YouTube has the video Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders Address at Puerto Cabezas Sister City Program.

Burlington established a sister city relation with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua in 1984. Over 35 years ago Bernie Sanders was railing against the USA behavior that seems to have come to a head right now.

Here is an excerpt from my previous post How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.

Compare the foreign policy expereince of Bernie Sanders in 1984 with what Hillary Clinton displayed in 2009. Now do you understand why I would not vote for Hillary Clinton? If people understaood what Hillary Clinton was and is, I don’t think they would have voted for her either.

The Conversation has the story How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration.

U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace.” As a result, the Caribbean coast “became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.”

By 1914, U.S. banana interests owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land.

As you read more of the story, it just gets worse.

The Reagan administration also played a big role in restructuring the Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms, with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak social safety net.

These decades of U.S. involvement in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which began to markedly increase in the 1990s.

What our oligarchs did in Honduras was just a rehearsal for what they are now trying to do in the USA. Unless you want to live a life like the majority of Hondurans do, we need to wrest control of our government from the big money interests.