Risk: Honduras takes a risky step, but shows it is more responsible and grown up than the US and Venezuela.

The Obama administration was clearly on view during the Honduran fiasco.  I really dislike Obama for his feckless policy toward Honduras - for cow-towing to Venezuela, and dictators in Latin America, and standing against freedom, and the people of Honduras.

Obama was acting on behalf of Chavez, and ended up at a stalemate with a tiny country who refused to budge despite sanctions, visas pulled, international pressure, business sanctions ...




OPINION: THE AMERICAS
NOVEMBER 1, 2009



Hillary's Honduran Exit Strategy


Honduras signs a deal that means international recognition of the November 29 elections.




By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY



If there is one person in Honduras who is more despised these days than deposed president Manuel Zelaya it is a foreigner who goes by the name of Hugo. We refer here not to the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez but to U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.

Many Hondurans, including, rumor has it, President Roberto Micheletti, see Mr. Llorens as the principal architect of a U.S. policy that has caused enormous Honduran hardship.

There is a chance that the agreement signed late Thursday between the interim government and Mr. Zelaya will put an end to that suffering. Finally the U.S. and the Organization of American States (OAS) have agreed to step aside and allow Honduran institutions to decide if Mr. Zelaya is to be reinstated. Without international meddling, it is quite likely that Mr. Zelaya will be refused the presidency once more.

Yet many risks remain, starting with the fact that though the U.S. said it was going to butt out of Honduran affairs, old habits die hard. Referring to Mr. Zelaya's bid for reinstatement, Thomas Shannon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemispheric affairs, said last week, "That's the issue that's the most provocative and the one we will be watching most closely." Mr. Shannon should try watching the World Series instead.

The need to dictate to Hondurans how to run their country has been the problem from the start. The moment the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the arrest of Mr. Zelaya in June for organizing mob violence and attempting to overthrow the constitution Mr. Llorens anointed himself colonial viceroy in charge of imposing U.S. will. Plenty of Molotov-hurling leftists also took Mr. Zelaya's side. But Mr. Llorens staked out a position for the U.S., defending the legitimacy of the erratic former president. The U.S. ambassador used every weapon he could lay his hands on to try to force the country to restore Mr. Zelaya to power.

This violated Honduran sovereignty. But Mr. Llorens's boss back home, Barack Obama, seemed more interested in appeasing U.S. enemies than standing by friends, or even sticking to his pledge not to meddle in other countries' affairs. Mr. Chávez and Fidel Castro were supporting Mr. Zelaya, and Mr. Obama apparently wanted to be part of the gang.

Clearly no one in Washington expected it to be so hard to break the will of Hondurans. That effort became even more embarrassing when zelayistas mounted a campaign of terror, kidnapping and murdering Honduran authorities and their relatives. There were at least three such incidents in two weeks. The terrorists were also sabotaging the country's electricity grid. To avoid further taint, the U.S. sent a delegation to strike the compromise reached late Thursday.

The spin is that Mr. Zelaya will return to power. But the Honduran Congress will decide that, using opinions from the Supreme Court, the attorney general and other legal experts. Since it was the court and Congress that threw Mr. Zelaya out, this is positive. Yet if the court, which has the legal upper hand, stands firm and Congress reverses itself in favor of Mr. Zelaya, there will be a constitutional crisis.

That's not impossible, as the Zelaya reputation for buying votes is legendary. In May, the mayor of Tegucigalpa publicly denounced an offer by the Zelaya government to pay him $15 million to support a referendum on rewriting the constitution. Mr. Chávez has money too, and so do other drug-trafficking terrorist organizations around the region, like Colombia's FARC and numerous Central American gangs. These groups are notorious for infiltrating institutions. Honduras isn't immune.

Yet it is likely that the interim government decided to take the gamble because it believes that the high court and Congress, which both voted overwhelmingly to strip Mr. Zelaya of the office, will stand strong. In return for this risk, it gets U.S. and OAS recognition of the Nov. 29 presidential elections.

What is more, there will be no amnesty for Mr. Zelaya. He already has more than a dozen outstanding arrest warrants against him, and when he steps out of the Brazilian Embassy it is fully expected that he will be detained. The agreement also says that there will be no constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution so as to end presidential term limits.

Unnamed U.S. officials have told the press that Mr. Zelaya probably is coming back, turning up the heat on Honduras's Congress. And the OAS's General Secretary José Miguel Insulza is making noise about returning to Honduras to involve the OAS in Congress's decision. But Mr. Shannon reiterated to me yesterday that the U.S. believes this is now an issue for Honduran institutions to settle. He completely rejected a report in Sunday's El Pais newspaper claiming he is lobbying for votes for Mr. Zelaya's return.

By signing this agreement, Honduras helped Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton save face. In return, Mrs. Clinton should tell Mr. Insulza to stay out of the country and its affairs. She should also tell U.S. officials to cease and desist with their pro-Zelaya rumors. While she's at it, the secretary could reassign Mr. Llorens. Havana comes to mind as a suitable posting. He will be greeted as a hero by the Castros and will find it easy to continue his friendship with Mr. Zelaya.










