Source: Common Dreams
State Department’s role in 2009 Honduras coup makes Clinton’s “campaign-season progressive rhetoric seem hollow”
During her time as Secretary of State, presidential candidate and former first lady Hillary Clinton engaged in the “engineering of regional politics in the service of the economic elite,” according to a Salon exclusive, Hillary Clinton Sold Out Honduras, published Monday.
“Though it’s less sexy than Benghazi, the crisis following a coup in Honduras in 2009 has Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints all over it, and her alleged cooperation with oligarchic elites during the affair does much to expose Clinton’s newfound, campaign-season progressive rhetoric as hollow,” writes journalist Matthew Pulver. “Moreover, the Honduran coup is something of a radioactive issue with fallout that touches many on Team Clinton, including husband Bill, once put into a full context.”
In June 2009, as Pulver describes it, “more than two hundred armed, masked soldiers stormed the house of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. Within minutes, Zelaya, still in his pajamas, was thrown into a van and taken to a military base used by the U.S., where he was flown out of the country.”
The UN General Assembly, European Union, and the Organization of American States condemned the events as a military coup.
The official storyline—which Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrot has noted “was dutifully accepted by most in the media”—was that the Obama administration also opposed the coup and wanted Zelaya to return to office.
In fact, as Weisbrot wrote in a separate piece titled Top Ten Ways You Can Tell Which Side the United States Government Is on With Regard to the Military Coup in Honduras, “conflicting and ambiguous statements from the Obama administration left many confused about whether it opposed this coup or was really trying to help it succeed.” Indeed, as various coverage that appeared on Common Dreams at the time shows (including here, here, and here), the U.S. government—and the State Department in particular—had its fingerprints all over the coup.