Remembering 9/11

Yesterday was the anniversary of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, surely worth remembering.  But as fellow anthropologist Mark Moberg (University of South Alabama) reminds us, there was another 9/11 back in 1973:

Long before 9/11/2001, September 11 was a day of mourning for South Americans. The region's longest-lasting democracy ended with the military coup that overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende, replacing him with the junta of Augusto Pinochet that ruled that country for nearly 20 years. After Allende was killed in the coup, Pinochet suspended Congress, banned the opposition press, outlawed all political parties, directed the murder of an estimated 10,000 Chileans, oversaw the torture of many thousands more, and exiled more than a hundred thousand. Allende's crime? He had nationalized US copper corporations that had held Chile's economy in thrall -- the coup was directed, funded, and supported by the Nixon administration under "Operation Make the Economy Scream." In the words of Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, "We will not allow Chile to go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."

I didn't write anything about 9/11 this time either

Last year at this time, I posted a non-post of sorts about 9/11.  At least it had a couple of essays that seemed relevant, including one by Will Rivers-Pitt.  Please go have a look.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty much continuing the tradition this year.  Except for a couple of things.  For one, it occurs to me that as we remember our 9/11, it would serve us well to recall another 9/11, September 11, 1973.  This was the day the world came crashing down on the Chilean people.  A US-supported fascist named Augusto Pinochet ousted the popularly elected and left-leaning president of Chile, Salvador Allende.*  A pretty decent summary of that event can be found here.

 Meanwhile, closer to home, it's worth remembering that our own 9/11 happened at least partly due to the mind-blowingly catastrophic ineptitude of our own elected leaders. The New York Times has a good summary.

Finally, we are reminded of John Stewart's treatment of the debacle regarding Condoleeza Rice and the President's Daily Briefings leading up to 9/11/01. One of those PDBs was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."  Stewart takes an incredulous look at Secretary Rice's bizarrely incoherent testimony before Congress.

                       

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Read, watch, weep.

*Father of acclaimed writer Isabel Allende.

M pa pi mal

Haitians, especially rural, traditional Haitians, tend to answer the question "how are you" (ki jan ou ye?) with one of several one might say guardedly pessimistic responses. One is m la, literally 'I am present.' Another is m ap kenbe, "I'm hanging on." Still another is m pa pi mal, 'I'm no worse.' Answering too positively by saying, for example, m byen (I'm well) might be tempting fate; better to stay below the radar.

Haitians have good reason to prefer guarded pessimism. Their society was founded as a French exploitation colony dedicated to producing wealth for France with the use of involuntary migrant labor from Africa- slaves. And produce they did. In 1789, just before the Revolution, Haiti accounted for one-third of France's overseas trade and two-thirds of France's tropical produce. And then, inspired, ironically enough, by the American and French revolutions, and led by military geniuses like Tousent Louvèti, the African slaves overthrew their masters, defeated Napoleon's army, and took over their country. They returned to it the name its Amerindian inhabitants had called it: Ayiti. They ripped the white stripe from the French tricolor to create a new flag, and set about building a new nation.

But then, things pretty much started going south. The US declined to recognize the new republic, fearing that their own slaves might get ideas (the US did finally recognize Haiti during Lincoln's administration). The French demanded reparations for their losses in exchange for recognition and the Haitians, backs against the wall, agreed: a bizarre case of the defeated side dictating the terms of disengagement. Haiti took almost a century to comply with this extortion, handing over to France a total of over 20 billion dollars in today's money, 20 billion dollars that France has been asked to return, but, well, you know...

The list goes depressingly on and on: 19 years (1915-1934) of occupation by virulently racist US military personnel; years of abuse under the kleptocratic regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and later his son, "Baby Doc"; the US-supported removal, not once but twice, of elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the second removal actually carried out by US Marines; more kleptocrats; the US-ordered slaughter of all Haitian pigs; the ongoing dysfunction of an educational system reluctant to allow Kreyòl, the language of everybody, as a medium for teaching; and so, and on.

And these are the human-caused disasters. Let's not forget the malaria, the hurricanes (a word that comes to us from Haiti's original inhabitants), and now, the Earthquake.

