Otto Reich and the Honduran Coup D’Etat: The Provocateur, his Protege, and the Toppling of a President – Part One

The story of Otto Reich’s role in fomenting the June coup d’etat in Honduras is not a brief one.  This report will be posted over two days.

OTTO REICH AND THE HONDURAN COUP D’ETAT:
The Provocateur, his Protégé, and the Toppling of a President (Part One)

By Machetera*

The very same day that the coup d’etat in Honduras began, in an emergency session of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington D.C., Roy Chaderton, the Venezuelan ambassador to the OAS, spoke with a simmering fury as he looked directly at Hector Morales, the U.S. Ambassador to the OAS.

“There’s a person who’s been very important within U.S. diplomacy, one who has re-connected with old friends and colleagues and helped encourage the coup perpetrators,” he said.

“The gentleman’s name is Otto Reich, former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs during the government of George [W.] Bush. We in Venezuela have suffered this man, as the U.S. Ambassador in Venezuela, as an interventionist, we suffered him later in his position as Assistant Secretary of State…we had the First Reich, later, the Second Reich, now unfortunately we’re facing the Third Reich, moving within the Latin American ambit through an NGO [non-governmental organization], to fan the flames of the coup.”

Following Chaderton’s furious denunciation, Reich penned a strange non mea-culpa opinion piece which the Miami Herald obligingly printed, complete with Reich’s deliberate misspellings of Chaderton’s name.  He said that he was not the coup’s “architect,” which is quite some distance from a total denial.

Carlos Alberto Montaner would like some attention please

…for his role in the Honduran coup d’etat.  It wasn’t all Otto Reich, he wants you to know!

Naturally, like Reich, he goes about telling you this in sort of a backwards kind of way.  In his column that ought to be found at El Nuevo Herald, but isn’t (hmm, maybe there actually is an MI5 report floating around out there, d’ya think?…), Montaner the scribbling bomber complains that Havana is after him once again, trying to “assassinate his voice” (from your lips to God’s ears, Carlos) by circulating the completely false rumor that there is a secret report prepared by a country very close to the United States explaining how he and Reich collaborated with the putschists in Tegucigalpa.  Not true!  Not true in the least!  He’s never even met Micheletti!  Billy Joya either! (A pity Pedro Magdiel Muñoz can’t say the same.)

“Why do they lie?” says Montaner.

“Very simple: propaganda, disinformation, the “specialties” of totalitarian governments.  In English, there’s a very graphic expression for a certain kind of extreme defamation: character assassination.  It consists of the methodical destruction of the image of a person until they’re turned into a repugnant figure with whom nobody wants to be associated.”

Are your ears burning yet, Otto?  Otto Reich and Associates?  Yeah, you.  Pendejos.

Billy Joya cranks up the killing machine in Honduras

Monday, July 27, 2009

Infiltrations, Murders and Attacks on the Honduran People

“Billy Joya is running state security now.” — Carlos H. Reyes

By Dick Emanuelsson, for ARGENPRESS.info

Translation: Machetera

A bomb exploded today at one of Honduras’s most combative unions, at the same time that three agents from the DNIC (National Office of Criminal Investigation) were captured by those attending the burial of the young brickmason Pedro Magdiel Muñoz Salvador.

Otto Reich’s propaganda factory still churning out the goods

There’s something about a U.S. produced op-ed piece of propaganda.  It’s hard to explain.  Partly it’s the syntax.  The organization.  The language.  The style.  And partly it’s that Machetera, with her PhD in Public Opinion, has some personal experience with the industry and can spot an op-ed written by a p.r. hack and passed off as the original creation of a high government figure, a mile away.

One thing she can assure you is that the Op-Ed that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal under Roberto Micheletti’s signature was definitely not written by him. 

Refried cold-war rhetoric on the Colombian menu

The translating factory has been idled this week while Machetera was chasing a very interesting story related to Otto Reich and the Honduran coup d’etat – more on that later.  But this morning, as she was checking to see where Waldo Mel Zelaya might be and whether Romeo Vasquez Velasquez had managed to kill him, as promised, she ran across this piece from Aporrea, picked up from Venezuelan TV.

First of all, not that one should judge a person by his picture (Machetera certainly never would) but doesn’t this guy just sort of ooze “little prickness?”

