An Indigenous woman holds a poster with a photograph of Berta Caceres during a
march to demand justice in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (photo: Reuters)
The
Fate of Honduras
By Parker Asmann & Dana
Frank, Jacobin
10 December 16
From the “USS Honduras” to the 2009 coup and its aftermath,
Honduras has suffered some of the worst abuses of US foreign policy.
It’s
rare for Honduras to make headlines during a US national election. But after
Honduran human rights activist Berta Cáceres was
murdered in her home in the early hours of March 3, observers raised the
connection between her assassination and Hillary Clinton’s support for
the 2009 coup that
unseated President Manuel Zelaya and unleashed a wave of violence against
activists in the country. To many, Cáceres’s death was emblematic of everything
wrong with Clintonite foreign policy: a toxic confluence of investor and
commercial interests with an uncomfortably high tolerance for shady regime
change.
But
Clinton’s position on Honduras is more remarkable for how little it deviates
from the United States’s previous history in
the country. The relationship has long been defined by American support of
ruthless, antidemocratic domestic elites in the service of transnational
commercial interests and continued US domination in the region.
Now,
with Donald Trump set to enter the White House, the situation looks even worse.
To discuss the current moment in Honduras in the context of of its long history
under the United States’s thumb, Jacobin spoke with Dana
Frank, a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert
on the country.
Can
you give an overview of the historic relationship between the United States and
Honduras?
Throughout
its modern history Honduras has always been what scholars have called a “captive
nation.” It’s been one of the United States’s most locked-down allies,
particularly in Central America.
The
country has a long history of US domination, with Honduran domestic elites
consistently working with transnational corporations like United Fruit
Company and US imperial strategies to dominate the country. In 1954, the CIA
used Honduras as a base to overthrow the democratically elected
socialist government of Guatemala. Honduras was famously used in the 1980s as
the base for the invasion and war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — the
country was known as the USS Honduras at the time.
It has
never had a moment in the twentieth century when it was independent of US
domination.
What
happened with the 2009 coup d’etat? What role did the United States play in
Manuel Zelaya’s removal?
For
decades Honduras has been dominated by two elite parties, both of them
right-wing and controlled by the oligarchic families that run the Honduran
economy in collaboration with the US government and transnational corporations.
President Manuel Zelaya came from one of those parties, the Liberal Party. He
was elected in 2006, and gradually started moving somewhat leftward in
alignment with the rise of democratically elected left and center-left governments all
over South and Central America.
He was
no leftist, but he did stop elite privatizations and power grabs, and he did
double the minimum wage. He alienated his fellow elites so much that they
turned on him in 2009, using a ballot measure as their pretext.
In
Honduras, the president has a right to put a survey on the ballot. Zelaya put a
question on the ballot for June 28, 2009, asking whether Hondurans wanted to
elect delegates to a constitutional convention that would take place well in
the future, in 2010 or 2011. The elites seized on that poll question and
claimed that Zelaya was using it to try and change the constitution so that he
could get a second term. We have zero evidence that Zelaya was trying to do so.
In
collaboration with the military, the Supreme Court, and the majority of
Congress, the elites deposed Zelaya. On the
morning of the survey vote, the military put him on a plane to Costa Rica in
his pajamas and sent him out of the country. That ushered in the reign of
terror that has torn through Honduras ever since.
During
that first twenty-four hours, President Obama and then secretary of state
Hillary Clinton acknowledged that it was an unconstitutional coup, and
Obama even said something to the effect of, we thought the dark ages of Latin
American coups were over. But very quickly the United States pivoted to
supporting the post-coup dictator, Roberto Micheletti, who immediately
unleashed tremendous repression against the opposition. Obama and Clinton would
never condemn Micheletti.
Then
the United States moved negotiations between Micheletti and Zelaya over a
possible resolution of the coup out of the Organization of American States
(OAS) and into Costa Rica, because almost all OAS member countries had
denounced the coup and refused to recognize the post-coup government. So the
United States moved negotiations onto territory it could control and eventually
legitimated the completely bogus, fraudulent November 2009 election, which was
boycotted by all international observers, including the Carter Center, the OAS,
the European Union, and the United Nations, except the US Republican Party.
US law
says that if there is a coup with substantial military involvement, then the
United States has to immediately cut all aid to that country — all of
the aid. And clearly this was a military coup: the military put President
Zelaya on a plane and took him out of the country.
