U.S. role in coups: Sinister no more?

Lynda Hurst
The Star
July 11, 2009

No sooner had Honduran President Manuel Zelaya been forced out of his country at gunpoint (and in pyjamas) than Hugo Chavez suggested the U.S. was involved in the June 28 coup.

"They will have to get to the bottom of how much of a hand the CIA ... had in this," said Venezuela's fiercely anti-American, leftist president.

Chavez knows a thing or two about coups. He staged an unsuccessful one himself in 1992, was elected in 1998, survived a coup attempt in 2002, and has since been re-elected.

And, after all, the U.S. has had a long, dark and complex history in Latin America.

Had this been the 1980s or the '70s, '60s, or '50s, not many jaws would have dropped at Chavez's reflexive reaction. But it isn't.

The White House moved quickly to scotch "any rumours that we were in any way involved in this."

Granted, says Christopher Sabatini, senior director at the Americas Society think-tank in New York, "the U.S.'s sinister hand has been behind many coups in the region in the past.

"But this was a Honduran coup of institutions, between its Supreme Court and its democratically elected leader."

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