Sunday, April 29, 2018

What is the deal with #Honduras? #immigration #caravan

This country is always involved in strange things it seems. Remember in the 90's when we shipped all our garment worker jobs to Honduras? 

From 1994 to 2005, the United States lost more than 900,000 textile and apparel jobs to offshoring


Wealthy Honduran Elite Implicated in Panama Papers

Jaime Rosenthal and Gilberto Goldstein, both linked to the Panama Papers, are members of the Honduran elite that have huge economic power in the country.
The latest data dump of the Panama Papers has linked two of the richest families in Honduras, both with an ambiguous position on the 2009 U.S.-backed coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya, to offshore companies set up in tax havens through the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. 
Jaime Rosenthal and Gilberto Goldstein are both prominent Honduran business moguls with holdings across media, banks, real estate, food products, and more. Their families are also connected by marriage through Jaime’s nephew Yankel Rosenthal and Gilberto’s daughter.
According to Panama Papers data released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Rosenthal’s only brother Edwin Mayer was the officer of an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands under the name Pinkenton International Corporation. One of Rosenthal’s sons, Cesar Augusto, was the sole shareholder of a Panamanian entity called Renton Management S.A.
The Rosenthal family controls Grupo Continental, a conglomerate of dozens of companies including Banco Continental, the newspaper El Tiempo and other media, a crocodile farm for leather exports, and sugar, banana, coffee, and cacao companies, among other businesses. Three Rosenthals, including head of the family, Jaime, were linked to money laundering and drug trafficking last year.
Jaime Rosenthal is a key member of the Honduran Liberal Party, the former party of ousted President Manuel Zelaya before he was removed from office, and has reportedly spoken out against the coup. But the Rosenthals may have suffered a breakdown with Zelaya before the coup.
Jaime’s son Yani was appointed Minister of the Presidency when Zelaya came to power in 2006. Yani left the post at the end of 2007 to run in the party’s internal elections, but instead joined forces with the political current led by Roberto Micheletti, the Liberal Party figure who headed the coup regime as illegitimate president after Zelaya was ousted in 2009.
Goldstein, on the other hand, is a backer of the National Party, which has traditionally traded power with the Liberal Party and returned to Honduras’ top office after the 2009 coup.
In the Panama Papers database, Gilberto Goldstein and his deceased son Mark are both listed as shareholders in the British Virgin Islands entity Melston Investment Ltd.
According to Honduran researcher Leticia Salomon, both Rosenthal and Goldstein had ambiguous and chameleon-like stances on the 2009 coup.
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Wealthy-Honduran-Elite-Implicated-in-Panama-Papers--20160510-0040.html

HMMMMMMMMMM

And Hillary is blamed for an assassination of a Honduran eviromentalist.  

Right Out in Plain Sight: Dona Hillary and the Clinton Cartel
by CHARITY CROUSE 3/14/2016 

Politics in the U.S. has long been accepted as dirty business, especially when it comes to U.S. relations with Latin America. But a new standard has been set with the ascendance of presidential contender Hillary Clinton. The March 3, 2016 assassination of Lenca leader Berta Carceres is a direct result of policies enabled and supported by Clinton and her criminal syndicate in Honduras. As her relationship with Honduras reveals, Clinton is a gangster attempting to posit herself as the head of the largest crime empire on the planet, “whatever it takes.”

Seeing the Clinton racket in its full glory takes an understanding the recent history in Honduras and how she factors into it. In 2005, the Central American Free Trade Agreement was passed in the United States. CAFTA advanced the aims of the 1994 Bill Clinton-sponsored NAFTA further south into countries like Honduras. The neo-liberal free trade deal had found a receptive audience among the established economic elite in the country affiliated with long-standing familial oligarchies that controlled finance, trade and industry. Many of the patriarchs in the oligarchy, including Miguel Facusse and Juan Cuanahuati, had been historic and early proponents of free trade in Honduras and headed industries that found fertile grounds to flourish under the model CAFTA promoted, including maquila zones and the attendant “company towns” that were branded as “industrial parks.” These practices were in effect since the mid-1980s in Honduras but were accelerated thanks to CAFTA. The increase of these “parks” caused the rapid proliferation of previously small town areas into more urbanized enclaves particularly in the north as people from the rural areas moved to work in one of the new factories.

Miguel Facussé Barjum

"the seventh of nine children of Nicholás and María Barjum de Facussé and his family is of Palestinian descent"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Facuss %C3%A9_Barjum



The Honduran Business Elite One Year After the Coup

What has happened in Honduras since the coup is the fusion of the transnational business class with government. Today, President Porfirio Lobo’s Foreign Minister Mario Canahuati remains as a director of the Lovable Group, which owns four export processing zones and produces products for Costco, Hanes, Russell Athletic, Footlocker, JC Penny, and Sara Lee, and is one of the largest industrial groups in Central America.
Honduras’s new government and some of its allies, like the United States, are working overtime to try and undo the diplomatic damage done by the coup. In April, Canahuati was in Washington DC, where he met with Hillary Clinton and officials from other states as well. And earlier this month, Clinton pushed the Organization of American States to re-admit Honduras.
https://nacla.org/news/honduran-business-elite-one-year-after-coup


Hillary and Honduras....

The Hillary Clinton Emails and the #Honduras Coup

The released emails provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes view of how Clinton pursued a contradictory policy of appearing to back the restoration of democracy in Honduras while actually undermining efforts to get Zelaya back into power.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/24/hillary-clinton-emails-and-honduras-coup





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