Do the right thing!

San Jose Mercury News
Peninsula readers' letters: July 8

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Peninsula readers' letters: July 8



From Daily News Group readers
Posted: 07/07/2009 10:56:24 PM PDT






Do the right thing in Honduras

Dear Editor: Ousted Honduras President Manuel Zelaya has vowed to return to Honduras within the next few days in an attempt to reclaim power. Zelaya was forced out of office and exiled to Costa Rica in a military coup d'etat on Sunday.

There's a communiqué, issued by a popular front against the coup, saying that Battalion 316 is operating again. Battalion 316. This goes back to the Reagan years with John Negroponte, who was ambassador to Honduras at the time. He was involved in organizing the Honduran branch of the Iran-Contra war. And the Baltimore Sun ran a series of articles that made it quite clear he was involved in the cover-up of a number of death squad executions and more than 100 disappearances by Battalion 316.

Honduras was effectively an outpost of the United States' worst campaigns during the Cold War. The United States built a huge air base in Honduras and a training center for the Central Americans it hoped to train to fight — not their own battles but U.S. battles in Central America. The U.S. has always felt it had a perfect right to do anything it wanted to do in Latin American. That was its backyard and for the sake of good security it had a right to do as it pleased down there.

President Barack Obama says — and he does so very clearly and strongly and admirably — that he doesn't want to return to the dark policies of the past. We hope that Obama will be honest and do the right thing.

Ted Rudow III,MA