Media Distortions Legitimize Honduras Regime

Originally published at Truthout. Also published at Z Magazine.

Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009, that were deemed illegitimate by most of the international community and resulted in the presidency of Porfirio Lobo, a conservative politician and agricultural landowner. [I] The election occurred just months after the illegal coup overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya and, as a result of a significant boycott, only included candidates who supported the coup. [II]

At the time of the elections, the US mainstream media had an atrocious record of reporting on the coup itself, as well as on the elections that followed, helping to legitimize a startling attack on Honduran democracy. [III]Despite the illegal nature of the coup and numerous accounts of human rights abuses against supporters of Manuel Zelaya - including violence against protesters, mass arrests and crackdowns on press freedom - the US media portrayed the events in a way that painted Zelaya as a villainous follower of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and legitimized those who ousted him, in part by ignoring their many crimes and abuses. [IV]

Unfortunately, in the year that has followed these two troubling events, little has changed: the Lobo regime has continued the human rights abuses that have plagued the country for more than a year, while the media has downplayed, distorted or ignored the crimes of his regime.

Read the rest, here.

NACLA: The U.S. Media and the Crisis in Ecuador

Originally published at NACLA.org

(Note: a slightly modified version was published in the Nov/Dec print edition of Nacla Report on the Americas, in the Media Accuracy in Latin America (MALA) section. That version is available in print, and here (PDF).)

When Rudolfo Muñoz, a reporter working in Ecuador for CNN, resigned from the cable news channel in the immediate aftermath of the September 30 political crisis, not a single noteworthy U.S. news outlet—including CNN—bothered to report on his departure. Fittingly, Muñoz cited the media’s failure to report important information as his primary reason for quitting his job, telling the Latin American media outlet TeleSur that he quit the job because CNN had a “distinct slant” on the deadly police uprising in Ecuador and “acted as if nothing happened” despite “proof that [police forces] tried to kill the president.”

"That same night on Sept. 30 I determined that it was no longer in my interest to continue doing that sort of work,” he said.

While it is still unclear whether the violent events of September 30 constituted an attempted coup, as President Rafael Correa claimed, Muñoz’s critique raises questions about how the crisis was covered in the U.S. mainstream media.

The crisis in Ecuador came less than 18 months after the Honduran military successfully overthrew its democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. If Ecuador’s police uprising was indeed a failed attempt at overthrowing the government, it would mark the fourth coup attempt on left-leaning Latin America leaders in less than a decade — since 2002. The three earlier coup attempts took place in Venzuela, Haiti, and Honduras. The uprising in Ecuador, if it constituted a coup, was the fourth.

Given the long history of U.S. intervention in the region, the crisis in Ecuador should warrant serious examination from the U.S. media. However, not only were relevant historic angles ignored, but, as Muñoz observed, several important events of that day were not seriously covered. The most prominent mainstream media outlets either ignored the incident, or treated it as if it occurred in a vacuum—offering no context about the long history of U.S. involvement in coup attempts in the Americas.

Read the rest, here.

A Tale of Two Elections: Iran and Honduras

Originally published for the Nacla Report on the Americas.

On November 29, the de facto authorities in Honduras held a blatantly fraudulent election—complete with state violence against dissidents in the run-up to the voting, ballot irregularities, and manufactured turnout numbers.¹ Sadly, some countries are recognizing these elections, giving unwarranted legitimacy to former de facto president Roberto Micheletti and the other coup leaders who took power in June.²

The mainstream news coverage has been a significant factor in portraying the Honduran election as a peaceful, legitimate exercise in democracy. By ignoring the abuses and corruption of the coup leaders before and during the election, the U.S. media in particular became complicit in thwarting Honduran democracy.

The coverage of the Honduran elections is especially interesting since it came on the heels of the uprising in Iran, which was triggered in June by an election widely denounced as fraudulent. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was accused of rigging the election to secure his victory over an opposition candidate who was less hostile toward the United States.³ In this case, The New York Times’ coverage was exhaustive; its editorials loudly condemned the Iranian leadership for abuses and fraud.⁴

But in the Honduran election—where those accused of fraud are advocates of the dominant neoliberal ideology of the United States—the Times’ editorial standards were dramatically different.

Read the rest here.

Iran v Honduras: the Times' Selective Promotion of Democracy

Published at EXTRA!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

When the results of the June 13 Iranian elections were decried as fraudulent (charges that were later backed up by a detailed study by Chatham House--6/21/09), U.S. media instantly became the champions of the oppressed Iranians who took to the streets in protest. Cries of righteous solidarity echoed from virtually all mainstream editorial outlets, and the large demonstrations were front-page news on every newspaper in the country each day.

