THE LONG, DISTURBING VOYAGE OF THE “U.S.S. HONDURAS”: A brief history of imperial servitude…

Current Affairs

Following a close call off the coast of Central America in 1502, Christopher Columbus is reported to have exclaimed: “Gracias a Dios que hemos salido de estas honduras”—“Thank god we’ve gotten out of these depths.” The name Honduras, then, was perhaps inauspicious from the get-go. Now, more than half a millennium after the legendary Italian’s nautical escapades, Honduras’ entrance into full-blown bloodbath mode—characterized by massive homicide rates and ruthless state repression—means that many Hondurans are fleeing the terrifying “depths” for the United States. But the U.S., a faithful heir of the Columbian tradition of decimating overseas populations, happens to be responsible for helping to sink Honduras to such great lows in the first place.

The abusive relationship between the United States and Honduras was solidified in the 1980s, when the Central American nation was endearingly designated the “U.S.S. Honduras” on account of its role as a base for U.S.-backed Contra mercenaries attacking neighboring Nicaragua—a campaign that Noam Chomsky has referred to as “a large-scale terrorist war against Nicaragua, combined with economic warfare that was even more lethal.” Some 50,000 Nicaraguans perished.

The aim of the Contra war was, of course, to punish the Sandinistas for daring to suggest that life without U.S.-directed capitalism might be possible, especially in the United States’ self-declared backyard—and to serve as a warning to other countries not to stray from the path of righteousness. In 1986, Ronald Reagan broadcast his hallucination that Nicaragua—a mere “two hours’ flying time from our own borders”—had become a campsite for “Soviets, East Germans, Bulgarians, North Koreans, Cubans and terrorists from the P.L.O. and the Red Brigades,” while also enjoying the affections of Muammar Qaddafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

In contrast to Nicaragua, Honduras was a model territory. As Stephen Kinzer notedin the New York Times in 1988: “Behind the guise of formal democracy [in Honduras], military leaders make all important decisions, and they respond to direction from the United States Embassy [in Tegucigalpa]…one of the largest State Department outposts in the world…American diplomats exercise more control over domestic politics in Honduras than in any other country in the hemisphere.”

Inevitably, some Hondurans still got out of line, but they were handled by Battalion 316, the “CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”—as the Baltimore Sun recalls. Battalion 316 was responsible for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds of people suspected of undesirable political orientation.

With the end of the Cold War, the U.S.S. Honduras got a bit of downtime, though the country remained a key outpost in the now-reigning global superpower’s international military network, playing host to U.S. personnel and armaments. The Stars and Stripes magazine boasts that Joint Task Force-Bravo, stationed at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, has since its establishment in 1983 remained the “face of America’s military presence in Central America.” Other contemporary North American presences in Honduras have included a flourishing sweatshop industry, an appropriate symbol of post-Cold War neoliberal conquest—not to mention the smorgasbord of gringo businesses and investors fully committed to exploiting hydro-electric dams, mining, palm oil, and other opportunities in everyone’s favorite banana republic.

Enter Manuel Zelaya, who assumed the presidency of Honduras in 2006 and proceeded to steer the Honduran ship a hair to the left, both raising the minimum wage for urban and rural areas and engaging in other behavior seen as heretical by the Honduran ruling class—like pursuing agrarian reform on behalf of peasant farmers, or, for example, actually bothering to ask impoverished communities how they felt about being forced to live smack in the middle of toxic corporate mining operations. READ MORE AT CURRENT AFFAIRS.

BOOK REVIEW: The US Created MS-13

Jacobin

Review of A Year Inside MS-13: See, Hear, and Shut Up, by Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson (OR Books, 2019).

Last year, Donald Trump’s administration issued a press release titled “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13,” the El Salvador–based transnational gang. The dispatch deployed the term “animals” an additional nine times in its explanation of how Mara Salvatrucha “follows the motto of ‘kill, rape, control’ by committing shocking acts of violence in an attempt to instill fear and gain control.”

Considering this motto could also apply to the past many decades of US military intervention worldwide, it seems there might be More Important Things You Need To Know about transnational violence — like the United States’s role in the rise of MS-13 itself. During the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s, the United States backed brutal right-wing forces that were responsible for tens of thousands of killings and countless atrocities. Many Salvadorans fled the country, with a substantial percentage ending up in Los Angeles, where gangs formed as a means of self-defense for marginalized communities. Then in 1992, at the end of the war, the United States undertook massive deportations of Salvadoran gang members (clearly the best step to ensure a shattered country’s chances of recovery).

