EcoLogics

Updated on 24 November 2009 (for updates please scroll to the bottom of this post)

In one of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels, the narrator explains that the gringos have even taken the water from one of Colombia’s bays. Last week, the U.S. and Colombia signed an agreement that suggests that the gringos are now also after Colombia’s—and perhaps Venezuela’s—land and skies. The signing of the agreement confirms the news, first reported in this blog on 3 July 2009, that the U.S. military will use, and almost certainly acquire operational control over as many as seven Colombian bases (it seems that the number is going up every other month; although Colombia’s own Cambio magazine reported it could be five, international media said at first it was three, then four, then five, and now it is ‘at least’ seven). The bases in question range from the Palanquero Air Force Base near Bogotá to Colombia’s main naval bases on the Pacific and Caribbean. Apparently the until recently secret agreement also includes a clause that allows the U.S. military free use of all of Colombia’s civilian airports.

Alas, the move has required an intricate constitutional hopscotch on Uribe’s part. According to Colombian laws, Congress needs to approve new treaties and any agreement involving the movement of foreign troops through the country. Aware no doubt that members of Colombia’s legislative branch might not approve of U.S. use of Colombia’s bases, Uribe has come up with a legal fiction that is as complex as it is misleading. His lawyers (or the ones provided by the U.S. embassy in Bogotá) have argued that, far from involving a new treaty, let alone the movement of foreign troops across Colombian territory, the ‘Complementary Agreement for Cooperation and Technical Assistance in Defense and Security’ with the United States is no more than a kind of supplement to three or more existing treaties. Aspects of each of these pre-existing treaties allegedly provide the ‘framework treaties’ (‘tratados marco’) with which to implement the new agreement. Of course, the new U.S. bases are not being described as new bases, let alone as U.S. bases. Given that nothing has really changed, or so Uribe’s argument goes, the president of Colombia is entitled to use his powers as the director of Colombia’s foreign policy to give the U.S. military (and its ominous civilian contractors) what is, in effect, free use of Colombia’s military infrastructure.

We owe it to President Lula of Brazil to have cut through this patently absurd argument in the course of the historic UNASUR meeting that took place in Argentina’s San Carlos de Bariloche on 28 August 2009. After Uribe claimed that the agreement with the U.S. did not constitute a significant change to existing policy, and that the U.S. had had access to Colombian bases for decades, Lula posed the obvious question: if that was the case, why was any agreement whatsoever required with the U.S.?

These and other interventions during the UNASUR gathering revealed the extent to which, less than a year after arriving to power, the Obama-Clinton presidency has managed to do what no other U.S. government has done in the 180 or so years since most South American countries obtained their independence from Spain: to unite South American countries in condemning U.S. policy in the region. It was extraordinary to watch live on television (UNASUR had live TV coverage at the insistence of Uribe himself), how leader after leader stood up either to express doubts about, or even to flatly condemn the U.S. bases in Colombia. Even Perú’s President Alan García, the other major U.S. proxy in the continent, was forced to qualify his support for Uribe during the course of the televised meeting. One has to wonder, in this sense, who advised Uribe to insist on wall-to-wall TV coverage; perhaps Uribe is so used to having the Colombian media submit to his iron will that he never contemplated the possibility that Latin American leaders would be playing for rather different audiences.

As predicted by this blog, even before the agreement was formally signed, it was already providing further incentive for a beefing up of Colombia’s neighbours’ armed forces. In late July Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez went shopping for fighters and helicopters in Russia, and in September Brazil announced an agreement in principle to buy France’s Rafale fighters. For its part, Ecuador has accepted an offer by Venezuela to donate six of its older Mirage fighters to the Ecuadorean Air Force. While not all of the transactions can be attributed directly to the establishment of the U.S. bases in Colombia, there can be little doubt that the bases will fuel the concern of leaders throughout the region. Many will calculate that, at the very least, they must make it as difficult as possible for the U.S. (or its Colombian proxy) to launch the kind of strikes that Reagan launched against Libya in 1986. The hope must be that current or future U.S. leaders will hesitate to launch such attacks if there is a likelihood of U.S. casualties. Venezuela and Ecuador most also be hoping that, if Uribe knows that his neighbours can strike back at him, he may be less eager to follow the instructions of his U.S. masters.

Unfortunately, this means that the U.S. bases are already paying rich political dividends for the Obama-Clinton presidency: whether this was the plan or not, precious resources that Venezuelan and other regional leaders could have poured into improving the lot of the poor are being devoted to the acquisition of advanced weapons systems. It seems likely that, sooner or later, arms traders will succeed in tempting one or more regional leaders with multi-million dollar bribes of the kind that have made Britain’s BAE notorious. If or when this happens, then the right-wing opposition of Chávez and other progressive leaders in the continent will have their work cut out for them.

