Hondurus in the news

 1. 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.

2. The real story behind Hernandez's pardon, as social media tells us all, is that Hernandez was the president who approved the dream community, Epsteinville - or whatever - that was put in place by some libertarian corp merging the money and brilliance, what there is of it, of Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. The project bought an island off the Honduran coast and land on the coast and set itself up as Prospera Honduras, a ZEDE - that is a Zone for Emplooyment and Economic Development. It was a ripoffy venture to escape taxes, laws allowing unions, the lot.

This happened under Trump. In Hondurus, a lefty president named Xiomara Castro was elected on the promise to abolish the ZEDE law. She did. And then Prospera sued. It sued for 10 billion dollars. It wanted the case to go before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The what? That's a court set up to make sure lefty govs don't nationalize any shit. Its a court enforced by trade treaty.

In the United States, Biden was elected. He appointed a new ambassador to Honduras, Laura Dugu. And she urged Honduras to remain "open for business". Biden stocked the state department with his people.The Honduran embassy under Biden was suddenly expanded. Here's a summary of the state of play by Foreign Affairs magazine:

"The U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Laura Dogu, who has made a habit of publicly criticizing the Honduran government on domestic policy, has also rushed to the rescue of the Próspera ZEDE. A few weeks after the U.S. Embassy tweeted about Dogu’s deputy meeting with Próspera investors in September 2022, the U.S. ambassador slammed the Castro government for wanting to “reduce or eliminate investment incentives.” “Without a doubt,” the ambassador said, the Castro government’s “actions are sending a clear message to companies that they should invest elsewhere, not in Honduras.” The U.S. State Department, in apparent disregard for Biden’s opposition to ISDS, has also voiced similar concerns, alleging that the Honduran government’s decision to repeal the ZEDE law “further contributed to uncertainty over the government’s commitment to investment protections required by international treaties."

3. The lesson here is not that all is awful and we should go back to watching TV - it is that the imperial policy of the United States is organized so that it runs through Democratic and Republican administrations to create the same result: profit for American corporations. The immigration "crisis" in the U.S. is one of the side-effects of a system that sucks the wealth out of a nation, produces huge social costs, and gains support from the U.S. government, military and all, to do these things. The people can, actually, stop this. 

But one has to know it is going on, first.