EMPIRE OF CHAOS
COUNTRIES
PAGE 4
HAITI
"President of Haiti Jean-Bertrand
Aristide did not resign. He was abducted by the United States
in the commission of a coup."
Randall Robinson, the founder and
former director of TransAfrica, 2004
"The coup against Aristide,
then, must be understood not in isolation, but as the culmination
of activities that really began the minute he was re-elected in
2000. Destabilization efforts by the U.S. government, active U.S.
support for the creation of a so-called civil-society opposition,
and eventually the invasion of Haiti by an armed band of criminals
and murderers were all part of a process designed to ensure that
Haiti would return fully to the fold of the U.S. empire and its
minions in Haiti."
Bill Fletcher, Jr, 2004
"Jean-Bertrand Aristide's
second term as President of Haiti would end the same way as had
his first had, cut short in a U.S.-backed coup d'état.
Aristide's opposition to neoliberalism, his defiant stance towards
the U.S. and France, and his enduring popularity with Haiti's
poor had made him a marked man from the very beginning of his
term in February 2001."
Nik Barry-Shaw, 2008
"On June 28, 2009, Honduran
President Manuel Zelaya was awakened by gunfire. A coup was carried
out by US-trained military officers, including graduates of the
infamous US Army School of the Americas (WHINSEC) in Georgia.
President Zelaya was illegally taken to Costa Rica.
Democracy in Honduras ended as a de facto government of the rich
and powerful seized control. A sham election backed by the US
confirmed the leadership of the coup powers. The US and powerful
lobbyists continue to roam the hemisphere trying to convince other
Latin American countries to normalize relations with the coup
government."
Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond,
2010
"History is repeating itself
in Haiti, as democracy is being destroyed for the second time
in the past fifteen years. Amazingly, the main difference seems
to be that this time it is being done openly and in broad daylight,
with the support of the "international community" and
the United Nations
... The US Agency for International Development and the International
Republican Institute (the international arm of the Republican
Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and organize
an opposition ... and to make Haiti under Aristide ungovernable.
... Taking advantage of Haiti's desperate poverty and dependence
on foreign aid, it stopped international aid to the government,
from the summer of 2000 until the 2004 coup."
Mark Weisbrot, 2005
"During the Cold War, the
U.S. supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier and then
Baby Doc Duvalier - which ruled the country from 1957 to 1986
- as an anti-communist counter-weight to Castro's Cuba nearby.
Under guidance from Washington, Baby Doc Duvalier opened the Haitian
economy up to U.S. capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Floods of U.S.
agricultural imports destroyed peasant agriculture. As a result,
hundred of thousands of people flocked to the teeming slums of
Port-au-Prince to labor for pitifully low wages in sweatshops
located in U.S. export processing zones.
In the 1980s, masses of Haitians rose up to drive the Duvaliers
from power - later, they elected reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide
to be president on a platform of land reform, aid to peasants,
reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and
increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers.
The U.S. in turn backed a coup that drove [Jean-Bertrand] Aristide
from power in 1991. Eventually, the elected president was restored
to power in 1994 when Bill Clinton sent U.S. troops to the island
- but on the condition that he implement the U.S. neoliberal plan
- which Haitians called the "plan of death."
Aristide resisted parts of the U.S. program for Haiti, but implemented
other provisions, undermining his hoped-for reforms. Eventually,
though, the U.S. grew impatient with Aristide's failure to obey
completely, especially when he demanded $21 billion in reparations
during his final year in office. The U.S. imposed an economic
embargo that strangled the country, driving peasants and workers
even deeper into poverty.
In 2004, Washington collaborated with Haiti's ruling elite to
back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported
Aristide. The United Nations sent troops to occupy the country,
and the puppet government was installed to continue Washingotn's
neoliberal plans."
Ashley Smith
"Haitian president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide was overthrown in a violent US-backed coup under the
George H.W. Bush administration... What Clinton did is he kept
Aristide in exile for years, until they could squeeze out of Aristide
a commitment to uphold US neoliberal economic programs in Haiti
and that Aristide would agree not to lay claim to the years he
spent in exile as part of his presidency.
