Hillary Clinton's Response To Honduran Coup Was Scrubbed From Her Paperback Memoirs

[Ichingcarpenter]

Those who want to know what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said about Honduras' 2009 coup in her autobiography shouldn't bother with the paperback version.

Clinton's role in the aftermath of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's ouster has come under greater scrutiny since the March 3 assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres. Critics argue that the U.S. push for new elections in the months after the coup helped legitimize the actions of the Honduran military, destabilize the country and pave the way for the extreme violence that followed. Killings of activists like Cáceres and others have become devastatingly common.

But the account Clinton offered of her response to the coup in her memoir Hard Choices was omitted from last year's paperback edition. In June 2009, Zelaya was overthrown by the Honduran military, ushered out of the presidential palace at gunpoint wearing only his pajamas. Months of protests against the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti followed. While virtually all Latin American governments condemned the coup and called for Zelaya's restoration, Clinton and the U.S. pushed for elections to bring in a new government -- a position she detailed in the hardcover edition of Hard Choices, published in 2014.

Days after the coup, she wrote, she teamed up with Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa to come up with a response.

"We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future," Clinton wrote.

But that paragraph -- indeed, the entire two-page discussion of the Honduran coup -- disappeared from the paperback edition. In the paperback version, the chapter on Latin America ends abruptly after a look at the debate over whether Cuba should be included in the Organization of American States.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-honduras-coup-memoirs_us_56e34161e4b0b25c91820a08

[hobbit709]

1. They're going to pretend the hardcover version was a misprint, just like she misspoke.

[Fairgo]

2. Like with a cloth?

[Octafish]

3. ''But nobody reads.'' -- Allen Dulles

"But nobody reads. Don’t believe people read in this country. There will be a few professors that will read the report…”

Describing the benefits of the "executive summary" of the Warren Commission Report over its chapters and thousands of pages of unindexed accompanying materials.

[Octafish]

4. TERROR on behalf of Wall Street and War Inc:

Nephew of murdered Honduran activist Cáceres: 'The atmosphere is terrifying'

Silvio Carrillo grew up alongside Berta Cáceres, a leading campaigner for human rights. After the deaths of hundreds of campaigners in Honduras in the span of a few years, he believes his aunt was targeted for her efforts

by David Smith
The Guardian, March 9, 2016

Silvio Carrillo holds a creased black and white photo of a three-year-old girl, frowning at the camera and clutching a doll, and fights back the tears. The girl grew up to be his aunt, Berta Cáceres, a fearless human rights activist and heroine to indigenous people in Honduras. Last week, she was shot dead in her home, a day shy of her 45th birthday.

Cáceres had long complained of death threats from police, the army and landowners’ groups over her opposition to one of Central America’s biggest hydropower projects. She won the 2015 Goldman environmental prize, regarded as the world’s top award for grassroots environmental activism.

Carrillo, 43, told the Guardian he believed she had been targeted for her work. “She pissed a lot of people off … She was a major threat to the establishment.

“She was a moral leader. She was put on this grand stage and that multiplied when she won the Goldman prize. If you heard her speak, she was powerful. She was near becoming impossible to take down,” he said.

Cáceres earned admiration – and enemies – leading a decade-long fight against a project to build a dam along the Gualcarque river, which is sacred to the Lenca people and could flood large areas of ancestral lands and cut off water supplies to hundreds. A week before her death, she had spoken out against the murder of four indigenous leaders in the Lenca community.

The co-founder of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (Copinh) was shot four times by gunmen at her home in La Esperanza at around 1am on Thursday. Gustavo Castro Soto, a Mexican human rights activist, survived by playing dead after bullets grazed his cheek and left hand. The attack was internationally condemned.

Carrillo, a US citizen who lives in Oakland, California, learned the news in a dawn phone conversation with his weeping mother, who was Cáceres’ eldest sister. He said the investigation had been mishandled from the start, with officials and the media circulating wild rumours of two perpetrators, 11 perpetrators, a crime of passion, a random robbery (nothing was stolen) or a power struggle within Copinh.

CONTINUED...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/09/berta-caceres-honduras-activist-murder-nephew-silvio-carrillo-interview

Kick for Truth and Democracy.

[kath]

5. How very interesting...

[amborin]

6. of course;