by Todd Gordon
Callejas introduced the first of three structural adjustment packages (SAPs) implemented in Honduras in the 1990s, agreeing to a range of measures advocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and other foreign lenders. Callejas ushered in an austerity program, consumption tax hikes, liberalization of price controls, privatization of various state-owned enterprises, and tariff reductions. These measures constituted the pillars of a wider orientation in political economy toward free markets, tourism, non-traditional exports, free trade zones, and maquila (assembly plant manufacturing) promotion, an orientation that would continue under successive Liberal and National governments over the next decade and a half.134
Roberto Reina, representing a Centre-Left populist current within the Liberals, won the next presidential elections in 1993. With a public profile as a human rights leader, Reina campaigned on putting a stop to political corruption and curtailing military powers. He temporarily dampened some of the military control over social and political life; however, he simultaneously deepened and extended the neoliberal model when he agreed to a new SAP. His Liberal successor in the presidency, Carlos Roberto Flores Facussé (1997–2001), represented the far-Right of the party, but given a spike in urban and rural protests against neoliberal restructuring under Reina, even Flores was obliged to campaign on a platform critical of IMF loan conditionalities in the 1997 elections. Of course, once in office, Flores changed tune and set to work expanding the maquila industry, tourism, and the non-traditional agro-export sector, not least through the implementation of a third SAP.135 Flores was succeeded by the ultra-conservative Ricardo Maduro (2001–2005) of the National Party, who continued neoliberal orthodoxy in the economy and reintroduced military control in civilian affairs through a dramatic escalation of the “war on gangs.”
One consequence of neoliberal restructuring in the countryside has been the dramatic dispossession of large numbers of peasants from their land and their subsequent migration either to the United States or to the slums of the major cities—principally to the capital Tegucigalpa in the Southwest, with its richer traditions of left-wing activism, or to the free trading industrial city of San Pedro Sula, characterized more by the dominance of the Honduran Right in social, cultural, and political affairs.136 Land use patterns and rural class structures were changing dramatically. Rural poverty rates rose to above 70 percent by the late 1990s, according to World Bank figures.137 By the early 2000s, nearly half of the rural population operated farms with less than five hectares of land. Rural landless constituted an additional 27 percent of the economically active rural population. These peasants were increasingly pushed into semiproletarian or proletarian status as they were increasingly forced to sever their permanent ties to the land to seek a variety of forms of nonfarm employment.138 Geographically, almost 80 percent of small-holder farming in the country takes place on hillsides, as the fertile valleys came to be dominated by large foreign agro-industrial capitals devoted to “livestock production, sugar cane, bananas, and palm oil cultivation.”139
Some of the most striking expressions of these new trends in the Honduran agrarian structure were to be found in the Bajo Aguán region. “Countrywide, approximately 30,500 hectares (over 75,000 acres) of peasant lands acquired through the agrarian reform were sold between 1990 and 1994,” according to Tanya Kerssen:
These lands were concentrated in the most resource-rich parts of the country: areas with the most fertile soils, water resources and access to communication, energy and transport infrastructure. So while the national average for land re-concentration during this four-year period was less than 10 per cent, in the Aguán Valley and Atlantic coast regions (areas suitable for high-value crops like bananas and African palm) it was over 70 per cent. In Aguán, of the 28,365 hectares awarded to peasant cooperatives by the agrarian reform, 20,930 were sold off. Three oil palm magnates were the primary beneficiaries: René Morales Carazo, Reynaldo Canales and the richest man in Honduras, Miguel Facussé Barjum (who has earned the nickname palmero de la muerte or “palm grower of death”). In all, 40 peasant cooperatives lost their lands in Aguán. This is also where one of the strongest movements for land rights would emerge.140
Within a few years of the first SAP in 1990, foreign direct investment flooded into five new government-sponsored, export processing zones, as well as five privately run industrial parks, in which the majority of workers were cheap, female, and non-unionized. A maquila workforce of only 9,000 in 1990 ballooned to 20,000 in 1991, 48,000 in 1994, and 100,000 by the turn of the century.141
By 2007, value-added export earnings from the maquila sector amounted to US$1.2 billion, relative to US$203.7 million in 1996. This made maquiladoras the second most important source of foreign exchange after family remittances flowing in from the United States. Parallel to the maquila sector and remittances, tourism revenue increased from US$29 million in 1990 to US$556.7 million in 2007.142 FDI eclipsed old records in 2007, reaching US$815.9 million, the better part of which was directed toward the maquiladoras, transport, communications (particularly cell phones), the financial sector, and tourism.143 The same record-breaking year, however, brought with it the slow beginning of a fall in U.S. demand for Honduran manufactured exports, as well as increased competition from lower-cost producers in Asia.
