Honduras: Military Coup engineered by two US Companies?

[Downwinder]

http://www.pastorsforpeace.org/

[Judi Lynn]

1. This is an excellent article by "Economic Hitman" John Perkins.

Honduras Military Coup engineered by two US Companies?

By John Perkins, Author of "Confession of an Economic Hitman"

"Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages…”

In writing my new book Hoodwinked (Random House, Nov 2009 publication date), 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.

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, "Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a 'leftist revolt' in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people."

More at your link.

Thank you, Downwinder.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Perkins nails Chiquita and Dole, but not the war profiteers like Dyncorp and Blackwater

who are running the failed, corrupt, murderous US "war on drugs" as a front for Rumsfeld's war plan to regain US global corporate predator control of Venezuela's and Ecuador's oil (and, if you read between the lines of the Wall Street Urinal's Mary O'Grady column this week, and her vicious, lying diatribe against Evo Morales, add in Bolivia's gas, oil and lithium as prime targets as well).

Honduras is step one of that war plan, and the primary goal there, in my opinion, was securing the US military base in Honduras, which President Zelaya had proposed converting to a commercial airport.

Step two is this secretly negotiated Colombia/Pentagon agreement for establishment of SEVEN new US military bases in Colombia, with NO limit on the number of US troops and 'contractors,' all of whom will receive full diplomatic immunity from Colombia's laws. The Bush-appointed US ambassador in Colombia has already signed this agreement, on behalf of President Barack Obama, with NO discussion here OR in Latin America (or in Colombia!). It has to come to the US Congress for approval, but Jim DeMint--a first term Puke senator from a state with THE most non-transparent vote-counting system in the USA--apparently has it all sewed up. HE is running US foreign policy in Latin America.

Big Ag's slave labor farms and Big Retail's clothing sweatshops are ancillary perks for Obama/Clinton's destruction of democracy in Honduras, just as the murders of thousands of union leaders on Chiquita farms in Colombia have been ancillary perks to the war profiteering of the $6 BILLION in military booty larded on Colombia's violent and lawless government and military by the Bushwhacks. The war profiteering is primary. Haven't we learned that yet? Good God, look at Iraq where a trillion dollars went missing! And what was the primary goal of that? Exxon Mobil just signed the contract.

Corpo-fascist slave labor is the ride-along.