Beuabien Plugs for Grandpa

Zelaya returned to Honduras and Jason Beaubien was spinning for his new, fiesty grandpa. Robert Siegel asks Beaubien, "Tell us a bit about Zelaya's politics and what led to his ouster?"

The version I transcribed Monday evening about 8pm:

Mentioned Zelaya shifting taxes away from the poor and onto the rich - and

"what really was the final straw was that he was attempting to put together a referendum that would have allowed him or someone else to run for president for a second term and that is when he was arrested. On the morning of June 28th soldiers burst into his bedroom, guns drawn, threw him on to a plane in his pajamas and dumped him on the airport in Costa Rica so that's basically what led to his ouster. Immediately after that, the next in line constitutionally was elevated to the president, and that's Roberto Micheletti..."

The transcript on the NPR site looked different and so I listened to it. It had indeed changed - I guess Micheletti wasn't the only one discombobulated by Zelaya's return! Beaubien again notes Zelaya's leftist politics, indicates that he shifted resources to the poor, and

"his opponents say he was basically trying to put in a Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan style socialist state. And on the morning of June 28, he was about to hold a referendum on whether or not the president could run for a second term."

One can debate about the legality of Zelaya's attempts to push a non-binding referendum - but the referendum would not have allowed anyone to run for a second term, it only would have allowed people to vote on whether a call for a constituent assembly should be made. You can read the text of the referendum here and get a moderate's reasonable view of the issue.

NPR Rediscovers Honduras and Gets a Big, Feisty, Grandfather of a Man

In spite of NPR's magical map of Central America, they do know where Honduras is - and, like Lanny cha-ching Davis, they certainly know how to spread all the coup government's talking points. The report on Wednesday's ATC was purportedly meant to illustrate the economic toll that sanctions against the coup regime are having in Honduras, but after a cursory look at that, NPR's Jason Beaubien features a glowing assessment of the coup president and claims, contrary to fact, that the failure to resolve the crisis in Honduras is the fault of both the coup government and the ousted Zelaya government.

Here's Beaubien introducing Mr. Coup himself, Micheletti:

"The de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, is a big, feisty, grandfather of a man with a crushing handshake."

And here's Beaubien summing up Grandpa's explanation for being a coup tyrant:

"Micheletti insists that this was not a coup because Zelaya had violated the constitution. Micheletti was next in line to the presidency and he was quickly sworn into office. He says Zelaya was being controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who was plotting to impose a communist dictatorship in Honduras."

No factual attention is paid to these outright lies - debunked here and here. Instead Beaubien counters them with the standard, lazy "he said - she said" relativism: "Zelaya denies this." In fact that's the extent of the "other side" that NPR gives in this piece. That may be all we hear from opponents of the coup regime, but Beaubien is not about to deprive Grandpa his microphone. Micheletti gets quite a bit of airtime to make these laughable claims:

"The Zelaya people, they are our brother, our sisters, you know. We love them. But we're going to let them to rule this country because they believe in communist and we are not. We are democratic people and we're going to sustain our democracy."

Finally Beaubien just makes up the idea that "both sides" are to blame for the conflict dragging on:

"...the Zelaya and the Micheletti camps. Two groups that appear unable to reach common ground....in every social conflict, eventually the parties come to a point where they sit down and work out their differences. The problem in Honduras...the parties aren't yet ready to do that."

This last claim is simply a lie, since the Zelaya camp agreed to the proposals for resolving the conflict as set out by Arias over the summer. Something NPR conveniently failed to report on back when it happened.

Beaubien's piece may be a mish-mash of distortions and outright lies, but he can take consolation in the fact that Grandpa will be very proud of him.