And on top of all of this, Haitians have to endure commentary by abysmally ignorant, racist loons like Pat Robertson:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil...But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

And from Rush Limbaugh, this:

Yes, I think in the Haiti earthquake, ladies and gentlemen -- in the words of Rahm Emanuel -- we have another crisis simply too good to waste. This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, 'credibility' with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.

Limbaugh, of course, is just an idiot. Robertson is worse, perhaps: a mendacious kleptomaniac fraud who extracts money from easily-manipulated people who think they're buying their way into heaven. His remark reflects the racist, ethnocentric attitudes those occupying US forces brought back from Haiti in the 1920s and 30s. If he were a functioning human being, he would be ashamed of himself.

M pa pi mal, indeed.

A dose of irony

Today is the 42nd anniversary of the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the young Argentinian physician who in the 1950s linked up with Fidel Castro and helped carry out the Cuban Revolution.

Guevara as prisoner, surrounded by Bolivian soldiers.

On this date in 1967 Che was executed after being captured along with members of his band of Bolivian guerrillas. The young Bolivian soldier who was ordered to do the shooting, and to make it look as though Che was killed in battle rather than sitting wounded in a chair, was named Mario Terán.

Now comes the irony part. A couple of years ago, a team of Cuban physicians working in Bolivia discovered Terán, now an old man, in need of eye surgery. They removed his cataracts, making it possible for him to see again.

So, the man who killed the person who helped establish the beginnings of Cuba's health care system was in turn given back his eyesight by that same health care system. For free.

US: Thumbs down on Honduran democracy

The US State Department has abandoned any pretense of supporting the return of elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya to office. Recall that Zelaya was removed from office and flown out of the country in June. His crime: attempting to find out whether the Honduran people supported the idea of overhauling their country's constitution.

A good summary of US involvement in and encouragement of the coup and Zelaya's exile is told in this article at Foreign Policy in Focus.

What's especially disturbing is that this behavior on the part of the US seems to have a life of its own, independent of particular administrations. After Grenada's revolution in 1979, both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations worked to destabilize the new Grenadian government, ultimately hastening its self-implosion in late 1983 and paving the way for the US invasion, which I wrote about here.

Historically, any time a Latin American or Caribbean government, be it Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, tries to implement policies that shift the wealth of the country away from the usual tiny elite class and into the hands of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples, former slaves, and others with a history of abuse and exploitation, the US has interceded in favor of the elites. These elites are typically hyper-conservative, actual or ideological descendants of the founding European landowners. They tend to be either members of or tightly tied to a military whose leaders are routinely trained in methods of terror and torture at the US's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas) at Fort Benning, Georgia. They are, to put it bluntly, fascists. And now, fans of fascism in the US have once again handed a people clamoring for democracy over to thugs.

But we don't have to leave the US to see these people in action. As I write, senators and congressional representatives trying to discuss health care reform in town hall meetings with their constituents are being terrorized by wandering gangs of the same sort of thugs, almost certainly some of the same people who were allowed to disrupt vote counting here in Florida during the 2000 election. And we all know how that turned out.

The only thing these troglodytes need to complete their ensemble is brown shirts.

A little more on Honduras

The more I learn about what's going down in Honduras, and the way in which the US is implicated, the less optimistic I am that anything good is going to come out of this. And by "anything good" I mean progressive policies that might potentially benefit regular Hondurans, as opposed to the maintenance of a neo-colonial power structure that favors members of the oligarchy and the military elite.

Honduras is a classic example of what anthropologists sometimes call internal colonialism: one segment of a society treats the rest of the society in much the same way that the former colonial powers (in this case, Spain) treated their colonies, as places and people to exploit and extract as much wealth from as possible. It is this internal colonialism that the "new leftist" leaders in Latin America, from Cuba to Bolivia, have tried to address, always with overwhelming support from the people targeted to benefit, always with resistance from the people fearful of losing their ill-gotten wealth and power who, in turn, are nearly always supported by the US.