He was a democratically elected president. The US violently overthrew
him. They butchered Haiti. And then Clinton refused to put Aristide
back in power, even though he could have done it with one phone
call. And instead, what he did is he implemented a vicious regime
of economic neoliberalism inside of Haiti. The Haitian people
now are suffering under that neoliberal economic model and the
aftermath of this repression force that just terrorized the people
of Haiti. To have Bill Clinton now be the person who's going to
"stabilize" Haiti and dabble in the economics of this
incredibly poor suffering nation, to me, is just a grotesque act
on the part of the United Nations. And I think that anyone who's
about justice for Haiti should rise up and say that Bill Clinton
has no business stepping foot in Haiti in any official capacity
with the United Nations at all."
Jeremy Scahill, 2009
"Condelleza Rice and Colin
Powell are both dangerous people. What they did in Haiti [2004
U.S.-backed coup that ousted democratically elected President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide] is a good measure of it. They destroyed
a democracy. They squelched loans that had been approved by the
Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything behind the
scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun the country.
They're frauds."
Randall Robinson
"In 1825, a scant two decades
after Haitian independence was declared, France demanded an indemnity
of 150 million francs (roughly estimated at $20 billion in today's
dollars) for the property lost by French plantation owners during
the quite bloody, quite fiery revolution-one that Haiti had won.
Haiti was to compensate France not only for lost plantation lands
and crops, but also for the loss of the Haitians themselves since
Haitian slaves had been France's most valuable Caribbean asset.
France backed up this demand with the threat of a full-blown blockade,
and Haiti agreed to pay in exchange for France's recognition.
As a result, France duly recognized Haiti as an independent country.
The huge debt payments were delivered assiduously by the Haitian
government with money borrowed-conveniently-from French banks.
Haiti also paid the interest on those loans in a timely fashion.
... France, in collusion with the United States, continued to
bleed Haiti until related debts were finally paid off-in 1947!
This is how Haiti began to be a failed state."
Amy Wilentz, 2015
"The intractable poverty
and social discord in Haiti is a legacy of US governments backing
decades of dictatorships under Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier.
Repeated US military invasions over the past century to repress
socially progressive politics ensured that Haiti retained its
function as an impoverished offshore location for American corporations
to ruthlessly exploit for sweatshop labor."
Finian Cunningham, 2017
"Haiti was the centerpiece
of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, launched by David Rockefeller's
International Basic Economy Corporation, which aimed to create
a low-wage manufacturing platform in the Caribbean for US multinationals.
Real wages in Haiti declined 56% from 1983-1991 after the Caribbean
Basin Initiative kicked in. The US textile industry has a huge
presence in Haiti. Nowhere in the world is labor cheaper."
Dean Henderson in his book "Big
Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"
"The Clinton administration
was credited for working for the return to power of Jean Bertrand
Aristide after he was overthrown in a military coup. But, in fact,
Clinton had stalled the return for as long as he could, and had
instead tried his best to return anti-Aristide conservatives to
a leading power role in a mixed government, because Aristide was
too leftist for Washington's tastes.
... Clinton was not actually repulsed by coup leader Raoul Cédras
and company, for they posed no ideological barrier to the United
States continuing the economic and strategic control of Haiti
it's maintained for most of the century.
... Faced ultimately with Aristide returning to power, Clinton
demanded and received - and then made sure to publicly announce
- the Haitian president's guarantee that he would not try to remain
in office to make up for the time lost in exile. Clinton of course
called this 'democracy,' although it represented a partial legitimization
of the coup... Jean-Bertrand Aristide's reception was a joyous
celebration filled with optimism. However, unbeknownst to his
adoring followers, while they were regaining Aristide, they may
have lost Aristidism."
William Blum
"The violent U.S., Canadian,
and French-inspired coup d'état [against Jean-Bertrand
Aristide elected-President of Haiti] in February 2004 left thousands
killed, displaced, imprisoned and exiled, and the imposition of
a disastrous regime of human rights abuses that lasted two years
under direct United Nations sanction. The 2004 coup was yet another
crushing blow to Haiti's remarkable democratic movement of the
poor majority - and has set the country back decades, economically,
socially and politically."
