Standard Fruit, Standard Oil and the US Legacy of Tyranical Puppets

Honduras: While Corruption and Repression Mushroom, Justice Rots on the Vine
By Mark Engler – 15 February, 2012 – FPIF

Honduras has become a human rights disaster. The country now has the world’s highest murder rate. And impunity for political violence is the norm.

For all this, the United States deserves a good deal of the blame.

I was pleased to see the New York Times recently publish a hard-hitting op-ed by Dana Frank that makes this case. Lest anyone in this country think that things in Honduras have settled into a peaceable, post-coup normality, Frank describes the post-June 2009

chain of events—a coup that the United States didn’t stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted—[that] has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns. At least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup, according to the leading human rights organization Cofadeh. At least 13 journalists have been killed since [President Porfirio] Lobo took office, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The police in Tegucigalpa, the capital, are believed to have killed the son of Julieta Castellanos, the rector of the country’s biggest university, along with a friend of his, on Oct. 22, 2011. Top police officials quickly admitted their suspects were police officers, but failed to immediately detain them. When prominent figures came forward to charge that the police are riddled with death squads and drug traffickers, the most famous accuser was a former police commissioner, Alfredo Landaverde. He was assassinated on Dec. 7. Only now has the government begun to make significant arrests of police officers.

State-sponsored repression continues. According to Cofadeh, at least 43 campesino activists participating in land struggles in the Aguán Valley have been killed in the past two and a half years at the hands of the police, the military and the private security army of Miguel Facussé. Mr. Facussé is mentioned in United States Embassy cables made public by WikiLeaks as the richest man in the country, a big supporter of the post-coup regime and owner of land used to transfer cocaine.

This past Tuesday, a comical response to Frank’s piece appeared at Foreign Policy, written by former Bush administration official José Cárdenas. It was humorous in that it included an understated disclaimer at the end. Cárdenas wrote, “Full disclosure: In July 2009, I helped to advise a Honduran business delegation that came to Washington during their presidential crisis to defend Manuel Zelaya’s removal from power.”

Not surprisingly, given his qualifications, Cárdenas frames Honduras’s current problems as solely the product of drug trafficking, and he encourages the United States to recognize that “Honduras’s war on drugs is ours too.” …more