by Dawn Paley
Violence in Honduras is sometimes presented as random and wanton, or as somehow involving drugs, but it can’t be separated from the acute poverty imposed on the country’s majority. The war on drugs is the government’s latest justification of extreme violence in Honduras. It cannot be a surprise that the drug war is providing useful cover for Honduras’ skyrocketing murder rate following the 2009 coup d’état, and according to one of the country’s most respected activists, its designs go beyond Honduras’s borders. “In reality this is a dangerous pretext because it means that territories are occupied and human rights are violated, and of course it guarantees the pillage and appropriation of the common goods of nature by the United States, which is exactly why they’re here, and of course for the geopolitical interests, because Honduras has a particular, privileged location between two oceans and with countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and in reality the occupation of Honduras is to help impede the advance of emancipatory processes throughout the continent,” said Berta Cáceres, General Coordinator of the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).
The US-backed war on drugs picked up in Honduras when the United States began renewed anti-drugs funding in Central America in 2008 via the Mérida Initiative. The Mérida Initiative was later split, and the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) became an independent program in 2010. The program has five overarching goals, which are comparable to those of the Mérida Initiative: to “help make streets safer, disrupt criminal networks, support the development of strong government institutions, bring services to at-risk communities, and promote greater collaboration among the region’s governments, not only within Central America but with Mexico, with Colombia, and beyond.”[1] US aid to Honduras climbed from $62 million in 2010 to $90 million in 2012, thanks in large part to increases in Department of Defense spending and CARSI. As elsewhere, the more US aid to the drug war flowed, the higher the murder rate climbed, peaking in 2012 when US aid for the drug war topped out. Under CARSI, “Honduras received $12.1 million in FY2010, nearly $14 million in FY2011, and an estimated $24.8 million in FY2012.”[2] By 2014, CARSI funding had dropped off to zero, and the US directed the majority of $49.3 million in aid to Honduras to development projects.[3]
In the fall of 2012, when Hillary Clinton was still the US secretary of state, she addressed the Central America Citizen Security Meeting and boasted of improvements in the region following an increase in US spending through CARSI. She claimed the homicide rate in Honduras was down 25 percent in the first six months of 2012 compared to the first six months of 2011. “In some communities, we are told that the fear of violence is beginning to fade for the first time in many years,” Clinton said.[4] Whoever was telling the State Department that things were improving was a creative statistician, to put it mildly. The Honduran Observatory on Violence, an organization comprising police, the Attorney General’s Office and the National University of Honduras, recorded 3,594 reports of homicides in the first six months of 2011, compared to 3,614 over the period of 2012.[5] By December, they said that the number of homicides in 2012 was in fact one percent higher than the previous year, at 7,172.[6] Those numbers don’t include many others who are killed in Honduras each year but whose deaths are not classified as homicides, like the 360 people killed in the Comayagua prison fire in 2012. Regardless, the number steadily climbed each year, increasing from 2,155 homicides in 2004 before peaking in 2012.[7] In 2013, the number of homicides fell to 6,747, or about nineteen each day and an average of 563 per month.[8] In 2013, the government changed the system it uses to count murder victims, which has not yet affected the number of dead counted by the observatory, but has already made the Honduran murder rate appear to decrease.
The devastating present-day ramifications of US aid in Honduras, and the link between military assistance and increased insecurity, can best be understood in the context of Honduran history. Washington’s influence in Honduras throughout the twentieth century was primarily devoted to protecting American investors, to building up a transnational faction of the Honduran elite, and to using the country as a staging ground for military attacks on neighboring countries.
