Features » July 29, 2009 » Web Only

The Honduran Connection (cont’d)

The Hondutel Scandal

The Latin Node scandal may touch on one of the key issues behind the coup. Despite the media focus on Zelaya’s supposed agenda to get term limits overturned, one of the real goals of his proposed constitutional reform was to re-extend national control over Honduras’ telecom system. The officials who Latin Node allegedly bribed were executives of the national company Hondutel, who apparently took kickbacks to allow Latin Node to provide digital telephone service in Honduras.

In an April 7 article that he wrote for Miami’s Spanish-language Nuevo Herald, Reich reminded readers that Zelaya’s nephew, Marcelo Chimirri, was a high official at Hondutel and had been accused of various illicit practices. An outraged Zelaya went on national radio and TV to announce that he would sue Reich for defamation: “We will proceed with legal action for calumny against this man, Otto Reich, who has been waging a two-year campaign against Honduras.”

In January, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa denied Chimirri an entry visa into the United States, citing “serious cases of corruption.” This wasn’t Chimirri’s first attempt to get a visa. Zelaya had complained to Washington a month earlier about the visa issue, urging U.S. officials to “revise the procedure by which visas are cancelled or denied … as a means of [applying] pressure against … people who hold different beliefs or ideologies which pose no threat to the U.S.”

Bush-appointee Ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford also weighed in, telling the Honduran newspaper La Tribuna that the U.S. government was investigating North American telecom carriers for allegedly paying bribes to Honduran officials to engage in so-called “gray traffic”—the illicit bypassing of legal telecommunications channels. He recommended greater competition as a means to combat this supposed abuse.

The Honduran business elite has long sought to privatize Hondutel. In the late 1990s, none other than Roberto Micheletti—the current coup-installed president—was Hondutel’s CEO. Nikolas Kozloff, author of Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left, wrote in a commentary at BuzzFlash.com:

At the time, Micheletti favored privatizing the firm. Micheletti later went on to become president of Honduras’ National Congress. In that capacity, he was at odds with Zelaya, who opposed the so-called ‘telecom reform’ that could open the door to outright privatization.

Chimirri was arrested by the new regime on July 2, 2009. The Arcadia Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for a statement. In a July 9 Miami Herald op-ed titled, “I Did Not Orchestrate Coup in Honduras,” Reich denies being the “architect” of the coup – which he also denies was a coup, and defends as “legal and constitutional.”

The website of Reich’s consulting firm, Otto Reich Associates, lists among its former clients AT&T and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon)–both of which would be possible purchasers of a privatized Hondutel.

Congressional coup backers

The New York Times reported comments from a House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee hearing in Washington on July 10, where several members of Congress criticized the Organization of American States (OAS) for suspending Honduras less than a month after it lifted the suspension of Cuba.

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) urged the United States to cut its support for the OAS, which gets 60 percent of its financing from Washington. He said the OAS response to the Honduras crisis proves that it is a “dangerous organization” that sides with Hugo Chávez in undermining democracy in the region.

“What has happened in Honduras was not a military coup,” Mack said. “If anyone is guilty here it is Mr. Zelaya himself for having turned his back on his people and his own Constitution.” Elsewhere, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) called Zelaya “a Chávez-style dictator” and described President Barack Obama’s call to reinstate Zelaya as “a slap in the face to the people of the Honduras.”

Reich was also among those who testified on July 10, as a transcript of Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearings held that day reveals. “What happens in Honduras may one day be seen as either the high-water mark of Hugo Chavez’s attempt to undermine democracy in this hemisphere or as a green light to the continued spread of Chavista authoritarianism under the guise of democracy,” he said, adding that Zelaya’s removal constituted “legal and defensible measures” by the Honduran judicial and legislative branches against the executive.

Hans Bader, counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a pro-corporate, right-wing think tank, told Voice of America on July 3 that the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress believe Zelaya had put the country in peril. “I don’t think they needed to wait until he actually made himself into a dictator,” he said. “I think they were entitled to take action against a budding dictator.”

Throughout the hemisphere, the political right is assembling a barrage of legalistic sophistries in defense of the Honduran coup. If they prevail and the coup is allowed to become a fait accompli, it will be a grave step backward for democracy in the Americas and worldwide–made all the more insidious because, this time around, in contrast to the Cold War coups d’etat, it is being done under a veneer (however transparent) of propriety.