Obama admin. backed 2009 military coup in Honduras removing democratically elected Pres. Zelaya who had sought to raise minimum wage in Honduras. Big business didn’t want that. Obama and Hillary backed business interests preventing return of Zelaya–Huffington Post, 9/2009…Added: Increase of Honduran misery caused by Obama admin. is partly responsible for masses of Hondurans flooding US borders in recent years-Consortium News, Joseph Nevins, 10/31/2016
9/7/2009, “The Minimum Wage and the Coup in Honduras,” Huffington Post, Robert Naiman, updated 5/25/2011
“The coup in Honduras–and the at best grudging and vacillating support in Washington for the restoration of President Zelaya—has thrown into stark relief a fundamental fault line in Latin America and a moral black hole in U.S. policy toward the region. What is the minimum wage which a worker shall be paid for a day’s labor?…The Washington Post noted in mid-July [2009], “To many poor Hondurans, deposed president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya was a trailblazing ally who scrapped school tuitions, raised the minimum wage and took on big business."
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Added:
“U.S. policy in Honduras, particularly during the Obama administration, is directly responsible for part of the immigration crisis now gripping the U.S., argues Joseph Nevins.” Article originally published 10/31/2016:
6/21/18, “How US Policy in Honduras Set the Stage for Today’s Mass Migration,” Consortium News, Joseph Nevins (Article originally published 10/31/2016)
“Central American migrants–particularly unaccompanied minors-are again crossing the U.S.-Mexico boundary in large numbers.
Under the Obama administration In 2014, more than 68,000 unaccompanied Central American children were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico boundary. There were more than 60,000 in 2016.
The mainstream narrative often reduces the causes of migration to factors unfolding in migrants’ home countries. In reality, migration is often a manifestation of a profoundly unequal and exploitative relationship between migrant-sending countries and countries of destination [ie, the US].
Understanding this is vital to making immigration policy more effective and ethical.
Through my research on immigration and border policing, I have learned a lot about these dynamics. One example involves relations between Honduras and the United States.
U.S. Roots of Honduran Emigration…
U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace.”
As a result, the Caribbean coast “became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.”
By 1914, U.S. banana interests owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land. These holdings grew through the 1920s to such an extent that, as LaFeber asserts, Honduran peasants “had no hope of access to their nation’s good soil.” Over a few decades, U.S. capital also came to dominate the country’s banking and mining sectors, a process facilitated by the weak state of Honduras’ domestic business sector. This was coupled with direct U.S. political and military interventions to protect U.S. interests in 1907 and 1911.
Such developments made Honduras’ ruling class dependent on Washington for support. A central component of this ruling class was and remains the Honduran military. By the mid-1960s it had become, in LaFeber’s words, the country’s “most developed political institution,” – one that Washington played a key role in shaping.
The Reagan Era
This was especially the case during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. At that time, U.S. political and military policy was so influential that many referred to the Central American country as the “U.S.S. Honduras” and the Pentagon Republic.
As part of its effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua and “roll back” the region’s leftist movements, the Reagan administration “temporarily” stationed several hundred U.S. soldiers in Honduras. Moreover, it trained and sustained Nicaragua’s “contra” rebels on Honduran soil, while greatly increasing military aid and arm sales to the country.
The Reagan years also saw the construction of numerous joint Honduran-U.S. military bases and installations. Such moves greatly strengthened the militarization of Honduran society. In turn, political repression rose. There was a dramatic increase in the number of political assassinations, “disappearances” and illegal detentions.
The Reagan administration also played a big role in restructuring the Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms, with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak social safety net.
These decades of U.S. involvement in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which began to markedly increase in the 1990s.
In the post-Reagan era, Honduras remained a country scarred by a heavy-handed military, significant human rights abuses and pervasive poverty. Still, liberalizing tendencies of successive governments and grassroots pressure provided openings for democratic forces.
They contributed, for example, to the election of Manuel Zelaya, a liberal reformist, as president in 2006. He led on progressive measures such as raising the minimum wage. He also tried to organize a plebiscite to allow for a constituent assembly to replace the country’s constitution, which had been written during a military government. However, these efforts incurred the ire of the country’s oligarchy, leading to his overthrow by the military in June 2009.
Post-coup Honduras
The 2009 coup, more than any other development, explains the increase in Honduran migration across the southern U.S. border in the last few years. The Obama administration played an important role in these developments. Although it officially decried Zelaya’s ouster, it equivocated on whether or not it constituted a coup, which would have required the U.S. to stop sending most aid to the country.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, [Mrs.] Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.