Honduras

Obama Hypocrisy: Honduras

The lists are endless - but immediately the question of - Americans are not special, we are no more special than anyone else, we should not and can not meddle in the affairs of other countries - and this is not meddling?

Honduras is standing up to enormous pressure. It is standing up for the rule of law, for democracy, and all Obama can do is turn on the people of Honduras and subject them to oppression in the form of Zelaya.

Obama has shown he does not care about freedom or democracy - he cares about promoting his values at the expense of all else.








US revokes visas of 4 Honduran officials

Jul 28, 2009
By MORGAN LEE and JUAN CARLOS LLORCA
Associated Press Writer

OCOTAL, Nicaragua (AP) - The U.S. government said Tuesday it has revoked the diplomatic visas of four Honduran officials, stepping up pressure on coup-installed leaders who insist they can resist international demands to restore the ousted president.

The U.S. State Department did not name the four, but a Honduran official said they included the Supreme Court magistrate who ordered the arrest of ousted President Manuel Zelda and the president of Honduras' Congress.


[To read the rest of the article, click on the title link]










Obama

Summit of the Americas - Obama has no opinion

Obama Endures Ortega Diatribe
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega lashes out at a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America.


By Major Garrett
FOXNews.com
Saturday, April 18, 2009


PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago -- President Obama endured a 50-minute diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega that lashed out at a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America and included a rambling denunciation of the U.S.-imposed isolation of Cuba's Communist government.

Obama sat mostly unmoved during the speech but at times jotted notes. The speech was part of the opening ceremonies at the fifth Summit of the Americas here.

Later, at a photo opportunity with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Obama held his tongue when asked what he thought about Ortega's speech.

"It was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored two questions about Ortega's speech, instead offering lengthy praise of a cultural performance of dance and song opening the summit.

"I thought the cultural performance was fascinating," Clinton said. Asked again about the Ortega speech, Clinton said: "To have those first class Caribbean entertainers on all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space, I was overwhelmed."

[Amazing - no opinion at all. Did she not hear the person asking the question? Or was she so fascinated by space and its usage. Amazing. Even when she and Obama are not bowing or pushing reset buttons, they manage to create fodder for further attacks on the US and a weakening of opposition to the tyrants of Central and South America. And of note - before I made the preceding statement, I studied all the intelligence on the matter and considered all options before choosing the words.]


A senior administration official declined to criticize Ortega, saying the president wanted to focus on the future.

"His expectation is that these debates of the past can remain that, debates of the past and that the leaders can take advantage of this opportunity to focus on what they can do in the future to advance the interests of all the people of the hemisphere."

Ortega, meanwhile, droned on about the offenses of the past, dredging up U.S. support of the Somoza regime and the "illegal" war against the Sandinista regime he once led by U.S.-backed Contra rebels in the 1980s. Ortega was a member of the revolutionary junta that drove Anastasio Somoza from power in 1979 and was elected president in 1985. He was defeated in 1990 by Violeta Chamorro and ran unsuccessfully twice for the presidency before winning in 2006.

Of the 19th and 20th centuries, Ortega said: "Nicaragua central America, we haven't been shaken since the past century by what have been the expansionist policies, war policies, that even led us in the 1850s, 1855, 1856 to bring Central American people together. We united, with Costa Ricans, with people from Honduras, the people from Guatemala, El Salvador. We all got together, united so we could defeat the expansionist policy of the United States. And after that, after interventions that extended since 1912, all the way up to 1932 and that left, as a result the imposition of that tyranny of the Samoas. Armed, funded, defended by the American leaders."

Ortega denounced the U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's new Communist government in Cuba in 1961, a history of US racism and what he called suffocating U.S. economic policies in the region.

In his 17-minute address to the summit, Obama departed from his prepared remarks to mildly rebuke Ortega.

"To move forward, we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements. I'm grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old. Too often, an opportunity to build a fresh partnership of the Americas has been undermined by stale debates. We've all heard these arguments before."

Actually, the president misspoke [He tends to do that when he doesn't have a teleprompter] on the sequence of events in Cuba. The invasion of CIA-trained rebels at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba occurred in April 1961. Obama was born August 4, 1961.

Ortega's speech, indulgent even by regional standards, also mocked the very summit he was attending and helping to open.

"This summit and I simply refuse to call it summit of the Americas. Yes, we are gathered here, we have a large majority of presidents, heads of state of Latin America and the Caribbean," Ortega said, lamenting the lack of Cuban participation in the summit due to it exclusion since 1962 from the Organization of American States. "They're absent from this meeting. One is Cuba, whose crime has been that of fighting for independence, fighting for sovereignty of the peoples. I don't feel comfortable attending this summit. I cannot feel comfortable by being here. I feel ashamed of the fact that I'm participating at this summit with the absence of Cuba."









Obama