re: "The betrayal of Honduras"

José R. Cárdenas at Shadow Government ("Notes From The Loyal Opposition") has an update about further attacks on the Honduran constitution.

Money quote(s):

"Only the willfully deluded or the dangerously naïve would believe that the return of the disgraced former president means anything more than increased civic disturbances, more violence, and more chaos in one of Latin America's poorest countries.

Why? Because that is the way Hugo Chavez wants it.

The Venezuelan autocrat has bankrolled the two-year exile of his puppet Zelaya, as well the international campaign to force the oligarch-turned-populist's return to Honduras. Chavez has never gotten over the fact that Zelaya's attempt to replicate the Chavez model in Honduras was cut short by his impeachment by the Honduran Congress and his removal from office by order of the country's Supreme Court for violating the country's Constitution and other illegal acts. (Zelaya's apologists insist on characterizing what transpired as a "military coup.") "

Previously, I'd had a reasonable feeling of respect for the OAS. After all, most of its members were/are (finally!) democracies. But the Zelaya-instigated constitutional crisis in Honduras made me re-think that, when the OAS and its membership made it clear that it was much more interested in protecting the rights and privileges of presidents than in the democratic liberties of its member nation's citizens.

"What is noteworthy is the complicity of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, whose government teamed with Chavez to engineer Zelaya's return. It is now apparent that President Santos cannot run away fast enough from the legacy of his wildly successful and pro-U.S. predecessor Alvaro Uribe. And peace and stability in the region will be the poorer for it.

Santos's foreign minister, María Ángela Holguín, is in Washington this week for a bit of diplomatic back-slapping with Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, another co-conspirator in forcing Zelaya's return who can always be counted on to do the wrong thing. (The OAS is scheduled to vote this week to reinstate Honduras, after they were suspended in the wake of Zelaya's ouster.)

So what we have here is that instead of allowing the Honduran people to move on with their lives following the turbulent and polarizing Zelaya years, they are now forced to accept the anti-democratic fox back into the henhouse just so a few Latin American politicians can preen before the cameras celebrating their diplomatic "victory."

And just what message is this "victory" sending to the hemisphere? That it is perfectly acceptable that an elected president can run roughshod over democratic institutions, undermine separation of powers, and rewrite the constitution to seek indefinite re-election? That co-equal branches of government must remain supine before any president bent on aggressively aggrandizing power? That the Chavez model is a paragon of democratic legitimacy and rule of law and any attempts to legally thwart it are ipso facto illegitimate? "

JO - Time to care again for Caricom

From my archive of press clippings:

Jamaica Observer

Time to care again for Caricom

Sir Ronald Sanders

Sunday, April 26, 2009


IT seems that every time the countries of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) make one step forward in the quest for deeper integration, they take two steps backward, and the goal becomes even more elusive.

Sir Ronald Sanders

There have been several recent manifestations of this, one of them being the approach to ALBA - the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas - created by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"One member government of Caricom is formally a member of ALBA and two others have indicated that they might join the organisation.
The government that has joined ALBA is Dominica and the governments that have announced their intention to do so are St Vincent & the Grenadines and Antigua & Barbuda."

"The known members of ALBA are: Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Dominica.

When ALBA was conceived, it was not a treaty organisation and its principles resided in economic co-operation arrangements which appeared to benefit countries that joined it with Venezuela being the principal donor."

&

"Since then, however, a military dimension has crept into the organisation. Both Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega have argued that the member countries of ALBA "should work to form a joint defence strategy and start joining our armed forces, air forces, armies, navies, National Guards, and intelligence forces, because the enemy is the same, the empire (meaning the United States)"."

_____


Responses to: ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com

Sir Ronald Sanders is a consultant and former Caribbean diplomat.

re: "Honduras coup: Nice job, but here's how to do it better next time"

J Michael Waller at PoliticalWarfare.Org ("Words, images and ideas as tools of first resort.") had some suggestions for Honduras.

Money quote(s):

"How different modern Latin American history would be if the US had backed the brave Venezuelan officers and civilians who dared challenge the man who would abuse the democratic system to become an aggressive dictator.

Across Latin America, the Chavez model of political subversion of existing democratic and legal structures is taking root, with extremists taking power through Venezuelan petrodollar-funded covert operations to topple pro-western governments and create a Bolivarian "near abroad."

The US has done nothing to try to stem the trend. Nothing. Democrat or Republican - American leaders have handed the playing field over to Chavez and his Cuban and Iranian allies. It's been a pathetic show.

How refreshing it was to see that humble Honduras is the only country in the region not to lose its political cojones and that, to keep its Chavez-backed president from violating the constitution, its other institutions acted.

"It's all about process. As Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush proved in Venezuela, it's not really democracy that the US wants. It's legalistic process that matters. Just like the bureaucrat who doesn't care if you've really complied with a regulation, all that matters is the piece of paper that certifies that you did comply. Whether or not you really did. So Chavez can build his dictatorship simply by working through the democratic system and subverting it, and his model has been replicated again and again in the Americas. All to the cheer of do-gooders and demokracy-uber-alles fanatics alike.

And when the Good Guys step in to stop the nonsense, they are condemned because they are working outside The Process."

&

"Zelaya is a nut and illegal political agent of a foreign power who has alienated practically everyone in Honduras. He can hardly get TV time. His own party unanimously abandoned him, voting to agree to his resignation and the alleged "coup." The rest of the democratically elected congress called on the military to take action against him, too. So did the Supreme Court."

re: "On The Wrong Side Of The Right Man"

Jude at Hugh Hewett ("A blog of Townhall.Com") provided some illumination about the new Honduran president.