In spite of an influx of FDI and positive appraisals from the international financial institutions regarding the pace and character of neoliberal reform, macroeconomic growth in Honduras over the course of the 1990s only peaked above 4 percent for one year (1997), and the decade was book-ended by periods of negative growth. The next decade, though, witnessed a distinct shift. Between 2003 and 2007, “Latin America experienced the most remarkable period of economic growth since the long post-World War II boom that ended in the mid-1970s,” generated by “the extraordinary combination of four factors: high commodity prices, booming international trade, exceptional financing conditions and high levels of remittances.”144 The economy of Honduras echoed these trends. Together with remittances, high commodity prices,145 and primed demand in the U.S., Honduras qualified in 2005 for debt relief as part of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.146 Having fully complied with the rigors of an IMF poverty reduction and growth facility program by 2004, Honduras became eligible for an HIPC facility; the initiative was scheduled to bring US$1.2 billion in debt relief between 2005 and 2015, some of which is supposed to go toward reducing poverty in Honduras as part of United Nations Millennium Development Goals.147
GDP accelerated quite rapidly between 2003 and 2007, surpassing 6 percent in 2005, 2006, and 2007, before tumbling with the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008. The global crisis, and particularly its American dimensions, began to hit Honduras in 2008 through weakening demand for Honduran exports, declining family remittances, and truncated inflows of foreign direct investment.148 GDP growth rate fell to 4.2 percent that year. However, these mechanisms transmuting the crisis from the core of the world system really only took full effect in 2009, as GDP growth entered into negative territory at -2.1, with a modest and fragile recovery in 2010 and 2011.
In spite of high growth rates in the mid-2000s, social conditions at the end of this period remained abysmal. Of 177 countries listed in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index for 2009, Honduras ranked 112. Of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, only Bolivia (113), Guyana (114), Guatemala (122), Nicaragua (124), and Haiti (149) faired worse.149 By 2011, Honduras had dropped to 121.150 Seventy-five percent of the population lived below the poverty line and 38 below the indigence line in 1990, the inaugural year of neoliberalism.151 By 2002, just prior to the commodities boom, those figures had in fact risen to 77 and 54 percent, respectively. By 2007, in the wake of the boom and auspicious circumstances for improving social conditions, poverty and indigence levels had only receded to 69 and 46 percent, respectively.152 In 2009 poverty and indigence figures were
65.7 and 41.8 percent, while by 2010, in the fallout of the 2009 contraction, these had worsened to 67.4 and 42.8, one of only two countries in the region—the other being Mexico—to register a “significant increase in poverty and indigence rates” in all of Latin America and the Caribbean over this period.153
Likewise, the figures of national income distribution depicted in Table I illustrate regression rather than progress since the outset of neoliberalism, in spite of the favourable economic environment for radical redistribution between 2003 and 2007. The marginal drop in the proportion of national income going to the richest 10 percent of the population between 2002 and 2007 was largely passed on to the next highest 20 percent of income earners. The poorest 40 percent of the population still took home less of the national income in 2007 than they did in 1990, and the boom years of the 2000s actually erased some of the extremely modest gains they had made over the course of the 1990s. Even after the boom years, the basic infrastructural underpinnings of the country’s economy were still massively underdeveloped, with the railway network first established to serve the banana companies having gone into disuse—the majority of the 785 kilometres of track missing from theft—and only 21.3 percent of the 15,628 kilometres of primary, secondary, and municipal roads having been paved.154 According to the country’s official statistics, 11 percent of households are overcrowded, one in six people over fifteen years of age is illiterate, and approximately 15 percent of households go without an adequate sewage system.155
Table I: Distribution of National Income in Honduras
Year
Poorest 40%
Next 30%
20% Below
Richest 10%
1990
10.2
19.7
27.1
43.1
1999
11.8
22.9
29.0
36.5
2002
11.4
21.7
27.6
39.4
2006
8.8
22.5
29.3
39.3
2007*
10.1
23.5
29.5
37.0
* Projected figures.
Source: Derived from CEPAL, Panorama Social de América Latina 2008. Santiago: Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), 2008: 230.
VIOLENT INSECURITY
The rural and urban popular classes resisted the neoliberal assault on their livelihoods over the 1990s and into the 2000s, but this epoch was also notable for its persistent state repression and punctuated remilitarization of politics under the aegis of the “war on crime” and the “war on gangs.” Peasant movements remained an important social force in Honduran politics. Indeed, Tegucigalpa acted as the headquarters for probably the most important transnational peasant movement in the world, the Vía Campesina, between 1996 and 2004.156 Nonetheless, the collective power of Honduran peasants to resist the reigning power structure at home began to diminish between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, as the political economy of the countryside plunged into precipitous decline. In the labour movement, banana workers—and increasingly women banana workers—“struggled to survive plantation closures, new production systems, and other machinations of the banana corporations—not to mention Hurricane Mitch.”157 New women’s groups, worker and peasant organizations, and community associations continued to emerge in the dozens over the course of the 1990s and engaged in different modes of struggle.158 By 2003, urban social movements against the privatization of state-owned utilities and public services were able to draw 25,000 people into the streets.159 All the same, by the late 1990s the overarching character of Honduran political and social life was made manifest not in effective rural and urban class struggle from below, but in the emergence of new and violent social pathologies among the poor and dispossessed, alongside the remilitarization of the state. The latter was ostensibly meant to ameliorate plebeian violence, but in reality acted as the coercive guarantee for the preservation of the neoliberal order.
