Otto Reich and the Honduran Coup D’Etat, now in Spanish

Otto Reich and the Honduran Coup D’Etat: The Provocateur, his Protégé and the Toppling of a President is now available in Spanish, here and here.  Thank you Manuel Talens, Paloma Valverde and Atenea Acevedo, all members of the wonderful and amazing Tlaxcala translation collective.

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.

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.

Naked gun in Honduras

This report appears to have been culled by M.H. Lagarde, at Cambios En Cuba, from Aporrea and possibly other sources.  English translation by Machetera.

Honduran Putschists tell Telesur and VTV: “Get Out of Here, There’s Nothing Here to Report”

The employees of the de facto government in Honduras who arrested the journalists from Telesur and the Venezuelan state television network VTV on Saturday night told them not to go back to the hotel where they were staying, but to go directly to the airport since in Honduras “there’s nothing to report.”  They also argued, in a menacing tone, that these violations were the fault of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

The Costa Rican wake

Great news!  The very talented journalist and translator, Diana Barahona, has finally started her own blog.  Here’s an excerpt from her post from yesterday, which included translated excerpts from Hugo Chávez’s press conference on Friday:

“…what happened in Costa Rica was a miscarriage, it was a miscarriage, and there it is, buried. Nevertheless, since the miscarriage is buried, Washington’s horrible miscarriage, a tiny little candle was surely left there: a commission discussing I-don’t-know-what, until the candle burns out; they are at a wake for the burial in Costa Rica. But the precedent is nefarious; the precedent is nefarious; a putschist, a usurper received by a democratic president.”

Go read the rest, now, here.

Mel Zelaya’s road to Damascus

Manuel (Mel) Zelaya’s Conversion

Luis Hernández Navarro – La Jornada, May 30, 2009

Translated by Machetera

Manuel (Mel) Zelaya is more than 6 feet tall, has a thick black mustache, wears a wide-brimmed hat and cowboy boots.  A son of landowners, he studied civil engineering but never graduated.  Before he got involved in politics, he spent his time as a successful timber merchant and rancher.  In 1987 he was named a director of the Honduran Council for Private Enterprise (COHEP) as well as president of the timber merchant’s guild.

In 1970, Mel entered the Honduran Liberal Party (PLH), an organization with a wide and well-documented anti-communist trajectory.  He was elected to congress a number of times and from there went on to various public jobs.  The liberals and the Honduran National Party (PNH) are the two main parties among the five that exist in Honduras.  However, when it comes to governing, there’s not a lot of difference between the two.  “The only thing that differentiates them,” says a workers representative, ” is the color of their flags: one is blue and the other is red and white.”

Alpha 66 and Miami on the job in Tegucigalpa

From Cubadebate:

• There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton was the one who solicited the interview with Globovision.
• There’s no doubt that all the questions were planned.
• There’s no doubt that the time and the place of the meeting (immediately after her meeting with President Manuel Zelaya) were part of the message.
• There’s no doubt that this interview is part of the campaign against Venezuela described by Angel Palacios in the following article:

The Campaign of Hatred Against Venezuela

By Angel Palacios/Honduras Resiste

Translation: Machetera

Along Morazán Boulevard, the “Zona Rosa” of the Honduran capital where you need to have money…and plenty of it, to live, the newspaper “El Heraldo” has plastered posters at the stoplights carrying the most important news according to the paper’s editorial line.  They say: “Chávez planned an aerial provocation.”

Nothing new.  The campaign to demonize Venezuela, President Chávez and the Bolivarian process has been a tonic for the usurper government and its allies since weeks before the coup d’etat.  On the radio and tv broadcasts controlled by the putschists, it’s normal to hear Chávez and Venezuela mentioned as associated with supposed actions of interference, invasion, attacks, conspiracies.

Reporters for the Truth deconstructs Hillary’s Busy Day

From Aporrea.org - translation by Machetera

July 8, 2009 – In a communique addressed to our editorial staff, the organization “Journalists for the Truth” denounced the intentions behind yesterday’s interview of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Globovision mafia representatives.

The note states:

“The interview between the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and representatives of the privately held Globovision TV news channel provides evidence that this station is a political partisan of the ultra-rightwing opposition to the government of President Hugo Chávez Frías, and the only one recognized by Barack Obama.

It is notable that the State Department is receiving spokesmen from a television channel that is undergoing administrative review and sanctions in our country, for its presumed violations of our laws and our Constitution.

Obama’s theatre of impartiality

This has gone completely unreported in the English language press, as far as Machetera can see.

With an exquisite sense of timing and the sure knowledge that few non-Latin Americans would understand the implications (and therefore bother to report on them), directly after pummeling Honduran president Mel Zelaya into a “dialogue” with the people who shoved him out of Honduras at gunpoint, the U.S. Secretary of State went straight to a meeting yesterday afternoon with two of the most repugnant people in Latin America: Alberto Federico Ravell, director of coupmongering Globovision, and Leopoldo Castillo, who has a program on Globovision but is more notorious for his service to rightwing deathsquads during the 1980′s, as Venezuela’s ambassador to El Salvador.

Greg McDonald translated the following report which appeared at Cubadebate, based on information reported by Luigino Bracci Roa at YVKE Mundial, as well as reporting from ABN.

The North American Twin Track: Clinton with the Venezuelan Ultra-Rightwing

Clinton together with Alberto Federico Ravell and former Venezuelan Ambassador to El Salvador, Leopoldo Castillo – Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Obama’s non-non-interference pledge

Spanish translation by Atenea Acevedo available here.

Obama’s Non-non Interference Pledge

With apologies to Gertrude Stein.

Oh, the irony.

Today, at the “New Economic School” in Moscow, Russia, which President Obama himself pointed out was “founded with Western support,” Obama recurred to a phrase we’ve come to hear from him with some frequency: “Let me be clear.”

Now let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven’t always done what we should have on that front. Even as we meet here today, America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies. We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not.

But the President’s actions are anything but clear.  If people are still confused about how to “read” Obama, Machetera has a suggestion. Watch what he does, not what he says.