Strong military ties between the U.S. and Honduras persist: several hundred U.S. troops are stationed at Soto Cano Air Base (formerly Palmerola) in the name of fighting the drug war and providing humanitarian aid.
Since the coup, writes historian Dana Frank, “a series of corrupt administrations has unleashed open criminal control of Honduras, from top to bottom of the government.”
Organized crime, drug traffickers and the country’s police heavily overlap. Impunity reigns in a country with frequent politically-motivated killings. It is the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists, according to Global Witness, an international nongovernmental organization.
Although its once sky-high murder rate has declined, the continuing exodus of many youth demonstrates that violent gangs still plague urban neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, post-coup governments have intensified an increasingly unregulated, “free market” form of capitalism that makes life unworkable for many. Government spending on health and education, for example, has declined in Honduras.
Meanwhile, the country’s poverty rate has risen markedly. These contribute to the growing pressures that push many people to migrate, raising ethical questions about the responsibility of the United States toward those now fleeing from the ravages U.S. policy has helped to produce.”
“This article was originally published on Oct. 31, 2016 on The Conversation.
Joseph Nevins received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include socioterritorial boundaries and mobility, violence and inequality, and political ecology; he has conducted research in East Timor, Mexico and the United States-Mexico border region.”
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Among comments to Consortium News article:
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Honduras is property of US oligarchs:
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Added:
Honduras minimum wage is $1.80 per hour as of 2013. This guarantees an endless flow of docile cheap labor to the US:
2013, “Honduras rises the national minimum wage,” countryeconomy.com
“In 2013, the national minimum wage in Honduras remained fixed at 248.1 € [$289 US] per month, that is 2,977 euros per year, taking into account 12 payments per year.” That’s $72 per week, $14.40 per day, $1.80 per hour. Honduras population is 9,112, 867.
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Added: Sept. 2009 article about US influence in Honduras:
Added: Sept. 2009 article about US influence in Honduras:
…………
9/7/2009, “The Minimum Wage and the Coup in Honduras,” Huffington Post, Robert Naiman, updated 5/25/2011
“The coup in Honduras — and the at best grudging and vacillating support in Washington for the restoration of President Zelaya — has thrown into stark relief a fundamental fault line in Latin America and a moral black hole in U.S. policy toward the region.
What is the minimum wage which a worker shall be paid for a day’s labor?
Supporters of the coup have tried to trick Americans into believing that President Zelaya was ousted by the Honduran military because he broke the law. But this is nonsense. A Honduran bishop told Catholic News Service,
“Some say Manuel Zelaya threatened democracy by proposing a constitutional assembly. But the poor of Honduras know that Zelaya raised the minimum salary. That’s what they understand. They know he defended the poor by sharing money with mayors and small towns. That’s why they are out in the streets closing highways and protesting (to demand Zelaya’s return)”
This is why the greedy, self-absorbed Honduran elite turned against President Zelaya: because he was pursuing policies in the interests of the majority. The Washington Post noted in mid-July,
“To many poor Hondurans, deposed president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya was a trailblazing ally who scrapped school tuitions, raised the minimum wage and took on big business."
In a statement condemning support for the coup by U.S. business groups, the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation expressed its concern that under the coup regime, there are
“worsening working conditions, and in particular at efforts to claw back a wage increase ordered by President Zelaya six months ago in order to reflect the increased cost of food and other essentials. In reality the increased wage barely covered 90% of basic food needs and less than a third of a living wage covering basic needs such as food, rent, transport, education, and medical care.”
It’s not just in Honduras that raising the minimum wage provoked a coup. In reporting about efforts by Haitian lawmakers this week to raise the minimum wage in Haiti, AP noted:
“Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in 2004, in part after business owners angered by his approval of an increased minimum wage organized opposition against him.”
This May [2009], the Haitian Parliament approved a proposal to triple the minimum wage to about $5 a day. But President Preval rejected this, saying
“the increase should omit workers at factories producing garments for export. Preval said those workers should receive an increase to about $3."
What’s the argument in Haiti against raising the minimum wage?
“The debate has fueled unrest across the impoverished Caribbean nation, with some critics arguing that an increase would hurt plans to fight widespread unemployment by creating jobs in factories that produce clothing for export to the United States."
There are the magic words I search for in these articles, often buried at the bottom: “United States.”
So, the argument is being made that Haiti can’t afford to raise the minimum wage for workers in the export sector to $5 a day, because if they did Americans would buy clothes and shoes produced in some other countries.
