[E-rundbrief] Info 856 - Honduras Coup, the CIA and US-Corporations

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 856 - John Perkins (USA): Honduras Coup, the CIA and 
two American Corporations; Mark Weisbrot (USA): The high-powered hidden 
support for Honduras' coup, The country's rightful president was ousted 
by a military leadership that takes many of its cues from Washington 
insiders. (Extracts)

Bad Ischl, 25.8.2009

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Honduras Coup, the CIA and two American Corporations

By John Perkins

August 07, 2009 "Information Clearing House"

(Quotation)

Full text: http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/2009082409171659

  I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was 
convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the 
democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been 
engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and 
its new president were not standing up for democracy.

Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United 
Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an 
increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy 
would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of 
textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor 
to work in their sweatshops.

Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing 
people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United 
Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected 
president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & 
Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile’s 
Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s 
president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 
because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s...

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The high-powered hidden support for Honduras' coup

The country's rightful president was ousted by a military leadership 
that takes many of its cues from Washington insiders.

By Mark Weisbrot July 23, 2009

(Quotation)

Powerful special interests have flexed their muscles and confronted 
President Obama on the most important legislative priorities of his 
domestic agenda. But this kind of politics-by-influence-peddling doesn't 
stop at the water's edge. And in foreign policy, the consequences can be 
more immediate, violent and deadly.

Meet Lanny Davis, Washington lawyer and lobbyist, former legal counsel 
to President Clinton and avid campaigner for Hillary Rodham Clinton's 
presidential bid. He has been hired by a coalition of Latin American 
business interests to represent the dictatorship that ousted elected 
President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in a military coup and removed him 
to Costa Rica on June 28.

Davis is working with Bennett Ratcliff, another lobbyist with a close 
relationship to Hillary Clinton who is a former senior executive for one 
of the most influential political and public relations firms in 
Washington. In the current mediation effort hosted by Costa Rican 
President Oscar Arias, the coup-installed government did not make a move 
without first consulting Ratcliff, an unnamed source told the New York 
Times...

Full text: http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/2009082409171659


-- 

Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
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