I for one followed the recent blogs on class warfare and the oligarchy with keen interest - and it is obvious to me that class struggle and toppling the oligarchy is the foundation of current events in Honduras.  I would think, then, that there would be a keener interest among folks here in the US, who are concerned with increasing wealth of the upper 10%, in the developing crises in Honduras.  There ought to be some camaraderie between US resistors of Oligarchy and their Latin American counterparts, yes?  Could it be that serious solidarity is shattered by the Right's serious propanda?

FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has a very provocative column up on their web site right now: Rerun in Honduras: Coup pretext recycled from Brazil '64. by Mark Cook.  The sameness of this military coup 49 years ago to Honduras is remarkable.  Not only in the pretext for the coup, but in the MSM response to both. 

The pretext for the Honduran coup d'état is nothing new. In a remarkable replay, bogus charges that the corporate media in the U.S. and Europe have repeated endlessly without attempting to substantiate--that Honduran president Manuel Zelaya sought to amend the country's constitution to run for another term--are virtually identical to the sham justification for the 1964 coup against Brazilian president João Goulart.

The Brazilian coup, depicted at the time as a victory for constitutional democracy, kicked off a series of extreme right-wing military coups against democratically elected governments throughout the Southern Cone of Latin America and beyond. Brazil was turned into a base for subversion of neighboring democratic governments (National Security Archive, 6/20/02); Goulart and a previous Brazilian president, Juscelino Kubitschek, both died in 1976 in incidents that have since been attributed to the multinational assassination program Operation Condor (Folha, 1/27/08; Carta Maior, 7/17/08). Given that history, the strength and unanimity of Latin American and international condemnation of the Honduran coup--despite a worldwide media disinformation campaign against Zelaya--is hardly surprising.

On March 31, 1964, the democratic government of Brazil's Goulart, a wealthy rancher hated by big business for having dramatically raised the minimum wage, was overthrown in a coup d'état organized by ultra-rightist elements in Brazil's military and strongly backed by the U.S. government. For decades, U.S. officials denied involvement in the coup, but in 2004 the nongovernmental National Security Archive (3/31/04) published newly declassified documents revealing President Lyndon Johnson's personal involvement and a massive U.S. military and CIA commitment.

The second graf, about Brazil kicking off a series of military coups in other Latin American state, of course underscores the reasons why many scholars and statesmen are worried about Honduras.  And this concern no-doubt explains, to a large degree, the multilateral rejection that the Honduran coup has generated.

But what about us? Do we believe that a grassroots movement designed to check the trend of more wealth traveling to fewer individuals is possible?  When I think about that what echos in my head is all that rhetoric about "redistribution of wealth" i.e. socialism that has come to our ears recently. What guarantee do we have here in the US that an effective movement to transfer wealth to the working class would bet met less brutally than it is in Latin America?

Ich bin ein Honduraner, folks. (my German is just as bad as JFK's)