For a glimpse at how things have panned out since then, a good place to start is Salvadoran sociocultural anthropologist Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson’s A Year Inside MS-13: See, Hear, and Shut Up, newly translated from Spanish by Natascha Uhlmann. Martínez d’Aubuisson, who spent 2010 in the company of the Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha — the MS-13 clica that presides over “the last neighborhood on the hill” in Mejicanos, a suburb of San Salvador — describes his book as a “snapshot in time [and] a collection of field notes . . . that served as the basis for my academic work.” And while there’s certainly no shortage of violence in its pages, the work is mercifully free of the “violent animal” approach, offering instead a snapshot of humans who are — like everyone else — products of their contexts. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

How the US Created Violent Chaos in Honduras

Jacobin: Excerpt from EXILE

In the predawn hours of June 28, 2009, heavily armed Honduran soldiers descended upon the Tegucigalpa residence of the nation’s president, Manuel (Mel) Zelaya, and carted him off to Costa Rica in his pajamas, never again to be restored to his lawful post.

Ever so slightly left-leaning, Zelaya had stepped on the toes of the entrenched Honduran oligarchy, whose members had long ago pledged allegiance to the predatory capitalism endorsed by their benefactors in the United States. Not only had Zelaya raised the monthly urban and rural minimum wages to a whopping $290 and $213, respectively, he had also shown himself to be more willing than his predecessors to listen to the complaints of impoverished communities affected by mining and other toxic operations by international corporations. All of this naturally indicated that the communist apocalypse was nigh.

The last straw came in the form of a nonbinding public opinion survey, scheduled for June 28, in which citizens would be asked whether they supported the inclusion of an extra ballot box at upcoming elections in order to then vote on whether to convene a constituent assembly to update the national constitution. As the Honduran right-wing and concerned gringos spun it, this was concrete proof that Zelaya was scheming to abolish the constitutional article that limited presidents to a single term and to thereby install himself as eternal dictator. Of no consequence, apparently, was that any constitutional tweaking would only take place after Zelaya had already left power. Eventually, the article in question was abolished anyway, albeit under a sufficiently ultra-rightist administration so as not to merit a peep from the guardians of democracy.

In the months following Zelaya’s pajama-clad expatriation, the United States busied itself hemming and hawing over how to categorize his ouster without resorting to the obvious descriptor — “military coup” — that would then trigger massive cutoffs in aid to the post-Zelaya allies. After initially declaring that the United States was “withholding any formal legal determination” regarding the Coup-Type Thing in Honduras, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set about “strategiz[ing] on a plan to restore order in [the country] and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.”

This, at least, is what she herself told us in her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, in a passage mysteriously excised from the paperback edition the following year. New elections were indeed swiftly held, and mootness rendered — although it’s anyone’s guess as to how elections staged after an illegal coup could qualify as legitimate, particularly when the Honduran people had already chosen Zelaya to serve out his four-year term. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Oppose American and British foreign policy? Then you might be a 'violent extremist'

The New Arab

Do you see the US, UK, and Israel as greater threats to world peace than North Korea and Iran? If so, chances are you might be suffering from sympathy for violent extremism. 

This, at least, is one of the hypotheses set out by a new study titled "Violent extremist tactics and the ideology of the sectarian far left". Funded by the UK Commission for Countering Extremism, the study is authored by Daniel Allington, Siobhan McAndrew and David Hirsh, all lecturers at British universities. 

The authors use the term "revolutionary workerism" to describe "the belief system disseminated by the sectarian far left"—distinguishable by such concepts as "Capitalism is essentially bad and must be destroyed", "Industry should produce for need and not for profit", and "The wealthy make life worse for the rest of us".

The study compares individual support for the above concepts with support for phenomena like "Violence as part of political protests", "Committing terrorist acts", and "Street violence against anti-democratic groups". Surveyed individuals were also asked to select up to three countries—from a group that includes the US, UK, Israel, North Korea, China, Russia and Iran—that "represent the greatest threat to world peace". (We already know the wrong answer to that one.)

The upshot: while the authors found "no evidence that sectarian groups on the British far left currently have the capacity or the inclination for direct organisational involvement in terror activities of any sort", they have nonetheless determined that there is a "positive relationship between sympathy for violent extremism and both revolutionary workerism and an 'anti-imperialist' geopolitical outlook". READ MORE AT THE NEW ARAB.