9/6/2010
On June 8, 2010, American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced it was time to readmit Honduras to the Organization of American States, and perhaps—if only briefly— reminded the world of the events that took place last summer.
Like the plot of a John Le Carré novel read years ago, the memory of why President Rosales was awoken and flown to Costa Rica on the morning of June 28, 2009 has now been long forgotten by most, cast to the backwaters of obscure, rarely-read history as an unfortunate event that nonetheless led to a free and fair election. Some aren’t so quick to forget.
Honduras has a history of being a geopolitical launching pad for the United States, with successive collaborative governments facilitating American intervention in the region— be it harboring Contras in the Nicaraguan civil war or training ARENA death squads in El Salvador. But as familiar as that sounds to many, even those events took place in 1980s; that was Ronald Reagan fighting the Evil Empire in a proxy war—not a mustachioed cowboy who, though drinking increasingly bigger glasses of the populist Bolivarian Kool-Aid, was still just the President of one of the of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Besides, this was the government of Barack Obama; things had changed.
When the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, José Miguel Insulza, invoked Article 21 of the Inter-American Democratic Charter and suspended Honduras from participating in the hemispheric body, economic sanctions followed suit: Venezuela ended their supply of cheap oil through Petrocaribe and the United States cut off all non-humanitarian aid.
Venezuela and the Americans were agreeing.
It seemed like a final death knoll was being rung for containment and the Monroe Doctrine. An abrupt turn was being made towards dialogue and multilateral relations.
It certainly wove a nice narrative, and the cooperation was intoxicating. But even the occasional American newspaper recognized that that version might be a little naïve.
In the USA today last August 16th, President Zelaya was quoted: “The Obama administration has been firm in condemning the coup and demanding my restitution. I do not see reasons to believe that the Obama administration has two faces. Now, there are some elements of the CIA that could have been involved. When they took me by plane to Costa Rica, it was a short flight but the plane made a stop at the Palmerola air base to refuel…Palmerola is a base administered by Honduran and U.S. troops. If it was a short flight, some 40 minutes, why did they have to refuel at Palmerola base?”
Zelaya’s plane refueling at the very same airbase the Americans used to intervene in the previously mentioned conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador, though circumstantial, was nonetheless suspicious. But as Zelaya was willing to give a fairly new Obama administration the benefit of the doubt, the suspicion remained quiet. It was dismissed as something conjured up in the vivid imagination of the conspiracy theorist.
Time passed; Zelaya remained in Brazil’s Tegucigalpa embassy for four months; an election generally considered to be fair was carried out and Porfirio Lobo became the new President.
The United States resumed aid and Zelaya was offered asylum in the Dominican Republic.
And that was that.
Of course there have been a few hiccoughs…
Most countries in the 12-member South American Union of Nations (UNASUR) have still not recognized Lobo's government, and many threatened to boycott last month’s EU-Latin America summit if Lobo came.
A reluctant Lobo didn’t attend—opting against being a regional party pooper.
But all things considered, it’s gone pretty smoothly. With Hillary Clinton announcing “it’s time for the hemisphere as a whole to move forward and welcome Honduras back into the inter-American community”, and Brazil’s position softening, the neglected intrigue seems to be heading towards a quiet denouement.
Oliver North won’t be testifying at a hearing this time around. And eventually all but the most recalcitrant will stop resisting. Someone somewhere will put their copy of “The Last Tailor of Panama” back on the bookshelf, and in Honduras life will go on—maybe better, maybe worse, but definitely different.
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