Post Coup Honduras

8/13/2019 Post Coup Honduras

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T. Gordon, J.R. Webber / Historical Materialism 21.3 (2013)1656 17

with Roberto Micheletti, a gure from a competing faction of Zelayas ownLiberal Party, bringing to an end the countrys halting democratic experiment,

in place since 1982. Having been expelled from the Organization of AmericanStates (OAS) for the interruption of democratic rule, elections designed toprovide the regime with a new legitimate face were carried out in Novemberthat year. Porrio Pepe Lobo, of the National Party, won this deeply fraudulentelection and was inaugurated on 27 January 2010 in the midst of mass-resistanceprotests on the streets of Tegucigalpa and elsewhere. The ousting of Zelaya wasthe second successful coup dtat in the Western hemisphere since AlbertoFujimoris auto-golpe, or self-orchestrated coup, in Peru in 1992.

This paper traces the origins of the coup, the political and economic dynamics

of its consolidation, and the complex forms of its contestation in the shape ofa national resistance movement. A full account of the coup, and the resistanceit has spawned, needs to take seriously the wider history, political economy,and popular cultures of opposition and struggle in both Honduras and CentralAmerica over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-rst centuries. Thecurrent conjuncture cannot be seriously understood in isolation from this past.We begin, then, with the historical foundations of the Honduran economy andits integration into the world market, as well as the geopolitics that emergedfrom this material foundation, which saw Honduras transformed into an integral

hub of Ronald Reagans counter-insurgency campaigns against guerrilla forceselsewhere in Central America throughout the 1980s. The military defeat ofmass guerrilla insurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador, combined with thetriumph over the Sandinista revolutionary government in Nicaragua by 1990,set the stage, we argue, for the neoliberal pacication of Central America as awhole over the course of the 1990s. Honduras was no exception to this generalrule. It was out of the socioeconomic catastrophe intensied by neoliberalrestructuring in Honduras that the centre-left government of Manuel Zelayaemerged. Once in oce, Zelaya modestly encroached on neoliberal orthodoxyacross a range of social and economic policies, and, in foreign afairs, alignedhimself increasingly with left and centre-left governments in the region, evenif for largely pragmatic purposes. These domestic and foreign moves together

courageous ghters against incredible odds. Finally, the authors thank Dana Frank for herenthusiastic support of our research, and for her unusual generosity in sharing sources andinformation regarding unfolding developments in Honduras. Todd Gordon received nancialsupport for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

2. Salomn 2012, p. 58.

3. A successful coup was carried out against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004, andunsuccessful attempts were made against Hugo Chvez in Venezuela in 2002 and Evo Moralesin Bolivia in 2008. At the time of writing, what appears to be a third successful coup, of aparliamentary variety, has just been carried out in Paraguay. See Gordon and Webber 2012.


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oversaw the production and export of more bananas from Honduran soil thanany other country in the world. These old-school multinationals consequently

dominated domestic political as well as economic life. The banana cropaccounted for more than 90 per cent of the countrys export prole. But thiswas also a typical enclave sector, situated narrowly on the northern Atlanticcoast, which was inaccessible from most other parts of the country by rail orroad. Prices were subject to the whims of uctuating international supply anddemand. In the wake of the Great Depression, bananas took a considerablebeating and cofee emerged as an important parallel source of foreignexchange, one just as vulnerable, however, to massive peaks and troughs inthe world market.

Built on two shaky pillars, the Honduran political economy in the rst halfof the twentieth century was the most backward in Central America, withboth the subordinate and dominant classes . . . historically the least developed,allowing for the vulgar domination of the country by foreign companies. Inthe 1950s and 1960s, capitalist modernisation slowly began to penetrate socialrelations throughout much of the rest of the country and alter its mode ofincorporation into the world market export diversication expanded toencompass cotton, cattle and sugar, alongside the earlier staple crops. Thepolitical expression of this evolving social structure took form in the shape

of two malleable and faction-ridden parties the Liberal Party, which rstappeared in the late nineteenth century, and the National Party, a split fromthe Liberals, which made its presence felt in the early twentieth century. Thetwo parties have since monopolised the ocial sphere of public life until thepresent day, apart from sometimes lengthy military interregna. The longestsuch period of successive military regimes lasted from 1963 until 1982, afterwhich a very restricted transition to electoral democracy occurred, followed adecade later by a neoliberal transformation of the economy.

Outside the connes of the Liberal Party, National Party, and authoritarianspheres of ocial regime politics, vibrant traditions of peasant and workerradicalism began to take root alongside and against capitalist expansion inthe middle part of the twentieth century. The most explicit asseveration ofworkers new-found capacities was expressed in the 1954 strike against the

9. Bulmer-Thomas 1991, pp. 193, 196.10. Robinson 2003, pp. 11819.11. Regime transitions throughout Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s generally involved a

shift from direct authoritarian military rule to low-intensity democracy, or polyarchy, a systemin which a small group actually rules, on behalf of capital, and participation in decision makingby the majority is conned to choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled electoralprocesses. See Robinson 2004.


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20 T. Gordon, J.R. Webber / Historical Materialism 21.3 (2013)1656

United Fruit Company. It marked a historic turn, suggests historian WalterLaFeber. The society loosened and even began to liberalize as certain workers

rights were recognized for the rst time. In straightforwardly economic termsthe workers only achieved small wage hikes, but politically they won legalrecognition for unions and the right to organise. The reaction of Cold Warriorsin both Washington and Tegucigalpa to Communist participation in the 1954strike insinuated itself over the coming decades into the states relationshipwith the Honduran labour movement. The guardians of liberty exercised bluntcoercion against radicals in concert with consensual strategies of cooptation,such as the sponsorship of free and democratic anti-Communist labourorganisations.

The countryside, meanwhile, witnessed a veritable explosion of peasantmobilisation beginning in the 1960s, not least because of the Cubanrevolutionary example in 1959. Peasant mobilisations and occupations overthe course of the next two decades forced military governments to redistributeclose to two hundred thousand hectares of land to landless and land-poor ruraldwellers. These land struggles, intersecting with labour actions in the bananaplantations, persisted into the 1980s and 1990s in various forms. Peasantmilitancy in the early 1960s erupted initially in the same area of the northernAtlantic coast as the location of the strike of 1954. The peasants were spurred

by expropriations of their land as the United Fruit Company expanded itsoperations. They formed the Federacin Nacional de Campesinos Hondureos[Federation of Honduran Peasants, FENACH], an independent and militantorganisation rooted in mass direct action oriented toward the occupation orrecovery of dispossessed ejidal, or communal, land. FENACH was foundedwith the help of former union leaders still in the area after having been redfor their roles in the 1954 strike, leftist political activists, radicalised students,and incipient revolutionary guerrilla movements.

The response to peasant mobilisation from the Honduran state and itsAmerican imperial backer mirrored in many respects their answer to labouractivism. Eforts at cooptation were articulated most visibly in the overtlyanti-Communist Asociacin Nacional de CampesinosHondureos [NationalAssociation of Honduran Peasants, ANACH], organized with substantialassistance from the United States through the AFL-CIO and its Latin Americanarm, the Inter-American Regional Organization of Labor (ORIT). The coercive

12. LaFeber 1993, p. 179.

13. Bulmer-Thomas 1991, pp. 2234.14. Booth 1991, p. 48.15. See, for example, Corr 1999, pp. 3050.16. Brockett 1991, pp. 25960.


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side became most visible after the overthrow of the civilian regime in 1963 andthe forceful liquidation of FENACH as an organisation: the leaders who were

caught were jailed, its oces and archives were demolished, and its membershiprepressed. The clampdown increased in intensity throughout the 1980s, aswe will see momentarily. In spite of the fact that state coercion was moderatewhen compared to the horrors being orchestrated by the dictatorships inneighbouring El Salvador and Guatemala, illegal detentions, disappearances,and targeted killings were nonetheless common in Honduras.

