Hondo Hillary - 1

"Why has there never been a coup in Washington, DC?"

"There's no US Embassy there."

               -Latin American joke

Apparently, Hillary Clinton will run for the Presidency of the United States in 2016.  Thus would another political dynasty be established, and -- given the Republicans' demonstrated capacity in the last few years to throw away Presidential elections with less than stellar performers -- the first female would occupy the Oval Office.  I don't know if that will come to pass, her candidacy or her election.  And the way things work now, it really won't make a great deal of difference.  If you ain't down with the Wall Street bond traders, you ain't goin' nowhere . . . and that's just the he and the she of it.

What bothers me most nowadays about elections is how accustomed we all become to mountains and valleys and rivers and seas of pure bullshit in this vast personality contest, where manipulative speech becomes the absolute norm.  Everybody who is in the game -- and it it s game -- from the manicured candidates themselves down to the last neighborhood activist gets on board with something called "messaging," which is, explicitly, speech aimed at manipulation and deceit.  The deceit is not always in the form of lies, but in the accentuation of the positive (for this audience) and elimination of the negative (for that audience).

So in preparation for the election, Chasin' Jesus will do a series on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's role in a coup d'etat in the little nation of Honduras that hardly caused a ripple in the US media.  Because before all the bullshit begins to flow, we need a truth check on what happens to real people as a consequence of these ever-so-important political celebrities' decisions and actions.

Honduras is what used to be called a "banana republic."  That term meant a nation that was run by powerful and ruthless local landowners who were partnered with American agricultural export companies, like the ones who brought bananas to your grocery store shelves up here in El Norte; and their governments were basically vassals of said American companies, who were backed by the US Department of State, the US Agency for International Development, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the American Armed Forces.

The rich in Honduras profit grandly from this arrangement and they have gladly slaughtered those not-rich Hondurans who organized in any way to oppose it.  This was gradually changing, and in 2006, a President who came from one of the rich families, Manuel Zelaya, decided to turn against his fellow rich men, and began leading the country in a more independent direction.  He was becoming immensely popular on this account, so in 2009, members of the Honduran armed forces and the nation's reactionary politicians -- with the secret support of the United States Department of State, headed then by Hillary Clinton -- conducted a coup d'etat against Zelaya, and kidnapped him from his own bed in the middle of the night.  Mass protests followed, and they were met with lethal violence.

In this series, we will outline what happened that year, and what has happened since, and the critical role played by Hillary Rodham Clinton in aiding the deceptions of the public about the coup, in lying about the reasons for the coup,  in covering up the killing, and in helping the de facto post-coup government consolidate its deadly hold over Honduras, returning it firmly to its status as a violent banana republic.

I think this matters for Christians, because the teachings and example of Jesus do not support manipulation, lies, violence, torture, and murder, which is what happened, and what continues to happen in Honduras to this day, with the able support and assistance of Clinton's (and now Kerry's) State Department.

Then you can cast your vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton as another exercise of symbolic liberal politics in the light of at least one un-spun truth.