Tegucigalpa, May 14 (RHC)-- Former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, ousted in 2009 after a coup d'état, said there are similarities between that operation in Honduras and the attempts at destabilization in Venezuela.

Manual Zelaya pointed out that the maritime incursion in which armed mercenaries attempted to enter Venezuelan territory on May 3rd and which was thwarted by Venezuelan military personnel in La Guaira has points of comparison with the coup d'état in Honduras in 2009.

The former president, who was overthrown by the Honduran armed forces in the early hours of June 28th, 2009, said that more than a decade after that institutional breakdown, "everything indicates that U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved."

In the first edition of the book "Hard Choices" published in 2014, Zelaya said: "The e-mails published by Wikileaks also confirm that behind the military that broke the constitutional order in Honduras was not only the Honduran oligarchy, but also the U.S. intelligence agencies."  Zelaya said that even former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirms this in her book.

Comparing what happened in Honduras in 2009 to Venezuela today, Zelaya explained that in these plans, once the democratic order is overthrown, "political mafias or political cartels" are installed to govern the countries, something that "responds to a pirate instinct" that hovers over Latin America "from the Monroe Doctrine and the politics of the Big Stick."

The Monroe Doctrine is named after the fifth president of the United States, James Monroe (1817-1825), who in 1823 said that any intervention by Europe in any of the American countries would be considered by the United States as an aggression against its own territory.  "America for the Americans" was the phrase with which the doctrine was illustrated.

What at the beginning of the 19th century could be seen as a way to avoid the re-colonization of America by Europe, changed substantially from the middle of the 20th century.  Under that concept, the United States participated in several military operations in the territory of other Latin American countries that had governments not aligned with their interests.  The coup d'état in Guatemala in 1954, the frustrated Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961, the military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, the creation and funding of the contras in Nicaragua in 1980, the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the support to South American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s are some of the crudest examples.

The Honduran president overthrown in 2009 stated that these types of actions are driven by "the hegemonic power of capitalism and its impositions, which can no longer be sustained with intelligent arguments but through authoritarianism, force and the threat of war, which is the way Donald Trump acts today.