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| DeMint Continues to Hold Obama Administration Accountable on Honduras |
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Following his call for the Obama Administration to admit they were wrong in their hasty decision to back former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, a would-be dicator, Sen. DeMint introduced a measure yesterday that would require the Director of National Intelligence to present a full report on any role that Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Cuba’s leaders played in the ongoing crisis in Honduras, leading up to and after the removal of Zelaya from office.
DeMint has also delayed confirmation of President Obama’s nominee for the top U.S. diplomatic post for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela, who supports Zelaya's power grab. The confirmation of Arturo Valenzuela as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs has been postponed until the committee’s next business meeting. The nomination of Thomas Shannon as ambassador to Brazil (who would be replaced at his current post by Valenzuela) has also been put on hold. Both Valenzuela and Shannon, like the Obama Administration, have defended the unconstitutional strong-arm tactics of Zelaya.
Reports Bloomberg News:
Valenzuela defended the White House’s decision to condemn the overthrow as a coup and suspend aid to Honduras, Central America’s third poorest nation, at the foreign relations panel’s hearing on his nomination.
“In my studies of military coups in Latin America, this was a classic military coup,” he said at the July 9 hearing.
When pressed by DeMint about whether Honduras’s military acted to defend the constitution against abuses by Zelaya, Valenzuela said “I don’t want to get into some of the details of this. I’m not familiar myself with all of the details.”
DeMint said Valenzuela’s responses were unsatisfactory. “Mr. Valenzuela told me he didn’t even know the facts in Honduras,” DeMint said in the statement today. “Yet, everyday Zelaya’s own statements reveal his true desire to be a Chavez- style dictator advocating violence in order to return to power.”
DeMint also said that Shannon, in his State Department post, “has still failed to show a clear understanding of Honduras’s fight to defend democracy.”
New reports indicate that Zelaya's illegalities are more extensive than was first apparent. Honduran officials are investigating the disappearance of almost $3 million withdrawn from the central bank by Zelaya and his aides before he was escorted out of the country last month. Computers have also been seized from the Presidential Palace that reportedly contain the fixed results of the constitutional referendum Zelaya attempted to hold that, if passed, would have removed the limit on the number of terms he was allowed as president:
The National Directors of Criminal Investigation seized various computers from the Presidential Palace that had recorded the supposed results of the referendum to reform the constitution that the deposed leader, Manuel Zelaya, was planning to conduct on July 28, the day he was removed from office.
The official investigation now deals with the possible crime of fraud and falsification of documents due to the fact that some of the certified voting results had been filled with the personal information of individuals that supposedly participated in the failed referendum that did not take place because of the coup. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have threatened interim Honduran president Roberto Micheletti with the loss of U.S. financial aid if he does not allow Zelaya to return to power.
DeMint was one of 17 Senators that signed a letter to Clinton asking her and President Obama to reassess their stance on the situation in Honduras.
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