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This column
was published by the Los
Angeles Times on July 23, 2009.
Powerful
special interests - energy, coal, utilities, financial, pharmaceutical
and insurance lobbies - have flexed their muscles and confronted
President Obama on the most important legislative priorities of his
domestic agenda. But this kind of politics-by-influence-peddling doesn't
stop at the water's edge. And in foreign policy, the consequences can be
more immediately violent and deadly.
Meet Lanny Davis, Washington lawyer and lobbyist, former legal counsel
to President Bill Clinton and avid campaigner for Hillary Clinton's
presidential bid. He has been hired by a coalition of business interests
to represent the dictatorship that ousted elected President Manuel
Zelaya of Honduras in a military coup three weeks ago. President Zelaya
was taken by soldiers at gunpoint from his home and removed to Costa
Rica.
Davis is working with Bennett Ratcliff, another lobbyist with a close
relationship to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a former senior
executive for one
of the most influential political and public relations firms in
Washington's history. According to the New York Times, in
current mediation efforts, the coup government did not make a move
without first consulting Ratcliff.
Davis and Ratcliff have done an amazing public relations job so far. The
average American believes that President Zelaya was ousted because he
tried to use a referendum to extend his term of office. This is not only
false but impossible. Zelaya's proposed referendum on the day of the
coup was a non-binding poll of the electorate. It only asked voters if
they wanted to have a real referendum on reforming the country's
constitution, on the November ballot. Even if Zelaya had gotten
everything he was looking for, a new president would have been elected
on the same November ballot. So Zelaya would be out of office in
January, no matter what steps were taken toward constitutional reform.
If we add together the high power lobbyists from the Clinton camp,
Republican Senators and members of Congress, and conservatives within
the State Department - the coup government has an awful lot of support
from the U.S.
So
it's up to President Obama to do the right thing. He can have the
U.S. Treasury freeze the coup leaders' bank accounts and deny them visas
to the U.S. He could also impose trade sanctions for any part of the 70
percent of Honduran trade that is with the United States. He would have
worldwide support: both the Organization of American States and the UN
General Assembly voted unanimously to demand the "immediate and
unconditional" reinstatement of President Zelaya.
Almost all of the Latin American governments - which are mostly left of
center -- also sympathize with Zelaya because he is a reform president
fighting against a corrupt oligarchy. In one of the poorest countries in
the hemisphere, he raised the minimum wage by 60 percent, increased
teachers' salaries and public pensions, as well as access to education.
This is a classic Latin American coup in another sense: General Romeo
Vazquez, who led it, is an alumnus of the United States' School of the
Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Co-operation). The school is best known for producing Latin American
officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including
military coups.
The coup government has shot and killed peaceful demonstrators, closed
TV and radio stations, and arrested journalists. Two political activists
have been murdered.
During the 1980s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency trained a
military death squad - the infamous battalion 316 -- that tortured and
murdered hundreds of Honduran political activists. The U.S. embassy
looked the other way, and the State Department doctored its annual human
rights reports to omit these crimes.
President Obama has so
far been silent about the coup government's violence and censorship.
This silence is very unfortunate and difficult to explain. The
repression may worsen if - as expected - current mediation efforts fail
and Zelaya returns to Honduras.
Obama needs to show that the United States is different than in the
past, by supporting Zelaya's return not just with words but action.
Anything less will look like complicity in the eyes of the world,
especially given the coup government's friends in high places.
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