Obama and Honduras

A lot of us have been puzzled by president Obama’s fondness for tyrants, including Ahmadinejad in Iran and Chavez in Venezuela. We attributed his interference in Honduras in favor of a would-be dictator as another of his ideological ventures. However, we might be wrong about Obama here. Maybe it is just the Democrats’ old culture of corruption returning to business as usual.

In October 1994, President Bill Clinton used the U.S. military to force Haiti to take back former President Jean Bertrand Aristide, an intolerant populist who had been deposed in a coup three years earlier. The Haitian people didn’t fare well under the decade of Aristide tyranny and corruption following that U.S. intervention. But key Democrats, who secured contracts with the Haitian government, did.

Why would he do a thing like that ?

Once restored to power, Aristide ruled Haiti for a decade, either as president or as the power behind the throne during the presidency of Mr. Préval. It wasn’t until he was chased out of the country a second time, in 2004, that Haitians were able to document that their government had been doing business in telecommunications with Americans who were close to Mr. Clinton.

Haitians had been complaining to me since the late 1990s about the relationship between Haiti Teleco and a company called Fusion Telecommunications. They alleged that Fusion had ties to Joseph P. Kennedy II, a vociferous supporter of Aristide, and that instead of paying the official settlement rate that all U.S. carriers were supposed to pay, it was getting a special price. The company would not even acknowledge that it operated in Haiti. What I did learn at that time was that Fusion was run by former Democratic Party Finance Chairman Marvin Rosen. Mr. Kennedy was on the board. So too was Mr. Clinton’s former aide, Thomas “Mack” McLarty, and former Mississippi Democratic Gov. Ray Mabus.

Maybe we need to start looking for the Chicago-Honduras connection.

The Honduran constitutional crisis is very different than the Haiti case, in that the Honduran military has never been in charge. When Mr. Zelaya was deported, the presidency was passed, as the constitution requires, to the president of Congress. Mr. Zelaya’s party is still governing the country.

Yet there are important lessons from Bill Clinton’s Haiti policy that hold for Honduras. One is that the U.S. is more than capable of misjudging a constitutional crisis and of backing the wrong guy. When it does, there is no guarantee it will rectify the problem.

Another lesson from Haiti is that a Caribbean despot can offer good terms to foreign investors. Since the Haiti episode Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has conducted a courtship with Democrats too. He gives Mr. Kennedy’s Citizen’s Energy company cut-price home-heating oil that the former Massachusetts congressman distributes to the poor in order to polish the Democrats’ image. Never mind about Venezuelans suffering under chavismo.

It is all becoming clear now.

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