Empire Entropy

How How How Honduras

Obama [meeting last wednesday with Chilean president Bachelet] did manage a chuckle at U.S. expense — over the old joke that there’s never been a coup in the United States because it has no American Embassy.

The Honduran military is a farm team of the Pentagon. Its ranks, from private to general, are trained, equipped and advised by Uncle Sam. In recent times, Washington has organized it into death squads to keep down the population of leftists in central America.
On Sunday, the Honduran army overthrew the country’s democratic government, sent the elected president packing in his pyjamas, and disappeared the foreign minister, among other outrages.
Sunday was supposed to be the day for a national referendum to create a new constitution emphasizing human and social rights. A few days earlier U.S, ambassador Hugo Llorens opined that "we can't have a constitution that allows the 'people' to elect members of the supreme court and allows the 'people' to be involved in government."
The coup was immediately condemned by the European Union, the UN and every other country in the western hemisphere. Yes, every other country but the United States. Here, the Obama administration merely noted its “concern” and advised “calm.”
Speaking from Costa Rica, where he had been dumped by the plotters, Manuel Zelaya, the legit president of Honduras, said he interpreted Washington’s weaseling as support for the coup.
Finding itself utterly isolated on the fascist flank of the diplomatic front, the Obama administration began urging negotiations, presumably between the plotters and their targets, and then let the word out that it, in fact, favored restoring Zelaya to office. By monday, Obama and Clinton were finally declaring the coup “illegal,” an obvious fact that the rest of the world had instantly grasped on news of the event.
The interesting questions are whether Washington was in on the coup, and if it wasn’t, why didn’t it have the juice to thwart it? Another even more interesting question is whether some cabal in the bowels of the national security apparat had pulled it off to set up or embarrass Obama in one way or another?
In any event, Honduras is a lose-lose for the empire. Either it underlines to the already alienated Latinos that we’re still up to our old tricks, or it advertises to the world that the Shock and Awe Imperium can no longer expect obedience from even its lowliest satraps.