The Islamic regime's harsh suppression of demonstrations was rightfully the focus of prolific news coverage and vigorous editorial discussion. As the pages of the New York Times informed Americans, a "genuine democratic movement...including women, young people, intellectuals and members of the moderate clerical establishment," had "united" in "resistance" against Iran's clerics (6/14/09), who used "overwhelming force to crush the demonstrations" (6/16/09), and against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (6/14/09), "an intensely divisive figure here and abroad."

"Death to the dictator," the protesters were quoted as crying, after Ahmadinejad's victory "provoked deep suspicion" given Iran's tendency towards "vote-rigging" which had "often been raised." Indeed, the Times (6/15/09)editorialized , "given the government's even more than usually thuggish reaction, it certainly looks like fraud."

By contrast, about two weeks later, demonstrators in Honduras who took to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the democratically elected president who had been violently abducted by soldiers that were armed, trained and advised by the United States received no such media support or attention. Hardly a mention that hundreds of protesters--two of whom were killed and 60 injured, according to the Chinese press agency Xinhua (6/30/09)--were confronting tanks and droves of armed forces in the Honduran capital could be found in mainstream news outlets or editorial pages.

The New York Times (6/29/09) framed its reporting on events in Honduras much differently: President Manuel Zelaya, "a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,"was ousted by the U.S.-backed Honduran military, which was "acting to defend the law" after "months of tensions over [Zelaya's] efforts to lift presidential term limits"--efforts that "critics said [were] part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the constitution's limit of a single four-year term for the president."

This portrait of events laid out by Times reporters and opinion writers has been wildly inaccurate and misleading.

Read the rest here.

Reuters: Chavez Wins

Reuters is reporting that Chavez has won the constitutional referendum.

Latin America, the United States and Democracy

Eva Gollinger has an interesting essay at Venezuela Analysis regarding the role of the US in trying to fund anti-Chavez forces in Venezuela. While the US likes to speak the sweet narrative of democracy, they simply find the way it has panned out in Venezuela to be unacceptable to US interests--and so they go to extreme lengths to work on ousting Chavez and to thwart the democratic will of the people.

Of course they went as far as to actually back a 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, though the democratically elected leader was back in charge less than 2 days after he was kidnapped and jailed by opposition forces. But despite the failed coup, Gollinger notes, the National Endowment for Democracy are still quite busy undermining the will of the people in the Venezuela.

The US Congress has already approved $3.6 million for this office in Venezuela for the year 2007-8, which indicated that this subversion will continue increasing and threatening the Bolivarian revolution.

Historically, It has long been the policy of the United States to support coup attempts toward government's in Latin America that are not willing to play by Washington's rules. This is easily found in the public record. In 1965, a now-declassified memo (available in the Foreign Affairs Series) was written by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, to George McBundy, who was special assistant to President Johnson, clearly illustrates that the policy of the US is if the US military to work to overthrow governments that they felt were not interested in"the welfare of the nation" -- which amounts to the welfare of US economic interests.

The first such example, which preceded the McNamara-McBundy memo, was the the 1954 US backed coup in Guatemala that overthrew the democratically elected administration of Jacob Arbenz, which was justified as a means to counter Soviet expansionism.

Ever since the US has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these types of operations. The overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in the early 7o's is well documented since Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon are on tape speaking about the effort. In Robert Dallek's latest book, Nixon and Kissinger we see the contents of a Kissinger memo which read " 'Allende's election was a challenge to our national interest .... [Chile] would soon be inciting anti-American policies attacking hemisphere solidarity, making common cause with Cuba, and sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union.'" And so, the message was clear, despite the fact that Allende was elected fairly and freely even in the face of US efforts to defeat him, an "Allende government was unacceptable to the United States" and CIA Director Richard Helms instructed his agency to "prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him." Nixon, obsessed with this policy, sent Helms a memo that said " $10,000,000 available, more if necessary .... make the economy scream." Eventually the covert activities helped to take Allende down, on Sept. 11, 1973.

There are of course many other examples that are worth looking into.William Blum's Killing Hope, for an entire history of US military and CIA interventions since 1945, is an excellent place to start.

But the major lesson to take from these policies is clear: the United States and the NED are not interesting in promoting democracy, and in fact, are eager to undermine it if they do not like the way people voted. This is seen in Palestine, where now the people of Gaza are being collectively punished, living without electricity, and with little food, because the US did not like the way they voted in a an election that has been deemed free and fair by international bodies. The United States will support democracy only when it suits their geopolitical interest; they will oppose it at every turn when it does not.