Niraj Joshi, 2009
"In 1990, Haiti had its
first free election, and to the surprise and shock of Washington,
the organized public in the slums and hills elected Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation theology. The
United States at once moved to undermine the elected government
and, after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later,
lent substantial support to the vicious military junta and its
elite supporters who took power.
In 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the
United States, joined by Canada, kidnapped President Aristide
- who had been elected again - and shipped him off to central
Africa. Aristide and his party were then effectively barred from
the 2010-11 elections."
Noam Chomsky
"In 1909, US financiers
began to lay the groundwork for an American occupation of Haiti...
The occupation was a mechanism to control Haiti while American
businesses sucked value out of the country and made sure nationals
of other countries could not.
... During the nineteen-year occupation, periodic rebellions and
uprisings were brutally put down by the marines. Finally, in 1929,
another massacre of Haitians provoked a review of the occupation
by Congress, as well as an eventual pullout in 1934.
... Nineteen years of occupation left enduring scars on Haitian
society. The racism and segregation enforced by the marines led
directly to the reactionary black-power rhetoric employed by François
"Papa Doc" Duvalier as he rose to power in Haiti. The
brutality and kleptocratic behavior of Duvalier's administration,
while not unknown in pre-occupation Haiti, had been honed to a
fine point under the Americans' regime. The nightmarish Duvalier
and his corrupt son and successor, Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"),
fertilized the terrain on which Haiti as a failed state would
grow."
Amy Wilentz, 2015
"A relatively few Americans
knew what wealthy white Haitians were doing to poor Haitians through
their black surrogates in the years between 1957 and the coup
of February 29, 2004. With the unpublicized support of the bourgeoisie,
François (Papa Doc) Duvalier and his dreaded macoutes killed
an estimated 50,000 poor blacks during his rule. His son, Jean-Claude,
took up where his father left off. Even after Jean-Claude's expulsion
from the country in February 1986, the slaughter of the pro-democracy
black poor continued unabated."
Randall Robinson in his book "An
Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a
President"
"Haiti is best understood
as a successfully failed state. As of last estimate, 65% of Haiti's
government revenue comes from international agencies. 84% of its
rice grown abroad. This is because of U.S. and other Northern
countries' economic policies, wherein Haiti's ability to feed
itself with domestic rice production was wiped out by Washington-subsidized
imports that U.S. agribusiness has profited from. At Ronald Reagan's
behest, Haiti initiated a series of neoliberal measures in the
1980s, including trade liberalization, privatization and decreasing
investment in agriculture, that led to the disappearance of Haiti's
cotton and sugar export industries. During the 1990s, the U.S.
conditioned its food aid ? sent to alleviate a hunger crisis ?
with demands that Haiti lower its tariffs and open its markets
to U.S. imports. This subsidized U.S. rice was much cheaper than
Haitian rice, forcing local farmers out of business. Over the
same period, Haiti became increasingly more reliant on the International
Financial Institutions, which imposed more neoliberal conditions
on its help. Since 1980, when Haiti started receiving the World
Banks' help in earnest, its per capita Gross Domestic Product
has shrunk by 38.3%. Haiti is left with a 1.4 billion dollar multinational
debt. In addition to draining resources from needed sectors ?
such as health, education, or developing national production,
this debt has served as leverage for the IMF and World Bank to
impose even more neoliberal measures."
Mark Schuller, an anthropologist
at Vassar College, 2008
"We should be wary of the
role of international NGOs. While many NGOs are trying to address
the crisis, the U.S. and other governments are funneling aid to
them in order to undermine Haitians' democratic right to self-determination.
The international NGOs are unaccountable to either the Haitian
state or Haitian population. So the aid funneled through them
further weakens what little hold Haitians have on their own society."
Ashley Smith
"While the real economy
[in Haiti] had been driven into bankruptcy under the brunt of
the IMF reforms, the narcotics transshipment trade continues to
flourish. According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA), Haiti remains "the major drug trans-shipment country
for the entire Caribbean region, funneling huge shipments of cocaine
from Colombia to the United States." (US House of Representatives,
Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources Subcommittee,
FDHC Transcripts, 12 April 2000).