Asked in a recent BBC World Service interview what he thought of President Obama, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa politely suggested that Obama was a very nice man, but that he was not in control of the U.S. military ‘machine’ or of the CIA. EcoLogics suggests that Obama is as much in control of these as any other U.S. president has been (which is not to say that he is completely in control); when it comes to the United States, it has always been the case that perorations of democracy on the home front have tended to be flatly contradicted by policies vis-à-vis countries that the U.S. considers to be a part of its ‘sphere of interest’.

Obama confirmed this practice when he effectively reversed his policy vis-à-vis Colombia’s appalling human rights record. Before the elections, and in a speech given to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia on April 2nd, 2008, Obama said that he would ‘oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements’. Despite evidence provided by Human Rights Watch that Uribe’s government continues to tolerate, if not itself engage in murderous actions against left-wing activists, Obama now appears to have changed his mind about Colombia: in his remarks after a meeting earlier this year with Uribe, Obama was quoted as saying that

We discussed, most prominently, the interests of both countries in moving forward on a free trade agreement. This is something that has been discussed for quite some time. I have instructed Ambassador Kirk, our United States Trade Representative, to begin working closely with President Uribe’s team on how we can proceed on a free trade agreement. There are obvious difficulties involved in the process and there remains work to do, but I’m confident that ultimately we can strike a deal that is good for the people of Colombia and good for the people of the United States. […] I commended President Uribe on the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia and dealing with the killings of labor leaders there, and obviously we’ve seen a downward trajectory in the deaths of labor unions and we’ve seen improvements when it comes to prosecution of those who are carrying out these blatant human rights offenses.

Obama’s comments came hard on the heels of the news of the new ‘complementary’ agreement. We can only deduce that Obama’s increasingly complimentary disposition towards Uribe is a function of a quid-pro-quo involving the U.S. bases in Colombia.

Updates (most recent first)

24 November 2009: Anyone who has watched Uribe’s rise to power will know that he will stop at nothing—he even changed the constitution during his presidency to allow himself to get re-elected not once, but twice. The fruits of this change, which has involved political corruption of the crudest kind, are finally becoming evident to Colombians themselves. Uribe is now trying to put an end to Colombia’s centuries-old system of checks and balances by brow-beating the one institution that has refused to be cowed: the Supreme Court. After the court failed to rubber stamp Uribe’s choice for a prosecutor general, Uribe has engaged in a war of words with the leading supreme court judge, accusing him of lying. The equivalent in the United States would be for Obama to accuse the chief justice of lying, an act with the greatest political and constitutional consequences. What next? Will Uribe accuse supreme court president Augusto Ibañez of being a ‘terrorist’ and sick the paramilitaries on him? As noted by Human Rights Watch, it would not be the first time that the ruthless politician accuses his political opponents of being ‘terrorists’.

It seems that the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership in the Vatican has perfected a technique that we might describe, in the now seemingly ancient tradition of Marxist analysis, as ‘ideological inversion’. It involves turning history upside down, and politics inside out.

Just a few months after Rome’s man in Tegucigalpa, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, came out in favour of the US-supported coup that deposed the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, the good Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, has denounced what he describes as ‘political colonialism‘ in Africa.

Eh?

This blogger is left reeling by the historical revisionism, to not say contradiction which Ratzinger’s denunciation dissimulates. Even if we forget the Church’s own historical role in Latin America and in Africa itself, we cannot overlook the part that Ratzinger  played whilst he was the head of the modern version of the Holy Inquisition: between 1981 and 2005, Ratzinger was the ‘Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’. As this blog has documented in an analysis of Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga’s intervention in Honduran politics, Ratzinger made it his business to stamp out any hint of liberal, let alone liberation theology throughout the Church. During his pre-papal spell as the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was, in effect, the éminence grise of the Roman Catholic Right, and spent over 20 years pursuing anyone who dared to espouse left-wing, or even centre-left views within the Church. (Perhaps this is a good reason to refer to Ratzinger as ‘his Eminence’).

So it is richly ironic to hear the same man, clothed now in the garb of Pope Benedict XVI, denouncing ‘political colonialism’ and the spreading of what he describes, somewhat comically, as materialist ‘toxic spiritual rubbish’. How extraordinary that the man who has arguably done the most to undermine left-wing critiques of the consumer culture that took off during the Reagan and Thatcherite era is now preaching, albeit from a right-wing perspective, about the pitfalls of that selfsame culture!

That he should use some of the vocabulary that was once so maligned by his own office is particularly ironic. EcoLogics is reminded of a story that seems especially appropriate in these times when the Right is rediscovering the discourse of the Left. In the 1850s, Charles Nisard was an ‘under secretary’ of the French Ministry of Police charged with repressing the street-literature that the French authorities found subversive. This allowed him to amass a collection of the so-called ‘colportage’ books, which he evidently read rather assiduously. Indeed, he became so fascinated by them that he went on to publish one of the first studies about their use of the Parisian argot.

