It would be interesting and very depressing to trace the road to the pardon of Honduran ex-president Hernández back and back into the wilds of American foreign policy vis-a-vis Hondurus. Back to that time the Obama administration, with Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, decided that the democratically elected president, Mel Zelaya., was way too lefty and dangerous. The U.S. did not plot the coup in which Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and put on a plane out of the country (unless secret docs emerge confirming the negative), but by Clinton's own account, she worked in the post coup situation to render the "question of Zelaya" moot.
When you help render a country helpless before its most ruthless and vile people - as the U.S. has done time after time in the Caribbean and Central America and Latin America - people will flee.
And where do they flee? Well, in the American sphere, they flee North.
After the coup, with the Military in charge and the Honduran murder rate doubling - from the highest in the world already - thousands of Honduran children came illegally to the U.S.
"In 2014 Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “It may be safer [for the children to remain in the U.S.],” but “they should be sent back.”
"During the Feb. 11 Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Clinton said that sending the children back would “send a message.” In answer to a question by debate moderator Judy Woodruff of PBS, she said, “Those children needed to be processed appropriately, but we also had to send a message to families and communities in Central America not to send their children on this dangerous journey in the hands of smugglers.”
Sanders retorted, “Who are you sending a message to? These are children who are leaving countries and neighborhoods where their lives are at stake. That was the fact. I don’t think we use them to send a message. I think we welcome them into this country and do the best we can to help them get their lives together.”
Well, we know who lost that debate - Sanders. And a decade later, Trump pardoning one of the products of the rightwing coup, the drug dealing ex-Honduran president, helps locate precisely the problem - created by American foreign policy under a far right dictate since 1959, when Castro overthrew Batista.
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