Before Her Murder, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Criticism [link to www.thenation.com (secure)]
Before her murder on March 3, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous rights and environmental activist, named Hillary Clinton, holding her responsible for legitimating the 2009 coup. “We warned that this would be very dangerous,” she said, referring to Clinton’s effort to impose elections that would consolidate the power of murderers.
In a video interview, given in Buenos Aires in 2014, Cáceres says it was Clinton who helped legitimate and institutionalize the coup. In response to a question about the exhaustion of the opposition movement (to restore democracy), Cáceres says (around 6:10): “The same Hillary Clinton, in her book Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the bad legacy of North American influence in our country.
Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup [link to www.democracynow.org]
In her memoir, Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton wrote about the days following the coup. She wrote, quote, “In the subsequent days I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa [in] Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections [could] be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot,” unquote.
Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous places in the world. In 2014, the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres spoke about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2009 coup. This is the woman who was assassinated last week in La Esperanza, Honduras. But she spoke about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2009 coup with the Argentine TV program Resumen Latinoamericano.
Honduran soldier says activist Berta Cáceres was killed by U.S.-backed coup regime [link to www.salon.com]
Cáceres was gunned down at her home in March. The killers are not known, but activists who worked with Cáceres have insisted she was killed by the Honduran coup regime — which the U.S., under the leadership of President Obama and Sec. Hillary Clinton, helped legitimize.
A former first sergeant in the Honduran military told The Guardian that, months before her death, he saw Cáceres on a hitlist distributed to U.S.-trained special forces units. He said names and photographs of numerous activists were given to two elite units, which were ordered to kill the targets.
Hillary Clinton Emails Reveal Questionable Support for Overthrow of Elected Government in Honduras
[link to www.blacklistednews.com]
Some of the recently released emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server show a link between Clinton and members of a coup that removed Honduras’ elected president, Manuel Zelaya, from office.
After the left-leaning Zelaya was driven from office in June 2009, Roberto Micheletti was installed as interim president. Clinton reached out through Lanny Davis, who served as a Clinton adviser during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and now acts as a crisis communications advisor to those with image problems, to contact Micheletti. Davis was employed to work on behalf of the post-coup Honduran government, according to Bill Conroy at Narco News.
The U.S. government did its best to support the ouster of Zelaya. It blocked a resolution by the Organization of American States that would have required Zelaya’s return as a pre-condition for staging an election. The United States also refused to call the change in government a military coup, which would have meant a cutoff in aid to Honduras.
The interim government scheduled an election for November 2009. In the run-up to the vote, there was violence against anti-coup organizers and opposition rallies. The pro-coup faction won the election with many opposition candidates boycotting the contest. Although observers and officials from other Latin American countries questioned the fairness of the vote, U.S. State Department officials called it “free, fair and transparent.”
Since the election of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa in 2009 and the subsequent election of Juan Orlando Hernández in 2014, conditions have deteriorated in Honduras. University of California- Santa Cruz history professor Dana Frank, an expert on human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras, told Narco News previously that the “2009 military coup that deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya…opened the door to a free-for-all of criminality in Honduras.”
“Since then,” she added, “organized crime, drug traffickers and gangs have flourished, worming their way ever-higher within the Honduran government, courts, attorney general’s office and congress.” Honduras is generally credited with having the highest murder rate in the world.
Wikileaks Clinton Email
HONDURAS: MAYBE, MAYBE
From: Cheryl Mills
To: Hillary Clinton
Date: 2009-08-28 13:30
Subject: HONDURAS: MAYBE, MAYBE
