by Todd Gordon
PART II
CENTRAL AMERICA
CHAPTER 2
AUTHORITARIAN CAPITALISM: THE NEW NORMAL IN HONDURAS
In the pre-dawn hours of June 28, 2009, the Honduran military overthrew the social democratic government of Manuel Zelaya and replaced him temporarily with Roberto Micheletti, a figure from a competing faction of Zelaya’s own Liberal Party, bringing to an end the country’s halting democratic experiment, in place since 1982.98 Having been expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) for the interruption of democratic rule, elections designed to provide the regime with a new legitimate face were carried out in November that year. Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, of the National Party, won this deeply fraudulent election and was inaugurated on January 27, 2010 in the midst of mass resistance protests in the streets of Tegucigalpa and elsewhere. The ousting of Zelaya was the second successful coup d’état in the Western hemisphere since Alberto Fujimori’s auto-golpe, or self-orchestrated coup, in Peru in 1992.99
The present Honduran moment encapsulates a wider fusion of neoliberalism and militarism stretching across the greater Central American corridor, from Colombia in the south to Mexico in the north.100 The full implementation of Barack Obama’s proposed Plan Central America would finally bridge the synthesizing security apparatuses of the isthmus, initiated with Plan Colombia under Bill Clinton and continued with Plan Mexico under George W. Bush. The associated “war on drugs” in Mexico carried out during the presidency of Felipe Calderón left at least 55,000 dead between 2006 and 2012, while the Colombian program has pumped US$3.6 billion into the militarization of counternarcotics regulation and enforcement in that country since 2000.101
Cementing the regimes of Lobo and his successor Juan Orlando Hernández’s clasp over Honduran society is a lynchpin in the coercive component of emerging accumulation strategies of North American capitals and their domestic allies in Central America, traversing as they do the conflict-ridden sectors of open-pit mining, hydroelectrical development, tourism, biofuel plantations, carbon-credit forests, and low-waged textiles and manufacturing—the maquiladora zones.102 “FDI flows into Honduras totalled US$1.014 billion in 2011, 27% more than the figure for 2010,” according to the latest report issued by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). “The largest investor in Honduras was the United States (28.6% of the total), followed by Canada (18.4%) and Mexico (15%).”103
This is the complex regional scenario that needs to be understood if we are to unpack how Honduras has become an important anchor to Canada’s engagement with Central America, an engagement driven by the promotion of strong property rights for capital and the containment of challenges to these rights through diplomatic, economic, and security strategies. At its core, then, this chapter has two principal objectives. First, it provides an overarching account of the multifaceted components of Canadian imperialism in Honduras since the coup of 2009. Second, it attempts to situate Canadian geopolitics in Honduras against that country’s own complicated historical development and the ongoing forms of popular resistance to the status quo that persist into the present. Employing such an approach, we try to avoid any easy portrayal of the Honduran people as merely the passive victims of imperial abuse.
The chapter begins with a deep reflection on the historical foundations of contemporary Honduras, charting the dynamics of counterinsurgency during the Cold War and the neoliberal pacification of society in the 1990s, as well the legacy of new forms of violent insecurity and inequality that Cold War politics and neoliberal economics left in their wake in the early twenty-first century. Against this backdrop, the chapter then situates the rise of Zelaya to office and maps out the principal characteristics of his short-lived administration. The following sections explore Ottawa’s post-coup diplomacy in relation to Honduras, including Canada’s key role in the so-called Tegucigalpa-San José Accord, the sanitization of the record of human rights abuses under Micheletti and Lobo, the reintegration of Honduras into the “international community,” and the solidification of what is known as the Cartagena Accord in 2011. At this stage, we return again to the agency of the Honduran popular classes, showing how a heroic resistance movement has been forged in the most difficult of circumstances to challenge the domestic ruling class and the aligned interests of imperial capital. With that context in place, it is possible then to understand the deeper, underlying motivations of the Canadian intervention, beginning with a materialist exploration of Canadian capital in the country, particularly in mining, maquilas, and tourism. Those material interests help to ground the closing sections, which analyze Canada’s longer term economic engagement plans in Honduras and the underlying role of the new Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement within those plans. The conclusion to the chapter reconsiders all of these complexities in light of the results of the November 2013 general election in Honduras. It provides an assessment of the political significance of that election, as well as offering a socio-economic panorama of the present.
HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS
The modern history of Honduras is the paradigmatic narrative of a Banana Republic. The banana industry developed relatively rapidly from its nascent beginnings in the 1860s. By 1928, three American corporations—Cuyamel Fruit Company, Standard Fruit Company, and the United Fruit Company—oversaw the production and export of more bananas from Honduran soil than any other country in the world. These old-school multinationals consequently dominated domestic political as well as economic life. The banana crop accounted for more than 90 percent of the country’s export profile.104 But this was also a typical enclave sector, situated narrowly on the northern Atlantic coast, which was inaccessible from most other parts of the country by rail or road. Prices were subject to the whims of fluctuating international supply and demand. In the wake of the Great Depression, bananas took a considerable beating and coffee emerged as an important parallel source of foreign exchange, one just as vulnerable, however, to massive peaks and valleys in the world market.