It is estimated that Haiti is now responsible for 14 percent of
all the cocaine entering the United States, representing billions
of dollars of revenue for organized crime and US financial institutions,
which launder vast amounts of dirty money. The global trade in
narcotics is estimated to be of the order of 500 billion dollars.
Much of this transshipment trade goes directly to Miami, which
also constitutes a haven for the recycling of dirty money into
bona fide investments, e.g. in real estate and other related activities."
Michel Chossudovsky
"Thirty years ago, Haiti
imported almost no rice. Today, Haiti imports nearly all of its
rice. It even imports sugar, even though it was the sugar-growing
capital of the Caribbean. And the reason is that in order to get
these loans, which they need desperately to be able to survive,
that they had to open up their markets to competition.
... The United States exports over 200 million metric tons of
rice every year to Haiti... And the reason is that our rice is
cheaper than the rice that they could grow there themselves, because
our rice is so heavily subsidized. A billion dollars a year of
taxpayer money goes to rice farmers in the United States, plus
we have a tariff ... that adds between three and 24 percent protection
for our rice farmers. And as a result, the rich and powerful country
of the United States, along with other rich and powerful countries
in the world, have just really bullied these small countries into
accepting our rice. And as the rice from the United States came
in, it destroyed the ability of farmers in Haiti to be able to
grow rice. And as a consequence, the country now depends totally
on imported rice."
Bill Quigley, 2008
"Since 1915, the United
States has treated Haitian governments as rubber stamps for US
policy, American businesses working in Haiti and Haitian-run businesses
friendly to American interests. For almost the entire twentieth
century, only US-approved Haitians could be president. The embassy
looked the other way at internal political repression, to say
nothing of continuing starvation in the countryside, as long as
Haitian governments were friendly - or at least anticommunist,
like Papa Doc's. Any leader who seemed to have an agenda that
put the Haitian people first was thrown out."
Amy Wilentz, 2015
"After the Haitian slave
revolution which concluded in January, 1804, Haiti became the
second free country in the Western World (after the United States),
and the first black republic. However, the United States was still
a slave nation, as was England. While France had freed the Haitian
slaves during the revolution, France and other European nations
had slaves in Africa and Asia. The international community decided
that Haiti's model of a nation of freed slaves was a dangerous
precedent. An international boycott of Haitian goods and commerce
plunged the Haitian economy into chaos.
It is difficult to measure the exact impact of this international
conspiracy. Here was a nation of ex-slaves trying to rise to democratic
self-rule, rising to run an economy in which the masses had only
served as slaves before. The international boycott of Haitian
products at this time was devastating for Haiti's long-term economic
development."
Bob Corbett, Director of "People
To People", 1999
"The effort to weaken,
demoralize and then overthrow Lavalas [the social/political movement
that allowed Aristide to achieve the Presidency of Haiti] in the
first years of the twenty-first century was perhaps the most successful
exercise of neo-imperial sabotage since the toppling of Nicaragua's
Sandinistas in 1990. In many ways it was much more successful,
at least in the short-term, than previous international triumphs
in Iraq (2003), Panama (1989), Grenada (1983), Chile (1973), the
Congo (1960), Guatemala (1954) or Iran (1953). Not only did the
coup of 2004 topple one of the most popular governments in Latin
America but it managed to topple it in a manner that wasn't widely
criticized or even recognized as a coup at all."
Peter Hallward in his book "Damning
the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment"
"Few people anywhere have
suffered more for so long, yet endure and keep struggling for
change. For brief periods under Jean-Bertand Aristide, they got
it until a US-led February 29, 2004 coup d'etat forced him into
exile where he remains Haiti's symbolic leader.
UN paramilitaries [MINUSTAH] occupy the country . Washington effectively
controls it.
... Haitians suffer dearly as a result, deeply impoverished, at
times starving, denied the most basic essentials, plagued by violence,
a brutal occupier, police repression, an odious and onerous debt,
and exploitive sweatshop conditions for those lucky enough to
have a job in a country plagued by unemployment and deprivation."