The United States had established a special formal relationship with theHonduran military in 1954, through which the Hondurans began to receiveaid to professionalise their military. Still, it took a sea change in Central

American politics ignited initially by the successful Sandinista Revolutionin 1979, and fuelled further by simultaneous mass guerrilla insurgencies in ElSalvador and Guatemala to solidify and accelerate the special US-Honduranmilitary relationship. Internally, Honduras was undergoing momentous changein the late 1970s and early 1980s. The country was sufering a major economiccrisis, as income per capita plummeted by roughly 12 per cent over the rstfour years of the 1980s. Elections were held in 1981 for the rst time since 1963,bringing to oce Liberal Party candidate Rafal Suazo Crdova. Even as thetransition to electoral democracy unfolded, however, the role of the military

in domestic afairs was actually expanding with an unprecedented inow ofAmerican aid. Honduras became a principal staging ground in the Americanefort to bring down the Sandinista government and prevent similar guerrillamovements from coming to power in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Cold War counterinsurgency

Part way 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. Under the subsequentadministration of Ronald Reagan, though, the crusade against the Communistdominos acquired unforeseen dimensions. Eight hundred Honduran soldierswere cycled through the infamous School of the Americas for military trainingin the 1980s as the country became the pivotal base of operations for Central

17. Brockett 1991, p. 259.

18. Booth 1991, p. 54.19. LaFeber 1993, p. 182.20. Robinson 2003, p. 124.21. LaFeber 1993, p. 264.


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American counterinsurgency. Immediately after Reagans inauguration, thenew head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Casey, was briefed

by Honduran ocers who pitched their idea of organizing eeing membersof Nicaraguas National Guard into a counterrevolutionary expedition thatcould destabilize the Sandinista government. Thus the Contras were born.Honduras efectively metamorphosed into the rearguard for 20,000 Nicaraguancontra troops, whose supply lines involved a vast network stretching fromUS and Honduran military bases to the contra camps along the borderwith Nicaragua. At the same time, the Honduran border with El Salvadorbecame another important front against left-wing guerrilla operations in thatcountry.

Between 1980 and 1992, Honduras received $1.6 billion in economic andmilitary aid from the United States. The American Empire established itsownmilitary and airforce bases, intelligence centers, and regional commandposts, and a training center for Salvadoran soldiers run by US commandos,until it was closed down in 1985. American aid provided Honduran forceswith mobile training teams of US personnel, artillery, night-vision capabilities,high-tech communications equipment, reconnaissance planes, and patrolboats to police its coasts. Moreover, Honduras provided sanctuaries fromwhich counterinsurgent Salvadoran pilots, under CIA direction, could launch

air attacks on Nicaragua as well as supply Contra forces with resources tosustain their campaigns of terror. As early as 1983,

the U.S. operation was so large that the C.I.A. opened a press bureau in a HonduranHoliday Inn to brag about its exploits. Some 300 to 400 North American militarypersonnel worked in the small country. The 116 members of the U.S. Embassymade it one of the largest in all Latin America.

This formal support from the US state was fortied by an allied international

network of actors supporting the anti-Communist eforts in Central America.The intricate web included the authoritarian junta in Argentina until its demiseafter the Falklands War in 1982, the Saudi Arabian, Taiwanese, Panamanian,

22. Gill 2004, p. 83.23. Grandin 2006, p. 114.24. Robinson 2003, p. 124. See also Chomsky 1987, pp. 1289.25. Flynn 1984, p. 113.26. Robinson 2003, p. 121.

27. Robinson 2003, p. 123, emphasis in original.28. Flynn 1984, p. 111.29. Chomsky 1987, pp. 1289.30. LaFeber 1993, pp. 31011.


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and Israeli states, and a variety of non-state components, including conservativereligious organisations of the American Christian Right, private mercenaries

and arms dealers, security rms, and drug trackers.If, on the one hand, the military build-up in Honduras was geopoliticallymotivated by the countrys propitious geographical proximity to the Nicaraguanand Salvadoran fronts, it also served to capacitate domestic coercion againstreal and potential popular resistance or preemptive counterinsurgency athome. 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 partiesor groups considered leftist. At a minimum, 290 teachers, union activists,

peasants, and labour militants disappeared between 1980 and 1984 at thehands of the Honduran states coercive apparatus. Another wave of resistanceagainst the militarisation of Honduran society in supposedly democratic timeswas led in 1986 and 1987 by peasant movements, drawing on their long historicaltraditions of struggle. The state riposte was a rash of assassinations againstboth peasant and labour leaders. Trade-union and peasant federations,radical Christian grassroots communities inspired by liberation theology, andmilitant student organisations 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 movementswere joined, on the one hand, by human rights organisations 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 methodsnever before used in the country, such as anti-terrorist laws, disappearances,and state-organised death squads, as the population fell victim to the samemass violation of human rights as in neighbouring countries. This violentcleansing of popular movements was the sine qua non for the subsequentintroduction of neoliberalism. With a few important exceptions, Grandin hasobserved, state- and elite-orchestrated preventive and punitive terror was keyto ushering in neoliberalism in Latin America. The prerequisite for the rapideconomic restructuring that took place throughout the Americas beginning

31. Most famously, Grandin writes, [Oliver] North [of the National Security Council] createdan elaborate circuit of exchange that, with the help of Israeli arms traders, sold U.S. missiles toIran at inated prices, with the prots from the deal used to supply the Contras. There is ampleevidence, not the least of which comes from Norths handwritten notes, that the CIA employedLatin American cocaine and marijuana dealers as middlemen, using their planes to ship arms to

the contras in exchange for easy access to American markets. Grandin 2006, p. 115.32. Gill 2004, p. 83.33. LaFeber 1993, pp. 312, 3312.34. Robinson 2003, p. 124.


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full throttle in the 1980s, he remind us, had as much to do with the destructionof mass movements as it did with the rise of new nancial elites invested in

global markets.

Neoliberal pacication

With the end of the Cold War on the international scene, the defeat of theSandinista revolution in Nicaragua in the 1990 elections, and the ending ofthe civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, the region transitioned froma period of state terror and guerrilla struggle in the 1980s to an epoch of

neoliberal consolidation over the course of the 1990s what James Dunkerleyhas called the pacication of Central America. 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 inthe 1990 elections marked the earnest inauguration of neoliberal restructuringin the country. Callejas, an agricultural economist, banker and member ofone of the wealthiest families in Honduras, headed up a newly hegemonic wingof the National Party, dominated by neoliberal technocrats and externally-oriented sections of the Honduran bourgeoisie. Indeed, a dening feature of

politics since the neoliberal transition has been the emergence of internecinefactional conicts within the still-dominant Liberal and National parties, asexternally- and domestically-oriented sections of Honduran capital comeinto conict the former (and more powerful) wing of capital has interestsin sustaining and deepening neoliberal restructuring based on the emergentexport-oriented model of accumulation, and the latter (weaker) fraction,who remain tied to features of the domestic market which are in decline, iscompelled to forge contradictory and episodic populist alliances with thepopular classes.

Callejas introduced the rst of three structural adjustment packages (SAPs)implemented in Honduras in the 1990s, agreeing to a range of measuresadvocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Inter-AmericanDevelopment Bank, the World Bank, and other foreign lenders. Callejasushered in an austerity programme, consumption-tax hikes, liberalisationof price controls, privatisation of various state-owned enterprises, and tarif

35. Grandin 2004, p. 14.36. Dunkerley 1994.

37. Robinson 2003, p. 127.38. See Robinson 2003, pp. 12732, for details on the political expressions of these externally-oriented fractions of Honduran capital in the form of New Right clusters within both the Nationaland Liberal parties.


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reductions. These measures constituted the pillars of a wider orientation inpolitical 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 Nationalgovernments over the next decade and a half.

Roberto Reina, representing a centre-left populist current within theLiberals, won the next presidential elections in 1993. With a public proleas a human rights leader, Reina campaigned on putting a stop to politicalcorruption and curtailing military powers. He temporarily dampened some ofthe military control over social and political life; however, he simultaneouslydeepened and extended the neoliberal model when he agreed to a new

SAP. His Liberal successor in the presidency, Carlos Roberto Flores Facuss(19972001), represented the far-right of the party, but, given a spike in urbanand rural protests against neoliberal restructuring under Reina, even Floreswas obliged to campaign on a platform critical of IMF loan conditionalitiesin the 1997 elections. Of course, once in oce, Flores changed his tune andset to work expanding the maquilaindustry, tourism, and the non-traditionalagro-export sector, not least through the implementation of a third SAP.Flores was succeeded by the ultra-conservative Ricardo Maduro (20015) ofthe National Party, who continued neoliberal orthodoxy in the economy and

reintroduced military control in civilian afairs through a dramatic escalationof the war on gangs.