Money quote(s):

"Roberto Micheletti is the legally elected president of Honduras who counts among his allies the Honduran constitution, the rule of law, the Honduran Congress, the Honduran Supreme Court and Catholic Bishops, plus a majority of the Honduran people, including the business and political classes. Meanwhile, perched in Nicaragua and seeking to overturn the constitutional government of Honduras is ousted president Manuel Zalaya. Among his allies are Marxists, despots and cocaine cartels, Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, Castro, and ...President Obama."

&

"How is it possible for our President to get this one so wrong without having ill will toward Honduras and the desires of a democratic people?

Whether the military over-stepped or not by taking Zelaya out of the country, the transfer of power was legally performed."

re: "Why Honduras matters"

Neo-Neocon ("to tell the tale of my political change and provide a forum for others") explained the significance of Hondura's "coup".

Money quote(s):

"The summary version: the UN, which is now mostly a vehicle to promote tyranny, wants Zeleya back, whereas patriots in Honduras are working feverishly to prevent their country from becoming another Venezuela. Obama, of course, is on the side of the UN."

"I happen to be in favor of not only democracy, but constitutional checks on the possible tyranny of the majority in a democracy. And I would like to preserve such things even for little countries like Honduras, whose government is trying mightily and heroically to maintain its sovereignty, and to stop those who would usurp its ability to protect itself from that tyranny.

Unfortunately, our very own President Obama is among those people."

"(T)o recognize what’s been occurring there and what it signifies, one must know something about history, most particularly about how such power grabs occur. Then the patterns become clear. "

&

"(T)yrants very often use “democracy” as an excuse to get the people to override a constitution and grant them what turns out to be dictatorial, or near-dictatorial, powers, as well as the ability to extend or abolish term limits and stay in power longer than the constitution says (and in many cases indefinitely). Once the rules are changed about term limits, and power is consolidated and the voting apparatus compromised, staying in power is a relatively easy matter, really a trifle.

Most dictators of recent history have gone this route; the path is well worn and the methods tried and true. Zeleya was attempting to follow in the footsteps of compadre Chavez, and the government and people of Honduras knew it."

re: "Tyranny At Home. Tyranny Abroad."

Scipio at The Return of Scipio ("writing not for fortune or fame but because God is watching") explained what Honduras has to do with liberty.

Money quote(s):

"Who could have guessed that one day little Honduras would be in the news? Who could have guessed that one day little Honduras would be seen as a bulwark against tyranny? Who could have guessed that one day Honduras would stand firm against pressure from the OAS, the UN and the US?"

"Honduras is reliving the ancient struggle between liberty and tyranny. In all of our 6000 years of history liberty has almost always gone down to defeat. Simply put, tyranny has had too much in its favor. Laws were written by tyrants to ensure their hold on power. States would create an apparatus of prisons and police and spies to prop up any dictatorship. All media were placed under the direct scrutiny of those who ruled. These things were as true for Ashurbanipal as they are true for Hugo Chavez. "

&

"The most earth shaking event in secular world history was the creation of the United States of America. It was quite literally “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Nothing like it had ever come about. From the start she presented to the world a frightening thing, the possibility that the citizens of a nation might actually control the levers of power in a state. If she succeeded she would become a “dangerous nation” and a threat to tyranny around the world. Thus the hatred that European nations had for the new nation. None of them even believed that the US could possibly survive. It was a good thing for them that she did."

re: "Backtracking on Zelaya"

DRJ guest-posted at Patterico's Pontifications ("Harangues that Just Make Sense"):

Money quote(s):

"(T)welve days have passed since a State Department spokesman acknowledged that U.S. legal advisers were “actively assessing the facts and the law in question.” These advisers have clearly had enough time to conclude their research regarding the legality of Zelaya’s actions and the Honduran response, as well as communicate their conclusions to the State Department and the White House.

The continued silence by the Obama Administration on this topic speaks volumes. My guess is the word went out to Hugo Chávez and Manuel Zelaya that the Obama Administration is throwing Zelaya under the bus."

re: "Obama and the new template"

Neo-Neocon is trying to make sense of something.

Money quote(s):

"I’m not advocating some sort of armed insurrection. I believe Obama can, and must, be defeated at the polls, and that the same thing has to happen to a significant number of Democrats in Congress. It seems an urgent matter to work for this."

"(T)he blogosphere represents only a small minority of the population. What we have in common here is that we pay more attention than the average person to political and world events; otherwise, we wouldn’t be spending all this time at our computers reading and writing. Whether as a group we’re more intelligent or wiser than people who don’t do this is unknown and unknowable, but we are at the very least more well-informed and more strongly motivated."

&

"(W)hat is “the worst?” For some of us, it’s that Obama is a puppet run by others on the Left who have nefarious plans of various sorts. For some (and again, I’m in this group I’m about to describe) he is mostly his own man, an ideologue of the Left who has grandiose ideas of how he will make this country into something between a European welfare state and Chavez’s Venezuela, grabbing greater and greater power for the executive branch, and cooking the election rules (through redoing the census, relaxing voter registration laws even further, and enlisting the help of ACORN in outright fraud) so thoroughly that he hopes that his wing of the party will never lose control. As for foreign policy, whether Obama be the pawn of others or the master of his own fate, his plan appears to be to weaken the US and its influence on the world stage, bowing to international groups such as the UN and other organizations that feature a preponderance of tyrannies, as well as selling out Israel.

To most people in this country, however, this sounds not only absurd but unhinged."

(Bold type added for emphasis.)