|
Written by Nikolas Kozloff
|
|
Tuesday, 30 June 2009 22:21 |
 Could the diplomatic thaw between Venezuela and the United States be coming
to an abrupt end? At the recent Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain,
Barack Obama shook Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s hand and declared that he
would pursue a less arrogant foreign policy towards Latin America. Building on
that good will, Venezuela and the United States agreed to restore their
ambassadors late last week. Such diplomatic overtures provided a stark contrast
to the miserable state of relations during the Bush years: just nine months ago
Venezuela expelled the U.S. envoy in a diplomatic tussle. At the time, Chávez
said he kicked the U.S. ambassador out to demonstrate solidarity with left ally
Bolivia, which had also expelled a top American diplomat after accusing him of
blatant political interference in the Andean nation’s internal affairs.
Whatever goodwill existed last week however could now be undone by turbulent
political events in Honduras. Following the military coup d’etat there on
Sunday, Chávez accused the U.S. of helping to orchestrate the overthrow of
Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. “Behind these soldiers are the Honduran
bourgeois, the rich who converted Honduras into a Banana Republic, into a
political and military base for North American imperialism,” Chávez thundered.
The Venezuelan leader urged the Honduran military to return Zelaya to power and
even threatened military action against the coup regime if Venezuela’s
ambassador was killed or local troops entered the Venezuelan Embassy.
Reportedly, Honduran soldiers beat the ambassador and left him on the side of a
road in the course of the military coup. Tensions have ratcheted up to such an
extent that Chávez has now placed his armed forces on alert.
On the surface at least it seems unlikely that Obama would endorse an
interventionist U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Over the past few months
he has gone to great lengths to “re-brand” America in the eyes of the world as a
reasonable power engaged in respectful diplomacy as opposed to reckless
unilateralism. If it were ever proven that Obama sanctioned the overthrow of a
democratically elected government this could completely undermine the U.S.
President’s carefully crafted image.
Officially, the military removed Zelaya from power on the grounds that the
Honduran President had abused his authority. On Sunday Zelaya hoped to hold a
constitutional referendum which could have allowed him to run for reelection for
another four year term, a move which Honduras’ Supreme Court and Congress
declared illegal. But while the controversy over Zelaya’s constitutional
referendum certainly provided the excuse for military intervention, it’s no
secret that the President was at odds politically with the Honduran elite for
the past few years and had become one of Washington’s fiercest critics in the
region.
The Rise of Zelaya
Zelaya, who sports a thick black mustache, cowboy boots and large white Stetson
hat, was elected in late 2005. At first blush he hardly seemed the type of
politician to rock the boat. A landowner from a wealthy landowning family
engaged in the lumber industry, Zelaya headed the Liberal Party, one of the two
dominant political parties in Honduras. The President supported the Central
American Free Trade Agreement which eliminated trade barriers with the United
States.
Despite these initial conservative leanings, Zelaya began to criticize powerful,
vested interests in the country such as the media and owners of maquiladora
sweatshops which produced goods for export in industrial free zones. Gradually
he started to adopt some socially progressive policies. For example, Zelaya
instituted a 60 per cent minimum wage increase which angered the wealthy
business community. The hike in the minimum wage, Zelaya declared, would “force
the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.” “This is a government of
great social transformations, committed to the poor,” he added. Trade unions
celebrated the decision, not surprising given that Honduras is the third poorest
country in the hemisphere and 70 per cent of its people live in poverty. When
private business associations announced that they would challenge the
government’s wage decree in Honduras’ Supreme Court, Zelaya’s Labor Minister
called the critics “greedy exploiters.”
In another move that must have raised eyebrows in Washington, Zelaya declared
during a meeting of Latin American and Caribbean anti-drug officials that drug
consumption should be legalized to halt violence related to smuggling. In recent
years Honduras has been plagued by drug trafficking and so-called maras or
street gangs which carry out gruesome beheadings, rapes and eye gouging.
