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NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2009
Honduras and the U.S.: long, tragic history
The military coup currently being played out in Honduras brings to the fore the history of U.S. military occupations and the political-economic domination of Central America in general, and Honduras in particular. Though the Obama administration critiqued the coup--which did mark a change from the century-plus U.S. role in Central America--its response has been tepid. One segment of U.S. aid, $16.5 million in military aid, has been suspended.
But security aid, $42 million in development aid, and training for Honduran military officers in the U.S.'s infamous School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), continue. It remains to be seen how serious the U.S. is in mobilizing its dominant influence to roll back this coup. While the new administration may not have played any direct role in allowing the coup to go forward and may even have opposed its implementation, the greater truth is that a century-plus of U.S. imperialist actions in Honduras laid the ground.
The Spanish-American War of 1898 opened nearly 25 years of active military presence in Honduras. It coincided with the economic invasion by the Standard Fruit Company followed by the United Fruit Company. The U.S. Marines were sent in more than half a dozen times from 1903 to 1925 to protect U.S. business interests, prop up or manipulate corrupt governments, oppress any opposition. Complete control of banana exports, arranging huge land holdings, domination of the railroad, and the Marines, all characterized Honduran-U.S. relations.
A new assault began after World War II. In Guatemala, a U.S.-CIA coup was carried out against a moderately progressive government in 1954. The U.S. saw Central America and the Caribbean only through its myopic anti-Communist lens. This could not halt the revolution in Cuba, nor Central American revolts. When Reagan took office, he was determined to destroy the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua as well as back the Rightist military and its death squads in El Salvador's civil war. Honduras was key to Reagan's Central American militarism. In 1982, U.S.-backed Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries, or "Contras," launched operations to bring down Nicaragua's Sandinista government from Honduran territory. U.S.-run training camps against Salvadoran revolutionaries were also put in place. Between 1981 and 1985, U.S. military aid to Honduras escalated from $4 million to over $77 million. A number of Honduran military officers involved in the coup were trained in the School of the Americas attended by hundreds upon hundreds of Latin American military over the years. It would take most of the 1990s to even partially de-militarize Honduras.
A new "invasion" of Honduras began by the mid-1980s in the form of neoliberal economic policies. The export economy, with its maquiladoras (assembly plants in free-trade zones), particularly manufacturing knit and woven apparel with dirt-cheap labor costs was the new future. The basic economic framework of the original banana plantation was repeated with new products, but with the same reliance on the sweated, exploited, underpaid labor of women and men. A 2008 UN report said seven of ten Hondurans were living in poverty. Unable to make a living in their own country, an estimated 800,000 now reside in the U.S.
It is in the context of this history and present reality that the Honduran workers, peasants, Afro-Hondurans, youth, and women have been struggling to change their conditions of life and labor. They tried to do so by electing Manuel Zelaya with his call for "citizen power." Yet even so mild a democratic movement for change threatened the old oligarchy, feeding from the neoliberal economic trough, and their military enforcers. Where lies the historical responsibility of the U.S. for shaping such a poverty-ridden, unequal and unfree reality? And what will the U.S. do at this moment of coup and popular outrage against it?
--E.W.
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