Ratzinger, like Nisard, is one of countless political figures who have done their best first to destroy, but then to redeploy so-called ’subversive’ discourses. So it is that we now have Pope Benedict XVI denouncing colonialism in Africa even as he himself prohibits the use of condoms in the same continent, and as his man in Honduras works with coup plotters to try to ensure that the left is banished for good from that country. The world goes round and round, does it not Joseph?

Updated 2 December 2009

Some news in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday.[...] The administration officials, who announced the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused. [...] “The emphasis will be on insuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent over overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations.

There is really not much to say beyond what this blogger wrote in a post published on February 6, and which was titled The Day that Obama’s Hope Died. Hillary Clinton, the head of the State Department, supported the Iraq War, and recently refused to describe the coup d’etat in Honduras as that: a coup. Why should we be reassured that people abducted by the CIA (or perhaps by a private contractor like Blackwater, now renamed as a ridiculous ‘Xe Services’) will escape torture, or as the NY Times has so often called it, ‘torment’?

No, this policy exists because it provides the U.S. government with a way of circumventing its own country’s legislation—legislation that was designed to prevent the illegal abduction and torture of people by the U.S. military, and secret services after the Vietnam and Nixon era excesses—excesses that now seem almost timid by comparison to what is happening today. The Obama policy makes a mockery of the notion of due process, and of the recent U.S. protestations over Scotland’s release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Then again, perhaps it is the other way: if a country feels it can kidnap and torture at will, then of course the head of its FBI would have opposed the application of due process in the Lockerbie case.

The confirmation that renditions will continue means that the slightly ridiculous Reagan era appellation ‘evil empire’ now actually applies to the U.S.. This regardless of the party in power, and the individual who sits in the Oval Office. Doubtless many good people in the U.S. are despairing in much the same way that many of us beyond the U.S. are; the fact nevertheless remains that the Obama administration has effectively sanctioned, and now almost certainly made permanent, the Bush-era authoritarianism. No wonder Obama does not want the U.S. equivalent of a Truth Commission.

How paradoxical—and how tragic—that Obama now inhabits almost exactly the same political place that Bush did: despite his far greater intelligence and worldliness, he too, is but a pawn of the forces that are desperately trying to maintain U.S. ascendancy by recourse to kidnapping and torture.

Update 2 December:  Obama is on course to be a one-term president

The above title would have been unthinkable even a few months ago. Our memories of the despair and desolation generated by the Bush-Cheney administration were still fresh, but rather more importantly, so were the Obama invocations of a new dawn of U.S. politics—this in both the domestic and the international scene. Alas, as early as the beginning of February 2009—some would argue long before—it began to be clear that there would not really be a regime change in what Hugo Chávez rightly describes as ‘el imperio’, the empire. In a post titled ‘Obama, Miliband, and Torture‘, this blog reported on the moves that were afoot in the new administration to quietly reintroduce extraordinary renditions and even the possibility of torture via the backdoor of the classification so used and abused by Bush-Cheney, enemy ‘non-combatants’ and ‘terrorists’. Another post titled ‘The Day that Obama’s Hope Died‘ documented the extent to which Obama had surrounded himself with a coterie of Clinton-era operatives, most of whom were and remain hard-core neoliberals, and political apparatchiks very much in the spell of the kind of corporate welfarism that has long dominated U.S. politics.

In these and other posts, EcoLogics suggested that Obama was thus in some respects a change for the worse: while Bush-Cheney was so obvious and unsubtle in his politics that you could see him coming a mile away, Obama-Clinton is far more astute and is better able to dissimulate the ongoing U.S. abuse of its power. Witness what happened in Honduras (a crass, but not unclever way of eliminating a Chávez ally in Central America), and what is happening now in Colombia. In both cases, we see a return to big stick diplomacy, covered by ambiguous U.S. policy statements in the public domain, and completely unambiguous politics of intervention within the countries themselves. This is precisely the kind of practice that I alluded when I suggested in this blog’s About page that ‘we may face a return to what is, in some respects at least, an older and more hegemonic modus operandi, in Gramsci’s sense of the term.’