Anyway, Nikolas Kozloff has an article posted today that does a disturblingly good job of focusing on the US role in Honduras. We learn of the involvement of US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, a hold-over from the Bush regime and ideological, if not actual, member of the anti-Castro Miami Mafia. We also learn of the tangled web that connects the Honduran right-fascist elite to the US; I reproduce the concluding paragraphs here:

What is the connection between U.S. interests and [Honduran] constitutional reform? If you had any doubt about Washington's true intentions in Honduras consider the following AP Report for July 8 about diplomatic negotiations between the coup regime and ousted president Zelaya: "Clinton would not discuss specifics of the mediation process, which she said would begin soon, but a senior U.S. official said one option being considered would be to forge a compromise under which Zelaya would be allowed to return and serve out his remaining six months in office with limited powers [italics added]. Zelaya, in return, would pledge to drop his aspirations for a constitutional change."

It's the State Department then under Hillary Clinton, allied in spirit to figures from the old Bush establishment, which is seeking to cut off constitutional reform in Honduras --- reform which could lead to popular mobilization as we've seen in Ecuador and Venezuela. Obama meanwhile has condemned the coup but his failure to rein in either Llorens or Clinton suggests that he too believes that Zelaya's proposal for a constitutional reform is dangerous and needs to be halted.

Read the whole article.

Catching up, again

As previously reported, I had rotator cuff surgery on July 7 and have been wallowing in pain medication and general aimlessness since then. But now it's time to pull myself out of my funk, since my Trophy Wife (apologies to PZ Myers) is off to visit relatives on Monday, leaving me to fend for myself for the following three weeks. Just in time, it seems, I can now bathe and dress myself, do some simple things in the kitchen, and even drive.

Meanwhile, lots of interesting things have been happening out in the world, responses to which have been swimming in my head. And now that I can type two-handed on my laptop, I get to catch up a little. The goal is to call attention, and maybe save depth for a little later.

Honduras. The evidence seems to be accumulating that the US prefers the leaders of the coup against President Zelaya over Zelaya himself. Too bad, but not that surprising, given that it also appears that the golpistas (coupsters) have strong ties to well-placed crypto-fascists here in the US, and of course the Honduran military is virtually a branch of the US military. There's a brief article here, and a more detailed one here.

Judge Sotomayor and the Rethuglicans. I watched some of her confirmation hearings, mostly snippets on the news. I must say I was astounded by the blatant, over-the-top sexism and racism displayed by the Rethuglican neo-confederates Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). The ongoing and apparently indestructible meme that White Males can't possibly be biased, since they have no ethnic identity that might provide a basis for such bias, is understandable, of course. From a linguistic/anthropological perspective, we say that White Male is the unmarked category; its very real biases are thus rendered invisible. But still, can't we climb out of the of 19th century sometime, please?

"Race" and ethnicity. Pundick Pat "why on Earth does this troll still have a job?" Buchanan keeps calling Judge Sotomayor a "racist" for siding with the Hispanics in a recent discrimination case. When will he (and most of the rest of the US) learn that "Hispanic" is no more a "race" than "English-speaking" is? See my photo of Spanish-speaking Cuban schoolchildren in an earlier post.

R-e-s-p-e-c-t. Speaking of the aforementioned pundick, on July 14 HumanEvents.com published an article by Buchanan titled "How to Handle Sonia." "Sonia?" Is this really the proper way to refer to someone with a 17-year record on the bench? Of course, for him it is, because she's a Hispanic Female.

Affirmative action. Buchanan, again, this time claiming, in the same HumanEvents article, that Sotomayor's (or should I say "Sonia's?") entire career is the result of her taking advantage of affirmative action to gain benefits that she was never really qualified for. Oh, the irony: PB is naturally unaware (because he belongs to the unmarked category) that White Males like himself have been the exclusive beneficiaries of affirmative action since the founding of the Republic. He may even be unaware that, without this White Male targeted affirmative action, nobody would be paying him to pundickificate...

There must be more but my right arm is getting tired and I need to put it back in its sling. Perhaps more on some of these topics later.

Honduras and the US

Recent happenings in Honduras present the US, or rather the US managerial elite, with a problem.

In Honduras on Sunday, June 28, in the middle of the night, left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya was taken into custody by the Honduran military and spirited off to Coast Rica. The complaint was that he wanted to conduct a referendum to determine whether or not the Honduran people would like to have the opportunity, in the future, to vote on whether to change Honduras's constitution to allow a president to serve more than one term.