Built on two shaky pillars, the Honduran political economy in the first half of the twentieth century was the “most backward” in Central America, with “both the subordinate and dominant classes…historically the least developed,” allowing for, “the vulgar domination of the country by foreign companies.”105 In the 1950s and 1960s capitalist modernization slowly began to penetrate social relations throughout much of the rest of the country, and alter its mode of incorporation into the world market—export diversification expanded to encompass cotton, cattle, and sugar, alongside the earlier staple crops. The political expression of this evolving social structure took form in the shape of two malleable and faction-ridden parties—the Liberal Party, which first appeared in the late nineteenth century, and the National Party, a split from the Liberals, which made its presence felt in the early twentieth century. The two parties have since monopolized the official sphere of public life until the present day, apart from sometimes lengthy military interregnums. The longest such period of successive military regimes lasted from 1963 until 1982, after which a very restricted transition to electoral democracy occurred, followed a decade later by a neoliberal transformation of the economy.106
Outside the confines of the Liberal, National, and authoritarian spheres of official regime politics, vibrant traditions of peasant and worker radicalism began to take root alongside and against capitalist expansion in the middle part of the twentieth century. The most explicit asseveration of workers’ new-found capacities was expressed in the 1954 strike against the United Fruit Company. “It marked a historic turn,” suggests historian Walter LaFeber. “The society loosened and even began to liberalize as certain workers’ rights were recognized for the first time.”107 In straightforwardly economic terms the workers only achieved small wage hikes, but politically they won legal recognition for unions and the right to organize. The reaction of Cold Warriors in both Washington and Tegucigalpa to Communist participation in the 195
4 strike insinuated itself over the coming decades into the state’s relationship with the Honduran labour movement. The guardians of liberty exercised blunt coercion against radicals in concert with consensual strategies of cooptation, such as the sponsorship of “free and democratic” anti-Communist labour organizations.108
The countryside, meanwhile, witnessed a veritable explosion of peasant mobilization beginning in the 1960s, not least because of the Cuban revolutionary example in 1959. Peasant mobilizations and occupations over the course of the next two decades forced military governments to redistribute close to two hundred thousand hectares of land to landless and land-poor rural dwellers.109 These land struggles, intersecting with labour actions in the banana plantations, persisted into the 1980s and 1990s in various forms.110 Peasant militancy in the early 1960s erupted initially in the same area of the northern Atlantic coast as the location of the strike of 1954. The peasants were spurred by expropriations of their land as the United Fruit Company expanded its operations. They formed the Federación Nacional de Campesinos Hondureños (Federation of Honduran Peasants, FENACH), an independent and militant organization rooted in mass direct action oriented toward the occupation or recovery of dispossessed ejidal, or communal, land. FENACH was founded with the help of former union leaders still in the area after having been fired for their roles in the 1954 strike, leftist political activists, radicalized students, and incipient revolutionary guerrilla movements.111
The response to peasant mobilization from the Honduran state and its American imperial backer mirrored in many respects their answer to labour activism. Efforts at cooptation were articulated most visibly in the overtly anti-Communist Asociación Nacional de Campesinos Hondureños (National Association of Honduran Peasants), “organized with substantial assistance from the United States through the AFL-CIO and its Latin American arm, the Inter-American Regional Organization of Labor.” The coercive side became most visible after the overthrow of the civilian regime in 1963 and the forceful liquidation of FENACH as an organization: “the leaders who were caught were jailed, its offices and archives were demolished, and its membership repressed.”112 The clampdown increased in intensity throughout the 1980s, as we will see momentarily. In spite of the fact that state coercion was moderate when compared to the horrors being orchestrated by the dictatorships in neighbouring El Salvador and Guatemala, illegal detentions, disappearances, and targeted killings were nonetheless common in Honduras.113
The United States had established a special formal relationship with the Honduran military in 1954, through which the Hondurans began to receive aid to “professionalize” their military.114 Still, it took a sea change in Central American politics—ignited initially by the successful Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, and fuelled further by simultaneous mass guerrilla insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala—to solidify and accelerate the special U.S.–Honduran military relationship. Internally, Honduras was undergoing momentous change in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The country was suffering a major economic crisis, as income per capita plummeted by roughly 12 percent over the first four years of the 1980s.115 Elections were held in 1981 for the first time since 1963, bringing to office Liberal Party candidate Rafaél Suazo Córdova. Even as the transition to electoral democracy unfolded, however, the role of the military in domestic affairs was actually expanding with an unprecedented inflow of American aid. Honduras became a principal staging ground in the American effort to bring down the Sandinista government and prevent similar guerrilla movements from coming to power in El Salvador and Guatemala.
