Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani

but they certainly took advantage of it,’ he concluded.

      Shortly after Zelaya was marched out in his pyjamas, Barack Obama called the coup a coup. ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,’ he said. ‘It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition, rather than democratic election.’

      His unequivocal condemnation buoyed social leaders like Berta and Carlos H. Reyes as they secretly gathered in safe houses to organize demos and talk strategy. The coup plotters grew nervous. Could the North American president possibly champion a Chávez lackey over us, their closest and most loyal allies in the region? The illusion didn’t last long: an old-school military putsch to effect leadership change was exactly what happened. That is, Hillary Clinton happened.

      ‘We do not think that this has evolved into a coup,’ Clinton told reporters on 29 June 2009. This statement was designed, according to the official line, to prevent suspending US aid to needy Hondurans (US law bans aid to any country whose leader has been toppled by a military coup). ‘If we were able to get to a … status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome,’ Clinton added.

      The plotters breathed a collective sigh of relief.

      What Clinton really meant was a restoration of the status quo ante, the old order that existed before Zelaya upset the apple cart. She wanted him replaced with a president she liked better, as she explained in her memoir Hard Choices: ‘We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.’

      Yet the US embassy was explicit in its definition of the event. In a July 2009 cable, entitled ‘Open and shut: the case of the Honduran coup’, Ambassador Llorens said that while Zelaya might have ‘committed illegalities’ and ‘even violated the constitution’, for his team there was ‘no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the executive branch … Micheletti’s ascendance as “interim president” was totally illegitimate.’

      Despite Llorens’s immediate and unequivocal assessment, the State Department was only interested in two things: negotiations and new elections. The coup vanished from the discourse.

      Meza thinks the flip was most likely the result of hardball lobbying and scaremongering by ultra-right Honduran political and business leaders, ex-ambassador Ford, oil companies and other transnationals unhappy with Zelaya’s reforms, along with the Cold War neocons operating around the Pentagon and State Department. Former Bush adviser Roger Noriega was hired by the coup plotters to impart his world view that Honduras was ‘ground zero’ with regard to the spread of Chavista authoritarianism under the façade of democracy. In Hard Choices