The AFP published an article today that troubles me. I’m jaded already with AFP and Reuters imprinting their ideology on the news about Honduras, but there are some facts they let slip that could show what this summit was all about.

Honduras was not invited to the summit. And, that the organizers of the summit should snub Honduras because Honduras is not a member of the OAS is telling. The summit was held to create an alternative to the OAS, a regional “alliance that would exclude the United States and Canada”, AFP reported Mexican President Felipe Calderón as saying. So if it is an alternative to the OAS, why wasn’t Honduras included? Why should it matter if Honduras isn’t a member of the OAS any more?

But even more telling is this: the next summit will be held in Caracas, Venezuela. Smell the sulfur already? The Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas is another alliance created by Hugo Chavez to “liberate us from the yoke of the dollar”, and the “imperialist project that oppresses us and leads us to barbarism.” This new “alliance” seems to be going in the same direction.

The AFP reported Raul Castro as “one of the first to laud the new regional bloc as a historic move toward ‘the constitution of a purely Latin American and Caribbean regional organization.’ ” That AFP should only report host Felipe Calderon’s and Castro’s comments show their leanings a little too clearly.

Calderón’s quote seems very anti-US as well. What do you think? I would shudder to see Honduran president Porfirio Lobo go to the Caracas summit next year, almost as if he were going to Berlin during the Third Reich.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe today became the first president to visit Honduras since Porfirio Lobo took office. During his visit, Honduras and Colombia signed an accord for cooperation in national security, specifically in dealing with narcotics, drug traffic, and kidnapping. Colombia and Uribe’s success in this area is something we sorely need. This is also a slap in the face for narcoterrorists and the governments who harbor them.

I suspect Uribe wanted to challenge Hugo Chavez subtly, whose friendship with the Colombian guerrilla and willingness to use them as a proxy to weaken the US and its allies has resulted in many Venezuelan aircraft laden with cocaine crossing Honduran airspace.

Uribe praised the willingness of Hondurans to act with independence, in a nod to Micheletti’s government, although neither Lobo nor Uribe mentioned him explicitly.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, image: César Bojorquez, CC license

Not content to shut down RCTV on the public airwaves when their broadcasting license expired, by quietly ignoring their repeated attempts at renewing it, Chavez has forced cable TV companies to stop carrying the channel as well. The following CNN report talks about it, in a balanced tone they denied Honduras, when president Micheletti temporarily shut down radio stations were openly transmitting hateful calls for violence and anti-Semitic messages.

I am against any government meddling with the press, either to force them to broadcast the government agenda, or even pay them to do the same. Both carry too much power for the media to be able to remain untainted by them. Furthermore, the government should have the authority to control the public airspace, but not private Cable TV.

The laws Chavez has written in Venezuela allow him to control the media in an almost Orwellian way. Chavez is once more confirming his path to totalitarian dictatorship, twisting the laws he himself put in place during his rule by decree.

Zelaya's Resignation Letter

I suppose it was in the works a week or so before Zelaya “rescued” the ballots amigo Hugo flew to him. The media talk those days was that Zelaya was becoming mentally incompetent to govern, and that Congress was considering asking him to resign on those grounds. The letter above focuses on his creating national conflict and his eroding of his political base before mentioning his health.

Zelaya had already violated article 239 in private by saying that in 2010 Honduras would be governed by a Constitutional assembly with the intent on changing the protected reelection clauses, and on Thursday June 25, the date of this letter, publicly. That day, while confiscating the poll material, he said to Telesur reporters that in 2010 a Constitutional Assembly would govern Honduras, but did not mention reelection. Everyone knew his true ideas, the media complained loudly, but didn’t have Zelaya on the record admitting reelection was his intent.

But months before, he had published retroactively dated articles in the national Gazette calling for the a “referendum” to call for a National Constitutional Assembly. All Hugo Chavez’s ALBA nations had tried, and some succeeded, in creating those assemblies and rewriting their constitutions. When the Honduran Supreme Court pointed out to him that only Congress could call for a referendum, and ruled it unconstitutional, he changed the word to “survey” and published it again. That was the first public proof of his intent, but only lawyers read the Gazette. The Supreme Court again ruled the survey unconstitutional. Some time after his article was published, the Supreme Court drafted a secret document, dated June 2, accusing Zelaya of treason, abuse of authority, usurpation of functions among other things.

