Beating Up Honduras

The Obama administration is taking its bad August out on Honduras, announcing today the imposition of economic sanctions:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, responding to calls to increase pressure on the de facto Honduras government, announced the termination on Thursday of about $22 million in United States aid that was suspended immediately after President Manuel Zelaya was deposed.

As pointed out at Open Market, there is no legal basis for these sanctions:

Earlier, the State Department planned to cut off aid to Honduras based on the false claim that its removal of ex-president Manuel Zelaya was a “military coup.” But this claim was easily debunked, because Honduras replaced the ex-president with a civilian successor (a Congressman installed by Honduras’s Congress), who is backed by a democratically-elected legislature and a unanimous vote by the country’s supreme court….

Now, the State Department more or less admits that admits that there was no military coup, citing “the participation of both the legislative and judicial branches of government” in the president’s removal.

But while its original justification for cutting off the aid has disappeared, the Obama Administration was determined to cut off aid anyway, logic be damned.

The U.S. also is threatening not to recognize the government elected at the upcoming November election:

The U.S. government on Thursday toughened its stance against Honduras’s coup leaders and supporters, threatening to put them “in a box” by not recognizing the winner of a presidential election set for November.

This is the same U.S. administration which refused to refuse to recognize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stolen election, and did nothing at all to put economic pressure on the Iranian regime. The same administration which says not a thing about Hugo Chavez’s systematic dismantling of free press and opposition political parties. The same President who sits silently for an hour as Daniel Ortega lashes out at the United States.

How easy for the Obama administration to pick on someone not its size.

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Related Posts:
Don’t Forget Honduras
Let them come to Tegucigalpa
Hands Off Honduras

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Tags: Hillary Clinton, Iran, Latin America, Obama Foreign Policy

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