One consequence of neoliberal restructuring in the countryside has beenthe dramatic dispossession of large numbers of peasants from their land andtheir subsequent migration either to the United States or to the slums of themajor cities principally to the capital Tegucigalpa in the Southwest, with itsricher traditions of left-wing activism, or to the free-trading industrial city ofSan Pedro Sula, characterised more by the dominance of the Honduran Rightin social, cultural and political afairs. The 1992 Law for Modernisation andDevelopment of the Agricultural Sector (LMDSA) attempted to irrevocablyreverse the gains of the 1975 agrarian reform that had been set in motion asearly as 1990. The LMDSA focused on strengthening individual property rightsto land, extending titling eforts including the privatization of cooperativelands, activating land rental markets and private credit markets, and removingthe government from all forms of direct land redistribution eforts that didnot involve market mechanisms. Roughly 30,500 hectares of land acquired

39. Booth, Wade and Walker 2006, p. 144; Robinson 2003, p. 129.40. Booth, Wade and Walker 2006, p. 145.41. For a detailed discussion of this general trend across the Global South, see Davis 2006.42. Ruben and van den Berg 2001, p. 109.


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by peasants through the agrarian reform of the mid-1970s were sold between1990 and 1994. Once disembedded from pre or non-capitalist relations of

reciprocity, Robinson notes, this new reserve army of labour is t to work inthe maquiladoras, the new agricultural centers, and service sectors, dominatedby inows of foreign capital. Agriculture as a percentage of Gross DomesticProduct (GDP) declined from 15.2% in 1995, to 14% in 2000, to only 13.6%in 2005. Agriculture in these gures includes hunting, forestry, and shing,meaning that declines in crop agriculture are more than likely underestimatedby signicant margins. Agricultural employment declined from 42% of theeconomically active population in 1990 to 36% in 2005. Finally, agriculturalexports as a percentage of total exports shrunk from 60% in 1995 to only 29.5%

in 2005. With the downturn in the countryside, the urban population grewfrom 43 to 48% of the total population between 1995 and 2005, and is projectedto rise to 51 and 53% in 2010 and 2015, respectively.

Land-use patterns and rural class structures were changing dramatically.Rural poverty rates rose to above 70% by the late 1990s, according to guresprovided by the World Bank. By the early 2000s, nearly half of the ruralpopulation operated farms with less than ve hectares of land. Rural landlessconstituted an additional 27% of the rural economically-active population.These peasants were increasingly pushed into semi-proletarian or proletarian

status as they were increasingly forced to sever their permanent ties to theland to seek a variety of forms of nonfarm employment. Geographically,almost 80% of small-holder farming in the country takes place on hillsides,as the fertile valleys came to be dominated by large foreign agroindustrialcapitals devoted to livestock production, sugar cane, bananas, and palm oilcultivation.

As we will see later in the paper, when the topic of peasant resistance isexplored in detail, some of the most striking expressions of these new trendsin the Honduran agrarian structure were to be found in the Bajo Agun region.Countrywide, approximately 30,500 hectares (over 75,000 acres) of peasantlands acquired through the agrarian reform were sold between 1990 and 1994,according to Tanya Kerssen.

43. Kerssen 2011.44. Robinson 2003, p. 131.45. Edelman 2008, pp. 23940.46. CEPAL 2009a, p. 33.

47. Boucher, Barham and Carter 2005, p. 108.48. Ruben and van den Berg 2001, p. 550.49. Ruben and van den Berg 2001, p. 551. For some basic detail on this matter, see also Kok

2004, pp. 7389.


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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 theAguan Valley and Atlantic coast regions (areas suitable for high-value cropslike bananas and African palm) it was over 70 per cent. In Aguan, of the 28,365hectares awarded to peasant cooperatives by the agrarian reform, 20,930 weresold of. Three palm-oil magnates were the primary beneciaries: Ren MoralesCarazo, Reynaldo Canales and the richest man in Honduras, Miguel FacussBarjum (who has earned the nickname palmero de la muerte or palm grower ofdeath). In all, 40 peasant cooperatives lost their lands in Aguan. This is also whereone of the strongest movements for land rights would emerge.

Within a few years of the rst SAP in 1990, foreign direct investment oodedinto ve new government-sponsored, export processing zones, as well as veprivately run industrial parks, in which the majority of workers were cheap,female, and non-unionised. A maquilaworkforce of only 9,000 in 1990 balloonedto 20,000 in 1991, 48,000 in 1994, and 100,000 by the turn of the century. Thechanges to the urban class structure of the country wrought by the economictransformations of the 1990s are outlined in Tables I and II.

By 2007, value-added export earnings from the maquila sector amountedto US$1.2 billion, relative to US$203.7 million in 1996. This made maquiladorasthe second most important source of foreign exchange after family remittancesowing in from the United States. Parallel to the maquila sector andremittances, tourism revenue increased from US$29 million in 1990 to US$556.7million in 2007. 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 nancial sector, and tourism.The same record-breaking year, however, brought with it the slow beginning ofa fall in US demand for Honduran-manufactured exports, as well as increased

competition from lower-cost producers in Asia.

50. Kerssen 2011.51. Robinson 2008, p. 120.52. EIU 2008, pp. 1516. This report also points to the rise since the mid-1990s of non-traditional

exports such as shrimp, tilapias, melons and African palm oil. In the traditional agriculturalsector it charts the renewal of high prices in cofee since 2004 and the increased production thathas consequently arisen, whereas bananas have sufered from increases in tarifs in the EuropeanUnion. One of the areas it highlights will be of great interest to foreign investors in mining of zinc,

silver, lead and gold. Honduras is thought to have large unexploited mineral deposits that couldbecome available for foreign investors if controversial environmental legislation can be passed.53. EIU 2008, p. 24.


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As indicated in Table III, in spite of an inux of FDI and positive appraisalsfrom the international nancial institutions regarding the pace and characterof neoliberal reform, macroeconomic growth in Honduras over the course ofthe 1990s only peaked above 4 per cent for one year (1997), and the decade wasbook-ended by periods of negativegrowth. The next decade, though, witnesseda distinct shift. Between 2003 and 2007, Latin America experienced the most

remarkable period of economic growth since the long post-World War II boomthat ended in the mid-1970s, generated by the extraordinary combination of

Table II: Bottom of Honduran Urban Class Structure, 198098

Year

Formal Workers Informal Workers

Public Private* Sub-total Micro-

Enterprise**

Own

Account***

Domestic

Service

Sub-Total

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

* Waged workers in rms with ve or more workers. ** Waged workers in rms with fewer than ve workers.*** Excludes professionals and technicians.Source: Derived from Portes and Hofman 2003, pp. 567.

Table I: Top of Honduran Urban Class Structure, 198098

Year Capitalists* Professional/Executives** Petty Bourgeoisie***

. . . . . . . . .

* Owners of rms employing ve or more workers. ** Salaried administrators, university professionals, and technicians in rms employing ve ormore workers.*** Owners of rms employing fewer than ve workers plus own account professionals andtechnicians.

Source: Derived from Portes and Hofman 2003, pp. 567.

Table III: Growth of GDP in Honduras, 1980s1990s

GDP . . . . . . . . .

Source: Derived from CEPAL 2000a, p. 68.


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four factors: high commodity prices, booming international trade, exceptionalnancing conditions and high levels of remittances. The economy of

Honduras echoed these trends. Together with remittances, high commodityprices, and primed demand in the US, Honduras qualied in 2005 for debtrelief as part of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Havingfully complied with the rigours of an IMF poverty-reduction and growth facility(PRGF) programme by 2004, Honduras became eligible for an HIPC facility; theinitiative is scheduled to bring US$1.2 billion in debt relief between 2005 and2015, some of which is supposed to go toward reducing poverty in Honduras aspart of United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

A brief perusal of Table IV will indicate that GDP accelerated quite rapidly

between 2003 and 2007, surpassing 6% in 2005, 2006 and 2007, before tumblingwith the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008. The global crisis, andparticularly its American dimensions, began to hit Honduras in 2008 throughweakening demand for Honduran exports, declining family remittances, andtruncated inows of foreign direct investment. The GDP growth rate fell to4.2% that year. However, these mechanisms transmuting the crisis from thecore of the world system really only took full efect in 2009, as GDP growthentered into negative territory at -2.1, with a modest and fragile recovery in2010 and 2011.

