• THE 2009 coup d’état in Honduras
was "illegal and unconstitutional," as Cuban-American
Hugo Llorens, U.S. ambassador to Tegucigalpa, was
forced to admit. Llorens is also a former
collaborator of Otto Reich, whose role in the events
remains to be seen. A report from Llorens to the
State Department is among the U.S. documents leaked
on November 28 by Wikileaks, a website on the
Internet dedicated to leaking secret information.
The document, signed by Llorens and
sent to the State Department, also acknowledges that
Zelaya’s letter of resignation letter was a "fabrication,"
without giving details of the evidence confirming
that. The U.S. ambassador confirmed that "none of
the arguments mentioned" by the coup leaders to
justify the kidnapping and deportation of the
constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya, have any
validity under the Honduran Constitution, while some
are clearly false and others are "mere suppositions."
It shows how the accounts of
Zelaya’s arrest by the military demonstrate that he
was never legally served with an arrest warrant, "that
the soldiers gained entry by shooting the locks off,
and essentially kidnapped the president."
Llorens makes no mention whatsoever
of the complicity of the U.S. military forces
present in Honduras in the operation carried out by
elite troops from the Salvadorian army to fly the
head of state out of the country. Eva Golinger, the
Venezuelan-American lawyer and researcher, has
demonstrated that, in the weeks following the coup,
the Soto Cano Air Base which the United States
maintains in Honduran territory played a fundamental
role in overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya.
The document is one of hundreds of
thousands of secret dispatches from the State
Department leaked to the Spanish El País
daily, The New York Times, The Guardian
in the United Kingdom, the French Le Monde
and the German Der Spiegel magazine,
publications which are not known for criticizing the
U.S. government.
In a tragicomic sounding paragraph,
Llorens notes that "according to the logic of
argument 239" invoked by the coup leaders, "Micheletti
himself should be forced to step down because, as
president of Congress he considered legislation to
have a fourth ballot in the November 2009 elections
for voter approval of a constituent assembly to
rewrite the constitution."
Any member of Congress who debated
the proposal also should be removed from office, and
the presidential candidate of the National Party,
Pepe Lobo, who made the idea his, should be
disqualified from taking public office for 10 years",
he adds.
LLORENS, REICH, ROS-LEHTINEN AND CO.
In his report, Llorens takes refuge
behind Honduran legal experts whom the embassy
consulted in order to understand the arguments
wielded by the coup supporters and their opponents.
It is a fact that many other
documents, which are not "confidential" like this
one, but "Top Secret", were exchanged between
Washington and its embassy in Honduras during the
events of 2009.
Hugo Llorens’ close relationship
with U.S. foreign policy wolves no doubt explains
far better than his confidential report the rapid
turnabout in the diplomacy of Obama and Hillary
Clinton.
In a statement on November 28, the
ultra-right wing Cuban-American Congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, who represents the Republican Party on
foreign policy issues, described the revelation of
these sensitive State Department documents by the
Wikileaks website as "irresponsible."
The Miami congresswoman has reason
to be concerned: she flew to the support of the
dictator Roberto Micheletti shortly after the coup
d’état that led to the expulsion of the
constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya.
"I am with the president of
Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, because he is the
president of this country," the spokeswoman for the
extreme right in the U.S. Congress affirmed during a
press conference together with Micheletti in the
government house in Honduras occupied by the
dictatorship.
Llorens had advance notice of the
coup. That was revealed a few days before his death
by Roland Valenzuela, a former member of Zelaya’s
administration, in an interview broadcast by a radio
station in the city of San Pedro Sula.
Valenzuela recounted in detail how,
on June 10, 2009, Roberto Micheletti, at that time
president of the National Congress, before seizing
power on the 28th of that same month, drafted the
decree which would remove Zelaya from office.
He explained how a USAID contractor,
Jacqueline Foglia Sandoval, was pointed to as "the
person in charge of coordinating and executing the
coup d’état."
A few days after his statements,
Valenzuela was murdered in a public place by the
businessman Carlos Yacamán, who was arrested on
Wednesday, September 8 —not by the FBI, but by
immigration authorities—in Miami, where he had taken
refuge. Despite an official application for his
extradition by the San Pedro Sula District Attorney’s
Office, Yacamán remains under the protection of U.S.
authorities.
Ambassador Hugo Llorens, who
admitted after his report that he had participated
in meetings in which coup plans were discussed
before the kidnapping of President Zelaya, is a
Cuban-American "terrorism" specialist. He was
director of Andean Affairs at the National Security
Council in Washington when the coup d’état against
President Hugo Chávez took place.
Llorens directly reported to Otto
Reich, assistant secretary of state for Western
Hemisphere Affairs and the highly controversial
Elliot Abrams.
Otto Reich is one of the most
influential characters within the Miami mafia and in
June of 2009, he was personally put in charge of
protecting the Micheletti gang, together with
Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.