Not content with crushing the working poor here at home, Peter Roskam flew off to Honduras this past Friday, in the company of South Carolina’s Christo-fascist Senator Jim DeMint, to meet with members of the right-wing junta which seized power in Honduras in June in a military coup and has since suppressed the press and suspended the constitutional rights of the people including “the right to personal liberty, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and protections against arbitrary detention”.
Roskam framed his meddling as an attempt ensure free and fair elections in Honduras. That explanation, of course, makes no sense, as Roskam and company met only with members of the illigitemate government that overthrew the democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. They made no attempt to confer with Zelaya. The trip is best seen as an attempt to interefere with the Obama Administration’s foreign policy efforts in Honduras to restore the rightfully-elected President. As always, Roskam is acting on behalf of the powerful U.S. corporate interests seeking to subvert the reforms begun on behalf of workers by President Zelaya. Once again, Roskam show’s he has either no understanding of, or no concern for right and wrong. His conduct is despicable. The word “sociopathic” again comes to mind.
Zelaya enjoyed strong support from the poor and from the unions. His offense appears to have been attempting to raise the minimum wage by 60%. This move apparently angered, among others, the giant fruit companies Dole and Chiquita. Chiquita claimed, according to journalist Nikolas Kozloff that it would cost 20 cents more to produce a crate of pineapples and 10 cents more to produce a crate of bananas, eating into corporate profits. While there is no evidence linking these companies directly to the coup, they were, no doubt, among its most important beneficiaries.
The coup against Zelaya was led by Gen. Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez who, according to a report by Linda Cooper and James Hodge in the National Catholic Reporter, is a two-time graduate of the infamous School of the Americas (SOA). SOA is a U.S. military institution, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, located at Fort Benning in Georgia that, according to NCR, has “trained hundreds of coup leaders and human rights abusers in Latin America”:
The three Honduran generals fit into the larger picture of coup leaders trained by the U.S. Army school, which used to boast about how many of the school’s graduates had become heads of their countries.
The boasting, which stopped after the graduates’ undemocratic paths to power became better known, celebrated such figures as:
* Argentine Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, who seized power in a bloody coup, bringing down another SOA grad, Gen. Roberto Viola, who came to power during Argentina’s Dirty War.
* Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in a coup in 1982 and conducted a scorched earth campaign against the Mayan Indians.
* Panamanian dictators Gen. Omar Torrijos, who overthrew a civilian government in a 1968 coup, and Gen. Manuel Noriega, a five-time SOA graduate, who ruled the country and dealt in drugs while on the CIA payroll.
* Ecuadoran dictator Gen. Guillermo Rodriguez, who overthrew the elected civilian government in 1972.
* Bolivian dictators Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez, who seized power in a violent coup in 1971, and Gen. Guido Vildoso Calderon, who grabbed power in 1982.
* Peruvian strongman Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, who in 1968 toppled the elected civilian government.In ousting the Honduran president Sunday, Vásquez Velásquez had the help of other SOA graduates, including Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, the head of the Honduran Air Force.
Another two-time SOA grad, retired Gen. Daniel López Carballo, told CNN that the coup was justified because Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez would be running Honduras by proxy if the military had not acted.
Records show that Vásquez Velásquez took a basic combat arms course at SOA in 1976 and another course on small military units in 1984, while Prince Suazo took a 1996 course on joint operations.
The Obama Administration has responded to Zelaya’s ouster by terminating all non-humanitarian aid to Honduras. The coup has been condemned by the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the European Union. Nobel peace laureate Oscar Arias, the President of Costa Rica, tried unsuccessfully to broker a deal to return Zelaya to office.
And yet here’s our pissant Congressman Roskam, cozying up to this illegitimate regime, interfering in the President’s conduct of foreign policy. I guess it should come as no great shock. This behavior fits right into Roskam’s primary project of promoting the interests of big corporations and trampling the unions and the wage-earners who get in the way. And Roskam’s never met a right-wing thug he didn’t like.