Stephen Lendman, 2009
"In many ways, the people
(first-world diplomats, IFI economists, USAID consultants, IRI
mediators, CIA analysts, media specialists, ex-military personnel,
security advisors, police trainers, aid-workers, NGO staff) ...
managed to back one of the most popular political leaders in Latin
America i[Haitian president Jean-Bertande Aristide] nto a corner
from which he couldn't escape. They managed not only to overthrow
but also to discredit the most progressive government in Haitian
history, and they managed to attack this government in ways that
were rarely perceived (by mainstream commentators) as aggressive
at all. They managed to disguise a deliberate and elaborate political
intervention as a routine contribution to the natural order of
things. Ten years after his triumphant return from exile in 1994,
Aristide's enemies not only drove him out of office but into an
apparently definitive disgrace."
Peter Hallward in his book "Damning
the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment"
"There are some 10,000
NGOs operating in Haiti - a country smaller than Maryland with
a population of 10 million.
... These NGOs, each with its own projects, don't operate under
any kind of umbrella; nor are they truly regulated. What they
do, unintentionally, is substitute their own services for the
services that a government should provide. They prop up the kleptocratic
state, a mechanism for distribution of corruption."
Amy Wilentz, 2015
"The last and only Haitian
leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian
people before that of the domestic and international financial
mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Being of a socialist
persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United
States - twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush,
the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake
relief effort."
William Blum
"Haiti is best understood
as a successfully failed state. As of last estimate, 65% of Haiti's
government revenue comes from international agencies, 84% of its
rice grown abroad. This is because of U.S. and other Northern
countries' economic policies wherein Haiti's ability to feed itself
with domestic rice production was wiped out by Washington-subsidized
imports that U.S. agribusiness has profited from. At Ronald Reagan's
behest, Haiti initiated a series of neoliberal measures in the
1980s, including trade liberalization, privatization and decreasing
investment in agriculture, that led to the disappearance of Haiti's
cotton and sugar export industries. During the 1990s, the U.S.
conditioned its food aid ? sent to alleviate a hunger crisis ?
with demands that Haiti lower its tariffs and open its markets
to U.S. imports. This subsidized U.S. rice was much cheaper than
Haitian rice, forcing local farmers out of business. Over the
same period, Haiti became increasingly more reliant on the International
Financial Institutions, which imposed more neoliberal conditions
on its help. Since 1980, when Haiti started receiving the Banks'
help in earnest, its per capita Gross Domestic Product has shrunk
by 38.3%. Haiti is left with a 1.4 billion dollar multinational
debt, with a debt service next year of almost 80 million. In addition
to draining resources from needed sectors ? such as health, education,
or developing national production, this debt has served as leverage
for the IMF and World Bank to impose even more neoliberal measures."
Mark Schuller, an anthropologist
at Vassar College, 2008
"Immediately after the
earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the Clintons collected about $30
million for Haiti through the Clinton Foundation. From the foundation's
taxes, we know that only about 10 percent of funds were spent
on charity, so only about $3 million were spent on Haiti, and
it is unclear how. There were also about $54 million from the
Bush-Clinton Fund, but most of that money was spent on mortgages,
microfinance, and on refurbishing and building luxury hotels.
... With Haitian President Michel Martelly in place, the Clintons
did whatever they wanted. By July 2011, three months before the
IHRC's [Hillary Clinton's Interim Haiti Recovery Commission] 18-month
mandate was over, they had collected $3.2 billion and spent only
$84 million doing only five out of 75 projects they had planned.
In a meeting on August 11, 2011, the Chair of the Senate Public
Works Committee accused the IHRC of taking credit for projects
that had been funded before it even existed. The IHRC was not
renewed by Haiti's parliament, but the Clintons kept right on
raising money. By 2012, the IHRC had collected $5.9 billion out
of a total of $9.5 billion of pledged donations.
... More than 96 percent of Haiti's [2010 earthquake] reconstruction
funds have disappeared. If the Clintons are tried under the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and found guilty,
some of this money could be recovered, at the least by confiscating
their properties."