Honduras? Never Heard of It

It's really quite telling how drastically different NPR's coverage of Iran is from it's non-coverage of the Honduran coup. Do a search on NPR's site of Honduras coup and see what's been offered on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and the two Weekend Edition shows in the last week:

• A July 11th ATC sympathetic piece on coup supporters in Miami (which I critiqued here)

However search Ahmadinejad on NPR's site and see what the past week has featured:

• July 22 ATC on deepening divisions, demonstrations, and state violence against protesters
• July 21 ME on challenges to the election from former leaders

I don't have any complaint with NPR giving coverage to events in Iran, but the non-coverage of Honduras is stunning. After all, this past week has been very eventful in Honduras with ousted President Zelaya accepting a mediated solution only to have the coup government reject it.

NPR's non-coverage ignores Zelaya's compromise and is helpful in covering up the supportive role that the US military is continuing to offer the Honduran military in spite of official US denunciation of the coup. It also allows NPR to ignore the increasing repression of the coup government and the role of graduates from the US School of Coups in the overthrow of the Honduran president.

The BS Side of the Story

Gad! Greg Allen was in Miami and figured he'd just turn on the microphone and let the sons and daughters of the Honduran oligarchy have a go at it. All opinions aired were pro-coup and anti-Zelaya. Here are a sample:

• "What happened in Honduras was not a coup."
• "...it was not a coup; it was a constitutional action to prevent the president from trying to seek reelection indefinitely like other presidents in Latin America."
• "we obey the law and we can not allow the international community to tell Hondurans what to do - imposing the return of former president Zelaya."
• "...the only people that actually know what the internal problems of the country are are those people who know. This president [Zelaya, not Bush] is a criminal, has been a criminal, and has only made bad things to our country and government."

To put a professional sheen on this rant-fest Allen turned to Marifeli Pérez-Stable of Florida International University (and the Miami Herald). She made sure to ignore the legal issues of the coup and instead hammered on merging Zelaya with Chavez of Venezuela:

"In Honduras the Chavez model has been stopped. I really think that it has been stopped. It's not going to fly."

The problem with this piece by Allen is not that he talked with and even aired some of the rather contorted viewpoints of these Hondurans in Miami - but there was no informative context whatsoever. I kept wondering about the class makeup of the people in this interview and wondering how many of them (or their parents) were active in the right-wing human rights abuses of the 1980s. I assumed they were connected to the very rich in Honduras, but Allen's report never spelled this out.

Irony (and History) Is Dead at NPR

(graphic from Borev.net)

On Saturday's ATC Guy Raz held a friendly with John Negroponte to see what he thought about the US joining the UN Human Rights Council. Negroponte told Raz

• "No matter how repugnant some of these organizations or behaviors might be, we're probably better served in an international organization by participating..."
• "I think the leadership...are from countries that have good human rights records..."

Raz added his own skepticism noting that it barely approved monitors for Darfur and "it's already withdrawn human rights monitors from places like Cuba and Belarus. Can the council really be taken seriously if, as some have argued, many of it's decisions are simply political?"

Has Raz ever heard of irony, or for that matter Google? All one has to do it Google "Negroponte human rights" and voila! you get a whole assortment of interesting information about Negroponte's lifelong journey through the dark side. During the report Raz tells us that John Negroponte was "former US Ambassador to Iraq and UN, former director of National Intelligence, and most recently Deputy Secretary of State under the Bush Administration" but - dang! - he somehow failed to mention Negroponte's gig in Honduras from 1981 to 1985. That's odd because there's a lot of information out there about it. Let's see he's got his own special file at the National Security Archive, a nice long newspaper article in the Baltimore Sun, a virtual dossier of articles at In These Times, attention from The Nation and The Progressive, and even a film about his time there.

But really, who needs to know that Negroponte was running cover for an infamous Honduran death squad (Battalion 316) and paling around with death squad leader General Gustavo Alvarez when all he's on to talk about is the effectiveness of a UN human rights council? Besides that was so long ago, and after his tenure in Iraq there's no indication that the US had created death squads like the ones Negroponte helped operate in Honduras...or is there?