[A-List] NARCO NEWS: Llorens Discloses Secrets of Honduran Coup to GX Delegation

["james daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NARCO NEWS: Llorens Discloses Secrets of Honduran Coup to GX Delegation

Posted to CN by: "LaborExchange@xxxxxxx" LaborExchange@xxxxxxx
Wed Aug 19, 2009 6:29 am (PDT)



http://narconews.com/Issue59/article3767.html

US Ambassador Hugo Llorens Discloses Secrets of the Honduran Coup; Chinese 
Viewing Prohibited

Washington's Man in Tegucigalpa Met Friday Morning with Human Rights 
Observers in What He Termed an Intimate Conversation

By Bel?n Fern?ndez
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

AUGUST 15, 2009, TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS: While awaiting the arrival of United 
States Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens to a meeting at the US embassy in 
Tegucigalpa Friday morning, Deputy Mission Chief Simon Henshaw spoke to an 
American human rights delegation from Global Exchange. The meeting had been 
organized by Andr?s Conteris, founder of Democracy Now! en Espa?ol, who had 
managed to get me into the embassy despite the fact that I was not on the 
list and that my shoes set off the metal detector.

US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens.

In response to Global Exchange's concern for current human rights violations 
in Honduras suc h as police beating of marchers opposed to the coup that 
ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, Henshaw announced that the 
delegation was "preaching to the converted" and that "we condemn the [coup] 
regime and think they're thugs." Henshaw's subsequent declaration that "the 
first issue is that [the Honduran coup] was a coup and that it was a 
military coup and that it was wrong" suggested that the US State Department 
had finally reached a consensus on the nature of the events of June 28 after 
debating for 48 days whether the coup was military. The consensus was called 
into question with the arrival of Ambassador Llorens and his exchange with 
Joe Shansky of Democracy Now! en Espa?ol:

LLORENS: It's a clear-cut case of a coup.
SHANSKY: Military coup.
LLORENS: Well, whatever you call it.

Llorens went on to explain that-regardless of whether you called it a coup, 
a military coup, or a coup d'?tat-"it's horrible," and that coup President 
Roberto Micheletti was comparable to Napoleon given the zeal with which he 
had grabbed the Bible and sworn himself in as president of Honduras. As for 
why Napoleonic behavior had not triggered the freeze in US aid required by 
Section 7008 of the US Foreign Operations Law, Llorens momentarily 
supplanted the discussion of millions of dollars fl owing into Honduras 
courtesy of US-funded Millenium Change Corporation (MCC) with a discussion 
of how the joint US-Honduran military base at Soto Cano had been shut down.

When pressed by Global Exchange delegate Maria Robinson as to the definition 
of "shut down," Llorens explained that US troops were still there but that 
they were refraining from contact with their Honduran counterparts. Pressed 
once again by Judy Ancel on the issue of the MCC funds, Llorens claimed that 
90 percent of the sum promised to Honduras had already been spent or was "in 
the pipeline" for such projects as highway improvement, which if interrupted 
would create a huge legal liability for the US government. Not addressed was 
why the US Foreign Operations Law was not also a legal liability, or why the 
"pause" Llorens described in US assistance to the Honduran government was 
"not a legal suspension but, you know, it's the same thing."

As for other legal considerations, Llorens advised us not to get bogged down 
in Honduran constitutional minutiae regarding the abilities of the nation's 
president to consult his citizens, but admitted that-although it was "a 
problem" that Zelaya had intended to hold a referendum on the possibility of 
constitutional change-the military reaction had been more of a problem. 
According to Llorens, the Honduran crisis indicated a slight setback in20the 
process of military reform that had begun in the 1980s with the return of 
democracy to Latin America, an interpretation that contradicted not only the 
events of the 1980s but also Deputy Mission Chief Simon Henshaw's earlier 
description of Honduras' "extremely uneducated troops and policemen."

The Global Exchange delegation pursued the theme of education or lack 
thereof by interrogating Llorens as to the continued training of Honduran 
troops at the School of the Americas (SOA) while military and police 
repression occurred in the streets of Honduras. Llorens triumphantly 
announced that the SOA no longer existed; when delegation member Allan 
Fisher provided the updated acronym of the school, WHINSEC-standing for 
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation-Llorens refined his 
answer and said that he didn't think counterinsurgency was much of a 
curricular focus in such institutions. The possibility that Llorens' 
confusion was due to a traditional conflation of democracy and 
counterinsurgency in certain geographic zones was supported by his 
announcement that he and Henshaw had for the past several decades dedicated 
their careers to supporting democracy in Latin America.

WHINSEC was again brought up when Llorens was asked what would happen if the 
San Jos? Accord mediated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias did not 
succeed in resolving the Honduran political impasse. Llorens20replied: 
"Well, the US has a lot of options," to which Andr?s Conteris suggested that 
one of them be the suspension of Honduran troops from US military schools. 
Llorens in turn informed us that the troops in question were not subject to 
suspension based on the fact that they were already in the pipeline; the 
issue of whether Zelaya had not already been in the pipeline as well was not 
addressed.

