Battalion 3-16 goes back to the Reagan years with John Negroponte, who was, US ambassador to the United Nations. At the time John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras too.
He was involved in organizing the Honduran branch of the Iran-Contra war. And the Baltimore Sun ran a series of articles that were quite clear that he was involved in the cover-up of a number of death squad executions, over a hundred disappearances by Battalion 3-16.
Honduras in the mid-1980s and being startled by the heavy, heavy military presence in the streets. They would patrol regularly in San Pedro Sula and Puerto Cortes and the other major industrial towns, five and six at a time, with automatic weapons, as a normal part of the routine of everyday patrols. Honduras has had a very difficult history in terms of being able to establish firm democratic processes.
over the last ten years there’s been this remarkable turn in Latin America, as one left or center-left government after another, different in policy and style, but broadly committed to sovereignty and multilateralism, have been elected, have come to power.
There was a precedent last year, when separatist attacks in Bolivia began to try to destabilize Evo Morales’s government, and the US stayed silent and may have been—may have had a hand in it. The South America was unanimous in condemnation, and Brazil taking the lead and saying that there will be no civil—what they were calling a civil coup in Bolivia. So there was precedent to this outcry that we’re seeing with Honduras.
Dr. Almendares, head of the Honduran Peace Committee, he called Honduras an occupied country, occupied already by the United States, how dependent it is on the United States.
Between the trade remittances and foreign aid, Honduras is completely dependent on the United States. The US response has been schizophrenic, and the most generous reading of that is that the US is trying to retain some influence in order to negotiate a settlement without confrontation, without violence.
A more skeptical reading would understand the State Department’s reluctance to call it a coup legally, although Hillary Clinton hasn’t used the word in her pronouncements, but apparently there’s a legal definition of what a coup is, is that they’re trying to obtain leverage over Zelaya to back down of some of his populist policies. You could think of it as the “Haiti Option.” When Bill Clinton, president, restored Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, when he was deposed by a coup. He did so under the condition that Aristide would back off—would support and not roll back IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies.
Otto Reich and Roger Noriega and those people that were involved and implicated in the 2002 attempt to overthrow Chavez in Venezuela, they were largely discredited by the second Bush term, and then a more professionalized foreign policy service by Thomas Shannon, who was—Latin Americans felt was—whatever problems they may have had with him was a far cry from Otto Reich and Roger Noriega.
Greg Grandin talking.
Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at NYU and author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.