THE BRITISH THREAD II

BTW hat as so Imperialist about our response to the coup.??
We even continued sending humanitarian aid.

I'm astonished by the ability of people like Osborne to put a vigorous case with positive spin while promising us nothing of any substance.
He must have been studying Tony Blair.

SAid by one who lives in the declining years of the country who retired the prize. HA .

The 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis

was a political dispute over plans to rewrite the Constitution of Honduras. It began when Honduran President Manuel Zelaya planned to hold a poll on a referendum on a constituent assembly to change the constitution. A majority of the government, including the Supreme Court and prominent members of his own party, saw such plans as unconstitutional,as they could lead to presidential re-election, which is permanently outlawed by the Honduran constitution. The Honduran Supreme Court had upheld a lower court injunction against the 28 June poll, However, the constitutional process for dealing with this situation was unclear; there were no clear procedures for removing or prosecuting a sitting president. The crisis culminated in the removal and exile of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya by the Honduran military in a coup d'état.

On the morning of 28 June 2009, approximately one hundred soldiers stormed the president's residence in Tegucigalpa and flew him to San José, Costa Rica, actions which he immediately called a "coup" upon his arrival there.[9] Later that day, the National Congress voted to remove Zelaya, having read without objection a letter of resignation that Zelaya says was forged.[10] Roberto Micheletti, the Speaker of Congress and next in the presidential line of succession, was sworn in as Interim President.[11][12] A "state of exception" suspending civil liberties was declared on 1 July by Micheletti's government.[13][14]

On 21 September 2009, Zelaya returned in secret to Honduras, after several attempts to return had been rebuffed. It was announced that he was in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.[15] The following day five constitutional rights were suspended for 45 days by the Honduras government.[16] Specifically the government suspended: personal liberty (Article 69), freedom of expression (Article 72), freedom of movement (Article 81), habeas corpus (Article 84) and freedom of association and assembly.[17][18] The decree suspending human rights was officially revoked on 19 October 2009 in La Gaceta.[19]

International reaction to the 2009 Honduran crisis garnered widespread condemnation of the events as a coup d'état.[20] The United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS),[21] and the European Union was to condemn the removal of Zelaya as a military coup, and some of these condemnations may still remain unretracted. The OAS rejected an attempt by Honduras to withdraw from the organisation[22] and then suspended Honduras the next day.[23][24] Domestic opinion remains very much divided, and there have been demonstrations for and against Zelaya.

Efforts by Costa Rican President Óscar Arias[25] and the United States[26][27][28] to effect a diplomatic solution between Micheletti and Zelaya initially resulted in a proposal by President Arias calling for Zelaya's return to the presidency, albeit with curtailed powers.[29] Arias's proposal also stipulated political amnesty and advanced the Honduran general elections by a month, pushing them to take place in October.[30] In spite of U.S. support for the (dubbed) San José Accord, negotiations ultimately broke down as the two parties were unwilling to come to any lasting agreement.[31][32][33][34] Zelaya also insisted that he would not recognize the elections of 29 November as a precondition to returning to power.[35]

Honduran leaders refused to reinstate Zelaya before the elections,[36][37] and international support for the elections remained scant leading up to the polls.[38] Many Hondurans sought to move past the crisis with the elections, which had been scheduled previous to Zelaya's ouster.[39] While Zelaya had urged abstention from the vote, initial returns indicated a larger than usual turnout, around 60%,[40] a figure which was subsequently revised downward to 49%.[41] Zelaya also disputed those figures at the time.[42] Some Honduran activists have ended daily protests demanding the reinstatement of Zelaya since he was ousted in a coup, saying they are moving on since Congress had voted to keep Manuel Zelaya out of office.

The crisis drew to a close with the inauguration of the newly elected president, Porfirio Lobo, on 27 January 2010 and a deal to allow Zelaya to leave the Brazilian embassy into exile in the Dominican Republic

When the Honduran military deposed President Manual Zelaya on June 28, 2009, many took it as an unfriendly reminder of the banana republic era. Chiquita remains a major presence in Honduras, and at the time, some questioned whether the fruit company played a role in backing the 2009 coup, as it did in 1954 in neighboring Guatemala. As the coup crisis progressed, though, Chiquita's name was hardly mentioned.

Elite business interests, including Chiquita as well as the Honduran manufacturing sector, were disturbed by Zelaya raising the minimum wage by sixty percent, so nobody was surprised that the country's business council CEAL (the Honduran equivalent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) wanted to spin the coup as constitutional, and to paint Zelaya as a Hugo Chavez-aligned would-be-dictator.

To push this message, CEAL hired Lanny Davis (and his associate, Eileen M. O'Connor) from the lobbying firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP. Their efforts were aided by the Honduran government hiring Bennett Ratcliff and the lobbying firm Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates. Davis was a longtime political insider described by the infamous G. Gordon Liddy as one who "can defend the indefensible." (Davis has most
recently been in the headlines for serving as spinmeister for Ivory Coast leader Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to relinquish power after losing elections in November and has since been committing what the United Nations calls "massive violations" of human rights.) According to Robert White, former U.S. ambassador and current president of the DC-based Center for International Policy, "If you want to understand who the real power behind the [Honduran] coup is, you need to find out who's paying Lanny Davis."

