Bellum

Easy target.

It didn’t take long for the usual suspects to start theorizing that the United States was behind the ouster of Honduras’ leftist president, Manuel Zelaya. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, it is easy to blame the CIA for everything that happens in Latin America. The intellectual luminaries over at the Democratic Underground are squabbling amongst themselves over the extent of Agency involvement, as are some Ron Paul supporters, but the prize goes to Prison Planet’s theory that the CIA orchestrated the coup because Zelaya wanted to legalize drugs and, well, the CIA just loves the drug war too much to let that happen.

Of course, the US was quick to condemn the coup and even worked to prevent it from happening. Compare this swift and unified denial of US complicity to the bungled PR effort by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, during which contradictory statements led many to believe the CIA was involved.

The key point is this: We simply don’t care who runs Honduras. Total trade between our two countries in 2008 amounted to just under $8.9 billion, less than the $10.6 billion in trade with Norway. Coffee and bananas are not critical commodities. We try to keep Central America stable via expatriate remittances, but from a strategic perspective Honduras is just another banana republic that exports MS-13 and serves as a coca transit point.

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