In spite of high growth rates in the mid-2000s, social conditions at the endof this period remained abysmal. Of 177 countries listed in the United NationsDevelopment Programmes Human Development Index (HDI) for 2009,Honduras ranked 112. Of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, onlyBolivia (113), Guyana (114), Guatemala (122), Nicaragua (124) and Haiti (149)fared worse. By 2011, Honduras had dropped to 121.75% of the populationlived below the poverty line and 38% below the indigence line in 1990, theinaugural year of neoliberalism. By 2002, just prior to the commodities boom,those gures had in fact risen to 77% and 54%, respectively. By 2007, in thewake of the boom and auspicious conditions for improving social conditions,

54. Ocampo 2009, p. 704.55. It should be noted that while Honduras beneted overall from the high price of its principal

export commodities in these years it also sufered from the high price of oil between 2004 and2007 given its status as a petroleum importer.

56. ECLAC 2006, p. 129.57. EIU 2008, p. 17.

58. ECLAC 2009, p. 113. See also Mapstone 2009.59. UNDP 2009.60. UNDP 2011.61. CEPAL 2000b, p. 269.


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poverty and indigence levels had only receded to 69% and 46%, respectively.In 2009 poverty and indigence gures were 65.7% and 41.8%, while by 2010, inthe fallout from 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

signicant increase in poverty and indigence rates in all of Latin America andthe Caribbean over this period.

Likewise, the gures for national income distribution depicted in Table Villustrate regression rather than progress since the outset of neoliberalism, inspite of the favourable economic environment for radical redistribution between2003 and 2007. The marginal drop in the proportion of national income goingto the richest 10% of the population between 2002 and 2007 was largely passedon to the next highest 20% of income earners. The poorest 40% of the populationstill took home less of the national income in 2007 than they did in 1990, andthe boom years of the 2000s actually erased some of the extremely modestgains they had made over the course of the 1990s (see Table V). Even afterthe boom years, the basic infrastructural underpinnings of the countryseconomy were still massively underdeveloped, with the railway network rstestablished to serve the banana companies having gone into disuse themajority of the 785 kilometres of track missing from theft and only 21.3%of the 15,628 kilometres of primary, secondary, and municipal roads havingbeen paved. According to the countrys ocial statistics, 11% of households

are overcrowded, one in six people over 15 years of age is illiterate, andapproximately 15% of households go without an adequate sewage system.

Violent insecurity

The rural and urban popular classes resisted the neoliberal assault on theirlivelihoods over the 1990s and into the 2000s, but this epoch was also notable

62. CEPAL 2009b, p. 16.63. CEPAL 2011a, pp. 1617.64. EIU 2008, p. 13.65. EIU 2008, p. 11.

Table IV: Growth of GDP in Honduras, 2000s

*

GDP . . . . . . . . .

Source: Derived from CEPAL 2008a, p. 85; CEPAL 2011b, p. 96.* Preliminary gure.


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for its persistent state repression and punctuated remilitarisation of politics

under the aegis of the war on crime and the war on gangs. Peasant movementsremained an important social force in Honduran politics. Indeed, Tegucigalpaacted as the headquarters for probably the most important transnationalpeasant movement in the world, the Va Campesina, between 1996 and 2004.Nonetheless, the collective power of Honduran peasants to resist the reigningpower structure at home began to diminish between the mid-1990s and the early2000s, as the political economy of the countryside plunged into precipitousdecline. In the labour movement, banana workers and increasingly womenbanana workers struggled to survive plantation closures, new production

systems, and other machinations of the banana corporations not to mentionHurricane Mitch. New womens groups, worker and peasant organisations,and community associations continued to emerge in their dozens over thecourse of the 1990s and engaged in diferent modes of struggle. By 2003, urbansocial movements against the privatisation of state-owned utilities and publicservices were able to draw 25,000 people onto the streets. All the same, bythe late 1990s the overarching character of Honduran political and social lifewas made manifest not in efective rural and urban class-struggle from below,but in the emergence of new and violent social pathologies among the poorand dispossessed, alongside the remilitarisation of the state. The latter wasostensibly meant to ameliorate plebeian violence, but in reality acted as thecoercive guarantee for the preservation of the neoliberal order.

66. On the Va Campesina, see Desmarais 2007.67. Frank 2005, p. 58. Hurricane Mitch, which struck in October 1998, left more than 11,000 dead

and an astonishing 2 million people homeless (of a total population of 7.1 million). Among the

worst hit were the rural-to-urban migrants who had settled on the crowded hillsides surroundingTegucigalpa, which were washed away. Booth, Wade and Walker 2006, p. 145.68. Robinson 2003, p. 132.69. Booth, Wade and Walker 2006, p. 147.

Table V: Distribution of National Income in Honduras

Year Poorest % Next % % Below Richest % Richest %

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Source: Derived from CEPAL 2008b, p. 230.* Projected gures.


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Violent crime has increased dramatically throughout Latin America inthe wake of neoliberal restructuring. Central America is at the leading

edge of this phenomenon. The burgeoning lumpenproletariat, tossed outof the peasant world and refused admittance to the formal urban economy,was thrust cavalierly over the last two decades into a setting in which crimebecame one means of survival. The Isthmus was transformed into a mainthoroughfare for the shipping routes of drug cartels, with large numbers ofunemployed, demobilised (but still armed) ex-combatants from the civil wars,and repatriated gang members from California deported by the United Statesgovernment in large numbers in the mid-1990s lling the ranks of the lowerechelons of the trade. At best, Grandin argues, the energy of the dispossessed

is channelled into movements demanding a social-democratic redistribution ofwealth, 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. In theHonduran scenario, anthropologist Jon Wolseth concurs: In the face of socialsufering caused by neoliberal economics, evangelical Christian faiths haveofered disenfranchised youth in Honduras a spiritual response to individualpain while gangs have ofered self-empowerment predicated on interpersonalviolence.

In Honduras, in 2006, there were 3,108 killings, a yearly average of 46.2 violentdeaths per 100,000 people, which exceeded by ve times the global average.The two principal gangs operating in the country are Pandilla 18 and MaraSalvatrucha (MS), and the state has used their presence as a justication forthe remilitarisation of security and politics. In the early 2000s, the municipalgovernment of Tegucigalpa initiated a 2 a.m. curfew in the capital, reinforcedshortly thereafter by the mano dura, or iron st, policy of President RicardoMaduro at the federal level in 2002. As the streets begin emptying at night, onereporter explains, combined military-police units sweep into the citys barriosmarginales the poor neighborhoods surrounding the city, on the slopes ofthe surrounding hillsides, also known as the belt of misery with the statedaim of disrupting youth gangs and arresting their members. Harking back tothe dark days of the 1980s, these incursions have names like Operation Cage,Thunderclap, and Patria, and occur weekly.

70. Portes and Hofman 2003, pp. 6670.71. Edelman 2008, p. 247.

72. Grandin 2006, p. 207.73. Wolseth 2008, p. 99.74. Meja 2007, p. 27.75. Ibid.


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While the mano dura approach to crime has resolutely failed to achieveany reduction in the number of homicides, it has lled the countrys prisons

to the brink of collapse, and, most importantly, allowed the state to reversethe embryonic civilian control over the military set in motion through variousmeasures taken in 1996 under the Liberal presidency of Roberto Reina. UnderMaduro, the divisions between the military and police were dissolved, as wasany pretence of civilian control over the coercive apparatuses of the state. Forexample, his Operacin Guerra Contra la Delincuencia[War Operation againstCrime] deployed 10,000 police ocers into the streets under the authority ofa military ocial. Such tactics facilitated the continuation of social cleansingmethods already more than 1,500 street youth were killed between 1998

and 2002 through a combination of state death-squads and private securityforces and an intensication of politically-motivated assassinations of socialmovement activists.

A few representative examples of the political violence will suce. ErnestoSandoval, a leading activist in the Comit de Derechos Humanos de Honduras[Human Rights Committee of Honduras, CODEH], was assassinated in February1998. Padre Tamayo, a well-known priest and environmental activist with theEnvironmental Movement of Olancho, had a bounty of US$40,000 taken outon his head and has survived multiple kidnappings and murder attempts not

least among these experiences was the moment at a MAO rally in 2001 againstrampant deforestation by multinational logging companies when

Padre Tomayo was isolated by the head of the local police, who forced a livegrenade into his mouth before moving quickly away. I took it out and threw it asfar as I could. It exploded in a nearby eld, he says, smiling. Now the police havea case against me for causing a disturbance.