Dady Chery, a Haitian-born journalist
"Under Ronald Reagan, USAID
and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed
to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn't cover it up. They
gave an argument that Haiti shouldn't have an agricultural system,
it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs
in miserable conditions."
Noam Chomsky
"Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency in Haiti in
1990, then ousted in a military coup eight months later in 1991
by men on the CIA payroll... In 1994 the Clinton White House found
itself in the awkward position of having to pretend - because
of all their rhetoric about "democracy" - that they
supported the democratically-elected Aristide's return to power.
After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington
finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only
after obliging the priest to guarantee that after his term ended
he would not remain in office to make up the time lost because
of the coup; that he would not seek to help the poor at the expense
of the rich; and that he would stick closely to free-market economics.
This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant
of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation
wages."
William Blum
"In 2006 elections, the Haitian
masses voted in longtime Aristide ally René Préval
as president. But Préval has been a weak figure who collaborated
with U.S. plans for the country and failed to address the growing
social crisis.
In fact, the U.S., UN and other imperial powers effectively
bypassed the Préval government [of Haiti] and instead poured
money into NGOs. "Haiti now has the highest per capita presence
of NGOs in the world," says Yves Engler. The Préval
government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real
decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through
their chosen international NGOs."
Ashley Smith
"Haiti is called "the
Republic of NGOs," with over 10,000 operating (according
to World Bank estimates) for its nine million people, the highest
per capita presence worldwide in all sectors of activity and society,
many with sizable budgets. Yet their numbers beg the question.
With that abundant firepower, why is Haiti the poorest country
in the hemisphere, one of the poorest in the world."
Stephen Lendman, 2010
"Under Bill Clinton, Haiti's
leaders were pressured to reduce the country's longstanding tariffs
on imported food (including rice) from 50 percent to about 3 percent.
The United States then began dumping cheap, taxpayer-subsidized
surplus rice on the Haitian market, ostensibly for humanitarian
reasons, but actually so that it could dispose of an otherwise
unsellable product.
... The cheaper US rice undercut and effectively destroyed Haitian
rice farming. A country that was largely self-sufficient in this
staple in the 1980s was importing 80 percent of its rice by 2012."
Amy Wilentz, 2015
HONDURAS
"On June 28, 2009, Honduran
President Manuel Zelaya was awakened by gunfire. A coup was carried
out by US-trained military officers, including graduates of the
infamous US Army School of the Americas (WHINSEC) in Georgia.
President Zelaya was illegally taken to Costa Rica.
Democracy in Honduras ended as a de facto government of the rich
and powerful seized control. A sham election backed by the US
confirmed the leadership of the coup powers. The US and powerful
lobbyists continue to roam the hemisphere trying to convince other
Latin American countries to normalize relations with the coup
government."
Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond,
2010
"I have first-hand information
that the [United States] empire, through the U.S. Southern Command,
made the coup d'etat in Honduras."
Bolivian President Evo Morales,
July 2009
"Throughout 2008, John
Negroponte, US Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985 and a key
architect of the Reagan administration's contra wars and military
build-up in Central America, was building in Central America an
intelligence and diplomacy network charged with the mission of
regaining the positions lost by the US as well as of neutralizing
left regimes and ALBA integration initiative.
At present the US ambassadors to Latin American are Negroponte's
people. All of them have practical experience in destabilizing
and subverting political regimes unfriendly to the US, launching
propaganda campaigns, and creating fifth columns in the form of
various NGOs."
Russian analyst Nil Nikandrov,
2009
"The U.S. has been intervening
in Honduras since 1903, the year in which for the first time U.S.
Marines landed in that country to protect North American interests
in a moment of political crisis. In 1907, on the occasion of war
between Honduras and Nicaragua, U.S. troops were stationed for
three months in the cities of Trujillo, Ceiba, Puerto Cortes,
San Pedro Sula, Laguna, and Choloma. In 1911 and 1912 they repeated
the invasions, in the later case to prevent the expropriation
of a railroad in Puerto Cortes. In 1919, 1924, and 1925 imperialist
expeditionary forces again invaded Honduras, always with the same
pretext - protect the lives and property of North American citizens
residing in the country. But the largest invasion occurred in
1983 when, under the direction of a sinister figure, Ambassador
John Negroponte, the huge base of operations was established from
which the U.S. launched its reactionary offensive against the
Sandinista government and the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti guerrilla
movement."
