Hugo Llorens and the Honduran lab
By Elíades Acosta Matos
Until June 28, a wily coalition of think tanks, big communications media, neoconservative politicians and leftist turncoats had almost managed to convince Latin America that capitalism had entered a new stage in the region and the world. It was a stage where the coups d’état, the violations of the Constitution and democracy, the disappeared and tortured people, the death squads, the School of the Americas and the National Security Doctrine were merely a remote accident, youthful pranks definitely and forever left behind by the best of all possible social systems. Capitalism, in sum, had reached the healthy maturity that allowed it to demonstrate its legitimate essence.
Suddenly, however, from small and impoverished Honduras certain news began to emerge. Unknowingly, the correspondents of Telesur, the bloggers and other promoters of the alternative media, the same who presented to the eyes of the world the details of that Jurassic coup d’état, were waging a colossal ideological battle against the historic swindle and the induced amnesia, against the felonious attempt to conceal the wounds and show us the false face — kindly and participative, the generator of justice and well-being — of a system that has worn all its masks in Latin America without achieving neither justice nor well-being.
We didn’t dream up the Somozas or the Pinochets, and we didn’t invent — for the benefit of the ill-speaking propaganda — the ancestral misery, the hunger, the death. What was real, not fantasy, were the failed neoliberalism, the Alliance for Progress that died of consumption in a melodramatic show, the Yankee marines who landed in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Nicaragua.
What we have in Honduras is the post-modern version of the same coups as usual, the unavoidable sequel of a horror film watched to exhaustion, the return of the usual proconsuls, in the case of Cuba, for example, the reincarnation of Senator Orville Platt, Gen. Leonard Wood or Sumner Welles, conspiring in the shadows, pulling the wires from under the table, reviving, with secret magic spells, the same repressive beasts we thought were dead and buried forever.
Today, the tottering capitalism of always — the capitalism that returns to impose its wishes by force, kicking down the table of the same democratic game for which it rent its garments and which it swore to defend, the neoliberalism of the maquiladoras and the leonine free-trade agreements with the United States, the plans to burn food as biofuels in a hungry world, the secret programs for the maintenance and expansion of military bases on foreign soil, the strategic, ideological, cultural and geopolitical interests of the Empire, which continues to be an Empire under Obama and will remain one after Obama — has in Honduras a name and a face. It is doing its usual job, at full speed and in the disguise of an ambassador or a philanthropic Peace Corps or generous USAID, or civic NED, or seraphic press or cultural attaché in Quito and La Paz, Caracas and Guatemala City, Havana and Managua.
Hugo Llorens is the name assumed in Honduras by the entity described above, and his title is Ambassador of the United States of America, although he really should be considered to be the diploma-bearing representative of the maquiladoras and the 150 Yankee transnational corporations that have made direct investments of more than $698 million in a country where 60 percent of the population lives in poverty, infant mortality stands at 31 for every 1,000 newborns, AIDS affects 1.5 percent of its population, and the rate of homicide is 57 for every 100,000 inhabitants, one of the world’s highest. Llorens also represents the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies that keep at Palmerola Base (rebaptized with the politically correct name of Soto Cano) the Joint Task Force Bravo, one of three task forces under the Southern Command, with more than 550 servicemen and very eloquent missions.
Cuban-born Hugo Llorens, who has admitted ‘having participated in meetings where coup plans were discussed before the kidnapping of President Zelaya,” [1] a close collaborator to Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and Elliot Abrams, is an ambassador appointed by Bush. He is one of the many neoconservative moles who remained imbedded in the bowels of the “government of change” that was installed in the United States on Jan. 20 precisely so that nothing might change.
This man did not lie when he confessed, on April 16, 2008, during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, that he had “served in challenging missions in Bolivia, Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras and Argentina.” We Latin Americans know full well the meaning of the “challenges” before the Yankee envoys to the region, and we remember him supporting the coup against Chávez in Venezuela.
He also promised that “if I am confirmed, I shall expand the reciprocal commerce and the flows of [U.S.] investment derived from the Free Trade Treaty for Central America and the Dominican Republic (CAFTA-DR),” something that can be corroborated by the fact he took part in the passing of ALCA (FTAA) in 1998.
This man of his word named Hugo Llorens, this perfect imperial gentleman has been rewarded by his peers not for having promoted democracy or justice in the countries where he served but for his demonstrated ability to promote the interests of big business, for fiercely defending the huge profits and transnationals and maquilas, the factories that show their respect for human dignity by giving the Honduran women who work in them disposable diapers, so they won’t waste any valuable time going to the bathroom. For such gallant and effective defense, Llorens has received a Cobb Award and has been a finalist in the Saltzman Awards.