While Chiquita was a member of CEAL, its role in supporting the post-coup PR blitz was never analyzed or discussed. The coup that ousted Zelaya clearly helped Chiquita's interests, but considering the company's history of interference in Latin American politics, it understandably kept a low profile during the crisis. Through its membership in CEAL, Chiquita's name never came up, and powerful lobbyists successfully attracted attention elsewhere.

The PR Machine At Work

The 2009 PR blitz was right out of Bernays' 1954 playbook. Davis worked with a former Honduran foreign minister and Supreme Court Justice Guillermo Pérez-Cadalso to prep him for testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs; Davis also testified personally.

Right-wing Honduran legal "experts" made creative legal arguments about the legality of Zelaya's removal, which were then cited by an official government report. Honduras' lobbying firm appeared to help organize trips to the country for sympathetic legislators, briefed reporters on their interpretation of events, and placed op-eds in newspapers and magazines; Davis appeared personally on talk shows and drafted his own op-eds alleging the coup's constitutionality.

It is unclear how much money Chiquita provided to the Honduran equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, CEAL, during the PR offensive supporting the coup. The company understandably wanted to maintain a public distance from the events in Honduras. While Lanny Davis carried out his PR blitz on behalf of CEAL and the coup, Chiquita also maintained its own lobbyists from McDermott, Will & Emory, paying the firm $140,000 in 2009. Chiquita has had a long relationship with McDermott, working with the lobbying firm since at least 1999. Because Chiquita is incorporated in the U.S., lobbying activities directly on its behalf are not reported. Throughout the course of the coup crisis, Chiquita and CEAL maintained separate lobbying firms and the banana company successfully managed to avoid accusations of meddling in Honduran politics.

By the fall of 2009, though, the Honduran coup had slipped from American headlines. So few noticed when Davis and O'Connor left Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to join Chiquita's firm, McDermott, Will & Emory; CEAL also brought their business to McDermott.

With American news media focusing attention elsewhere, perhaps Chiquita no longer felt it necessary to maintain the appearance of separation from the coup supporters. The coup regime and its backers had successfully spun America into believing the coup was a constitutional response to an illegal power grab by a pro-Chavez president. Most who were following the story, including policymakers, had accepted Zelaya's removal as legal, and the "banana republic" allegations had faded from the limelight. However, with increasing political violence, oppression, and human rights violations at the hands of the right-wing post-coup government, and Chiquita's apparent connection to the coup supporters, perhaps Honduras really has become a banana republic once again.

You think there's a distinction to be made between the actions of American government and that of American business. The rest of the world makes no such distinction.

izzythepush wrote:

You think there's a distinction to be made between the actions of American government and that of American business. The rest of the world makes no such distinction.

Most of America makes no distinction between soccer hooligans and other Brits.

Our football supporters have got a very good reputation today, ....

The head of the British police contingent at Euro 2012 has praised the behaviour of England fans.

Around 5,000 supporters attended each of the opening four matches in Ukraine, with a similar number expected in Kiev for the quarter-final against Italy.

The atmosphere inside the Kiev fan zone before England played Sweden was occasionally tense, as a number of Three Lions supporters squared up to some of those from Scandinavia. The situation did not escalate beyond pushing and shoving, and not a single England fan has been arrested for disorder during the tournament.

Assistant Chief Constable Andy Holt, who is leading the British police in Ukraine for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: "We've been very pleased with the way they've behaved and the response that we've had when we've spoken to fans. If you'd offered me this at the start of the tournament I would have taken it.

"There have been no arrests. There have been occasions when it's got quite lively but we've managed, with our Ukrainian colleagues, to intervene and prevent it escalating."

... and not a single England fan has been arrested for disorder during the tournament.

SO no matter what the majority of the REAL press says,

In Honduras last summer and autumn, the US government did everything it could to prevent the rest of the hemisphere from mounting an effective political opposition to the coup government in Honduras. For example, they blocked the Organisation of American States from taking the position that it would not recognise elections that took place under the dictatorship. At the same time, the Obama administration publicly pretended that it was against the coup.


This was only partly successful, from a public relations point of view. Most of the US public thinks that the Obama administration was against the Honduran coup, although by November of last year there were numerous press reports and even editorial criticisms that Obama had caved to Republican pressure and not done enough. But this was a misreading of what actually happened: the Republican pressure in support of the Honduran coup changed the administration's public relations strategy, but not its political strategy. Those who followed events closely from the beginning could see that the political strategy was to blunt and delay any efforts to restore the elected president, while pretending that a return to democracy was actually the goal.


Among those who understood this were the governments of Latin America, including such heavyweights as Brazil. This is important because it shows that the State Department was willing to pay a significant political cost in order to help the right in Honduras. It convinced the vast majority of Latin American governments that it was no different from the Bush administration in its goals for the hemisphere, which is not a pleasant outcome from a diplomatic point of view.