Human-rights lawyers and judges were routinely murdered in the mid-2000s,

the oces of social movements ransacked, and those identied with theleft murdered or intimidated into submission with death threats. Thismilitarisation of politics and society, operating under the guise of a war oncrime, is actually the rst line of defence for those beneting from the violentneoliberal order. And it is only with this historical backdrop clearly in mind thatwe can begin to understand the relative ease with which Roberto Micheletti

76. Meja 2007, p. 28.77. Booth, Wade and Walker 2006, p. 147.

78. Booth, Wade and Walker 2006, p. 146.79. Bracken 2008. Two other MAO activists, Heraldo Ziga and Roger Ivan Cartagena, wereassassinated by national police agents in 2006.

80. Ibid.


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organised and orchestrated the violent and repressive coup against Zelaya inlate June 2009.

The Zelaya interregnum

Zelaya, a wealthy ranch owner and business magnate in the logging industry,assumed the presidential oce in January 2006 as leader of the dissident

Movimiento Esperanza Liberal [Liberal Hope Movement] current inside thetraditional Liberal Party. His ascension to government took place roughly eightyears into a signicant, 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 aprolonged legitimacy crisis of the neoliberal model. At the same time, Zelayasrise to oce coincided with the intensication of eforts by imperialist forcesand the Latin American Right to turn back the clock.

Zelaya had been a Liberal congressperson for three consecutive termsbetween 1985 and 1999, and he headed up the World Bank-funded Fondo

Hondureo de Inversin Social [Honduran Social Investment Fund, FHIS]between 1994 and 1999. In the presidential campaign of late 2005, he faced ofagainst National Party challenger Porrio Lobo Sosa. The campaign pivoted

almost exclusively around the issue of violent crime and youth gangs, withLobo Sosa pledging to continue the mano duraapproach and to reintroducethe death penalty, which had been abolished in 1937. Zelaya, by contrast,opposed the death penalty and the anti-gang legislation, arguing that this typeof repressive framework in the past had actually exacerbated the countryscrime problem. Instead, he ofered vague promises of new social programmesto alleviate high levels of poverty and unemployment, which he believed to becentral factors driving youth into the gangs.

Once in the presidency, Zelaya made some modest moves toward progressive

social and economic reform. He introduced free school enrolment, raisedthe salaries of teachers, and made initial eforts to reduce rising fuel costs.He also increased the minimum wage by 60%, from US$6.00 to US$9.60 perday, apologised for the executions of street children at the hands of securityforces in the 1990s, advocated the legalisation of some narcotics as opposedto escalating the war on drugs, and vetoed legislation that would have madethe sale of the morning-after pill illegal. In the domain of natural-resourceextraction, Zelaya introduced mining legislation for approval by Congress that

81. Webber and Carr 2013.82. EIU 2008.83. Grandin 2009a.


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outlined stricter environmental regulations, including the prohibition of open-pit mines. A new Forest Law passed in September 2007 introduced measures

to prevent further ecological collapse, designating 87.7% of Honduran nationalterritory as protected areas. In spite of pressure from business groups andright-wing factions of his own party, the president also refused to privatisethe state-owned electricity company, Empresa Nacional de Energa Elctrica(ENEE), and the telecommunications rm, Hondutel.

At the same time, it is easy to exaggerate the leftist turn of the Liberalsunder Zelaya, which, at least in domestic policy, never escaped the parametersof modest reformism. Public spending on education remained at merely3.8% of GDP. In April 2006 Honduras joined the Dominican RepublicCentral

American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) with the United States, anaccord meant to abolish tarifs and other trade barriers and establish anenvironment attractive to foreign direct investment, particularly on the partof export-oriented multinational rms with an interest in making Hondurastheir launching pad. Two years later, in April 2008, Zelayas governmentsigned a standby agreement with the IMF that commits the government tomaintaining macroeconomic stability, lowering current spending (particularlythe governments wage bill), achieving a scal decit of 1.5% of GDP, andfocusing public expenditure on infrastructure and poverty reduction. What

is more, to the extent that Zelaya enacted social reforms, it was in no smallpart due to consistent and intense pressures exercised from below throughincreasingly militant trade unions, peasant organisations, and student groupsinuenced by revolutionary-left ideologies and liberation theology. There wereno fewer than 722 ocially recorded social conicts over the rst thirty-twomonths of his presidency, against privatisation and free trade and for salaryincreases and subsidies to control the price of the basic breadbasket.

As noted, Honduras entered a steep economic downturn in 2008 associatedwith the spiralling global crisis, and particularly the deepening slump inthe United States, Hondurass main export market and source of tourists,remittances, and foreign direct investment. It was in this context that Zelayapragmatically opted for joining ALBA in September of that year. As part ofthe deal, Venezuela . . . ofered to buy Honduran bonds worth $100m, whoseproceeds will be spent on housing for the poor. Mr. Chvez has also ofered

84. EIU 2008, p. 12.85. EIU 2009.

86. Romero 2009, pp. 12938.87. EIU 2008, p. 10.88. EIU 2008, p. 10.89. Navarro 2009.


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a $30m credit line for farming, 100 tractors, and 4m low-energy light bulbs(Cuba will send technicians to help to install them, as well as more doctors

and literacy teachers). The international nancial press saw this move onthe part of Zelaya not as a matter of ideological association, but rather onedriven by nancial need.

Nonetheless, as history has indicated, it is hardly necessary for LatinAmerican governments to adopt social-revolutionary measures before thetraditional elite and conservative military forces feel threatened and actviolently in protection of their interests. Tensions sharpened in the lead-upto the Zelaya-supported nonbinding referendum to be held at the end of June2009. This referendum was to ask Hondurans if they wanted to hold a binding

referendum during the national elections in November on whether or not to calla constituent assembly. Hondurass current constitution was adopted duringmilitary rule in the 1980s. Zelaya called on the military to distribute the ballotsfor the referendum after the Supreme Court had ruled that the referendumwas illegal. The head of the Honduran armed forces, General Romeo OrlandoVsquez Velsquez, refused to comply. Zelaya dismissed Vsquez as head ofthe armed forces, and the General went on to play the leading military rolein the coup against Zelaya. Once Vsquez had been red, the minister ofdefence, ngel Orellana, resigned and the Supreme Court ruled that Vsquezs

dismissal was illegal. The majority of Congress, including the right-wing factionof the Liberal party led by Micheletti, turned against the president. A medleyof conservative social forces saw their opportunity and converged around theoverthrow of Zelaya:

Conservative evangelicals and Catholics including Opus Dei, a formidablepresence in Honduras detested him because he refused to ban the morning-

90. The Economist2008a.91. The Economist2008b.92. Supporters of the coup, Mark Weisbrot notes, argue that the president violated the law

by attempting to go ahead with the referendum after the Supreme Court ruled against it. This is alegal question; it may be true, or it may be that the Supreme Court had no legal basis for its ruling.But it is irrelevant to what has happened: the military is not the arbiter of a constitutional disputebetween the various branches of government. Weisbrot 2009.

93. Vsquez, it is relevant to point out, was trained at the School of the Americas on twoseparate occasions, in 1976 and 1984. The commander of the air force, Javier Prince Suazo, whoalso played a part in the coup dtat, was trained at the school in 1996. Brooks 2009.

94. The composition of the 128 seats in Congress was as follows: Liberal Party (62); National

Party (55); Partido de Unicacin Democrtica[Democratic Unication Party, PUD] (5); PartidoDemcrata Cristiana[Christian Democratic Party, PDC] (4); and thePartido Innovacin y Unidad Social Demcrata[Social Democratic Innovation and Unity Party] (2). The only party that formallytook a position against the coup was the PUD.


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after pill. The mining, hydroelectric and biofuel sector didnt like him because hedidnt put state funds and land at their disposal. The law-and-order crowd hatedhim because he apologized on behalf of the state for a program of social cleansing

that took place in the 1990s, which included the execution of street children andgang members. And the generals didnt like it when he tried to assert executivecontrol over the military.