Anyway, what would justify such and anachronistic and brutal coup d’état if it isn’t the selfish defense of interests that are no less anachronistic and brutal?
On Sept. 19, 2008, Hugo Llorens submitted his credentials to the government of Manuel Zelaya, whom he was “anxious to meet,” upon arriving in Honduras. From that moment on, he engaged in a frenzied campaign to extend and revive U.S. contacts in that nation, for which we must assume he utilized the elements left in place by the sinister personages who preceded him in the job, such as John Dimitri Negroponte.
He also used the covert tentacles of entities such as the Peace Corps. One week after arriving in Honduras, he swore in 49 new “volunteers” who spread throughout the country. Forty-four others joined them, after being sworn in on May 15, 2009, little more than a month after the coup. According the website of the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, “more than 200 volunteers work in Honduras. […] This is the nation that has the world’s larges number of Peace Corps members. […] Since 1962, more than 6,000 volunteers have worked here.” [2] Curious, isn’t it?
And just so that we understand the Empire’s modus operandi in times of changes and soft power and, by extension, the role of the U.S. Embassy in the Honduran coup, the Peace Corps “volunteers” go to the base not only to work with the municipalities and the faraway communities on issues of health problems, water and protected natural areas, but also “to promote entrepreneurial and business skills, citizen participation and civic education” — in their American versions, of course.
As to the USAID, another of the tools of influence and “soft” control available in Honduras to the loquacious Hugo Llorens, the agency itself claims to have “delivered to the country more than $3 billion since 1961.” Its credit has been used “to promote business and strengthen democratic institutions.” Was that the noble objective that spurred Ambassador Llorens to travel to the Honduran Mosquitia with Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez and the USAID’s director in that country, William Brands, barely nine days before the coup? Or was it to confirm the complicities that are now notorious?
The USAID modestly acknowledges that, through its program to promote “good government” in Honduras, it has fostered what it calls with Victorian propriety “the civilian society” to influence the nomination and selection of the Supreme Court of Justice and the Attorney General. It has materially supported the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and has trained those who must monitor the elections and the poll-takers. It has implemented its own system of reporting for the preliminary results, of controlling the financing of political campaigns and tabulations. It has trained more than 45,000 teachers, school supervisors and members of the community to implement “new systems for education and evaluation.” Its links to the big communications media in the country have enabled it to contribute $400,000 to their national campaigns. [3]
This “committed ambassador,” an expert in making pacifying and conciliatory statements with high-minded idealistic and democratic themes (according to the neoconservative prescriptions of ordering the bombing of other nations while one reads Plato); this exponent of the philosophy of Leo Strauss who, on his e-mail, promises to visit (but never does) the garbage dumps on the road to Olancho where thousands of children, men and women dig for their food daily, graduated in 1997 from the National War College, following the neos’ propensity to militarism and force.
Upon his assignment to Honduras, he brought Simon Henshaw, one of his disciples, as his second-in-command at the Embassy, with the title of Minister Counselor. It is very odd that someone who arrived in Honduras as an apostle of friendship and democracy seeks collaborators who are expert in covert operations, cultural or Fourth Generation wars, subversion and counterinsurgency.
The National War College does not train religious preachers or promoters of Gandhi’s pacifism. According to its own website, it trains military officers and State Department officials “with ambassadorial rank to serve as substitutes of the [military] chiefs and counselors in international affairs” in conflict zones, of course. This formative modality of imperial proconsuls was initiated in 1946 at the College with 13 well-remembered lectures by George Kennan, the true artificer and strategist of the Cold War.
Hugo Llorens may have arrived in the United States with a buffalo nickel in his pocket and a little suitcase, as he melodramatically stated at this Senate confirmation hearing. Today, this more-than-committed representative of multimillion-dollar businesses and imperialist interests with global outreach, a man frenetically intent in finding the chemical formula for the soft-coup in the Honduran laboratory, is charging a lot for refloating the old ship that sank where the Latin American gorillas carried hundreds of thousands of people to their death.
The experiment of this sorcerer’s apprentice will end like those of his comic-strip namesake, Hugo Simpson. The Honduran people are already on the streets.
Elíades Acosta Matos, a Cuban writer and journalist, holds a doctorate in philosophy. He is a regular contributor to Progreso Weekly/Semanal.
[1] See Jean Guy Allard, Granma, July 7, 2009.
[2] Bulletin of the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, May 15, 2009.
[3] See USAID Programs in Honduras, Bulletin of the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa.
