US President Barack Obama responded to growing criticisms of his government's position on the coup regime in Honduras at an August 7 press conference. The Honduran military overthrew elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28.
"It is important to note the irony that the people that were complaining about the US interfering in Latin America are now complaining that we are not interfering enough", Obama said.
While the formal position of the US government is for the return to power of Zelaya, Obama has repeatedly refused to apply economic sanctions and break all ties with the military dictatorship.
In practice, Obama's policies have helped keep the military in power.
Below Green Left Weekly publishes a response to Obama's comments from Roy Chaderton Matos, Venezuela' permanent representative to the Organisation of American States (OAS).
Matos explains the actions taken by Latin American governments in solidarity with the Honduran people and contrasts this with the huge propaganda campaign unleashed by the US and Colombia to justify military action against Venezuela to stop drug trafficking.
It has been translated by Federico Fuentes
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From the highest reaches of the official power of a member state of the OAS, a totally mistaken explanation has been leaked to the international media. Supposedly, other OAS member countries that usually accuse the US of intervening in the affairs of other nations, are today asking them to intervene in Honduras.
This explanation, which seeks to create a media impact, could not be any more arbitrary or malicious. What is at stake is the collective effort of the foreign ministers of the Americas to achieve the return of the Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya.
In other words, we expect all member states to take part, as much as each country can, to help restore the democratic system in Honduras.
On the other hand, interventionism has been used in the past to impose policies on other states. Also, democratic governments have been replaced with dictatorships that have violated human rights to serve particular political interests.
The OAS has responded well to this crisis. However, in the OAS's past are examples of complicity, silence, inaction or indifference in the face of invasions, destabilisation campaigns and the overthrow of dissident democratic governments in Latin America.
This past is very different from the measures of solidarity now taken by all of the member states of the OAS against the Honduran dictatorship.
To ask for more sanctions in support of democratic government in Honduras cannot be called hypocrisy.
A real example of hypocrisy is when the propaganda apparatuses of the largest producer and largest consumer of drugs in the world combine to present a socially advanced democratic country — a country that does not produce drugs and is not a significant consumer — as a narco-state [as the US is now doing to Venezuela].