Professor Atilio Borón
"In June 2009, the Honduran
military bundled democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya
into a plane, made a stop at a U.S. airbase, and sent him into
exile in Costa Rica. Zelaya then snuck back into Honduras, living
under the protection of the Brazilian embassy. The U.S., standing
virtually alone in the hemisphere and the world, refused to call
the removal of President Zelaya a coup, and announced that Washington
would recognize the results of last weekend's elections to succeed
Zelaya even though they were held under military martial law.
Hondurans who opposed the coup had no one to vote for, so of course,
the oligarchy's candidate won in a very low turnout."
Glen Ford - Black Agenda Radio
"It is unlikely the Honduras
coup took place without the knowledge of the U.S. military, which
has a base in that country. The coup is a message from Latin American
and U.S. 'ultraconservatives' to keep leftist governments in line."
Ecuador's President Rafael Correa.
July 2009
"The democratically elected
president [of Honduras Manuel] Zelaya, had called for a new constitution
to replace the old one that was really set up by the oligarchy
in favor of the very wealthy and the international companies.
He also called for a 60 percent increase in the bottom wage rate,
which had a huge impact on Dole and Chiquita, two of the biggest
employers in that company. They, along with a number of companies
that have sweatshops in Honduras, strongly objected, very much
the same way that they had objected to Aristide in Haiti, when
he did something similar, and called in the military. The general
in charge of the military was a graduate of our School of the
Americas, this, you know, school that's famous for creating dictators,
and they overthrew Zelaya. It was a classic CIA-sponsored type
of coup, very similar to what United Fruit had done in Guatemala
in the early '50s. And, of course, United Fruit became Chiquita."
John Perkins, 2009
"Right wing American ideologues
and shell NGOs based out of Washington played a critical role
in the coup [in Honduras in 2009 ... and are hell bent on stopping
the growing populist movements throughout Latin America from gaining
more influence and power."
Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond
"The increase in recent
years in Honduran migration to the US is a direct result of the
overthrow of Manuel Zelaya, whose crime was raising the minimum
wage, giving subsidies to small farmers and instituting free education."
William Blum
INDONESIA & EAST
TIMOR
"In Indonesia in 1965 a
group of young military officers attempted a coup against the
U.S.-backed military establishment and murdered six of seven top
military officers. The Agency seized this opportunity to overthrow
Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI),
which had three million members... Estimates of the number of
deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA ... operation run
from one-half million to more than one million people."
Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly
Deceits"
"The U.S. government played
a significant role in the 1965 Indonesian genocide by supplying
the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian
army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them."
Noam Chomsky
"Institutional speculators
and international banks raped Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea
(1997) then turned the shivering survivors over to the IMF, not
to help victims, but to insure that no Western bank was stuck
with non-performing loans in the devastated countries."
Chalmers Johnson
"East Timor declared itself
independent from Portugal on November 28, 1975. Nine days later
Indonesia invaded. The brutal occupation forces slaughtered an
estimated 200,000 people, one third of the population of East
Timor.
The U.S. government not only supplied the weapons used in the
massacre but also explicitly approved the invasion. According
to these records, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger met with Suharto on December 6, 1975, and agreed
with his planned attack, which was launched the next day."
John Perkins
"President Gerald Ford
supplied the arms and gave the green light to General Suharto
of Indonesia for the invasion of East Timor. President Carter
rearmed the Indonesian military when their supply of arms ran
low."
David Model
"The United States wished
things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about.
The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove
utterly ineffective in East Timor in whatever measures it undertook.
This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable
success."
UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"General Suharto was given
a green light by the United States to do what we did in East Timor.
We sent the Indonesian generals everything they needed to fight
a major war against somebody who doesn't have any guns."
Philip Liechty, CIA desk officer
in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1975