Johann Hari: The Other 9/11 Has Returned to Stalk Latin America
[Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. In 2007 Amnesty International named him Newspaper Journalist of the Year. In 2008 he became the youngest person ever to win Britain's leading award for political writing, the Orwell Prize.]
The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stalk Latin America. On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest. They ordered him to get up and marched him onto a military plane. They dumped him in his pyjamas on a landing strip in Costa Rica and told him never to return to the country that freely chose him as their head of state.
Back home, the generals locked down the phone networks, the internet, and international TV channels, and announced their people were in charge now. Only sweet, empty music plays on the radio. Government ministers have been arrested and beaten. If you leave your home after 9pm, the population have been told, you risk being shot. Tanks and tear-gas are ranged against the protesters who have thronged onto the streets.
For the people of Latin America, this is a replay of their September 11th. On that day in Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende -- a peaceful democratic socialist who was steadily redistributing wealth to the poor majority -- was bombed from office and forced to commit suicide. He was replaced by a self-described "fascist," General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to "disappear" tens of thousands of innocent people. The coup was plotted in Washington D.C., by Henry Kissinger.
The official excuse for killing Chilean democracy was that Allende was a "communist." He was not. In fact, he was killed because he was threatening the interests of US and Chilean mega-corporations by shifting the country's wealth and land from them to its own people. When Salvador Allende's widow died last week, she seemed like a symbol from another age -- and then, a few days later, the coup came back.
Honduras is a small country in Central America with only seven million inhabitants, but it has been embarked on a programme of growing democracy of its own. In 2005, Zelaya ran promising to help the country's poor majority -- and he kept his word. He increased the minimum wage by 60 percent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and "the rich must pay their share."...
Read entire article at Huffington Post
The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stalk Latin America. On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest. They ordered him to get up and marched him onto a military plane. They dumped him in his pyjamas on a landing strip in Costa Rica and told him never to return to the country that freely chose him as their head of state.
Back home, the generals locked down the phone networks, the internet, and international TV channels, and announced their people were in charge now. Only sweet, empty music plays on the radio. Government ministers have been arrested and beaten. If you leave your home after 9pm, the population have been told, you risk being shot. Tanks and tear-gas are ranged against the protesters who have thronged onto the streets.
For the people of Latin America, this is a replay of their September 11th. On that day in Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende -- a peaceful democratic socialist who was steadily redistributing wealth to the poor majority -- was bombed from office and forced to commit suicide. He was replaced by a self-described "fascist," General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to "disappear" tens of thousands of innocent people. The coup was plotted in Washington D.C., by Henry Kissinger.
The official excuse for killing Chilean democracy was that Allende was a "communist." He was not. In fact, he was killed because he was threatening the interests of US and Chilean mega-corporations by shifting the country's wealth and land from them to its own people. When Salvador Allende's widow died last week, she seemed like a symbol from another age -- and then, a few days later, the coup came back.
Honduras is a small country in Central America with only seven million inhabitants, but it has been embarked on a programme of growing democracy of its own. In 2005, Zelaya ran promising to help the country's poor majority -- and he kept his word. He increased the minimum wage by 60 percent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and "the rich must pay their share."...