 27, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Honduras and the Obama Administration

By LAURA CARLSEN | CounterPunch | March 20, 2012

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo.

The Honduran government issued a statement that during the one-hour closed-door conversation between Biden and Lobo, the vice president “reiterated the U.S. commitment to intensify aid to the government and people of Honduras, and exalted the efforts undertaken and implemented over the past two years by President Lobo.”

In a March 1 press briefing, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Blinken cited “the tremendous leadership President Lobo has displayed in advancing national reconciliation and democratic and constitutional order.”

You’d think they were talking about a different country from the one we visited just weeks before on a fact-finding mission on violence against women.

What we found was a nation submerged in violence and lawlessness, a president incapable or unwilling to do much about it, and a justice system in shambles.

Two-Year Slide

The crisis in human rights and governance in Honduras has become apparent to the world and is a fact of daily life within the country. In the two years since Lobo came to power in elections boycotted by the opposition, Honduras catapulted into the top spot in the world for per capita homicides — the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) Global Homicide Survey found an official murder rate of 82 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. There were 120 political assassinations in the country in 2010-2011. In the region of Bajo Aguan, where peasants are defending their land from large developers, 42 peasants have been murdered, and alongside 18 journalists, 62 members of the LGBT community, and 72 human rights activists have been killed since 2009. The Honduran Center for Women’s Rights reports that femicides have more than doubled and that more than one woman a day was murdered in 2011.

An Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report on the Honduran coup found at least seven deaths, harassment of opposition members, disproportionate use of force by security forces, thousands of illegal detentions,
systematic violations of political rights and freedom of expression, sexual violence, and other crimes, with almost no investigation or prosecution.

Despite the fact that security forces perpetrated many of these crimes, the response of the Honduran government — with the support of the United States — has been to beef up military presence. One of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, Honduras increased its military expenditure from $63 million in 2005 to $160 million in 2010. The Lobo government justifies the militarization saying that its own police forces can’t be relied on. He told us in a meeting, “We’re working on cleaning up the police but it’s going to take some years. The corruption is deep.”

The impunity with which common criminals, powerful transnational interests, and elements of the state violate the most basic principles of society with government complicity or indifference derives from the fact that the government itself is erected on the violation of those principles. The crisis in human rights and violence—as deep as it is—is but a symptom of a greater evil. When the 2009 coup was allowed to conserve power and seal itself off from prosecution, it immediately undermined governance, rule of law, and the social compact. Honduras’ constitutional crisis has now become a prolonged social and political crisis.

A Coup for Criminals

The coup d’état on June 28, 2009 was not only a criminal act. It was an act designed to benefit criminals.

When members of the armed forces kidnapped democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya and took him to Costa Rica in his pajamas, they destroyed the the fragile democracy built since the era of military dictatorships. None of the convoluted discussions of what the president had supposedly done to deserve forcible removal changed the fact that the millennium’s first coup d’état had taken place in the Americas. The OAS and every major diplomatic body in the world immediately realized that Honduras had become the symbol and the reality of the world’s new battles for democracy.

What many people don’t know is that the unraveling of the story is more tragic than the coup itself—and holds even greater lessons for global governance.. To make a long story short, the Honduran coup regime incredibly survived international embargos and diplomatic negotiations that in the end only served to extend its grasp on illegitimate power. The disturbing suspicion that the U.S. government, the historic godfather of the region, had given its blessing to the new regime became certainty when the State Department negotiated an agreement that paved the way for coup-sponsored elections without assuring the return of the elected government.

Porfirio Lobo came to power, and a nation pummeled by poverty splintered into an ungoverned free-for-all characterized by political polarization, a surge in crime, and widespread land grabs. Honduras is not a failed state. It’s a violated state.

Crime—common crime, organized crime, state crime, and corporate crime—has thrived since the coup. Drug trafficking in the country has increased. The most recent U.S. International Narcotics report calculates that 79 percent of cocaine smuggling flights from South America use landing strips in Honduras. Reports that Mexican kingpin El Chapo Guzman and others use Honduras as a hideout surface frequently. Militarization of the country has taken place alongside the spread of organized crime—a phenomenon that should provoke some reflection. But the Honduran and U.S. governments have been too busy promoting the drug war to pay attention to the correlation between militarization and organized crime.

Land grabs to transfer land and resources from small-scale farmers, indigenous peoples, and poor urban residents into the hands of large-scale developers and megaprojects have generated violence throughout the country. Many of the testimonies of violence and sexual abuse that we heard from Honduran women regarded conflicts over land, where the regime actively supports wealthy interests against poor people in illegal land occupations for tourism, mining, and infrastructure projects, such as palm oil magnate Miguel Facusse’s actions in Bajo Aguan.

The lack of investigation and prosecution for crimes — and the evidence that state forces are involved in human rights violations against opposition and “undesirable” sectors — creates a paradise for criminals and a hell for the majority of citizens.

U.S. Engagement or Complicity?

U.S. responsibility for what happened after the coup is a question that deserves far more analysis and soul-searching. By choosing not to support a return to democratic order and political healing before presidential elections, the United States helped deliver a serious blow to the Honduran political system and society. The United States has a tremendous responsibility for the disastrous situation, and the urgent question is what to do about it.

Biden stressed U.S. programs to vet police and justice officials. When we met with U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kubriskie, she insisted that continuing to fund Honduran security forces would eventually lead to reform by “engaging” with government forces.

But even if that did happen, in the meantime those government forces are murdering, raping, beating, and detaining Hondurans — with U.S. aid.

When does engagement become complicity? Citizen groups and members of the U.S. Congress have come to the conclusion that the line was crossed some time ago. So far, more than 60 members of Congress have signed a letter circulated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) to cut off aid to the Honduran military and police, claiming that the funding of these institutions fuels the abuse.

There’s no excuse for spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on security assistance to Honduras as human rights violations pile up. No amount of money poured into these programs will change the systemic corruption and human rights violations until there’s a real political commitment to justice and reconciliation. And that does not appear to exist under the current regime.

Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas Program based in Mexico City. She is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

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March 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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