Clinton
and Obama kept saying, “Well, it’s a coup, but it’s not a military coup.”
Therefore, they argued, the United States didn’t have to cut the hundreds of
millions of dollars in aid, particularly aid to the Honduran police and
military.
Since
the coup, how have human rights and environmental rights defenders in Honduras
fared?
First,
I think people need to know that Honduran people rose up immediately — on the
day of the coup — uniting a huge range of social movements in Honduras. It was
a coalition of trade unionists, feminists, campesinos, Afro-indigenous and
indigenous activists, and the LGBT movement, along with a broad swath of
middle-class people committed to the rule of law.
This
uprising was a movimiento amplio, or broad movement, that came
together in the National Front of Popular Resistance, and produced huge street
demonstrations, large blockades, and all kinds of protests, in an enormous resistance that was brutally
repressed by the post-coup regime.
The
coup, itself an illegal and criminal act, opened the door for spectacular
corruption. It’s not like things were squeaky clean in Honduras before, but the
post-coup government legitimated, permitted, and encouraged criminal behavior
from the top to the bottom. The Supreme Court is corrupted. The Congress was
largely corrupted by supporting the criminal act of the coup, which, in turn,
permitted a free-for-all of robbing the government blind in its aftermath. The
coup opened the door for the vast expansion of gangs, drug trafficking, and
criminal behavior, with almost complete impunity for criminal acts of any sort.
The
current president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, has a spectacular record
himself of overthrowing the rule of law. He was the head of a key committee in
Congress that supported the coup. When he was president of Congress in December
2012, he led what was known as the technical coup, which threw
out four members of the Supreme Court at three in the morning and named new ones
the next day, completely illegally.
Hondurans
now clearly call Hernández a dictator, and this is very important when we place
him in the context of the long arc of US policy in Latin America. He controls
the police, the military, the attorney general, Congress, and the Supreme
Court. So he has all the branches of power locked down.
Readers
may have heard about the scandal that broke in the spring of 2015 when it was
documented that Hernández and his party had stolen as much as $90 million from
the national health service and diverted that money into his and his party’s
2013 election campaigns. Literally thousands of people have died because of the
health service’s bankruptcy.
Even
he admits that the stolen money went into his campaign, and he’s still in power
despite massive street protests last year calling for his resignation. So this
man has a long, vast criminal history.
What
exactly are American dollars funding in Honduras? What sort of strategic role
does Honduras play for the United States?
The
United States has continued to recognize and legitimate the terrifically
repressive post-coup government that has stolen millions of dollars from the
health service and that supports a police force and a military that kill people
with impunity. It supports a president that has built his power around overtly
violating the Honduran constitution, not just the 2009 coup and the 2012
“technical coup,” but more recently by assigning the military to increasingly
take over domestic policing in violation of the constitution, and now by
running for reelection, although the constitution explicitly forbids it.
The
United States has continued to celebrate Hernández, just as it celebrated his
predecessor Porfirio Lobo. Most dramatically, in the spring
and summer of 2014, when around seventy thousand undocumented minors arrived at
the US border, the Obama administration used that as a pretext to celebrate
Hernández and the Honduran government even more. It used the supposed
immigration “crisis” to propose dramatically increased US funding for the
Honduran government as a way of stopping immigration and rebuilding the
Honduran economy, so immigrants wouldn’t need to flee.
Vice
President Biden, Obama’s lead on Latin America at the time, in January 2015
asked Congress for a billion dollars in the name of addressing immigration from
Central America. Congress eventually appropriated $750 million for Honduras,
Guatemala, and El Salvador in 2016 under a new program called the Alliance for Prosperity.
What’s
driving US policy in Honduras at a deeper level? First of all — and I want to
underscore this — this is the same pattern we’ve seen throughout the twentieth
century of the United States “dancing with dictators” and shoring up
dictatorial regimes that will be more or less loyal to it for geopolitical reasons.
These regimes allow a US military presence and repress social movements,
journalists, the opposition, and anyone critical of the government, the elites,
and their economic agenda; they will suppress all popular democracy to create a
free space for transnational corporations to exploit both the environment and
labor on a grand scale. That’s what’s driving US policy, that larger goal.