Let me underline this, dear reader. You, as an American consumer, you are being invoked in Haiti as the reason that the minimum wage cannot be raised to $5 a day.
Of course this is nonsense. The overwhelming majority of Americans, along with the overwhelming majority of Haitians and Hondurans, would be absolutely delighted if Haitian and Honduran workers producing clothes for the U.S. market would be paid more.
Labor costs are a small fraction of the prices that consumers face.
Wages are so low because that yields even more profits for those who already have more money than they can ever spend; the low wage floor is being determined by government policy in Washington, Haiti, Honduras, and elsewhere, not by the desires of consumers. No magic formula of economics determines the minimum wage that can be sustained in Haiti and Honduras. At the margin – whether the minimum wage shall be $3 a day or $5 a day in the export sector in Haiti — it is determined politically.
If you say that the leverage of the U.S. consumer market should be used to support higher wages for poor workers in poor countries, rather than the opposite, you’re likely to be told that this is not allowed. This leverage has been allocated to something else. The power of the U.S. market can only be used for things like forcing developing countries to enforce the patents, trademarks, and copyrights of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and Hollywood.
Indeed, if you say that we should be supporting efforts to raise the minimum wage in Honduras and Haiti, you’ll likely to be accused of “trying to impose American values.” But this is a baldfaced lie, the twisted-mirror image of the truth. The majority of Hondurans and the majority of Haitians want the wages of workers producing for export to the United States to be raised. Far from imposing “American values,” in Honduras and Haiti, we’re imposing Wall Street values, every day, through U.S. government policy, against the wishes and interests of the majority of the population, there and here.
And by its failure to help effectively Latin American efforts to restore President Zelaya, the Obama Administration is helping to drive down the minimum wage in Honduras, Haiti, and throughout the world. And the reason that the Obama Administration is, de facto, taking the side of the corrupt and greedy ruling elite in Honduras, is that, as usual, U.S. foreign policy is being determined by Corporate America, not Main Street America, because the power and efforts of Main Street America to affect U.S. foreign policy in Honduras — the U.S. labor movement and its friends, basically – is too weak, compared to the infrastructure and efforts of Corporate America’s actions to shape U.S. policy….
So, the next time some lying moron invokes “economics” to “explain” to you that the wages of impoverished third world workers who produce for the U.S. market cannot be raised, remember the coup in Honduras, and how Washington sat on its hands while a democratically elected government was punished by greedy elites with a military coup for trying to raise the minimum wage.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/the-minimum-wage-and-the_b_254023.html
…………………
Added:
4/5/2016, “How Hillary Clinton Militarized US Policy in Honduras,” The Nation, by Tim Shorrock
“She used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.”
“In 2012, as Honduras descended into social and political chaos in the wake of a US-sanctioned military coup, the civilian aid arm of Hillary Clinton’s State Department spent over $26 million on a propaganda program aimed at encouraging anti-violence “alliances” between Honduran community groups and local police and security forces.
The program, called “Honduras Convive,” was designed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to reduce violent crimes in a country that had simultaneously become the murder capital of the world and a staging ground for one of the largest deployments of US Special Operations forces outside of the Middle East.”…
…………………“The coup in Honduras — and the at best grudging and vacillating support in Washington for the restoration of President Zelaya — has thrown into stark relief a fundamental fault line in Latin America and a moral black hole in U.S. policy toward the region.
What is the minimum wage which a worker shall be paid for a day’s labor?
Supporters of the coup have tried to trick Americans into believing that President Zelaya was ousted by the Honduran military because he broke the law. But this is nonsense. A Honduran bishop told Catholic News Service,
“Some say Manuel Zelaya threatened democracy by proposing a constitutional assembly. But the poor of Honduras know that Zelaya raised the minimum salary. That’s what they understand. They know he defended the poor by sharing money with mayors and small towns. That’s why they are out in the streets closing highways and protesting (to demand Zelaya’s return)”
This is why the greedy, self-absorbed Honduran elite turned against President Zelaya: because he was pursuing policies in the interests of the majority. The Washington Post noted in mid-July,
“To many poor Hondurans, deposed president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya was a trailblazing ally who scrapped school tuitions, raised the minimum wage and took on big business."
In a statement condemning support for the coup by U.S. business groups, the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation expressed its concern that under the coup regime, there are
“worsening working conditions, and in particular at efforts to claw back a wage increase ordered by President Zelaya six months ago in order to reflect the increased cost of food and other essentials. In reality the increased wage barely covered 90% of basic food needs and less than a third of a living wage covering basic needs such as food, rent, transport, education, and medical care.”