After the ballot revolt on Thursday June 25, Zelaya fired the chief of the armed forces, and when Congress reinstated him on Friday, defied Congress and the Supreme Court. He called their opposition a coup, with a loud Hugo Chavez seeding the international media with the word “coup”. That night, June 26, there were already dozens of YouTube videos of Telesur coverage of a coup that did not exist. Zelaya hadn’t been deposed yet.

It seems the Congress and the Supreme Court thought they could convince Zelaya to relent, but when he plowed on, they changed strategy. Saturday, when Zelaya publicly stated that only God and the Virgin of Suyapa could stop the referendum, Congress and the Supreme Court declared the survey illegal again, and asked the people not to vote.

When Sunday June 28, the day of the survey/referendum, dawned, they arrested Zelaya based on Article 239. But since Congress had to rush to action, and already had that letter handy, I think they gave that letter for Zelaya to sign before he was flown out of the country. He had no choice but to sign it. Coercion is the only thing that could make it invalid

On the way to out though, looking for a country to grant him asylum, he must have talked to Hugo Chávez, who probably saw that Zelaya in Venezuela or Nicaragua wouldn’t garner public support, and sent him to Costa Rica instead, because he could count on Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, a closet supporter of constitutional reform, to harbor him. He had a sympathetic CNN team waiting for him in San Jose, baited to make him the victim in the eyes of the world. Especially jarring was the line, much parroted later on, that he was only conducting a non-binding survey.

With the image of Zelaya in pajamas beside Arias, Chávez even succeeded in fooling Obama to give a shoot-from-the-hip condemnation of the removal of Zelaya, which plagued everyone until last week. His ambassador, and advisers knew better. Thomas Shannon had been in Honduras during that final week. Obama must reign his tongue…he has gotten into trouble several times already by trusting his own opinion before he is briefed. Or maybe he was briefed…years ago he had written a strong condemnation about the US involvement in Grenada.

On Tuesday June 30th, the Court made the secret document public, a description of it can now be read on their website in their press release, (Google translation) explaining their legal grounds for removing him. Could this document have been drafted later and dated retroactively? Maybe, but given all the legal process the press release describes, I find it very unnecessary and unlikely.

In short, I think the letter was not fake, but might be legally void because of coercion.

Manuel Zelaya clarified that he is not renouncing returning to the presidency. He said that he is renouncing returning to the presidency through a US-backed accord. But what other option to returning to the presidency does he have? The people won’t overthrow the election as he seems to hope, they want the crisis to end. The accord, even though it was very unlikely gamble, had a better chance of reinstating him than his apparent plans for electoral sabotage. Why is he giving up on the accords?

I have begun to suspect that Zelaya has no ulterior motive, but is genuinely confused, and that his chief financier and strategist, Hugo Chávez, has already given up on him. Chávez is currently more interested in fabricating threats nearer to home, claiming to fear US invasion through Colombia. What would motivate Colombia to invade Venezuela? What would motivate the US to start another war?

No one will invade Venezuela, Venezuela simply isn’t a credible threat, its economy is severely dependent on that of the US. Russia has no interest in war with the US; the threat exists only in Hugo Chavez’s rhetoric. Hugo Chavez’s paranoia is enormous, but it might be false; it’s an enormously convenient cover for his failures at home. I think we are witnessing a rhetorical eclipse of the truth. I have a repulsive mental picture of an enormous tongue covering the sun, engulfing Venezuela in darkness. But the rest of the world has light.

Why won’t the left, intellectual as they are, read their history books and realize that unbridled socialism, just like unbridled capitalism, leads to corruption and disaster? The advocates of capitalism grew out of a love of freedom, and efficient use of land, labor and capital. The advocates of socialism grew out of the idea of class struggles and concern for social justice. But guess who have a better grasp of economics?

