Honduras, just so you know

Honduras. In 2009, the Obama Administration supported a coup d'etat in Honduras, which was papered over by the administration and a servile media as "a constitutional crisis." Even Wikipedia calls it that. President Zelaya was kidnapped from his own home, with his family, at gunpoint, in his underwear, and spirited to Costa Rica via the US Sotocano Air Base in Comayagua. Zelaya was popular for his reforms that aimed to assist the poor and give them greater political agency. This was anathema to the Honduran ruling class, a collection of thuggish families from around the world, and to the US neoliberal estsblishment, as well as John McCain's favorite sponsor, AT&T, for years now eying Hoduran telecommunications for a juicy privatization.

Hillary Clinton, then the Secretary of State, hired the fascistic gusano John Negroponte as her Deputy for this hit job. Negroponte already had an impressive body count as a violent Cold Warrior in Latin America, including a stint under Reagan as Ambassador to Honduras. Google or Duck-Duck it: "negroponte" "death squads," and you'll get almost 39,000 hits. He loved them, and they loved him, and anybody who wasn't careful could find herself at dawn laid out on some central plaza with her head chopped off.

Behind ther scenes, the Honduran ruling class unleashed a wave of terror to consolidate their post-coup grip on power. Mostly, it went unseen to the rest of the world, because for a time, Honduras became the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. Not Afghanistan. Not Colombia. Not Yemen. Honduras.

Honduras still holds another record: most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists, with 125 assassinated (c. 10-19-18) since the coup. Most well-known and well-loved among them was Berta Caceres, the leader and one of the founders of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, who had led the fight to defeat a dam project on the Gualcarque River. She was killed on March 2nd, 2016, as Hillary Clinton--who has assisted her killers into power--won Primaries in Tennesee and Alabama.

Accompanying this violence, which has targeted organizers, women in particular, and anyone suspected of working with them, every family lives in fear for someone they know. This insecurity has been compounded by regressive taxation, rapacious land grabs, and a general downturn in the Honduran economy that features extremely high unemployment. So many Hondurans have decided to throw in their lot with this migrant caravan poised along the Guatemala-Mexico border to the chagrin of the proud misogynist, xenophobe, and would-be autocrat Donald Trump.

Plenty will be made of the caravan, because Trump is trying to get his base all shit-scared about a brown invasion (nearly all these folks are indigenous, and some African too). But, given our reluctance to play Nathan to our own Davids in election season, the Davids that were Obama and Clinton won't be called into the dock by our chattering class.

So, as a voice in the wilderness who once enjoyed Honduran hospitality, I'm pointing at both, and I'm saying, "You are that man."