Dystopic cities

As noted, Zelayas term in oce introduced a modest break with neoliberalorthodoxy, but post-coup Honduras has witnessed its vengeful return, rst

under Micheletti, and then under Lobo. There has been perhaps no clearerindication of Lobos commitment in this regard than the investment conferenceheld in Trujillo in May 2011, Honduras is Open for Business, the motto ofwhich was a moment of change, a horizon of opportunities. The conferencewas accompanied by the publication of a government document, Honduras:A Country Open for Investment. As the government report explains, legislationis rapidly being introduced to facilitate the implementation of the variousfacets of two overarching development plans, Country Vision (20102038),and The Nation Plan (20102022). The preeminent objective of both is to

attract foreign direct investment into six areas in which the Lobo governmentbelieves Honduras enjoys a competitive advantage: infrastructure, renewableenergy, tourism, agribusiness, forestry and textiles, and electronic and businessservices.

Additionally, Lobo was able to introduce a massive restructuring of theeducational system, which will help to erode the inuence of the powerfulteachers union. Ination has been pressed down to the lowest level in twodecades. A law facilitating public-private partnerships a key edice of allneoliberal reforms in the region, facilitating, in efect, privatisation of public

assets with the nominal participation of the government was passed in 2010.A US$202 million stand-by arrangement with the International MonetaryFund (IMF) expired in March 2012, but there are expectations of a new deal.In the face of IMF pressure, the Economist Intelligence Unit reports, thegovernment is likely to step up eforts to stem excessive spending on wages

95. Grandin 2009b.96. Gobierno de Unidad Nacional de Honduras 2011.97. Gobierno de Unidad Nacional de Honduras 2011, p. 1.98. EIU 2012, p. 3.


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and consumption throughout 201213, although this may be partially thwartedby the run-up to the 2013 presidential elections.

Arguably the most sensational and emblematic feature of the neoliberalacceleration under Lobo, however, was the attempt to push forward thespecial development regions, or model cities, fashioned out of the concept ofcharter cities, conceived by Paul Romer, an economics professor at New YorkUniversity. The charter-city idea advanced by Romer, who actually workedas a consultant with the Honduran government, is in efect a corporate-runcity-state initiated and controlled by foreign investors. The Lobo regimepassed a constitutional amendment allowing for what amounts to internalstart-ups quasi-independent city-states that begin with a clean slate and are

then overseen by outside experts. They would have had their own government,written their own laws, managed their own currency and, eventually, heldtheir own elections. Their governance was to feature a transparencycommission constituted by a board of technocrats unelected foreigners a kind of board of trustees that appoints the governors, supervises their actionsand is meant to make sure that the entities are beyond reproach. Even themost basic elements of procedural liberal democracy would only have beenintroduced gradually, that is, only when the transparency commission deemsthat the time is ripe will citizens be able to elect the members of the normative

councils in efect, local parliaments, while taxes were to be capped at 12%for individuals, and 16% for corporations. However, this plan for neoliberal-dream enclaves appeared to have gone too far for even the countrys SupremeCourt (which supported the coup against Zelaya), which struck down thelegislation as unconstitutional on the grounds that such regions were outsidethe control of Honduran law.

Out of the interstices

An unanticipated consequence of the coup plotters casual breach of liberalinstitutions has been the emergence of a powerful popular opposition,characterised by ideologies and practices much closer to the best revolutionary-left traditions elsewhere in Latin America than had been the case in most ofthe modern political history of the Honduran left. The resistance erupted

99. EIU 2012, p. 6.100. The Economist2011.

101. Ibid.102. Ibid.103. Associated Press 2012.104. Rojas Bolaos 2010, p. 111; Senz 2009a, pp. 13945; Senz 2009b, pp. 14754.


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almost immediately. While Micheletti celebrated his triumphal seizure ofthe presidency, elsewhere in the capital, and throughout the country, an

eruption of the popular classes led by teachers, urban workers, students,indigenous communities, peasants, the urban poor, environmentalists,womens organisations, and others was taking shape and braving waves ofrepression. Makeshift barricades were erected in Tegucigalpa, highways wereblockaded, tyres burned in the streets, clashes between protesters, police andthe military erupted, and grati labelling Micheletti a fascist, and, better,Pinocheletti, sprung up on walls throughout the cities. They want to kickZelaya out at whatever cost, the peasant leader Rafael Alegra exclaimed, butthe only thing they have achieved is to present our country as savage, where

the rules of democracy are not respected. Or do you know of another case inthe world in which a poll has originated a coup dtat? Between 28 June and29 November, when the national elections consolidating the coup were held,there were roughly 150 days of continuous resistance activities, with chargedpinnacles on 5 July when Zelaya unsuccessfully attempted a return fromexile by plane and 15 September when the FNRP organised a parallel marchand demonstration of political deance against the ocial state celebrationsof National Independence Day.

The institutional core of the FNRP consists of diferent sectors of the

labour movement particularly teachers, banana workers, public sectorworkers, and bottling-plant workers. However, it also incorporates an arrayof social-movement actors, including peasants, women, alternative mediagroups, indigenous and Afro-indigenous sectors, human rights organisations,and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists, among others.Delegates from these various social-movement and trade-union bases are sentto participate in the central coordinating body of the front as representativesof their sectors. More than simply calling for the return of Zelaya, the FNRPalmost immediately began calling for a Constituent Assembly to fundamentallyrefound the country on the basis of social justice and equality. In ideology, andthrough its reliance on direct, mass actions that have built up the capacitiesof popular sectors to organise themselves under dire conditions, the FNRPrepresents an increasingly radical social left in the Honduran landscape. Inorder better to delve more deeply into the relational formation of politicalsubjectivity at play in these incipient socio-political formations of the left, it

105. Pinocheletti refers to Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator in power between 1973and 1990.

106. Cano 2009.107. Clix 2010, p. 44.108. Frank 2010.


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makes sense at this stage in our analysis to shift registers somewhat, from thepreceding macrohistorical, multiscalar, analytical lens toward a more rened,

ethnographic focus rooted in our investigations in the eld.

Ethnographies of opposition

We witnessed the spirit of the resistance most vividly in the streets ofTegucigalpa on Wednesday, 27 January 2010, the date of Lobos inauguration.It was clear that with the transfer of power from Micheletti to Lobo, business-as-usual would not go uncontested. Despite the black-suited sharpshooters

visible on the tower edges of buildings running parallel to the resistance march,and the hundreds of military and police troops weighed down with automaticweapons, it was hardly obvious that the protesting masses had more to fearthan Pepe Lobo. Indeed, as one popular resistance t-shirt proclaims, Nos tienenmiedo porque no tenemos miedo[They fear us because were not afraid].

In a meeting in Tegucigalpa on the eve of Lobos inauguration, Radio Globojournalist Felix Molina suggested to us that Honduras was entering a fourthmoment of the coup. The rst phase involved its preparation and execution.The second saw the gathering of domestic-elite and imperial forces around

the San Jos Accord. The third carried out that accord. A week before Lobosinauguration, the fourth moment began to congeal. Posters plastered thewalls of the capital celebrating the commencement of the new government ofnational unity. This fourth moment, Molina argued, was

about constructing normality, ostensibly with peace and reconciliation. Its aboutselling a supposed project of national integration. Essentially, the objective isto say that nothing happened here, that coups can be a democratic method tocorrect a democracy gone awry. The point of this fourth moment is to legalisethe coup.

As quickly as the states posters of calm and consensus marked the avenuesof Tegucigalpa, grati artists of the resistance ofered their response Fuera

golpistas asesinos! [Out with the coupist assassins!]. The corporate mediacast Lobo as the elected president, whereas the FNRP repudiated him as theson of a coup. The corporate media celebrated a national-unity governmentof integration, whereas the FNRP refused dialogue with Lobos regime, anddenounced it as the latest incarnation of the original coup of June 2009.

This war of words found its material expression in the protesting cascadesof hundreds of thousands, marching from downtown toward the airport, on27 January. The march paid homage to Zelaya as he nally escaped four


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months of sequestration in the Brazilian embassy for exile in the DominicanRepublic and, at the same time, announced that the struggle against the coup

regime would continue. We approached the rst row of military police and thecrowd rang out, urging folks to study and learn so that they will never have tobe on the other side of the barricades.

Estudiar, aprender, para chepo nunca ser!

Study, learn, so youll never be a cop!