Why
Honduras in particular? As I said at the beginning, Honduras for a century has
been a strategically important place for the United States. The Air Force base at Soto
Cano is one of the few places where the United States can land its larger
planes. The United States is also trying to lock down its power in Central
America — it doesn’t have any other rock-solid allies in the region. It has
been pushing back again against the wave of left and center-left governments in
South and Central America for the past eight years or so, and Honduras was the
first domino to fall.
Most
recently, the United States is waving a revived Cold War flag — arguing that it
has to lock down its power in Honduras in order to keep Russia and China out.
Again we’re hearing a classic rhetoric in which the United States says it
should dominate a country merely so that some other country doesn’t come along
and dominate it instead. But the Honduran social movements would be the first
to say that the US should get out and let them fight their own battles.
How
will the aid package and the new coalition between Honduras, Guatemala, and El
Salvador to combat gangs affect US-Honduras relations?
Part of
the problem is that we don’t have transparency about who’s actually receiving
that money. There is very little accountability to either Congress or to the
American people on where the $750 million is flowing. So I can’t even tell you
where most of it is going. It’s not even clear how much of that money is even
flowing at all, because of congressional challenges.
You
asked about the tri-national, anti-gang force that has been recently publicized
in Central America. I would not take that project very seriously at all in
terms of what the Honduran government is actually doing to fight gangs, except
I’d say that it shows that the Hernández regime is militarizing its approach to
criminal justice even more.
What should be
addressed are jobs and the rule of law. Instead we have transnational
militarization funded by the United States to address problems that are being
created, in part, by the very militarization of policing that US money props
up.
The
real issue in Honduras is that there aren’t jobs, there isn’t the rule of law,
and there’s near-complete impunity. But with “new anti-gang task forces,” the
Honduran and US governments both get publicity for fighting violence — while
both fund its creation.
This
past summer the New York Times gave an enormous amount of free
publicity to a US-funded “gang prevention program” in Honduras, in order to
push back against congressional calls to suspend US funding for the Honduran
police. It turns out, though, that US-funded Honduran police involved in
the Times‘s celebrated program had themselves committed
extrajudicial killings less than a year before. And this is their model
project?
If we
look at the economic development side of that $750 million allocated for
Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, we don’t have transparency. We don’t know
where it goes; we don’t know whether it’s effective; we don’t know how it’s
interlocked with the larger, dangerous situation with the US-funded and trained
police and military, let alone the Honduran elites who are pulling the strings
and robbing the country all day, every day.
But
Congress has been pushing back harder and harder every
year. It placed human rights conditions on half of the money allocated for the
central government of Honduras in 2016. The State Department has to certify
that Honduras has made progress on many fronts, including prosecutions of
corrupt officials and police and military who have killed people, respect for
indigenous land rights, and protection of journalists, human rights defenders,
and the opposition.
Some
of those conditions are terrific. Senator Patrick Leahy, in particular,
deserves recognition — he heroically led the successful fight to get those
conditions into the act.
Given
how terrible the situation remains in Honduras, we had hoped that the State
Department would not certify that the conditions had been met. But on September
30, the State Department informed Congress that yes, they had been met.
Like
clockwork, two weeks later, a hideous wave of repression erupted in Honduras.
A
prominent campesino leader and another campesino activist were assassinated,
and then the son of another prominent campesino leader was killed. The
government unleashed tear gas and water cannons on a peaceful demonstration —
including children and the elderly — by the Civil Council of Popular and
Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), in front of the presidential
palace.
The
United States had sent the Honduran government a signal, a green light; you can
do anything you want, and we’re still going to give you the money.
Honduras
has been rocked by a number of political assassinations recently, most
notably Berta Cáceres. Since her death,
other COPINH members have been killed or received death threats; José Ángel
Flores, the president of the United Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA), and
campesino leader Silmer Dionisio George were murdered in October. What are
activists demanding from the United States in the wake of these human rights
abuses?
Berta
Cáceres, an indigenous leader and environmental activist from COPINH, and one
of the most world-famous activists in Honduras, was assassinated on March 2. A
military officer and two retired members of the military, among others, have
been accused of her murder, illustrating the role of the Honduran military in
killing human rights defenders, in this and other cases.
Her
murder was a clear message from the Honduran right that they will kill anybody
now, no matter how internationally renowned.