COLD WAR COUNTERINSURGENCY
Partway through 1980, Jimmy Carter had already sent an American major general to inform the Hondurans of their role as a “bulwark of anti-Communism against the pressures of popular revolt.”116 Under the subsequent administration of Ronald Reagan, though, the crusade against the Communist dominos acquired unforeseen dimensions. Eight hundred Honduran soldiers were cycled through the infamous School of the Americas for military training in the 1980s as the country became the pivotal base of operations for Central American counterinsurgency.117 Immediately after Reagan’s inauguration, the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Casey, was briefed by Honduran officers who “pitched their idea of organizing fleeing members of Nicaragua’s National Guard into a counterrevolutionary expedition that could destabilize the Sandinista government.”118 Thus the Contras were born. Honduras effectively metamorphosed into “the rearguard for 20,000 Nicaraguan contra troops, whose supply lines involved a vast network stretching from U.S. and Honduran military bases to the contra camps along the border with Nicaragua.”119 At the same time, the Honduran border with El Salvador became another important front against left-wing guerrilla operations in that country.120
Between 1980 and 1992, Honduras received US$1.6 billion in economic and military aid from the United States.121 The American Empire established “its own military and airforce bases, intelligence centers, and regional command posts, and a training center for Salvadoran soldiers run by U.S. commandos, until it was closed down in 1985.”122 American aid provided Honduran forces with mobile training teams of U.S. personnel, artillery, night vision capabilities, high-tech communications equipment, reconnaissance planes, and patrol boats to police its coasts.123 Moreover, Honduras provided sanctuaries from which counterinsurgent Salvadoran pilots, under CIA direction, could launch air attacks on Nicaragua as well as supply Contra forces with resources to sustain their campaigns of terror.124 As early as 1983:
The U.S. operation was so large that the CIA opened a press bureau in a Honduran Holiday Inn to brag about its exploits. Some 300 to 400 North American military personnel worked in the small country. The 116 members of the U.S. Embassy made it one of the largest in all Latin America.125
This formal support from the U.S. state was fortified by an allied international network of actors supporting the anti-Communist efforts in Central America. The intricate web included the authoritarian junta in Argentina until its demise after the Falklands War in 1982, the Saudi Arabian, Taiwanese, Panamanian, and Israeli states, and a variety of non-state components, including conservative religious organizations of the American Christian Right, private mercenaries and arms dealers, security firms, and drug traffickers.126
If, on the one hand, the military build-up in Honduras was geopolitically motivated by the country’s propitious geographical proximity to the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran fronts, it also served to capacitate domestic coercion against real and potential popular resistance—or “preemptive counterinsurgency” at home. “Even though Honduras did not possess a major guerrilla insurgency,” anthropologist Lesley Gill observes, “military hard-liners targeted students, unionists, and peasants, as well as anyone who belonged to political parties or groups considered leftist.”127 At a minimum, 290 teachers, union activists, peasants, and labour militants “disappeared” between 1980 and 1984 at the hands of the Honduran state’s coercive apparatus. Another wave of resistance against the militarization of Honduran society in supposedly democratic times was led in 1986 and 1987 by peasant movements, drawing on their long historical traditions of struggle. The state riposte was a rash of assassinations against both peasant and labour leaders.128 Trade union and peasant federations, radical Christian grassroots communities inspired by liberation theology, and militant student organizations that had cropped up in the struggles of the 1970s continued to mount resistance even as some were coopted into the party system as electoral politics became increasingly important. These social movements were joined, on the one hand, by human rights organizations and, on the other, by a small number of ephemeral guerrilla fronts in the early 1980s. In response:
Honduras was visited…by counterinsurgency and state terrorist methods never before used in the country, such as “anti-terrorist” laws, disappearances, and state-organized death squads, as the population fell victim to the same mass violation of human rights as in neighbouring c
ountries.129
This violent cleansing of popular movements was the sine qua non for the subsequent introduction of neoliberalism. “With a few important exceptions,” historian Greg Grandin has observed, “state- and elite-orchestrated preventive and punitive terror was key to ushering in neoliberalism in Latin America. The prerequisite for the rapid economic restructuring that took place throughout the Americas beginning full throttle in the 1980s,” he remind us, “had as much to do with the destruction of mass movements as it did with the rise of new financial elites invested in global markets.”130
NEOLIBERAL PACIFICATION
With the end of the Cold War on the international scene, the defeat of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in the 1990 elections, and the ending of the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, the region transitioned from a period of state terror and guerrilla struggle in the 1980s to an epoch of neoliberal consolidation over the course of the 1990s—what historian James Dunkerley has called the “pacification of Central America.”131 With its own particularities, the trajectory of Honduras largely mirrored this regional turn.
The ascendance to the presidency by Rafael Callejas of the National Party in the 1990 elections marked the earnest inauguration of neoliberal restructuring in the country. Callejas, an agricultural economist, banker, and member of one of the wealthiest families in Honduras, headed up a newly hegemonic wing of the National Party, dominated by neoliberal technocrats and externally-oriented sections of the Honduran bourgeoisie.132 Indeed, a defining feature of politics since the neoliberal transition has been the emergence of internecine factional conflicts within the still-dominant Liberal and National parties, as externally- and domestically-oriented sections of Honduran capital come into conflict—the former (and more powerful) wing of capital has interests in sustaining and deepening neoliberal restructuring based on the emergent export-oriented model of accumulation, and the latter (weaker) fraction, who remain tied to features of the domestic market which are in decline, is compelled to forge contradictory and episodic populist alliances with the popular classes.133