US Military History in Honduras
Early US political involvement in Honduras rose with the banana industry, which reached its apex in the 1920s. By way of example, in 1914, John Ewing, a US minister in Tegucigalpa, sent a letter to the US State Department, in which he explained the reach of the United Fruit Company thus: “In order to obtain these concessions and privileges and to secure their undisturbed enjoyment, it [the United Fruit Company] has seen fit to enter actively into the internal policies of these countries, and it has pursued this course so systematically and regularly until it now has its ramifications in every department of the government and is a most important factor in all political movements and actions.”[9] In 1924, a platoon of 200 marines entered Honduras and traveled to Tegucigalpa after civil war broke out between Liberals and Nationalists. The peace treaty between Honduran parties took place under US supervision aboard an American warship.[10]
After 1932, the United States oversaw the seventeen-year dictatorship of General Tiburcio Carías Andino of the Liberal Party. Carías’s strategy against the opposition parties was known as “encierro, destierro y entierro,” or “round them up, throw them out, and bury them.”[11] Carías “gagged the press and jammed the prisons. He created an institutionalized dictatorship that combined political, military, and economic force.”[12] Turmoil followed, and the military seized power from the National Party in 1956 and governed for one year, until it was replaced by the Liberal presidency of Ramón Villeda Morales.[13] In an agreement “probably underwritten by the United Fruit Company and the US Embassy,” Villeda Morales signed off on giving the military autonomy from civilian control.[14] After paying off a debt to the US in 1953, the Honduran state, through the US Alliance for Progress program, again began to incur foreign debt in 1958. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the US trained at least 1,000 members of the Honduran army and provided $6.4 million in military assistance to the country.[15] By 1965, the military had become Honduras’s “most developed political institution,” controlling the government between 1963 and 1971, and again from 1972 until 1982.[16] The evolution of the Honduran Army is directly linked to US-financed military training and equipment provisions.[17]
In the early 1960s, the Bank for Central American Economic Integration and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) began to make large loans, of which the primary beneficiaries were the elite merchants and factory owners of San Pedro Sula, who joined together to create the Honduran Financing Bank (FICENSA). The creation of FICENSA was crucial in facilitating the extension of US resources to the Honduran private sector, as previously the military had been the main organization to take advantage of US “aid” to Honduras. Historian Edelberto Torres Rivas argues that the integration of Central American economies through the Central American Common Market (CACM) in the post-WWII period caused new social groups to emerge, including “the state, the local industrial and financial bourgeoisie, and children of the landowning oligarchy,” together creating the social base necessary for foreign investment.[18] Though the functioning of the CACM was seriously disrupted by the 1969 soccer war between Honduras and El Salvador, the social and economic base created during this long period of military rule would serve as a jumping off point for the project of democratization in Honduras. It also served as the soil from which the transnational economic project would germinate and grow to dominate the country’s bipartisan political system by the end of the 1980s.
Pressure from the United States pushed the military to aid in a transition toward a civilian democracy, and “although the Carter administration never severed military assistance to Honduras, it pressured General Paz to relinquish power.”[19] The transition to democracy was finalized in 1982, with the election of Liberal Roberto Suazo Córdova. After the 1981 elections, the US immediately came out with a series o
f recommendations known as Reaganomics for Honduras, released by then ambassador to the United States, John Dmitri Negroponte, days after Suazo’s election.[20] Regardless of the democratic opening, according to the US Congressional Research Service, “the military continued to operate as an autonomous institution.”[21]
Dr. Robinson defines a polyarchic system as having an exclusive focus on elections, which limits “the focus to political contestation among elites through procedurally free elections; the question of who controls the material and cultural resources of society, as well as asymmetries and inequalities, among groups within a single nation and among nations within the international order, becomes extraneous to the discussion of democracy.” For Hondurans, the transition toward democracy looked a lot like a transition to polyarchy.[22] It resulted in the closure of traditional political spaces, an increase in repression, and the imposition of economic and military programs at odds with popular opinion.[23] The Suazo/Reagan years saw the implementation of a “national security” doctrine in Honduras. That doctrine transformed Honduras into a staging area for US-led counterinsurgency efforts on the isthmus, and included the construction of twelve military bases where hundreds of thousands of US and third-party soldiers were trained. “Honduran society was altered by becoming the location of three non-national armies and was converted into the aggressive military axis of US foreign policy” in Central America.[24] US troops in Honduras had a three-part mission: crush incipient revolutionary (armed and popular) movements inside Honduras, provide a military backbone of stabilization during the transition to democracy, and wage war on revolutionary movements in neighboring countries.[25]
In 1981, US military aid to the country spiked, and over the next four years, the US would provide $41.48 million in military assistance to Honduras, second only to El Salvador in the region.[26] Between 1985 and 1992, the US would give another $83.33 million to the government of Honduras, earmarked for military spending.[27] During the 1980s, Honduras received $1.6 billion in economic and military aid from the United States.[28] By 1983, there were death squads in Honduras targeting political activists for murder or disappearance.[29] During the 1980s, there were at least 180 people disappeared, and hundreds of political dissidents were murdered—a significant number in such a small country, but still only a fraction of the level of violence wrought in Guatemala and El Salvador.[30] According to former US ambassador to Honduras Jack R. Binns, “one of the bitterest ironies was that Honduras’s human rights record deteriorated sharply under a democratic government, in part because US policy makers deliberately closed their eyes to growing abuses.”[31] Not only was there a build-up in the presence of the US military, but the United States also funneled money into Honduran civil society and the private sector often via USAID. According to the US State Department, at this time, “Honduras became host to the largest Peace Corps mission in the world, and nongovernmental and international voluntary agencies proliferated.”