The news that Obama is now set to send an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan even as he protests rather loudly that those self-same troops will start coming back in July 2011 confirms this point, albeit in a way that most probably signals the beginning of the end of Obama presidency. It may be argued that an army of occupation such as the U.S. has in Afghanistan can only negotiate its way out of conflict from a position of strength. But that position is undermined the moment it becomes clear that it is only a matter of time before domestic politics force that army to leave. The crude power of the Soviet army, unconstrained as it was by the niceties of public opinion, failed to put an end to the mullahs’ might in the 1970s and 80s. What on earth has persuaded Obama-Clinton that they can achieve a different outcome by undercutting themselves in the manner that they just have? If the war is morally bankrupt (which it is), and if it has thus far been fought on entirely the wrong military premises (which it has), America’s generals will now have to deal with the fact that the Taliban simply have sit back and wait for the marines to leave. On the home front, Obama’s political commanders will soon discover that this contradictory manoeuvre will satisfy neither the increasingly hysterical Republicans, nor all those on the political centre-right and centre-left who voted for Obama in order to effect regime. Obama has just opted for a policy which is the military anologon of his economic policy: in both cases, he has allowed himself to be persuaded by right-wing advisers to enact half-measures which will fail to secure political victory in the upcoming elections, as well as the military and economic fortunes of el imperio in the near future.

We don’t know—though as noted by critical commentators throughout Latin America, the initial silence of the Obama administration spoke louder than words, and now Hillary Clinton isn’t exactly busting a gut to pressure Micheletti and his cronies to reinstate Zelaya.

Here is an article by Nikolas Kozloff in Counterpunch that sheds light on one possible motivation for direct U.S. involvement in the Honduran coup (beyond the more traditional corporate motivations)

Zelaya, Negroponte and the Controversy at Soto Cano: The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

This blog recently praised Obama for his initial intervention in the wrongful arrest of Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates. Alas, in the end Obama felt compelled to engage in what amounted to a tactical retreat over the affair: the denunciation of the offending policeman was transformed into an opportunity to ‘drink a beer’ with him.

Earlier, this blog published a series of articles that chronicled another Obama retreat: in the days that followed the coup d’etat in Honduras, the Obama administration refused to recognise the event for what it was—a vintage coup on the part of Honduran oligarchy, led by a former member of congress turned dictator, Roberto Micheletti. As the leaders of Latin American countries took turns condemning the coup, a hitherto silent Obama was embarrassed into admitting that Zelaya was the rightful president, and that Zelaya should return to the presidency. Even after Obama accepted this, Hillary Clinton refused to call the coup a coup.

As noted in the post about the intervention of Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Zelaya’s return was blocked by Micheletti, his accomplices in the military, and the Honduran Roman Catholic Church. The last few weeks have seen a textbook example of hegemonic diplomacy: the U.S. agreed to let Óscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica, act as a mediator, and stood by as Micheletti refused to compromise on the power that he usurped on June 28. Each attempt by Arias to find a way forward has watered down the requirements for the Micheletti camp, even as it has reneged on the original objective of the full restoration of President Zelaya’s democratic powers. As noted by a number of critical commentators, the end result has been that Micheletti and Co. have had time to consolidate their grip on power, even as Zelaya has been left to fly around the continent, ineffectually trying to persuade the U.S. and other countries to force Micheletti out of power.

The subject of today’s post is the startling ideological inversion that Barak Obama has deployed to deflect criticism over the U.S.’s role in the coup—a role which at the very least has involved ‘looking the other way’, but which may well have involved direct U.S. government backing for the conspirators. The coup was at least a year in the making, and so may well have been planned with the assistance of the Bush administration.

According to news reports reaching EcoLogics, Obama is now saying that

‘”The same critics who say the US has not intervened in Honduras are the same people who say we are always intervening and Yankees need to get out of Latin America,” he said, accusing such opponents of “hypocrisy.”’‘”You can’t have it both ways”’.

EcoLogics wonders if Obama called the good Cardinal Rodríguez to ask him for advice on how to turn political reality on its head. Latin American history is littered with U.S. attempts to impose leaders that have been politically and economically convenient. It is, for example, now factually documented that this is what happened in Chile in 1973.

This being the case, there is no contradiction in suggesting that, as Obama puts it, the ‘Yankees’ should ‘get out of Latin America’ (if and when they meddle with the countries’ internal affairs); and suggesting that, if the U.S. really wanted to, it could either bring down the Micheletti dictatorship, or at the very least, make things so hot for the golpistas that they would have no choice but to negotiate with Zelaya.

The point is not to say that the U.S. should intervene, but rather, that it is disingenuous for the Obama administration to pretend that its hands are tied. This is the point that Obama has neatly dissimulated by accusing his critics of hypocrisy.

By way of a postscript: Obama should be careful about how he bandies about the H word: have a look at what Frank Rich has to say about Obama’s policy on healthcare; like a growing number of Democrats, Rich rightly warns Obama that unless he stops ‘punking’ his followers, he has less than four years left in the presidency.

Why has Honduras’ supposedly progressive cardinal become an accomplice of Micheletti and the rest of those behind the Honduran coup d’etat?