Social justice and economics need not be enemies; why can’t we have both? How can we have freedom and justice? Through work, democracies free of corruption, and education, the best way to eliminate class boundaries. Without class boundaries, there are no class struggles, and marxism has no reason to exist. We don’t need a government to permanently take care of the poor as a social class, but instead to help individuals realize their potential to escape poverty, taking their families with them.

We don’t need to attack the rich to help the poor, but to involve the rich in rescuing individual poor people, and creating workers who, through more valuable skills, will produce more valuable labor, and thus will be paid more, and will no longer be poor. Scholarships, not hand-outs. Entrepreneurship, not syndicates. The investment in even one person will benefit everyone in the long run. I am a living example.

My parents escaped poverty, in Honduras, through hard work and education. Work is not enough; millions emigrate to the US to escape poverty through hard work, but fail, because of their ignorance. In Honduras or anywhere else, hard work, education and freedom are the recipe for lasting justice and peace. They are the wiser choice over government ownership of land, labor and wealth.

But because this is not happening today, and billions of people are poor, uneducated, and worse, abandoned, third-world democracies are vulnerable. Unscrupulous leaders can rise, promising freedom for the them, but in the end removing freedom from everyone. As long as the poor are a majority this will continue to occur. Let’s lift the third world out of the hands of tyrants, one family at a time.

Voice of America news is reporting Hugo Chávez’s plans for a nuclear partnership between Iran and Venezuela. Venezuela has large reserves of unmined uranium, while Iran has advanced its nuclear program to a degree where developing a nuclear weapon is feasible in the short term.

What would Chávez do with a nuclear weapon? I doubt he would use it. First he would claim that Venezuela has the right to nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and then he would try to spread nuclear power to all his satellite ALBA states.

After a while of this, he would claim that an arsenal of nuclear weapons is a necessary deterrent to prevent a US invasion. The endgame, a world in which everyone has nuclear capabilities, and are only one psychopath away from a disaster greater than Osama’s terrorist attacks we remember today. The fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could befall Miami or Bogotá?

Anti-ballistic missile shields would have to be built in the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico, and…Colombia? I can just see the face of Hugo Chávez should that occur. But an anti-ballistic missile site anywhere outside the US is a political nightmare that invites attacks.

Image by Sprol, used with a Creative Commons license.

This editorial is an interesting look at Chavismo’s influence in the US.

This is a video about the opinions of a few people at yesterday’s march against Chávez in Monterrey, Mexico.

The Monterrey mayor did not authorize a large scale demonstration against Chavez today. Nevertheless a small group of Venezuelans and Hondurans braved the rain to meet in front of the Colombian consulate to show their rejection of Hugo Chavez.

Sadly our group leader never answered our emails and failed to show up today. Nevertheless we took pictures, signed collected emails and chatted a while. I’ll be editing a video later today.

I’m marching today at the international anti-Chávez demonstrations. Look up your city at nomaschavez.org, and join us. If it were not for Chávez, Zelaya would still be president, curiously. It was his rhetoric the provoked the opposition to do what they did. When it was happening I though Chávez was doing it on purpose with Zelaya to provoke a self-coup.

If it were not for Chávez, Obama would have been more successful in forging friendship with Latin America. If it were not for Chávez, Fidel and Ahmadinejad would be friendless. If it were not for Chávez, there would be freedom of speech in Venezuela. El Salvador and Nicaragua would not have former guerilla organizations, the FMLN and the Sandinistas ruling them.

So I’m marching against him.

I doubt there will be many people in Monterrey’s march, especially since there has been a lot of rain lately. But I’m marching anyway.

The way forward is clear. Hondurans need to tighten their belts and vote en masse. Once the election is over, I doubt the US will make another Taiwan out of us. But if it does, so be it.

The alternative, would be a socialist Honduras. If this occurs, I’d probably renounce my Honduran citizenship and become a Mexican. I wouldn’t seek, I think, to immigrate to the US, I’d probably never get over the anger enough to recite the pledge of allegiance with a clear conscience.