{"id":257221,"date":"2024-03-18T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=257221"},"modified":"2024-03-15T08:42:32","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T08:42:32","slug":"haiti-honduras-and-us-hegemony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/haiti-honduras-and-us-hegemony\/","title":{"rendered":"Haiti, Honduras, and US Hegemony"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

14 Mar 2024<\/em> – Haiti and Honduras have made headlines in the last few weeks. Honduras\u2019 former president, Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez, was just convicted in a US court of drug trafficking. He faces life in prison. Haiti is a nation without a government, as armed groups have united against the US-backed, unelected Prime Minister installed after the assassination of their president in 2021. In both cases, what is missing from mainstream news coverage is the role of US intervention that brought them to this point.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism,\u201d University of British Columbia Professor Jemima Pierre, a Haitian American scholar, explained on the Democracy Now! news hour.<\/a> In her NACLA<\/span> Report article headlined, Haiti as Empire\u2019s Laboratory,<\/a> she describes her home country as \u201cthe site of the longest and most brutal neocolonial experiment in the modern world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haiti<\/a> was the world\u2019s first Black republic, founded in 1804 following a slave revolt. France demanded Haiti pay reparations, for the loss of slave labor when Haiti\u2019s enslaved people freed themselves. For more than a century, Haiti\u2019s debt payments to France, then later to the US, hobbled its economy. The United States refused to recognize Haiti for decades, until 1862, fearful that the example of a slave uprising would inspire the same in the US.<\/p>\n

In 1915, the US invaded Haiti, occupying it until 1934. The U.S. also backed the brutal Duvalier dictatorships from 1957 to 1986. Jean-Bertand Aristide became Haiti\u2019s first democratically-elected president in 1991, only to be ousted in a violent coup eight months later. The coup was supported by President George H.W. Bush and later by President Bill Clinton. Public pressure forced Clinton to allow Aristide\u2019s return in 1994, to finish his presidential term in 1996. Aristide was reelected in 2001.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2004\u2026the U.S., France and Canada got together and backed a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat against the country\u2019s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,\u201d Jemima Pierre continued. \u201cThe U.S. Marines\u2026put him on a plane with his security officials, his wife and aide, and flew them to the Central African Republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Democracy Now! traveled to C.A.R. in 2004<\/a> covering a delegation led by Transafrica founder Randall Robinson and U.S. Congressmember Maxine Waters who defied US policy and escorted the Aristides back to the Western Hemisphere. Aristide confirmed to Democracy Now! then that he had been ousted in a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat backed by the United States. Aristide then went to live in exile in South Africa for the next seven years.<\/p>\n

In response to allegations that gangs are currently controlling Haiti, Professor Pierre said, \u201cThe so-called gang violence is actually not the main problem in Haiti. The main problem in Haiti is the constant interference of the international community, and the international community here is, very explicitly, the U.S., France and Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Biden administration is reportedly now considering the transfer of Haitian asylum seekers to the controversial U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba \u2013 a repeat of some of the worst U.S. policies in its long history of exploitation of Haitians.<\/p>\n

Honduras,<\/a> meanwhile, currently has a democratically-elected president, Xiomara Castro. Her husband, Manuel \u201cMel\u201d Zelaya, was elected president in 2006, then ousted in a US-backed coup in 2009. In the following years, Honduras descended into a narco-state, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee violence, seeking asylum in the United States and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

In 2013, Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez was elected president amidst allegations of campaign finance violations, then again in 2017 in an election widely considered fraudulent. Shortly thereafter, his brother Juan Antonio Hern\u00e1ndez was arrested in Miami for drug trafficking. Then, following Xiomara Castro\u2019s election, Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez himself was arrested and extradited to the US for cocaine trafficking. On March 8th, he was convicted in US federal court, and is currently awaiting sentencing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe evidence was chilling,\u201d history professor Dana Frank, who was in the courtroom, said on Democracy Now!<\/a> \u201cThis litany of assassinations of prosecutors, assassinations of journalists, corruption of the police, the military, politicians, the president, his brother, you name it. And it was like the curtain was drawn back, and you could see the day-to-day workings of this tremendous violent, corrupt mechanism that was the Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez administration\u2026this was what happened after the 2009 coup that opened the door for the destruction of the rule of law in Honduras.\u201d<\/p>\n

US intervention in Haiti, Honduras and other countries is one of the principal drivers of people seeking asylum in the United States, as they flee violence, poverty and persecution at home. This point is almost never mentioned in the US press. To understand and ultimately solve the \u201cimmigration crisis,\u201d Americans need to understand what their government has long done in their name, with their tax dollars\u2013arming and propping up brutal regimes abroad.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 Mar 2024 – Honduras\u2019 former president, Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez, was just convicted in a US court of drug trafficking and faces life in prison. Haiti is a nation without a government, as armed groups have united against the US-backed, unelected Prime Minister installed after the assassination of their president in 2021. In both cases, what is missing from mainstream news coverage is the role of US intervention that brought them to this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":257222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[2093,975,1126,1635,1050,541,2137,70],"class_list":["post-257221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","tag-central-america","tag-haiti","tag-hegemony","tag-honduras","tag-imperialism","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-south-america","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257223,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257221\/revisions\/257223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}