He is Álvaro Uribe’s foreign minister.

Honduran Defense Ministry’s list of drug traffickers links Micheletti to the Cali cartel

Honduran Defense Ministry’s List of Drug Traffickers Links Micheletti to the Cali Cartel

Jean-Guy Allard – Cubadebate

Translation: Machetera

The name of the leader of the Honduran coup d’etat, Roberto Micheletti, appears on a long undated list of drug traffickers drawn up by a senior official in the Honduran Ministry of Defense and Public Security, showing his relations with the Cali Cartel, the Colombian drug trafficking network.

The document, signed by infantry Colonel Rene Adalberto Paz Alfaro on Ministry letterhead shows ROBERTO MICHELLETI BAIN (misspelled), number SN-FF. AA. 060 – with a connection to the Cali Cartel, and under the column headed “Location,” the word “Yoro.”

Zero hour in Honduras

The gifted anthropologist and linguist, Adrienne Pine, has translated the latest dispatch from the Honduran Minister of Culture, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle.  Pine has been doing a lot of fine translations lately on events in Honduras, but her blog has many other interesting items too – check it out here.

The U.S. and the Coup: A Real Change of Course or a Just a Farce?

Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle

Translation by Adrienne Pine

Kudos to the European Union, whom history will recognize for its consistent posture in suspending aid since the second day. We are moved by the solidarity of Mexico and of course that of all Latin America and the UN. Never before in history have all the nations of the world supported an overthrown government. Nonetheless, it escapes no one that the possible solution or the degeneration of the current predicament in Honduras depends on the policy of the United States, the only power with the material instruments to overcome the stubborn madness of the usurpers, if they wanted to use them. It would seem that a certain ambivalence is at play.

Get your Honduran coup sponsorship here

Even though it’s very short, Machetera doesn’t have time right this second to translate this whole article, but basically, today LibreRed published two interesting documents from Honduras.  One is a letter from Honduran thug in chief Roberto Micheletti, to General Romeo Vazquez Velazquez reminding him about the mission to take place on June 28.  He says that “Hondurans who want to change our constitution don’t deserve to be in this country.”  The letter is dated June 26.

But the more interesting letter (for Machetera anyway), is the one from the Tegucigalpa Chamber of Commerce, also dated June 26, asking its members to help support “a civic and p.r. strategy”.  The price: $1000 to $3000 USD depending on whether you wanted the gold, silver or bronze coup d’etat sponsorship.

Polls or weapons?

Polls or Weapons?

Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, Honduran Minister of Culture

Translation: Machetera, with editing by Manuel Talens

The coup d’etat has not divided Hondurans, Mel even less so.  Rather, the increasingly concentrated and exclusionary process that has polarized us for half a century is to blame.  And President Zelaya’s proposal to take on the structural contradictions of this model and become aware of and involved in the effective remediation of misery, revealed the fault lines between the segments of the population who have benefited and been alienated by such a process (the various shades of the bourgeoisie) and, on the other hand, the increasingly frustrated marginalized majority, along with socially and ethically committed professionals and organized workers who are able to envision a more just order of things. In the news that reaches me from Honduras, two things stand out: confusion between all sectors, and indignation.

First of all, the profound confusion of the petty bourgeoisie, which has fallen into the trap of media manipulation, convinced that they are supporting a move “against communism and dictatorship.”  Poor things.  I don’t know if they’re redeemable.

Honduras coupsters’ big fat Cuban exile family

The Cuban Gestapo Mafia in Honduras

By Dr. Néstor García Iturbe
Translation: Machetera

When analyzing the events that resulted in the sly thuggery which took place in Honduras, we can hardly fail to be surprised by the number of Cuban exiles who are part of what’s been called the Gestapo mafia, and appear to be involved in the terrible events in which the will of the Honduran people has been short-circuited.

According to the criteria of these people, who acted in coordination with the extreme U.S. right wing in the Pentagon and the CIA, it was necessary to impede at all costs any further movement by Zelaya’s government toward the left, since that represented a danger to the “National Security of the United States.”  The fastest and most effective remedy at that time was the coup d’etat.

The journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner and the former Undersecretary of State in the George W. Bush government, Otto Reich, were participants in the initial coordination of the armed action.  Both were in constant communication with the coup plotters, the first from Miami and the latter from Panama.