We talked on Friday, as you may recall, with one of our colleagues from the Heritage Foundation about the then breaking story out of Honduras – the United States sent a couple of its senior officials down, Tom Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and the National Security Council’s Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs Dan Restrepo. Their mission – to break the logjam, or perhaps more accurately to break the knees, of the Honduran democrats who have been resisting efforts by the United States I’m sorry to say and most other countries in Latin America and indeed elsewhere around the world to compel those democrats to restore Manuel Zalaya, a man cut from the Hugo Chavez cloth, a man who had aspired to engineer a second term as president of Honduras despite the flat constitutional prohibition of his doing so. And in the face of this provocative behavior by Mr. Zalaya, the people of Honduras, their elected representatives in congress, their supreme court all acted to have him removed and the United States government came down squarely on the wrong side and I’m wondering now, a couple of days further to reflect on all of this, whether we haven’t finally seen a coup in Honduras.
No, no, not the coup that Harold Koh, the legal advisor to the State Department, a man that we frequently talk about here, a rabid transnationalist who authored apparently an opinion saying “Manuel Zalaya’s removal from power was a coup, we can’t have that democracy must be restored by putting this Chavista back in power”, presumably to pursue the program that he was bent on before, namely to make himself president if not for life at least for another term. So here we have it, the coup I think was won, engineered by messieurs Shannon and Restrepo, and oh by the way the much reviled US ambassador to Honduras, a man by the name of Hugo Lorens, in fact there’s a very good piece by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in today’s Wall Street Journal about how much contempt the people of Honduras have for our ambassador there. Why? Because he has been seeing as a prime mover behind the effort to restore a would-be dictator, to overturn the constitution to dispense with the laws of Honduras. And now the US government has perhaps set the stage for just such a coup.
Now, it’s unclear at this moment whether it’ll work. But Manuel Zalaya, the erstwhile president of Honduras certainly thinks he’s about the be restored to power, there’s a report in El Pais, the pre-eminent Honduran newspaper that ran on Sunday, an account of Tom Shannon actively trying to persuade the people who will decide now, whether to restore Manuel Zalaya to power, namely the legislatures in the Honduran congress, and the supreme court. Now, you’d think since both the congress and the supreme court were party to the decision to remove this guy that they are unlikely to agree now to his restoration. But don’t count on it because what the United States government has done here for days, months , actually, is use every instrument of soft power, as they’re fond of saying in the Obama administration, to compel this impoverished allied nation, a democracy, one the few left in Latin America, to do as Washington and others like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez demanded, namely put Manuel Zalaya back in power, for at least the remainder of his present term in office, which is to expire were he still in power at the end of January.
What happened when these diplomats went down to Honduras reminds me of what Vito Corleone used to say in the Godfather, they made the democrats an offer they couldn’t refuse. So how did that shake out? The US government said it would not recognized the elections scheduled at the end of this month if Zalaya’s fortunes were not revisited by the congress and supreme court, so don’t count with the continuing pressure of the Obama administration, don’t count on democracy to be able to withstand this further pressure. Yes, the elections going to go forward, yes we’re now saying we will recognize its results, Tom Shannon in fact, we’ve got a little clip here of what tom Shannon has said in which it makes it sound like whatever the Honduran people decide is okay with him:
“We, and not just the United States but the rest of the inter-American community, have constructed these negotiations that the solution be Honduran; and therefore, from our point of view, our deal is a deal. What the Hondurans can’t determine to decide among themselves we’ll accept.”
Yeah, right. Well, we’ll see is all I can see. Stay tuned here folks, to Secure Freedom Radio, because I don’t believe it. I think that Obama and company and Shannon and Restrepo, a guy who appears a creature of George Soros and the Center for American Progress and George Soros’ enthusiasm for legalizing narcotics plays right into Manuel Zelaya’s playbook, a guy who’s been actively supported, we’re told, by narco-trafficking in his country. In all of these ways, folks this is not done.
And the only coup that has happened in Honduras at this point is one for the Obama doctrine – undermine our friends, embolden our enemies, and diminish our country. I think all three of those have been on display in this sorry episode. I hope the people of Honduras will continue to stand up for their freedom and we will finally support them in doing it.
#tcot