“That era was one of disappearances, of torture, of the organization of death squads,” said Dr. Juan Almendarez about the 1980s, when I interviewed him in his clinic, off a small street near downtown Tegucigalpa, in 2009. Almendarez is a well-known activist and medical doctor who served as rector of the Autonomous University of Honduras. In person, he is soft-spoken, cycling back between history and the present in order to make his views understood. “I am a survivor of torture. I was condemned by the death squads during the decade of the ’80s, and it’s important to remember that there are still some [death squad members and members of the military and government] from that era who are today part of the coup d’état in Honduras.” Having participated in movements for decades, Almendarez was clear about the difference between the struggles in Honduras in the 1980s and those today. “It’s important to understand that in the ’80s the direct confrontation was more [against] the political sector working together with Army. Today, the struggle is precisely about the neoliberal economic model, imperial globalization, and this whole campaign by financial capital to gain power over our lands, to take our resources.”
Transnational ’90s
The Honduran elite is understood historically to be lacking power and coherency, and it is sometimes said to constitute the weakest oligarchy in Central America. With the onset of formal democracy in the 1980s, a transnationally oriented segment of the national elite began to gain coherence in Honduras, and toward the end of the decade they gained the upper hand over national capitalist groups.[32] “During the 1980s, as the country was being militarized, AID bankrolled the formation of almost two dozen business associations and private sector organizations that responded to the demands of transnationalism.”[33] According to the University of California’s Dr. Robinson, these included the Foundation for Investment and Export Development (FIDE), the National Council to Promote Exports and Investments, the Federation of Agro Export Producers, the National Association of Honduran Exporters, and the Honduran American Chamber of Commerce, among others. Half of the $711 million in economic aid that funneled in between 1980 and 1990 went directly from the US government to private sector groups, “entirely bypassing the government.”[34]
In one of the early political moves toward institutionalizing transnationalism, the US government signed the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA) in 1984. CBERA was part of a series of policies known collectively as the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). The CBI would provide favorable conditions for export-led development in the maquila sector. According to the World Bank, while “this act did not grant textiles tariff-free access to US markets, it did exempt them from the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) as long as they were assembled using US inputs.”[35] By encouraging Caribbean countries to assemble garments using imported US cloth, the CBI explicitly made clothing production into a transnational activity. In addition, the CBERA carried with it a number of mandatory criteria for all countries that participated in it, which among other things stipulated that they not be communist, that they not nationalize property of US citizens, and that they be party to an extradition treaty with the United States.
It wasn’t until 1990 that the government of Honduras would introduce economic measures and policies that fully institutionalized the open markets and government policies synonymous with neoliberalism. President Rafael Callejas “agreed in March 1990 to the first of three major structural adjustment programs negotiated with the IMF, USAID, and other international lenders,” including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.[36] This agreement, known in Honduras as “el paquetazo” (which translates as “the big package”) encouraged foreign direct investment in nontraditional exports, tourism, free trade areas, maquiladoras (sweatshops), and ushered in currency devaluation and fiscal austerity measures. In 1990, Honduran exports to the United States, by far the country’s largest trading partner, were worth $429 million; by 2007, exports from Honduras to the US were worth $3.728 billion.[37]
The Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) signed by Callejas eliminated protectionism for small and medium-sized businesses in Honduras, which would find they could no longer compete with larger corporations.[38] According to Honduran economist Alcides Hernández, the SAP and the economic stabilization program embarked upon by the Callejas regime “legitimized the rising rate of unemployment, the fall of net salaries, the deterioration of social services in the public sector, and the conversion of the state into a subsidiary of private export capital, which would likely become the most important emerging source for capital accumulation in the current economic crisis.”[39]
The maquila sector, operating from free trade zones and paying little tax, became Honduras’s contribution to global capitalism. Neoliberalism continued to deepen, and the international finance institution (like the IMF or the World Bank) oriented macroeconomic policies, which were promoted throughout the 1980s and adopted formally in 1990, became the norm in Honduras. Even while local economic conditions declined, the transnational elite continued to benefit from so-called austeri
ty measures within Honduras. “Creating a good investment climate means creating a climate against working people,” said Yadira Minero, of the Center for Women’s Rights in Honduras (CDM), in an interview in San Pedro Sula. “Foreign investment isn’t our salvation.”
Demilitarization began to take place at this time, with support from the private sector and as a result of the fact that militarization had become “unnecessary and unproductive for the transnational agenda,” whose backers felt constrained by the military.[40] “During the 1990s, successive Honduran administrations took steps to reduce the power of the military. Mandatory military service was abolished, the police and several state-owned enterprises were removed from military control, and—after the ratification of constitutional reforms in 1999—the military was subordinated to a civilian-appointed defense minister.”[41] Military cutbacks were in part a response to the changing geopolitical context of Central America at that time. US funding for the Honduran military began to drop, to $500,000 in 1995 and $325,000 in 1995.[42] Revolutionary movements in Guatemala and El Salvador had been violently repressed, and peace accords were drafted and signed.