On Sunday, June 28, in the early morning hours of a day when the people of Honduras were preparing to vote in a non-binding referendum on whether there should be an assembly to make changes to the constitution, dozens of military troops forcibly detained President Manuel Zelaya and exiled him to Costa Rica.
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The coup plot was brewing for several days, with full U.S. government knowledge, by its own admission in a telephone press conference call with two unnamed U.S. State Department “officials Number One and Number Two.”
Although the coup leaders claim to be following the constitution and legal norms, the tales of who gave the order for the ousting of Zelaya are unraveling, due to worldwide condemnation of the coup.
To date no government recognizes the coup’s militarily installed “president,” Roberto Micheletti. The coup plotters trip over themselves giving different explanations to try to justify the legality of the coup.
On July 3, the Miami Herald interviewed pro-coup Honduran military lawyer Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza. He admitted in chilling words the brutal intentions of the military. On the military’s decision to expel Zelaya instead of arresting him, Inestroza said, ‘What was more beneficial, remove this gentleman from Honduras or present him to prosecutors and have a mob assault and burn and destroy and for us to have to shoot?
“If we had left him here, right now we would be burying a pile of people.”
That threat became true when at least 200,000 peaceful protesters were fired upon on July 5 by the military as they gathered at Toncontín International Airport to await Zelaya’s plane. The plane was forced to divert to El Salvador.
U.S. government wants to turn back the clock
The fear of Washington and its subordinates in Honduras is that the people of Honduras could follow in the footsteps of the people of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, which have adopted new constitutions much more in line with the needs of the people and asserting control of their country’s natural resources.
No matter how much it tries to hide its role and claim neutrality in the current crisis, the United States imperialists are at least tacitly behind the Honduran ruling class’s coup. Certainly it has not acted to cut off military aid nor withdraw its ambassador as have several Latin American governments.
After all, the historic role of the United States in all of Central America has been the direct setting up of governments, building and arming their military and national guards, in order to repress the people and maximize U.S. corporations’ profits.
There is no better example of this than U.S.-Honduran history. From the time of U.S. direct military expansion in 1898 with the war against Spain, and takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico and in Asia, the Philippines—regarded as the beginning of U.S. imperialism—there was a parallel policy of direct intervention in Central America that continued for decades.
First ‘banana republic’
It was in 1899, that a banana empire was established in Honduras, with three major U.S. banana-exporting companies.
These companies operated with a free hand, taking control of the vast majority of the best lands, building railroads that transported the fruit to the Caribbean coast for export to the United States. This is where the term “banana republic” first came into being, to signify governments identified with U.S. interests, coups and brutal repression.
Three banana companies and the U.S. government dominated Honduran politics. Because of the conflicts among the companies, there were also constant coups among their corresponding political candidates, and struggles between the Honduran Liberal Party and the Honduran National Party.
By 1929, the notorious United Fruit Company bought out its largest rival and more fully dominated the country’s politics. Honduras became the largest exporter of bananas in the world, with 80 percent of its revenues coming from this crop. However, the greatest beneficiaries were the companies themselves.
But the early decades of the 20th century also saw the corresponding development of Honduras’s proletariat, the labor movement and struggles against their exploitation.
The worldwide capitalist economic crisis of 1929-33 severely affected the banana workers. There were strikes and militant protests against massive layoffs and cuts in wages.
Current developments in Honduras are bound to have an effect on the rest of the surrounding Central American countries. Honduras’ strategic placement, with Guatemala to the north, El Salvador to the west and south, and Nicaragua to the south, means that the United States has always interfered to keep control in any of those countries, against any revolutionary uprisings.
For example, in 1922 the U.S. government brought the presidents of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador onto a warship off the Atlantic coast. There it engineered an agreement that pledged support among those governments against any revolutions that could take place in the region. This was due to the rise of popular movements against oligarchy and U.S. imperialism.
Of course, this U.S. agreement didn’t keep Washington from engineering military coups or outright invasions.
One of the most critical interventions by the U.S. to quell progress in the region was in 1954, when Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz instituted major progressive changes: expropriation of United Fruit Company’s lands that were not being used, the encouragement of labor unions, and so on.