A group of energetic 10-year-olds danced amidst the marchers, chantingconcordantly for the death of the golpista regime. Peasants, trade unionists,

feminists, and diferent left groupings walked arm-in-arm and cheeredecstatically as cars moved in the other direction honking in solidarity. Teenagersleaned out of the windows of a passing bus, their sts raised in the air.

El pueblo dnde est?El pueblo est en las calles exigiendo libertad!

Where are the People?The people are in the streets demanding liberty!

Ests cansado?No!Tienes miedo?No!Entonces?Adelante, Adelante, que la lucha es constante!

Are you tired?No!Are you afraid?No!

So?Forward! Forward! In constant struggle!

The resistance has two principal pillars, Rafael Alegra, a principal peasantleader in the resistance, informed us during the march. A social pillar for therevindication of the peoples rights, in which the resistance accompanies peoplein their daily struggle, for agrarian reform, for just salaries, and opposition tothe privatisation of social services. This is the pillar of social mobilisation. Theother pillar, Alegra emphasised, is the political arm to convert ourselves

into a militant political force which will work towards taking political powerin our country.


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We asked Alegra about the Constituent Assembly, as the crowd around usthundered:

Qu somos?Resistencia popular!Qu queremos?Constituyente!

What are we?Popular Resistance!What do we want?Constituent Assembly!

The power of the people, he told us,

is going to result in massive transformations in this country. We are demanding aConstituent Assembly that is going to transform this country, into a participatorydemocracy. It will be a new Honduras a country with social justice, withequality, with a new model of development in which everyone is included, and, asthe Bolivians say, so that our entire country can live well.

Alegra contrasts this vision with the current situation, in which there is a

privileged oligarchy, which owns and controls everything, while on the otherhand there is an immense mass of impoverished people. This cant continue.

Two days earlier, in a gathering of the resistance outside the Brazilianembassy to celebrate National Womens Day in Honduras, we met withBrenda Villacorta, of Feminists in Resistance, who expressed many of the samesentiments.

Lobos possession of oce doesnt represent anything. It is the continuation, theperpetuation of the coup dtat that took place in this country on 28 June 2009.

The protagonists have changed but the scenario is exactly the same.

The marchers of 27 January agreed:

No existe Presidente!Si a la constituyente!

There is no President!We demand a Constituent Assembly!

The resistance will take to the streets again and again, Villacorta said. Thisis the only way we can apply pressure, or at least the most efective way of


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doing so. The process to create the Constituent Assembly will be a long one,she estimated, but worth the struggle. The old constitution was established

under a military dictatorship, and it does not benet the Honduran people, theauthentic Honduran people. Instead, it works in the interests of the businessclass and the big power groups.

For the Honduran resistance, Lobo does not signify an end of the coup butrather its consolidation under the veneer of democratic legitimacy. One dayinto his presidency, Lobo had already declared a nancial emergency, andcalled for new scal austerity measures. Together with the amnesty law forprotagonists of the coup and the opening up of mining concessions, all signalspointed to the consolidation of a hard-right shift in domestic and economic

policy, designed to roll back the modest reforms introduced by Zelaya. Thecoming socioeconomic assault on the popular classes, in the midst of a deeprecession exacerbated by the coup plotters, alongside continuing repressionand political intimidation, presented formidable challenges to the resistancelooking forward. If 27 January revealed anything, however, it was that therewere two sides to Honduras. The pole of Pepe Lobo and the imperialists, onthe one hand, and a multi-headed hydra of exploited and oppressed, on theother. If the masses had not yet gathered sucient power to toss Lobo into thedustbin of history, they had demonstrated that they would not easily be cowed,

by a tiny minority, even one armed to the teeth.

Complexities of left-rearticulation

Returning to Honduras in June 2011 we encountered a resistance that seemedto have entered its fth moment. Just over a month prior to our arrival, on22 May 2011, the Cartagena Accord had been signed. Promoted by Colombianpresident Juan Manuel Santos and his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chvez,

the accord was signed on 22 May 2011 by Santos, a representative for Chvez,Lobo and Zelaya. In exchange for Chvezs backing of Hondurass readmissioninto the OAS achieved on 1 June the Honduran government pledged to allowan end to Zelayas exile outside the country and to annul all legal proceedingsagainst him. The agreement further committed the regime to adhere to therule of law, to ensure the protection of human rights, and to permit popularplebiscites around political, economic and constitutional matters. Finally, theLobo regime, through the Cartagena proceedings, pledged to recognise anymove by the FNRP to transform itself into a formal political party. While the

accord, in Articles 5 and 8, explicitly required the Honduran state to takeresponsibility for the protection of human rights, little had changed on thisscore by June 2011. Indeed, the cynicism of the Lobo regime in this regard


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deed imagination. According to Bertha Oliva of COFADEH, shortly after theaccord was signed two people were assassinated in Tegucigalpa. One of the

victims, a woman, was a close friend of Zelayas wife, and was in the Brazilianembassy with Zelaya after his rst return to Honduras from exile in September2009. This bold assassination was an unambiguous signal that even those closeto Zelaya were touchable.

Those of us who are here on the ground, who understand the reality of thehuman rights situation, think that the Accord is a trap, or could easily becomea trap, Oliva told us in an interview on 24 June.

We know that before the Cartagena Accord, during the Cartagena Accord

negotiations, and during the reintegration of Honduras into the OAS, violationsof human rights continued. . . . The OAS is not interested in human rights. On theday of the readmission of Honduras into the OAS there were serious violations ofhuman rights occurring.

On 5 June, two weeks after Cartagena was signed, three peasant activists inthe Bajo Agun region were assassinated near their San Esteban cooperative.The same day, security guards working for Miguel Facuss, a large landownerwith interests in expanding his biofuel empire, entered the National Agrarian

Institute and opened re on the peasants who had taken refuge there in thewinter following a previous wave of repression. One person was seriouslyinjured. The shooting rampage in the National Agrarian Institute was followedon 10 June by an invasion of several other peasant cooperatives in the Agunregion by police, military, and private security forces. The Agun situationofers a particularly chilling portrait of the routinisation of political violencein post-coup Honduras as it intersects directly with contemporary patternsof international accumulation of increasingly limited arable-land supply. Thepeasant land reclamation struggles there, which had gained some traction

during the Zelaya presidency, are coming up against a powerful landownerin Facuss one of the richest persons in the country who is linked to theUS and World Bank eforts to expand international biofuels production. Statesecurity and his own private security forces have operated with impunity from the Honduran government, the World Bank and the US in their brutalenforcement of the local operations of the global biofuels regime, assassinatingmore than 40 peasant activists since the coup, as well as a lawyer representingone of the peasant organisations in the fall of 2012. Meanwhile, death threats

109. Bird 2012b; Frank 2012; Millennium Challenge Corporation 2010. The World BanksInternational Finance Corporation has provided approximately $30 million in loans to FacusssDinant Corporation since the coup, while the US has provided Honduras with over $200 millionin aid through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). On the MCCs role in land


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against other members of the resistance we talked to, including activists inTrujillo who were organising against Canadian-nanced mega-projects in the

tourism sector, continued to be an all-too-common feature of communitystruggles in the country.Impunity reigned in post-Cartagena Honduras. We are living in a state,

Oliva reminded us, in which the security forces can torture, and nothingwill happen, where they can detain people without cause, and nothing willhappen. According to Oliva, they can persecute and assassinate their politicalopponents and nothing will happen. They can drive into political exile whateverquantity of people they desire, and nothing will happen. At the basis of thisescalation of intimidation was a sustained efort by the coupists to create a

state of fear so crippling, to establish an environment in which people were soterried, that their will to struggle could be extinguished.

While the targeting of grassroots activists was the most pernicious andwide-reaching feature of post-Cartagena repression, the states apparatus forquelling dissent had begun to extend its reach into the highest echelons of theocial resistance. In what Zelaya himself insisted was a violation of Article 3of the Accord one that is supposed to guarantee the return, safety, andfreedom of the former ocials of the government who were exiled hisformer Chief of Staf, Enrique Flores, was put under house arrest by a judge

on 15 June, after having returned to Honduras on the same plane as Zelaya.The charges against Flores appeared to be rooted in a trumped-up corruptionscandal. That the Honduran state would detain such a high-prole gure wasa warning that no-one who crossed the dictatorship would be protected fromits punitive actions. The case of Flores was also telling because it revealed theutter condence with which the state was willing to carry out its agenda evenwith the ink of the Cartagena Accord barely dry.

