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.