The United States shipped massive amounts of weapons into Honduras, and Honduran troops and reactionary Guatemalan exiles invaded to help overthrow Arbenz. What followed was 40 years of terror against the Guatemalan masses, mostly Indigenous people.
A potentially revolutionary situation in Guatemala was stopped cold, again by the United States.
Another major period of U.S. maneuvering, militarization of the region, and using one country as a base against the other, was in the early 1980s.
What was the situation in Central America?
In Nicaragua, the Sandinista National Liberation Front had taken power July 19, 1979, to overthrow the decades-long, U.S.-backed Somoza regime. That was to Honduras’s south.
To the west and south was El Salvador, where the five revolutionary forces that comprised the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), were battling the fully U.S.-backed regime. The most intense period of that war was 1979 to 1984.
The United States used Honduras as a base for counter-insurgency against the FMLN, the guerrilla movement in Guatemala and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The fascist Nicaragua Contras established their bases in Honduras to attack the people of Nicaragua.
Honduras became increasingly strategic for U.S. counter-insurgency against its bordering neighbors. Consequently, U.S. military dollars flooded the country. In 1980, U.S. military aid to Honduras was 3.3 million, it jumped 10-fold to 31.3 million in 1983, and skyrocketed to $77.4 in 1984. From 1981 to 1985 U.S. military aid was $169 million. According to the U.S. Library of Congress Countries Studies, “… the percentage of the [Honduran] military budget coming directly or indirectly from the United States increased from 7 percent in 1980 to 76 percent in 1985.”
Under the command of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, the army’s notorious Battalion 316 engaged in internal repression against Honduran worker, student and religious activists. A creation of the CIA, this unit’s objective was the systematic rounding up, torture and murder of dozens. By some accounts, 184 people were murdered in the early 1980s.
In a June 1995, a groundbreaking series of articles in the Baltimore Sun brought to light the CIA’s direct role in creating, training and arming Battalion 316. .
In San Francisco, it was revealed in the early 1990s that a San Francisco police, Dan Gerard, was involved in the setting up of those death squads. He was also part of a surveillance operation of San Francisco progressive organizations in the 1980s.
Although the big-business media today states that civilian rule was restored in Honduras in 1982, clearly the role of the government was still one of subservience to the military and the United States.
Plotting against Zelaya’s unconditional return
In the meantime, the U.S. government and the Organization of American States worked to delay the plans of Zelaya to return to Honduras. At first Zelaya said he would go back on Thursday, July 2. Several leaders, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, Guatemala’s President Alvaro Colóm, and U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto of Nicaragua announced that they would accompany him on his return.
Then Organization of American States Secretary General José Miguel Insulza asked Zelaya to wait until Saturday, July 4, since an OAS resolution demanded that the coup plotters give up by then. Zelaya subsequently flew to Honduras on Sunday, July 5, but the Honduran military blocked the airport runway preventing the plane from landing.
Washington then advised Zelaya to negotiate with the coup-plotters and arranged for Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to mediate the conflict. Arias met separately with Zelaya and Micheletti, but no agreement was reached.
Micheletti has warned repeatedly that Zelaya would be arrested on his return.
While the imperialists and their Latin American accomplices are trying to find a way to return Zelaya greatly compromised or otherwise rendered ineffective, the ALBA alliance (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas—Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas), which Honduras joined in August 2008, has demanded Zelaya’s return with no conditions.
According to a July 10 Reuters dispatch, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez pronounced the Costa Rica talks “dead before they started” and called for a total trade embargo on Honduras. Reuters quoted Zelaya as saying that he is working on “peaceful, non-violent methods” to return to office.
What is taking place in Honduras shows the sharpening of the class struggle in Latin America and the continued interventionist policy of the U.S. government towards the continent under the Obama administration.
For those popular movements in Latin America anxious to see what the new Obama government would mean for the region, this should make clear the need to keep building the people’s struggles to defend their gains and maintain solidarity against U.S. imperialism’s strategy.