“Instead of pursuing drug traffickers, societies should invest resources in
educating drug addicts and curbing their demand,” Zelaya said. Rodolfo Zelaya,
the head of a Honduran congressional commission on drug trafficking, rejected
Zelaya’s comments. He told participants at the meeting that he was “confused and
stunned by what the Honduran leader said.”
Zelaya and ALBA
Not content to stop there, Zelaya started to conduct an increasingly more
independent foreign policy. In late 2007 he traveled to Cuba, the first official
trip by a Honduran president to the Communist island in 46 years. There, Zelaya
met with Raul Castro to discuss bilateral relations and other topics of mutual
interest.
But what really led Zelaya towards a political collision course with the
Honduran elite was his decision to join the Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas (known by its Spanish acronym ALBA), an alliance of leftist Latin
American and Caribbean nations headed by Chávez. The regional trade group
including Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Dominica seeks to counteract
corporate-friendly U.S-backed free trade schemes. Since its founding in 2004,
ALBA countries have promoted joint factories and banks, an emergency food fund,
and exchanges of cheap Venezuelan oil for food, housing, and educational
investment.
In an emphatic departure from previous Honduran leaders who had been compliant
vassals of the U.S., Zelaya stated “Honduras and the Honduran people do not have
to ask permission of any imperialism to join the ALBA.” Speaking in the Honduran
capital of Tegucigalpa before a crowd of 50,000 unionists, women’s groups,
farmers and indigenous peoples, Chávez remarked that Venezuela would guarantee
cheap oil to Honduras for “at least 100 years.” By signing onto ALBA, Zelaya was
able to secure access to credit lines, energy and food benefits. As an act of
good faith, Chávez agreed to forgive Honduran debt to Venezuela amounting to $30
million.
Infuriating the local elite, Chávez declared that Hondurans who opposed ALBA
were “sellouts.” “I did not come here to meddle in internal affairs,” he
continued, “but…I cannot explain how a Honduran could be against Honduras
joining the ALBA, the path of development, the path of integration.” Chávez
lambasted the Honduran press which he labeled pitiyanquis (little Yanqui
imitators) and “abject hand-lickers of the Yanquis.” For his part, Zelaya said
“we need no one’s permission to sign this commitment. Today we are taking a step
towards becoming a government of the center-left, and if anyone dislikes this,
well just remove the word ‘center’ and keep the second one.”
It wasn’t long before private business started to attack Zelaya bitterly for
moving Honduras into Chávez’s orbit. By joining ALBA, business representatives
argued, the President was endangering free enterprise and the Central American
Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Former President Ricardo Maduro
even claimed that the United States might retaliate against Honduras by
deporting Honduran migrants from the United States. “Don't bite the hand that
feeds you,” Maduro warned, alluding to Washington. Zelaya was piqued by the
criticisms. “When I met with (U.S. President) George W. Bush,” he said, “no one
called me an anti-imperialist and the business community applauded me. Now that
I am meeting with the impoverished peoples of the world, they criticize me.”
Zelaya’s Letter to Obama
In September, 2008 Zelaya further strained U.S. relations by delaying
accreditation of the new U.S. ambassador out of solidarity with Bolivia and
Venezuela which had just gone through diplomatic dust ups with Washington. “We
are not breaking relations with the United States,” Zelaya said. “We only are
(doing this) in solidarity with [Bolivian President] Morales, who has denounced
the meddling of the United States in Bolivia's internal affairs.” Defending his
decision, Zelaya said small nations needed to stick together. “The world powers
must treat us fairly and with respect,” he stated.
In November, Zelaya hailed Obama’s election in the U.S. as “a hope for the
world,” but just two months later tensions began to emerge. In an audacious
letter sent personally to Obama, Zelaya accused the U.S. of “interventionism”
and called on the new administration in Washington to respect the principle of
non-interference in the political affairs of other nations. According to Spanish
news agency EFE which saw a copy of the note, Zelaya told Obama that it wasn’t
his intention to tell the U.S. President what he should or should not do.
