What May Matter Most About Honduras, Truly… The USA’s Long Involvement There

When I was barely 23 in 1969, I drove the entire Pan-American Highway from the Rockies to the tip of Panama, then floated Jeep around the Darian Jungle to South America. One of those inspired dead-dangerous things young people do. I barely made it home alive. Especially while driving my battered Jeep through the jungles and mountains and lakelands of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador where the US Embassy said everything was fine… when in fact I ran face-first into wars and thugs and US-backed militaries that had spilled over frontiers in every direction.

I was confounded when I returned to the USA and found that most US citizens hadn’t the vaguest idea of wars going on in Central America, that the average citizen has zero knowledge of their taxpayer dollars being used by the US for military involvment in those years’ long wars in neighboring countries right down the road from the US.

Busted down outside of Tegucigalpa, Honduras on a bad road with sink holes, I came to know the kindness and humor– and suffering– of many of the Honduran people. They are excellent, as are the citizens of the other Central America countries I– not traveled through– but had constant car crashes, engine trouble, clutch goings out, being detained by military, held at the borders, stopped and searched for traveling at night, confiscated, etc, all leaving me stranded, and to be pitied– or not– by strangers and soldiers … who did not remain strangers for long, but rather became life-long memories of sometimes abject fear on my part, but far more often… mercy personified.

What May Matter About Honduras Now… and likely has for a long long time…

Generalisimo Vásquez Velásquez

1. The Generalisimo Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez, who forced out and banished President Manuel Zelaya at dawn one day last week, is reported to have surrounded the presidential palace with two-hundred armed soldiers and tanks while tear-gassing a crowd gathered outside…

2. President Zelaya is the democratically elected President of Honduras

3. Generalisimo Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez is a two-time graduate of the United States Army School of the Americas, located in Georgia, USA.

4. Generalisimo Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez pushed out President Zelaya after Zelaya tried to present a controversial referendum to the people’s vote that would have allowed him, via a presumed Constitutional amendment if possible, to lift a one-time-only term-limit on running for presidential office again.

5. Generalisimo ROVV forced Zelaya under armed guard to be taken by the army to a Honduran Air Force Base, where Zelaya was forced to board a plane that had received clearance–from whom in Costa Rica or beyond is not yet known, but surely will be soon– to land in Costa Rica.

6. For years now, many American religious groups, Quakers, Maryknoll missionaries and priests, Protestant and Jewish groups of conscience, have been trying to close down The School of the Americas that Generalisimo Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez has graduated from twice, as this particular Army school has been known to consistently train men from Central and South America in torture and coup-making and other nefarious endeavors…

7. The Pentagon did close the School of the Americas down in 2000, only to reopen it under a new name: “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.”

8. Since Generalisimo Vásquez Velásquez has been in power in Honduras this past week, Peace Activists in the US and elsewhere have rapidly stepped up pressure to close the school down again. The US school is nicknamed by activists, The School of Torture. It is also called “the School of Coups.”

9. Here, from National Catholic Reporter online, by Linda Cooper and James Hodge, who are the authors of Disturbing the Peace: The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School of the Americas. SOA Watch is the conglomerate group that has been protesting publicly and informing the US citizenry/taxpayers about what the School of the Americas teaches, and how it gives millions of US dollars, US weaponry, and lends US military ‘advisors’ to wars/initiatives/ overthrows throughout Latin America.

While the Defense Dept. promised transparency, it refused to release the names of the new graduates after SOA Watch found that the school was enrolling well-known human rights abusers. One — Salvadoran Col. Francisco del Cid Diaz, a 2003 graduate — was cited by the 1993 U.N. Truth Commission for commanding a unit that dragged people from their homes and shot them at point-blank range.

Last week the House approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2010, which would force the release of the names of its graduates, including their rank, country of origin and courses.
The bill – offered by Congressmen Jim McGovern (D-MA), Joe Sestak (D-PA), Sanford Bishop (D-GA) and John Lewis (D-GA) – has to survive a House and Senate joint conference committee.

