Hillary's state department backed the assassination of human rights activists in Honduras

Monday, October 10, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Honduras, human rights activists

---

(NaturalNews) The Middle East has exploded one country at a time and the great powers are the closest they've been to war since the last global conflagration, thanks to the foreign policy "leadership" of the Democratic presidential nominee.

But, when Hillary Clinton was Obama's secretary of state, the Middle East wasn't her only massive policy bungle. She should also be made to answer for the gross mismanagement of events that took place in Honduras during her tenure at the State Department, including the assassination of one of the country's most prominent human rights activists.

As reported by the Huffington Post, the trouble in Honduras began when the military staged a coup in 2009, kidnapping the country's democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya and flying him out of the country in his pajamas. Immediately, several organizations including the Organization of American States and the European Union began calling for Zelaya's reinstatement, but Clinton waffled and wavered, eventually backing the coup.

What 'Hard Choices'?

Initially, she tried to claim that what happened was the military, the country's judiciary and its legislative branches were attempting to "follow the law," even though it's difficult to see how kidnapping the president in the middle of the night and shipping him off is lawful.

What's more, the rest of the world outside of Hillary's incompetent State Dept. certainly saw the act as unlawful, the Huffington Post noted. And indeed, Clinton's director of policy planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter, advised her to "find that [the] coup was a 'military coup' under U.S. law and revoke the visas of more de facto regime members."

In addition, Slaughter voiced concern in the same email that "high level people" from the business and non-governmental organization communities were beginning to form the impression that the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department weren't as committed to constitutional democracy as both claimed publicly.

Finally, even the U.S. Embassy in Honduras made the determination "that there is no doubt" that the country's military, National Congress and Supreme Court all conspired in late June "in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup..."

But what did Secretary of State Clinton do? Only everything she could to ensure that the coup succeeded, consolidated and became legitimized – even as the military began cracking down violently on political opposition and the media.

One of those caught up in the violence, as Al Jazeera TV reported, was noted human rights activist Berta Caceres. She had singled out Clinton as backing the coup and claimed in 2013 that she would be killed when the coup government determined it was time. Caceres was shot and killed in her home in March.

Record of abject failure

In her book, Hard Choices, Clinton describes how she essentially helped keep the democratically elected president out of office, despite the fact that most of the rest of the world demanded it.

"In subsequent days [following the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere...We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot."

Even she must have thought that to be a damaging admission of her incompetence because, as HuffPo noted, that quote above is from her original hard-cover book; it was removed from the subsequent paperback edition.

The "elections" she claimed to have helped arrange did not satisfy nearly everyone else. The European Union, the OAS and the Carder Center all refused to send observers.

Clinton's time at the State Department was notable only in the number of failures she presided over, not successes. And again, as you can see, people died as a result.

Sources:

NationalSecurity.news

HuffingtonPost.com

WikiLeaks.org

NYTimes.com

BlacklistedNews.com