Llorens continued to stress US condemnation of the coup and alignment with 
the international community, which was possibly what prompted Maria Robinson 
to ask why Llorens had not thus been withdrawn from Honduras. The ambassador 
began a lengthy explanation of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's request 
that he stay in order to put pressure on supporters of the coup regime in 
favor of a resolution, reminding us that he could not put direct pressure on 
the coup regime itself due to the pause in relations but that there were 
plenty of evangelical leaders and business people to talk to. As for 
international alignment, Llorens remarked that his European ambassadorial 
colleagues were spending their summers in Madrid, Rome, and Paris, which was 
fine but did not detract from the fact that he was "stuck here in the mud in 
Honduras."

After stressing that "we realize that there is a time constraint here" and 
that "time is running out," Llorens responded to a question regarding the 
cut-off date for Zelaya's restoration to power by announcing that 
"Washington does not have deadlines. All I'm saying is that there is a sense 
of urgency." He predicted that the visit of a group of foreign ministers 
belonging to the Organization of American States (OAS), whose scheduled 
visit this week was thwarted by Micheletti, could occur as soon as August 
25, although Oscar Arias' recent contraction of swine flu might provide a 
pretext to further postpone any discussion of the San Jos? Accord. As for 
the potential holding of illegitimate elections in Honduras, Llorens advised 
against a US boycott based on the fact that boycotts complicate 
negotiations.

Another topic of discussion at the embassy this morning was the relationship 
between the Honduran media and the coup, one aspect of which was illustrated 
when Llorens turned on his office TV at 6.15 on the morning of June 28 to 
find static. According to the ambassador, he knew immediately that there had 
been a coup; it was not established whether he had also known immediately 
that the coup was not military.

The static had since been reversed, and Llorens cited Channel 36 and Radio 
Globo Honduras as evidence that "there is opposition press out there." He 
then chided the delegates that "I mean, you want to be fair"-by which he 
intended not fairness in reporting but fairness in acknowledging the 
existence of at least two anti-coup media outlets.

The US embassy's role in the dissemination of information had meanwh ile 
been covered earlier that morning with Henshaw, whose announcement that 
"we've been reporting for weeks" on violent police repression in Honduras 
led to the following dialogue with Maria Robinson of Global Exchange:

ROBINSON: You're reporting to who?
HENSHAW: To the State Department.
ROBINSON: Oh, so internally.
HENSHAW: That's what we do.
ROBINSON: Because it [the report] wasn't up on the website.
HENSHAW: We don't put our reports on the web.

Llorens expressed a different interpretation of embassy policy when Judy 
Ancel later asked him about information on current human rights violations:

LLORENS: It's on the web page, isn't it?

Ancel stressed that it was not and that she had spoken with a previous 
audience of Llorens' who reported that he had expressed the same shock the 
week before that the reports were not online. Llorens threatened another 
embassy employee that "they better be there; I really mean it," and promised 
that we would be able to view them online prior to exiting the building. 
Possibly for good measure, the ambassador emphasized that he knew the 
Honduran police were arresting people without warrants, beating them, and 
then quickly releasing them so as to eliminate evidence.

The elimination of evidence again surfaced as a theme when Llorens requested 
that certain contents of this morning's meeting not be published on the 
internet, apparently as an indication of the level of confidence the 
ambassador enjoyed with us. He later reformed the request, perhaps in 
deference to the earlier discussion of freedom of the press, and consented 
that the meeting's contents were allowed moderate exposure on the internet 
"but I don't want to see it, you know, picked up in China." I would thus 
appeal to the Chinese not to pick up the fact that the Global Exchange 
delegation did not view any online human rights reports prior to exiting the 
US embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Appointed by George W. Bush, Ambassador Llorens appears to have adopted the 
Bush-era reliance on comedy and incorrect verb tenses in the forging of 
diplomatic relations, such as in the following discussion with Allan Fisher 
this morning:

FISHER: Did you meet with [Honduran] military leaders before the coup?
LLORENS: Yes, we do. We have contact.
FISHER: So you knew about the coup, or had an inkling?
LLORENS (laughs): No, no, not really.

Further humor occurred when Andr?s Conteris asked whether it was four or 
five diplomatic visas that the US had revoked from the Honduran coup regime 
and Llorens chuckled: "I think it's four."

Near the conclusion of the meeting, Llorens reminded us that social justice 
is a great thing and implied that he had chosen to speak to us intimately 
rather than as a public official delivering official information. One of his 
intimate observations had been that a person could spend years building up a 
reputation and then destroy it in a minute, a reference to a coup official 
who had demonstrated considerable bravery in the 1980s but had recently had 
his diplomatic visa revoked by the US. It appears that Llorens' own 
reputation has not undergone any fundamental change, as he was President 
Bush's National Security Advisor on Latin America during the 2002 coup 
against Venezuelan President Hugo Ch?vez.


Full report of the Global Exchange Aug 7-15, 2009 delegation to be released 
Aug 18, 2009