Versión en español de este artículo: La Postura Política de la Iglesia Católica en Honduras: Cardenal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga

Updated November 26, 2009 (please scroll down to the bottom of this page to see the updates if you have already read the first part of the article)

News emerging from Honduras suggest that the country’s leading Roman Catholic, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, opposes the return of President Manuel Zelaya, the victim of a coup by Honduras’ military. According to Spain’s El País, the new government instituted by the coup forced all of the Honduran TV channels to carry a broadcast by Rodríguez Maradiaga. In it the cardinal told Zelaya  ‘I know that you love life…I know that you respect life, and until today not a single Honduran has died. But your return to the country at this point in time could lead to a blood bath. Please, meditate. Because afterward it would be too late’ (1).

This is an extraordinary statement. On the one hand, even President Obama, whose administration was criticised for effectively condoning the coup, belatedly acknowledged that Zelaya is still the rightful president of Honduras.  Zelaya has every right to go back to his country and reclaim his constitutional mandate to lead Honduras as its democratically elected president. On the other hand, the nature of the discourse employed by Rodríguez Maradiaga is such that it blames Zelaya in advance for a bloodbath that could only be the result of the actions of the golpistas led by de facto leader Roberto Micheletti. In effect, Rodríguez Maradiaga is trying to prevent Zelaya from returning to Honduras by inverting the order of politics: Zelaya is the victim of Micheletti & Co’s actions, but in Rodríguez Maradiaga’s statement, Zelaya has been transformed into the would-be aggressor. Little wonder that the illegal Honduran government interrupted normal broadcasts to show Rodríguez’s intervention on television.

This raises the question: who is Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, and why has he allied himself with the Honduran oligarchy behind the coup?

Anyone who does superficial research on the cardinal’s background could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that Rodríguez Maradiaga is a progressive religious leader. If one goes, for example, by the first part of the Wikipedia entry on the cardinal, he certainly does seem to be a force for good: according to the Wiki, ‘His campaign for human rights and the poor have won widespread praise. Cardinal Rodríguez is further admired as a dynamic pastor who brokered peace accords with rebels and led rebuilding efforts after a natural disaster. He is an outspoken proponent of the cancellation of Third World debt’(2).

He also seems to have a formidable intellect: according to the same Wiki, the cardinal has a doctorate in philosophy, and, in addition to his native Spanish, speaks English, French, Italian, German and Portuguese. As if this weren’t impressive enough, Rodríguez has a diploma in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, has taught chemistry and physics, and has even trained in classical piano. He has, in effect, the kind of education that only the most privileged in Latin America could ever hope to obtain.

According to the media, Rodríguez Maradiaga was a key mediator during the stand-off between the democratically elected president Zelaya and the Honduran oligarchy. El País went so far as to say that ‘There is a man who has much influence in Honduras and who has, until now, remained in silence. This man went to all of the secret meetings that took place in the U.S. Embassy to try to avert the coup d’etat. In those meetings, Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez always remained in a position of exquisite equidistance’(3).

Alas, the good cardinal has now not only abandoned that ‘equidistance’, but as noted earlier, has effectively adopted a stance that renders him an accomplice of the Honduran coup leaders.

And an accomplice he certainly now is: a man with a doctorate in philosophy, and with a diploma in clinical psychology might have chosen any number of ways to continue his work of mediation. Instead he has chosen what is arguably the most Machiavellian way of trying to stop Zelaya from returning to Honduras: by making him responsible for any deaths resulting from his efforts to restore the duly-elected presidency. We must thus ask once again, who is Rodríguez Maradiaga, and why would he adopt such a stance?

Clues that Rodríguez Maradiaga is not quite as progressive as he seems to be may be found if one reads beyond the headline accounts of his apparent moderation.

First, the cardinal has taken an extraordinarily hard line when it comes to the trials in the U.S. of Catholic priest paedophiles. According to the Wiki cited earlier, in a May 2002 interview with the Italian-Catholic publication 30 Giorni, Rodríguez Maradiaga claimed that ‘Jews’ had influenced the media to exploit the current controversy regarding sexual abuse by Catholic priests in order to divert attention from the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. No doubt the Israeli state (as distinct from the category of ‘Jews’ in general) is capable of all kinds of deviousness. But for Rodríguez Maradiaga to try to blame ‘Jews’ for media reporting on the outrages of priestly paedophillia is simply ridiculous. It smacks of a devious and divisive effort to divert attention from the real issues.