Violent crime has increased dramatically throughout Latin America in the wake of neoliberal restructuring.160 Central America is at the leading edge of this phenomenon. The burgeoning lumpenproletariat, tossed out of the peasant world and refused admittance to the formal urban economy, was thrust cavalierly over the last two decades into a setting in which crime became one means of survival. The isthmus was transformed into a main thoroughfare for the shipping routes of drug cartels, with large numbers of unemployed, demobilized (but still armed) ex-combatants from the civil wars, and repatriated gang members from California—deported by the United States government in large numbers in the mid-1990s—filling the ranks of the lower echelons of the trade.161 “At best,” Grandin argues,
the energy of the dispossessed is channeled into movements demanding a social-democratic redistribution of wealth, as happened in Bolivia and Argentina during their recent meltdowns. At worst, the poor seek remedy through more vengeful outlets, such as right-wing nationalism, religious fundamentalism, or street-gang brutality.162
In the Honduran scenario, anthropologist Jon Wolseth concurs: “In the face of social suffering caused by neoliberal economics, evangelical Christian faiths have offered disenfranchised youth in Honduras a spiritual response to individual pain while gangs have offered self-empowerment predicated on interpersonal violence.”163
In Honduras, in 2006, there were 3,108 killings, a yearly average of 46.2 violent deaths per 100,000 people, which exceeded by five times the global average.164 The two principal gangs operating in the country are Mara-18 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS), and the state has used their presence as a justification for the remilitarization of security and politics. In the early 2000s, the municipal government of Tegucigalpa initiated a 2 a.m. curfew in the capital, reinforced shortly thereafter by the mano dura, or iron fist, policy of President Ricardo Maduro at the federal level in 2002. “As the streets begin emptying at night,” one reporter explains, “combined military-police units sweep into the city’s barrios marginales—the poor neighborhoods surrounding the city, on the slopes of the surrounding hillsides, also known as the ‘belt of misery’—with the stated aim of disrupting youth gangs and arresting their members.” Harking back to the dark days of the 1980s, these incursions “have names like Operation Cage, Thunderclap, and Patria,” and occur weekly.165
While the mano dura approach to crime has resolutely failed to achieve any reduction in the number of homicides, it has filled the country’s prisons to the brink of collapse, and, most importantly, allowed the state to reverse the embryonic civilian control over the military set in motion through various measures taken in 1996 under the Liberal presidency of Roberto Reina. Under Maduro, the divisions between the military and police were dissolved, as was any pretence of civilian control over the coercive apparatuses of the state.166 For example, his Operación Guerra Contra la Delincuencia (War Operation against Crime), deployed 10,000 police officers into the streets under the authority of a military official. Such tactics facilitated the continuation of “social cleansing” methods—already more than 1,500 street youth were killed between 1998 and 2002 through a combination of state death squads and private security forces—and an intensification of politically-motivated assassinations of social movem
ent activists.167
A few representative examples of the political violence will suffice. Ernesto Sandoval, a leading activist in the Comité de Derechos Humanos de Honduras (Human Rights Comittee of Honduras, CODEH), was assassinated in February 1998.168 Padre Tamayo, a well-known priest and environmental activist with the Environmental Movement of Olancho (MAO), had a bounty of US$40,000 taken out on his head and has survived multiple kidnappings and murder attempts—not least among these experiences was the moment at a MAO rally in 2001 against rampant deforestation by multinational logging companies when
Padre Tomayo was isolated by the head of the local police, who forced a live grenade into his mouth before moving quickly away. “I took it out and threw it as far as I could. It exploded in a nearby field,” he says, smiling. “Now the police have a case against me for causing a disturbance.”169
Human rights lawyers and judges were routinely murdered in the mid-2000s, the offices of social movements ransacked, and those identified with the Left murdered or intimidated into submission with death threats.170 This militarization of politics and society, operating under the guise of a war on crime, is actually the first line of defence for those benefiting from the violent neoliberal order. And it is only with this historical backdrop clearly in mind that we can begin to understand the relative ease with which Roberto Micheletti organized and orchestrated the violent and repressive coup against Zelaya in late June 2009.
THE ZELAYA INTERREGNUM
Zelaya, a wealthy ranch owner and business magnate in the logging industry, assumed the presidential office in January 2006 as leader of the dissident Movimiento Esperanza Liberal (Liberal Hope Movement) current inside the traditional Liberal Party. His ascension to government took place roughly eight years into a significant, if uneven, social and political shift to the Left across large parts of Latin America, and close to a decade into what has proven to be a prolonged legitimacy crisis of the neoliberal model. At the same time, Zelaya’s rise to office coincided with the intensification of efforts by imperialism and the Latin American Right to turn back the clock.171
