The Honduras coup’s behavior virtually assures that come Monday, the US government will define it as a “military coup,” triggering a cut off of US aid, joining the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, PetroCaribe, the UN and the rest of the world in withdrawing economic support for the coup regime. (The US had already put all funds on “pause” this week, so the boycott has already begun and merely awaits formal moves to become permanent.)
This is very significant because of Honduras’ annual $3.5 billion budget, $2.3 billion – 65 percent - comes from those foreign sources.
This seemingly suicidal maneuver by the coup government can be partially explained by what I described yesterday as the “shared hallucination” of those in the Honduras oligarchy’s ten owning families and those elites in their orbit.
But something else is at work: Greedy people don’t just cast away 65 percent of their national budget unless they believe they can get it from other sources.
One of the big backers of the coup d’etat has been an international terrorist network of ex-Cubans, who have financed the dirty work of jet plane bomber Luis Posada Carriles over the years and have set up business interests in Honduras. These forces are desperate now that Washington is making the moves to ease and end the embargo of Cuba. Investigative journalist Guy Jean-Allard reports, via TeleSur, that Ralph Nodarse – ex-Cuban owner of Channel 6 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras – and arms-and-drug trafficker Rafael Hernández Nodarse are knee deep behind he coup-plotters in Honduras. The latter aided and abetted Posada Carriles to hide out in Panama in 2004.
There was likewise a strong nexus between the Honduras government and military and the 1980s Iran-Contra drugs-for-arms-for-Nicaraguan-paramilitaries scandal, where much of the illegal covert US cocaine smuggling operation was headquartered during the Reagan and Bush Senior presidencies.
Saturday 4 July 2009
Honduras Coup Chooses Path of Rogue Narco-State ☀
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