Second, the French magazine Golias noted that when it came to AIDS and condoms, the supposedly progressive cardinal is ‘more papist than the pope’: ‘Archbishop Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga said [in the monthly journal Comboni that] he was indeed convinced that condoms are not useful for combating the AIDS virus. “The fight AIDS should not focus on condoms (…) The use of condoms does not prevent all transmission of AIDS”‘(4). It may be that this last sentence is valid, when taken in isolation of the bigger issue. However, anyone who focusses on this detail misses the bigger picture: that Benedict XVI, and apparently Rodríguez himself, have adopted an utterly ideological stance vis-a-vis the matter of condoms. It is a stance that may endear them to the men who prefer not to use condoms, but it is also one that will result in needless, some would say criminal deaths. Apparently Rodríguez is not particularly concerned about those deaths (as opposed to the ones that might be caused by Micheletti if Zelaya returns).

Third, after making what many interpreted as relatively liberal comments regarding communion with pro-choice politicians in Time Magazine, Rodríguez Maradiaga engaged in a remarkable volte face: as noted by the Catholic News Agency,

…in statements to Carlos Polo, reproduced exclusively by the Catholic News Agency, Cardinal Maradiaga [sic], who is in Aparecida participating in the V General Conference of the Latin American Bishops’ Council, said his comments to Time magazine should be reformulated “in light of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith teaches in its document, ‘Worthiness to Receive Communion’.”“A politician who publicly supports abortion, he excommunicates himself.  It’s not question of receiving Communion or not; he has already done serious harm to the communion of faith of the Church, to the communion of moral life, and therefore that person himself is doing an act that is inconsistent with what he says he believes,” the cardinal said.(5)

For those unfamiliar with the workings of the Vatican, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith is the modern name for what used to be called the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Under the prefect-ship of the current pope, Joseph Ratzinger now Benedict XVI, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith became notorious for its world-wide persecution of liberal and liberation theology Catholics (more on this, below). From this point of view, Rodríguez Maradiaga’s u-turn may be seen as a recognition that Ratzinger’s hard line continues to dominate doctrinal matters.

One benevolent interpretation of Rodríguez Maradiaga’s intervention in favour of the Honduran oligarchy is precisely that Rome has ordered him to tow the hard line. This ‘Vatican-victim’ status is, however, flatly contradicted by the role that Rodríguez Maradiaga played while he was general secretary of CELAM, the Spanish-language acronym for the Latin American Episcopal Conference. CELAM was once a Catholic institution dominated by progressive Latin American clergy. The more radical members of the clergy initiated a movement known as ‘liberation theology’, and established what became known as ‘Ecclesiastical Base Communities’ throughout the continent. Such communities had a critical orientation that explored ways of helping the poor to overcome centuries-old exploitation by groups such as the ones that have carried out the coup in Honduras. The principle was that traditional Church calls for Christian generousity had clearly failed, and so what was needed was a radical redefinition of the Church’s policies and priorities in defence of the poor.

The Vatican initially tolerated the initiative. However, first under Pope Paul VI, and then again under the arch-conservative Pope John Paul II, the liberation theology movement was opposed, and then effectively disbanded by conservative CELAM general secretaries imposed by the Vatican, with Ratzinger as the Catholic Right’s éminence grise. Towards the bitter end of this process, from 1995 to 1999, Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga was one such secretary; as noted by the Washington Post, ‘although he has spoken out against free-market policies and in defense of millions living in abject poverty in Central America, Rodríguez Maradiaga is an opponent of the “liberation theology” that once supported leftist rebellions and sought to bend the rules of orthodoxy to bring the Church closer to Indian groups and the poor’(6). In 2001, John Paul II rewarded Rodríguez for his loyalty by making him the first cardinal of Honduras, and a few years later Rodríguez threw his hat into the ring of candidates to replace John Paul II when he died in 2005. The Golias article quoted earlier wondered if Rodríguez’s stance vis-a-vis condomns was part of a strategy designed to endear him to the Vatican’s all-powerful Right. The cardinal’s most recent actions raise similar questions: could it be that Rodríguez now has ambitions to replace Ratzinger and is willing to sacrifice the poor in Honduras in order to improve his chances of becoming the next pope?

Far, then, from being a victim of the Vatican, there is good reason to regard Rodríguez Maradiaga as the kind of Catholic leader that has haunted Latin American societies for centuries: a leader who, when it suited the Church, criticised the ruling elite for their greed; but also a leader who, when push came to shove, knew full well that the Vatican’s ideological interests were intimately aligned with those of the very oligarchies occasionally berated for their avarice. The Honduran cardinal’s sudden abandonment of a mediating role, and the extraordinary nature of his attack on Zelaya appear to be a sad example of just such a push, and just such a shove. The actions suggest that, at least where the Roman Catholic Church’s political interventions are concerned, Latin American history is being repeated.

