Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in New York on April 20, 2016. She won the state's primary with nearly 58 percent of the vote. Photo from Facebook

Did Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton do enough to address the removal of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya when she was Secretary of State in 2009? Mohawk artist and poet Alex Jacobs looks at the issue:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presidential candidate had to answer to her role in the “military coup” that ousted freely elected President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Clinton denied it was a military coup although the U.N. and rest of the world said it was illegal including her own embassy staff in Honduras. Clinton’s session with the New York Daily News Editorial Board did not receive all that media attention that Bernie Sanders received for his “ambush” interview. Except for Democracy Now correspondent Juan Gonzales who posted a story on Clinton’s Q&A for the New York Daily News with attention paid on the Honduras coup, violence in Central America and the women and children fleeing the narco-violence only to be rounded up and deported back to the violence. The gangs force families to work with them by threatening their children and they often end up “enslaving” them, which is a more correct term than “recruiting.”

This has been going in the USA’s back yard since Honduras was declared the first “banana Republic” in 1904 with the U.S. sending in troops several times between 1903 and 1925. It is the poorest country in Central America and the gap between rich and poor has consistently risen except for a time in the 50’s when workers were allowed to unionize. In 1963 a democratically elected President was overthrown in a military coup, 10 years after a similar CIA-backed coup deposed the freely elected President in Guatemala. Ronald Reagan upped the ante by supporting the CIA’s work with the Contras fighting the Russian-supported Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Next door violent wars raged in El Salvador and Guatemala and thousands would flee the violence north to Mexico, USA and Canada. That trend has only gotten worse with the failed War on Drugs and the potential failure of the narco-state that Mexico has become. Thousands of Central American women and children flooded the US border, only to have many of them deported back to the narco-gang violence that is terrorizing this country which is now one of the most violent in the world.

Get the Story:
Alex Jacobs: Hillary Clinton, the Honduras Coup and Globalization (Indian Country Today 4/28)

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