It’s not just in Honduras that raising the minimum wage provoked a coup. In reporting about efforts by Haitian lawmakers this week to raise the minimum wage in Haiti, AP noted:
“Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in 2004, in part after business owners angered by his approval of an increased minimum wage organized opposition against him.”
This May [2009], the Haitian Parliament approved a proposal to triple the minimum wage to about $5 a day. But President Preval rejected this, saying
“the increase should omit workers at factories producing garments for export. Preval said those workers should receive an increase to about $3."
What’s the argument in Haiti against raising the minimum wage?
“The debate has fueled unrest across the impoverished Caribbean nation, with some critics arguing that an increase would hurt plans to fight widespread unemployment by creating jobs in factories that produce clothing for export to the United States."
There are the magic words I search for in these articles, often buried at the bottom: “United States.”
So, the argument is being made that Haiti can’t afford to raise the minimum wage for workers in the export sector to $5 a day, because if they did Americans would buy clothes and shoes produced in some other countries.
Let me underline this, dear reader. You, as an American consumer, you are being invoked in Haiti as the reason that the minimum wage cannot be raised to $5 a day.
Of course this is nonsense. The overwhelming majority of Americans, along with the overwhelming majority of Haitians and Hondurans, would be absolutely delighted if Haitian and Honduran workers producing clothes for the U.S. market would be paid more.
Labor costs are a small fraction of the prices that consumers face.
Wages are so low because that yields even more profits for those who already have more money than they can ever spend; the low wage floor is being determined by government policy in Washington, Haiti, Honduras, and elsewhere, not by the desires of consumers. No magic formula of economics determines the minimum wage that can be sustained in Haiti and Honduras. At the margin – whether the minimum wage shall be $3 a day or $5 a day in the export sector in Haiti — it is determined politically.
If you say that the leverage of the U.S. consumer market should be used to support higher wages for poor workers in poor countries, rather than the opposite, you’re likely to be told that this is not allowed. This leverage has been allocated to something else. The power of the U.S. market can only be used for things like forcing developing countries to enforce the patents, trademarks, and copyrights of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and Hollywood.
Indeed, if you say that we should be supporting efforts to raise the minimum wage in Honduras and Haiti, you’ll likely to be accused of “trying to impose American values.” But this is a baldfaced lie, the twisted-mirror image of the truth. The majority of Hondurans and the majority of Haitians want the wages of workers producing for export to the United States to be raised. Far from imposing “American values,” in Honduras and Haiti, we’re imposing Wall Street values, every day, through U.S. government policy, against the wishes and interests of the majority of the population, there and here.
And by its failure to help effectively Latin American efforts to restore President Zelaya, the Obama Administration is helping to drive down the minimum wage in Honduras, Haiti, and throughout the world. And the reason that the Obama Administration is, de facto, taking the side of the corrupt and greedy ruling elite in Honduras, is that, as usual, U.S. foreign policy is being determined by Corporate America, not Main Street America, because the power and efforts of Main Street America to affect U.S. foreign policy in Honduras — the U.S. labor movement and its friends, basically – is too weak, compared to the infrastructure and efforts of Corporate America’s actions to shape U.S. policy….
So, the next time some lying moron invokes “economics” to “explain” to you that the wages of impoverished third world workers who produce for the U.S. market cannot be raised, remember the coup in Honduras, and how Washington sat on its hands while a democratically elected government was punished by greedy elites with a military coup for trying to raise the minimum wage.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/the-minimum-wage-and-the_b_254023.html
…………………
Added:
4/5/2016, “How Hillary Clinton Militarized US Policy in Honduras,” The Nation, by Tim Shorrock
“She used a State Department office closely involved with counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to aid the coup regime in Honduras.”
“In 2012, as Honduras descended into social and political chaos in the wake of a US-sanctioned military coup, the civilian aid arm of Hillary Clinton’s State Department spent over $26 million on a propaganda program aimed at encouraging anti-violence “alliances” between Honduran community groups and local police and security forces.
The program, called “Honduras Convive,” was designed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to reduce violent crimes in a country that had simultaneously become the murder capital of the world and a staging ground for one of the largest deployments of US Special Operations forces outside of the Middle East.”…
Comment: US oligarchs enforce global slave wages which guarantee misery and an endless flow of cheap labor across the open southern US border. If wages were allowed to rise in Honduras and other slave wage countries, US employers would have to raise wages here. Americans are global slaves. We aren't allowed to set our wages.
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