Update July 6, 2009

News today that the Honduran coup leaders have not only turned back Zelaya, but have killed one and maimed several others to ‘prove’ the cardinal’s point. (For updates on the rapidly evolving situation, see the Latin America News Review.) EcoLogics asks readers to consider: would the Honduran businessmen behind the coup have engaged in any of these actions if Obama had presented them with an ultimatum to cease and desist their actions immediately?

Update July 10, 2009

According to news in Britain’s Guardian, Joseph Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI) third encyclical reportedly suggests that ‘The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from “influences” of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way’.'In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise.’  EcoLogics will study the encyclical and will publish a post on the matter. However, on the face of it, it sounds eerily like Rodríguez Maradiaga’s own stance: the pope can certainly talk the talk of moral condemnation, but when one looks at his history, it becomes apparent that he has walked the path of destroying the very people who raised these selfsame concerns and tried to do something about them decades ago in the context of liberation theology.

Update July 16, 2009

Various news items have appeared that shed additional light on the points made in this post.

1) Rodríguez Maradiaga tries to row back. In an interview published in Argentina’s Clarín, the Cardinal has attempted to row back on his support for the coup leaders. He claims not to be a ‘Cardenal golpista’ (literally, a ‘coup-ist’ cardinal), and claims that he’s waiting for an explanation as to why Zelaya was deported in a flagrantly unconstitutional manner. But he fails to say anything negative about Micheletti… EcoLogics understands that there is a saying in Spanish, ‘El que calla otorga’, i.e. ‘He who remains silent agrees with…’ Rodríguez has not only failed to criticise Micheletti, but as noted in this post, has come out with ideological guns blazing against Zelaya… Are we really expected to believe the good Cardinal when he claims that he is not actually supporting the coup?

2) Rodríguez Maradiaga’s complicity with the military confirmed? The website of what appears to be a pro-Chávez radio station in Venezuela (YVKE), is both quoting, and showing the actual copy of a newspaper with an article published in January 1982 about a Catholic priest, Fausto Milla, who claimed at the time that the Honduran military forced him to leave Honduras after he denounced a massacre of Salvadoran refugees by Honduran and Salvadoran military in 1980. (This was at the beginning of the Salvadoran civil war; the Honduran military supported the U.S.-led Salvadoran military.)  The priest says he was threatened and nearly kidnapped by the Honduran military. More glaringly from the point of view of Rodríguez Maradiaga’s complicity with the current coup, Milla also claims that Rodríguez, who was then a newly appointed bishop in Father Milla’s province, supported the military. The following quote, translated from a part of the article provided by the website, is quite damning, and refers to the kind of anti-liberation theology politics mentioned in this post:

‘I [Fausto Milla] am also disappointed by those who were supposed to provide me with support and solace, but whose attitude suggests instead an alliance with those who persecute us, and this simply because we are doing the Church’s work.’ ‘The Presbyterian Council of Santa Rosa de Copán has been dismantled by the new bishop [Rodríguez Maradiaga, who was named Auxiliarby Bishop of Tegucigalpa in 1978]. The changes in the ecclesiastical personnel have been so abrupt that it’s as if Monseñor Rodríguez were playing a game of chess, dismantling the entire organisation that the now deceased Monseñor José Carranza y Chévez created’. ‘One cannot understand how it is that our superiors, who sign documents like the one in Puebla [the famous Puebla Declaration, in which leaders of the Latin American Catholic Church declared that the Church should support the poor], now take the side of those whom that document condemns for seeking to maintain the national security doctrine, which actually leads to insecurity for the whole population and only security for the money that they [the supporters of the national security doctrine] accumulate’.

EcoLogics has no way of vouching for the authenticity of the article, but it certainly fits with what we know about the cardinal’s politics. Any information that critical readers may provide confirming (or indeed disproving) the account of this article would be gratefully received.

3) A warning to readers that, after the publication of this post, Cardinal Rodríguez, or his supporters, have been at work on the English language version of the Wikipedia article, promoting the view that the cardinal was only trying to ‘avert a bloodbath’ in Honduras. Wikipedia is great, but it does have the limitation that it is open to manipulation from all sides.

Update on August 11, 2009: For a reply to Obama’s latest comments about the hypocrisy of his Latin American critics, see Obama: yes you can have it both ways.

Update on September 24, 2009: Great news that Zelaya is back in Honduras. Remarkable to note that Micheletti’s response was to once again to suggest that any deaths would be the responsibility of Zelaya. It is as if Micheletti and Rodríguez Maradiaga are singing from the same hymnal. If you would like confirmation that Rome supports the Micheletti regime and Rodríguez’s anti-democratic stance, have a look at the article in the Roman Catholic propaganda news site, Zenith, in which it describes Zelaya as being ‘holed up’ in the Brazilian embassy.