Here's the problem: Zelaya was a democratically elected president who was developing ties to other leftist leaders in Latin America. The people who got fed up and removed him are, to put it mildly, right-leaning members of the old oligarchical class, some of whom it would be fair to call fascists. And then there are the military leaders, some of whom were trained by the US at the School of the Americas in tactics specifically designed to squash exactly the kind of popular unrest we see in the wake of Zelaya's ouster.

So, which will it be: leftist democracy, or rightist dictatorship? Historically, the US has been more at ease with right-wing dictators like Batista (Cuba), Duvalier (Haiti), Pinochet (Chile), Somoza (Nicaragua), and others. Right next door to Honduras, in neighboring Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, from the 1950s through the 1980s, the US supported some of the worst human rights abusers in the history of humankind. And, for some time in the 1980s, the US essentially used Honduras as a base of operations for its war of terror against Nicaragua.

Conversely, the US has never been comfortable with leftist leaders such as Allende (Chile), Aristide (Haiti), Bishop (Grenada), Chávez (Venezuela), Morales (Bolivia), or Ortega (Nicaragua). Socialism, even in the relatively mild forms usually espoused in Latin America, makes us nervous: Give people health care? Give people free education through university? Give poor rural people land to work? Ensure workers the freedom to unionize and bargain for better working conditions? Limit the abuses of corporations like United Fruit? These kinds of goals don't mesh well with our national ideology of hyper-capitalism, hyper-individualism, and hyper-consumerism.

So what, if anything, will the Obama adminstration do about Honduras? So far, it's hard to tell. At this point I only hope that, for once, he can put the US on the side of right, rather than might.

Honduras update

Here is another good summary of the Honduras situation with some historical perspective by Benjamin Dangl, editor of TowardFreedom.com.

On early Sunday morning, approximately 100 soldiers entered the home of the left-leaning [President Manuel] Zelaya, forcefully removed him and, while he was still in his pajamas, ushered him on to a plane to Costa Rica. The tension that led to the coup involved a struggle for power between left and right political factions in the country. Besides the brutal challenges facing the Honduran people, this political crisis is a test for regional solidarity and Washington-Latin American relations.

Honduras

OK, so how worried should we be that the US, or elements from within the US, are behind the Sunday morning ouster of leftish Honduran President Manuel Zelaya?

This is not as much a stretch as it might seem at first glance. The US has a long history of engineering the overthrow of popularly elected left-leaning leaders in Latin America. Indeed, the Honduras coup calls to mind both the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende's Chile and the late-night kidnapping (as he described it) of Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. In the case of Chile, it was the Chilean military under Augusto Pinochet, supported by the US; in Haiti, it was the US's own military that spirited Aristide away in the hopes of making Haiti safe once again for US business interests.

But I digress. A good summary of the background to the Honduran coup can be found in this essay, by Latin American expert Nikolas Kozloff, who asks:

Are we to believe that the United States had no role in coordinating with Vasquez and the coup plotters? The U.S. has had longstanding military ties to the Honduran armed forces, particularly during the Contra War in Nicaragua during the 1980s. The White House, needless to say, has rejected claims that the U.S. played a role.

Meanwhile, Amy Goodman at Democracy Now has an interview with Honduran physician and human rights activist Juan Almendares and New York University professor of Latin American history Greg Grandin. Grandin says:

The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of the United States government. Honduras, as a whole, if any Latin American country is fully owned by the United States, it’s Honduras. Its economy is wholly based on trade, foreign aid and remittances. So if the US is opposed to this coup going forward, it won’t go forward. Zelaya will return, if the United States—if Obama and Hillary Clinton are sincere in their statements about returning Zelaya to power.

It should be pointed out that at least some of the military leaders of the coup were trained at the School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Georgia, well-known as a training ground for thugs, torturers, murderers, and worse. Also, in the Democracy Now piece, Amy Goodman reports that the Venezuelan representative to the Organization of American States has charged that former US Undersecretary of State Otto Reich played a role of some kind; Reich has a long history of participation in such activities, some of which can be found in this report from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

It's too early to be certain that this was a US-sponsored ousting of a popular and populist elected leader; but it's never too early to be paranoid.