Cáceres’s
brutal assassination shows how dangerous the situation is for every single
Honduran activist or person in the opposition. Hundreds of lawyers,
journalists, campesino activists, and other people have been assassinated since the
coup, with impunity. Her case is only the most famous.
We
need to recognize and honor the tremendous opposition movements of many kinds
that still survive in Honduras, the array of groups that built the post-coup
resistance. More recently, new movements led by middle-class Hondurans have
demanded the president’s resignation because of his corruption.
A
broad alliance of Honduran human-rights defenders and social movements supports
the suspension of US police and military aid, which is our most basic demand in
the United States. Don’t fund the people who are killing us, threatening us,
and ripping us from the lands we rightfully own and work, they argue.
The
demand to suspend security aid has coalesced around a bill introduced by
Representative Hank Johnson in June 2016, calling for the suspension of all
police and military aid to Honduras. That bill, in turn, is the product of
enormous grassroots pressure on Congress — the same pressure that made Congress
put the human rights conditions on the 2016 aid. There are now forty-six
co-sponsors of the Hank Johnson bill, and the number is still growing.
How
will a Donald Trump presidency change US-Honduras relations? Aside from his
plans to deport nearly three million immigrants, he has rarely discussed Latin
America and has in fact indicated an interest in pulling back from American
engagements around the world.
Of
course we don’t really know as of this moment. There are no indications that
Trump is going to care about human rights. The early signals are that the
people who he is proposing and considering for his administration are truly
dangerous, terrifying figures.
My
best guess is that the United States is going to come down really hard trying
to stop immigration from Central America. Remember that the single biggest
group of people coming without papers into the United States are not from
Mexico. Central America and Honduras are at the top of that list.
Hondurans
understand how dangerous Trump is on the immigration front. I think he will
deport people back to Honduras to die, which is already happening under Obama.
We’re going to see a lot of people dead.
I
think Trump is going to support President Hernández. Trump’s going to want that
combination of military power and a place firms can go to destroy the
environment and hyper-exploit workers in factories. That’s exactly what Trump —
an exploitative corporate businessman, with a factory in Honduras himself
— is going to want to support.
I also
think that under Trump we’re not going to have even the kind of minimal
pressure that the State Department has exercised on Hernández to at least be
not quite such a monster. There is a certain degree of
leverage right now in the State Department to try and control its monster and have
him not be out of control. I don’t see a Trump department of state caring about
any of that, which means, I think, that thousands of people are going to die,
and they’re already dying.
This
isn’t just about Honduras. Honduras is emblematic of larger US policy in Latin
America; it’s emblematic of the United States overthrowing democratically
elected governments worldwide and, in this case, helping support one. It’s
emblematic of all the work the State Department has been doing in the last two
or three years to push out or destabilize democratically elected governments in
South and Central America. It’s part of a long arc of imperial history.
People
may think, well, why does Honduras matter? It matters because it is the worst
and the most emblematic current example of the United States dancing with
dictators in Latin America. But it also matters because a beautiful and
powerful solidarity movement in the United States has made this policy visible,
forcing the US Congress to act, and helping the media report the corruption and
repression that US policy supports.
What’s
something tangible that Americans can do to impact our government’s
relationship with Honduras and Central America?
There
are some very clear things that people can ask Congress to do. An obvious
useful beginning is to pressure representatives and senators to both
immediately suspend police and military aid to Honduras and revoke the 2016
funding certification.
In
general, we have to pay attention more broadly to foreign policy in Latin
America. In the State Department, Latin American policy is treated like a minor
backwater — part of a long, racist history in which Latin American sovereign
peoples are seen as children that the United States should manage, part of a
long history of US financial, political, and military domination of Latin
America.
It’s
also important to keep US policy in Honduras visible at the grassroots level so
people can track where our tax dollars are going and how Honduras policy ties
into immigration, into racism against people of Latin American descent, and
into domestic racism more broadly, on many fronts. The militarized police
repression of African Americans in the United States, for example, is in many
ways identical to the militarized police repression of the opposition in
Honduras. To give another example, many of the same individuals who have
managed the US war in Afghanistan now manage US intervention in Honduras, while
military equipment left over from Afghanistan is sent for free to police
departments in US cities.
The
atrocity of US policy in Honduras — the United States’s chilling support for
the vicious post-coup regime, which generates immigration that the United
States then sends still more military support to try and stop — is symbolic of
larger dynamics of US foreign and domestic politics.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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