Update October 5, 2009

See the new post about Pope Benedict XVI, titled ‘Talk about “Toxic Spiritual Rubbish”‘

Update October 13, 2009

This week Micheletti and his fellow golpistas published a decree that ostensibly made it legal for them to engage in the censorship of any media not towing the putschist line. The official decree—aimed at the pro-Zelaya Channel 36 and Globo Radio—was coaxed in laughable language: ‘Se podrán cancelar las frecuencias de emisoras o televisoras que emitan mensajes que inciten al odio nacional, (y a la) destrucción de bienes públicos‘. A rough translation: ‘It will be possible to cancel the frequencies of radio or TV channels that broadcast messages that incite a national hatred, (and/or) the destruction of public property’. A national hatred? Is that a hatred of the nation, or a national hatred of Micheletti et al? Zelaya’s lawyers should have field day with the ambiguity of the expression, which would presumably allow the government to close down not just the offending media, but any channel broadcasting messages such as those of Rodríguez Maradiaga. After all, how would you define legally, a ‘national hatred’?

In case you didn’t read this post, you may wish to read the related Obama’s Big Stick and Alvaro Uribe’s ‘Entreguismo’

Update October 17, 2009

The latest news from Honduras appear to confirm what many of us suspected—that Micheletti and his cronies have learned how to employ what might be described as the Israeli model of ‘diplomacy’: pretend to negotiate, even as you brutally impose your own preferred modus operandi by way of physical force, i.e. by sending in the troops, and closing down any space for dissent. It also seems unambiguously clear now that the U.S. is backing the dictatorship, if only by allowing Micheletti to play the ‘Israeli’ game. In Honduras’ case that game involves delaying the negotiations to the point that the real president’s elected term comes to an end, so as to allow the junta to claim that an all-new scenario has emerged, in which ‘democratic’ elections can and must ‘now’ take place. It is so transparent—and so cynical. But the damage has been done; the Honduran oligarchy, which had managed to keep its corrupt dealings in the shade for the better part of a century, is now well and truly outed. So is the Clinton-Obama presidency, which in this context as in so many others, has revealed that the so-called Democratic Party is little better than the one it replaced when it comes to foreign affairs. Indeed, a case can be made that with Bush you knew exactly where you stood; with the Clinton-Obamas, it’s all smoke and mirrors. The only question now is, will the people supporting Zelaya rebel?

Update November 26, 2009

This blog has kept silent about the recent twists and turns in Honduran diplomacy; it seemed clear that, as noted in the previous update, the Honduran dictatorship was playing a game, with no real intention of giving up power. At one point Micheletti & Co. actually seemed to prove this blogger wrong, but alas, events have in the end adhered to the script outlined in earlier posts.

The one new element is that the U.S. cannot now deny that it has conspired with Micheletti and the rest of the Honduran oligarchy to depose a democratically elected president, and has done so in a style that is little different from the one employed for the better part of 150 years by historic U.S. governments. The cynism of the Obama-Clinton administration has not only been confirmed, but does extraordinary damage to the interests of the United States in Latin America, and elsewhere. Obama actually managed to persuade us for a time that the United States represented by Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the Republican mafia was something of an aberration, even in a country that has historically been inclined to do as it pleases with those whom it dominates. His ‘Yes we can’ seemed to be a breath of fresh air, even to those inclined to be deeply suspicious about the empire’s designs. Alas, we now have irrefutable evidence that the Bush modus operandi lives on, albeit in a somewhat more discrete, and astute manner. By accepting the outcome of the elections engineered by Micheletti et al, Obama-Clinton have in effect confirmed the legitimacy of the coup d’etat. The question, once again, is what the poor and those displaced politically by Micheletti (and Obama) will do now. Will they rise up in arms to defend their rights? They can at least take comfort from the fact that in Brazil’s Lula they still have a stalwart supporter.

Notes

1) ‘La Iglesia pide a Zelaya que no regrese’, in El País, July 5, 2009, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Iglesia/pide/Zelaya/regrese/elpepuint/20090705elpepiint_1/Tes, accessed July 5, 2009.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93scar_Andr%C3%A9s_Rodr%C3%ADguez_Maradiaga, accessed July 5, 2009.

3) ‘La Iglesia pide a Zelaya que no regrese’, in El País, July 5, 2009, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Iglesia/pide/Zelaya/regrese/elpepuint/20090705elpepiint_1/Tes, accessed July 5, 2009.

4) ‘L’enquête Caritas : Maradiaga déçoit’ in Golias, http://www.golias.fr/spip.php?article2853, accessed July 6, 2009.

5) Catholic News Agency, ‘Honduran cardinal clarifies interview on Communion and pro-abortion politicians’, May 18, 2007. http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=9402, accessed July 5, 2009.

6) ‘Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, Honduras’, Washington Post, April 16, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57842-2005Apr15.html, accessed July 5, 2009.