In overthrowing the government Sunday, Vásquez Velásquez , the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, joins earlier SOA Honduran graduates who seized power, Gen. Juan Melgar Castro and Gen. Policarpo Paz Garcia.

Melgar Castro ruled the country from 1975 to 1978, the years when one of his underlings – another SOA graduate, Jose Enrique Chinchilla – conducted an operation that tortured and executed two priests, Michael Cypher and Ivan Betancur. The two were tortured and killed along with two women and five peasants who were baked alive in bread ovens.

Melgar was overthrown in 1978 by fellow SOA graduate, Paz Garcia, whom the US Army installed into SOA’s “Hall of Fame.” His tenure was also marked by brutal military repression, including the formation of Battalion 3-16, a military death squad that worked closely with the CIA in targeting suspected leftists in the 1980s. Paz Garcia’s military commander was another SOA grad, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who ran 3-16 and ordered the execution of Fr. James Carney, a US missionary to Honduras.

The three Honduran generals fit into a larger pattern of coup leaders trained by the US Army school, which used to boast about how many of the school’s graduates had become heads of their countries.

The boasting, which stopped after the graduates’ undemocratic paths to power became known, celebrated such figures as

Argentine Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri who overthrew in a bloody coup another grad, Gen. Roberto Viola who’d come to power in 1981 during the Dirty War.
Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt who seized power in a coup in 1982.
Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos who overthrew a civilian government in a 1968 coup.
Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega, who ran the country while on the CIA payroll.
Ecuadoran dictator Gen. Guillermo Rodriguez who came to power in 1972 by overthrowing the elected civilian government.
Bolivian military dictator Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez who came to power in a violent coup in 1971.
Bolivian dictator Gen. Guido Vildoso Calderon who took power in 1982.
Peruvian dictator Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado who toppled the elected civilian government in 1968.
In ousting the Honduran president Sunday, Vásquez Velásquez had the help of other SOA graduates, including Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, the head of the
Honduran Air Force.

Retired Gen. Daniel López Carballo, also a two-time SOA grad, told CNN that the coup was justified because Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez would be running Honduras by proxy if the military had not acted.

Records show that Vásquez Velásquez took a basic combat arms course at SOA in 1976 and another course on small unit instruction in 1984, while Prince Suazo took a 1996 course on joint operations.

Zelaya was a businessman who had leaned to the right when he was elected in 2006. He surprised many when he started to loosen the strong ties Honduras has had with the United Stats, which had controlled the country to such a degree that it was once called the USS Honduras.

Zelaya enjoyed wide support among the poor and union leaders, but increasingly drew the wrath of the powers that be in the country, clashing with oil interests when he sought to reduce the price of oil for Hondurans.

Restricted by law to a 4-year term, he attempted to have a referendum asking voters to change the constitution and permit a second term. Zelaya said a single four-year term makes it impossible to address long-standing poverty issues in a country where half of the residents live on less than one dollar a day and have little voice in how the government operates.

The controversy heated up when Zelaya dismissed a Supreme Court ruling that held that the referendum was illegal. “The court,” he said, “offers justice for the rich, the powerful and the bankers, but only causes problems for democracy.”

Zelaya also dismissed Vásquez Velásquez from his military post after he refused to give logistical support for the referendum; his dismissal led up to the coup.

U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann said he “categorically condemns the criminal action by the army” and asked the UN to find a peaceful way to restore the president to power.

He also called for President Obama to condemn the coup, noting that Obama announced a new policy toward Latin America at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad last month. But he added, “Many are now asking if this coup is part of this new policy as it is well known that the army in Honduras has a history of total collaboration with the United States.”

The US has sent mixed signals about the coup. In the latest statement, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear that the United States is not insisting that the President be restored to power.

10. THe people of Honduras deserve far better: a democracy that votes for what it would like, a citizenry that does not in any way have to live in fear of being dragged away and tortured, and a stable peace with enough time to bring education to all, and prosperity … with neither peace nor prosperity being stolen by and for foreign interests’ sake.