He then however went on to do precisely that. First of all, Zelaya brought up
the issue of U.S. visas and urged Obama to “revise the procedure by which visas
are cancelled or denied to citizens of different parts of the world as a means
of pressure against those people who hold different beliefs or ideologies which
pose no threat to the U.S.”
As if that was not impudent enough, Zelaya then moved on to drug trafficking:
“The legitimate struggle against drug trafficking…should not be used as an
excuse to carry out interventionist policies in other countries.” The struggle
against drug smuggling, Zelaya wrote, “should not be divorced from a vigorous
policy of controlling distribution and consumer demand in all countries, as well
as money laundering which operates through financial circuits and which involve
networks within developed countries.”
Zelaya also argued “for the urgent necessity” of revising and transforming the
structure of the United Nations and “to solve the Venezuela and Bolivia
problems” through dialogue which “yields better fruit than confrontation.” The
Cuban embargo, meanwhile, “was a useless instrument” and “a means of unjust
pressure and violation of human rights.”
Run Up to June Coup
It’s unclear what Obama might have made of the audacious letter sent from the
leader of a small Central American nation. It does seem however that Zelaya
became somewhat disenchanted with the new administration in Washington. Just
three months ago, the Honduran leader declined to attend a meeting of the System
for Central American Integration (known by its Spanish acronym SICA) which would
bring Central American Presidents together with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in
San José, Costa Rica.
Both Zelaya and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua boycotted the meeting,
viewing it as a diplomatic affront. Nicaragua currently holds the presidency of
SICA, and so the proper course of action should have been for Biden to have
Ortega hold the meeting. Sandinista economist and former Nicaraguan Minister of
Foreign Trade Alejandro Martínez Cuenca declared that the United States had
missed a vital opportunity to encourage a new era of relations with Central
America by “prioritizing personal relations with [Costa Rican President] Arias
over respect for Central America's institutional order.”
Could all of the contentious diplomatic back and forth between Tegucigalpa and
Washington have turned the Obama administration against Zelaya? In the days
ahead there will surely be a lot of attention and scrutiny paid to the role of
Romeo Vasquez, a General who led the military coup against Zelaya. Vasquez is a
graduate of the notorious U.S. School of the Americas, an institution which
trained the Latin American military in torture.
Are we to believe that the United States had no role in coordinating with
Vasquez and the coup plotters? The U.S. has had longstanding military ties to
the Honduran armed forces, particularly during the Contra War in Nicaragua
during the 1980s. The White House, needless to say, has rejected claims that the
U.S. played a role. The New York Times has reported claims that the Obama
administration knew that a coup was imminent and tried to persuade the military
to back down. The paper writes that it was the Honduran military which broke off
discussions with American officials. Obama himself has taken the high road,
remarking “I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect
democratic norms [and] the rule of law…Any existing tensions and disputes must
be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”
Even if the Obama administration did not play an underhanded role in this
affair, the Honduran coup highlights growing geo-political tensions in the
region. In recent years, Chávez has sought to extend his influence to smaller
Central American and Caribbean nations. The Venezuelan leader shows no intention
of backing down over the Honduran coup, remarking that ALBA nations “will not
recognize any [Honduran] government that isn't Zelaya’s.”
Chávez then derided Honduras’ interim president, Roberto Micheletti. “Mr.
Roberto Micheletti will either wind up in prison or he'll need to go into exile…
If they swear him in we'll overthrow him, mark my words. Thugetti--as I'm going
to refer to him from now on--you better pack your bags, because you're either
going to jail or you're going into exile. We're not going to forgive your error,
you're going to get swept out of there. We're not going to let it happen, we're
going to make life impossible for you. President Manuel Zelaya needs to retake
his position as president.”
With tensions running high, heads of ALBA nations have vowed to meet in Managua
to discuss the coup in Honduras. Zelaya, who was exiled to Costa Rica from
Honduras, plans to fly to Nicaragua to speak with his colleagues. With such
political unity amongst ALBA nations, Obama will have to decide what the public
U.S. posture ought to be.
---
Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the
New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) Follow his blog at
senorchichero.blogspot.com.
Source: Counter Punch
|
|
|
