A Machete for Your Thoughts: Free Trade, Hillary Style

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36442-focus-a-machete-for-your-thoughts-free-trade-hillary-style

he government, as you mentioned Dennis, is a completely illegitimate government. There was a coup, your listeners may know, in 2009 that the U.S. was very behind. Hillary Clinton herself has taken pride, and publicly bragged at having consolidated it. As we have spoken about before on this show, in her last book, Hard Choices, she even said that, speaking of the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, she said, “We rendered Zelaya moot.” Which is an extraordinary statement about a sovereign government of another country.

But, of course, Honduras is not sovereign. It has been the main U.S. client state for the whole region of Central America ever since it was used as a base for the contra, who were, of course, fighting against the revolutionary Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and also as a base for death squads used in Guatemala. And now, I have clearer figures on the number of Honduran military bases that the U.S. is behind. The U.S. says it has zero military bases. But I consulted with some human rights observers who have been here for years and the U.S. is known to be involved in 12 to 13 military bases in this country, which is basically the size of Virginia.

So after the coup in 2009, there was then a false election later that year, and another false election in 2013, which I believe that only the U.S. and Canadian governments certified as legitimate, where the U.S. basically imposed its puppets, so though it is not widely recognized as such in the U.S., your listeners and everybody needs to know that this is a completely illegitimate government here to prop up the U.S. military presence, again that’s used all over Central America. And also Canadian investments in mines, which is happening here to an extraordinary degree, that extraction.

DB: Just to have you reiterate: How would you characterize the things that happen in Honduras in terms of the Clinton legacy as Secretary of State? Because that is touted as one of her strongest strengths.

Bell: Yes, well I also work in Haiti, and she has played a very similar role in Haiti with disaster capitalism. And, here, not only did she help to put in this horrendous government that is fully neo-liberal and that has run or that has operated under the explicit banner of “Honduras is open for business,” and incidentally in Haiti the exact same expression, “Haiti is open for business.” But English is used, in both cases, in a non-English speaking country. But Hillary Clinton here is very much seen as the person who facilitated for the U.S. government this ongoing regime of a government that has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, and that has presided over the nation that has the highest level of killing of environmental activists, according to the research of the group Global Witness. And Berta Cáceres, a few months before her death, singled out Hillary Clinton as having the blood on her hands of having destroyed that democracy, and then through the coup, as having responsibility for so many people who have been killed since. Hundreds and hundreds of environmental defenders have killed since.

[Octafish]

1. ''Canadian investments in mines''

Since the time of Gen. Smedley Butler, mineral extraction is the foreign policy of oligarchs.