The Cartagena Accord, the OAS legitimation of Lobos regime, and therepatriation of Zelaya precipitated a new stage of ux in the socio-politicalagenda of the always-heterogeneous Honduran resistance. An undeclaredbattle for hegemony within the Frente was opened up between its three mostcoherent currents. First, were the oxymoronically-named Liberals in Resistancewho, together with aliates of the Unin Democrtica [Democratic Union,UD] party, constituted what Carlos Amaya of Refoundational Space terms theocial resistance. The moniker derives from their political origins, as eliterenegades, only recently outcast from the two-party system [bipartidismo],

privatisation and biofuels development, see GRAIN 2010. Between 2000 and 2008 the total landarea devoted to palm oil plantations has almost doubled, from 62,000 to 115,00 hectares, leadingto a doubling of the harvest of palm fruit from 665,000 metric tonnes in 2000 to 1.3 million in 2008.See Craven 2011, p. 6944.


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that has long seen Honduran political power traded between the Liberalsand the National Party. The ocialdom of the resistance is, in other words, a

persecuted branch of former members of the ruling class.Unsurprisingly, this tendency of the resistance had been the most willingto entertain participation in future elections presided over by the Lobodictatorship, under the condition that Zelaya be able to run for the presidencyfrom within the country. Equally predictable was their critical embrace of theCartagena Accord, which they saw, by and large, as a democratic advance.Zelaya, in spite of his tactical embrace of unity between all currents withinthe Frente, had, from the outset, been closest to this wing. He was, after all, amember of a populist fraction of the Liberal party, until he was tossed out of

the presidency at the hands of traditionalist Liberals in June 2009.Second, there was Refoundational Space, an eclectic current of grassroots

movements, workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, feminist organisations,LGTB activists, various Marxist and autonomist political groupings, and ahost of radical youth organisations. The largest formal organisations active inRefoundational Space were COPINH and the Organizacin Fraternal Negra

Hondurea[Fraternal Black Honduran Organisation, OFRANEH]. This wing ofthe resistance united around a commitment to building a popular movementfrom below, rooted in anti-capitalist and anti-oppression politics. Their most

important demand had been for a refoundational, self-organised ConstituentAssembly. They argued simultaneously that conditions did not exist for fairelections in Honduras, and that any recognition of the Lobo regime as thelegitimate government of the country would constitute an unconscionablebetrayal of the movement.

A third and oscillating force within the resistance was, like RefoundationalSpace, composed principally of popular classes and oppressed groups, as wellas some political organisations of the Honduran far-left. This force had beenthe muddiest and most ill-dened; it was not a formally organised current,but rather a signicant segment of the resistance rank-and-le unalignedwith either the ocial resistance or Refoundational Space. It stood to reason,therefore, that its commitments had shifted between the politics of those twocurrents at diferent moments since the popular struggle against the coupbegan in 2009. While still too early to make denitive statements, it wouldseem that in the lead-up to the Cartagena Accord, and even more discerniblyin the wake of Zelayas return to Honduras, momentum within the resistancemoved from Refoundational Space to the ocial wing of the Frente.


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A tale of two assemblies

For the weekend of June 1718, we travelled four hours by bus, from Tegucigalpa

to La Esperanza, to attend a gathering of Refoundational Space at COPINHstraining centre essentially a community hall on farmland on the outskirtsof La Esperanza. The objective of the gathering was to esh out a commonperspective of Refoundational Space for the National Assembly of Resistanceto be held in the capital on 26 June. The gathering was remarkable for itsrevolutionary democratic character and egalitarian ethos. Multiple sessionsof discussion, driven by constant participation from the oor, lasted thefull two days and determined a host of resolutions for the way forward instruggle in cursory form, yes to building anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal popular power from below; no to participation in elections so longas the coupist power-structure remained intact; and no to any recognition ofthe Lobo regime.

Everyone slept at the encampment on mattresses on the oor or availablebunk beds, and communal meals were prepared and served. The participationof women was pronounced, from the coordinators at the front of the room, toparticipation from the oor. Half of the delegates from Refoundational Spacesent to the National Assembly were women. LGBT activists were a visible

presence and played an important role in the gathering. Indigenous and peasantrepresentatives from COPINH were leading players in the current, and were aclear force in the discussions over the weekend. Garfuna representatives fromOFRANEH were underrepresented at the weekend gathering likely due tothe geographical location of most Garfuna communities in the far north of thecountry but they were represented in the delegation elected to attend theNational Assembly in Tegucigalpa.

The spirit and strategy of struggle from below so evident in the gathering ofRefoundational Space had earlier won the day on a national scale during the

National Assembly of the Resistance held in February 2011. Gilda Rivera, anactivist in Feminists in Resistance, and an active member of RefoundationalSpace, in an interview on 26 June recalled the resolutions adopted by theresistance in the February 2011 national assembly:

110. The Garfuna are African-indigenous communities that trace their ancestral origins tothe survivors of a slave shipwreck in the seventeenth century and Carib and Arawak indigenous

nations. They arrived on the Caribbean coast of Central America over 200 years ago after beingdisplaced from their home on St Vincent by the British. UNESCO has ocially recognised Garfunalanguage and culture as an integral part of the human heritage.


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I would say that the decisions arrived at today were a result of the manipulationof the process by the leadership of the Frente, and a disinformation campaignwithin the population of the resistance. Sections of the leadership of the Frente

have always been positioning themselves such that they will be integrated intothe existing structures of power of this country. In other spaces of the resistance,this tendency has been defeated, but today they were victorious in this assembly.The decisions made in the last National Assembly of the Resistance, in February2011, were casually thrown into the garbage.

In terms of the process of the assembly, Rivera added, there was totalabsence of patient discussion, and a serious manipulation of the process. So,beforehand we had a ood of commentary in favour of the electoral path [in

the media, in the months leading up to the gathering], and little discussion inthe Assembly.I believe the Assembly lacked political debate, Andino added. There were

insucient opportunities available to challenge the ocial position. FromAndinos perspective, the decisions made today were made without sucientpreparation beforehand, and without adequate discussion. What is more, thedecision to opt for forming a party to participate in the elections in 2013 isthe wrong one to have made. In my opinion, he explained, the coupists willbe happy that the resistance has decided on the electoral path, because this

validates the existing political institutions in Honduras, and will likely leadto the continuation of the two-party system [bipartidismo] between Liberals[Partido Liberal] and the National Party [Partido Nacional]. In the conditionsthat presently exist, conditions in which the regime has been strengthened andthe resistance lacks a strategy of struggle, we are left almost to the whims of theregime, to whatever decisions they make. On this view, the Cartagena Accord,the reintegration of Honduras into the OAS, and the return of Zelaya underthese circumstances had together tamed, at least temporarily, the dynamicsof the resistance, while providing a basis for the legitimation of a dictatorial

regime that remains preeminently in control of every dimension of power inthe country.

The same powers that were responsible for the coup dtat remain in place,Andino stresses,

and the forces that overthrew a legitimately-elected government are the forces thatremain in power. The coupists have institutionalised their power. In the SupremeElectoral Tribunal, in the Supreme Court, the same gures that legitimised thecoup remain in place, as do the forces in the executive and within the Armed

Forces. So are we to expect that these forces that came to power through force aregoing to give up that power through voting? No! All of these conditions suggestthat the only strategy available to the people is to rise up, if they are to really


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express their will. If we simply move toward participation in elections we aregoing to be lost.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal that presently exists in this country is thesame one that was in place when the coup dtat occurred, Sandra Snchez,an activist with Refoundational Space, told us in a 26 June interview. This isthe same tribunal that said nothing when the government of Zelaya, whichit had earlier recognised as having been legitimately elected, was violentlyoverthrown in a coup dtat. And the institutional continuities of coupistpower do not stop at the tribunal. According to Snchez, the Supreme Courtin this country is the same one that remained completely silent when the coup

dtat occurred, that stayed silent when the constitutional order of this countrywas broken. The grand majority of the deputies currently in Congress are thosewho argued that Zelaya should write a letter of resignation after the coupdtat had been carried out. In this context, she suggested, who can reasonablysuggest that the power dynamics have changed in any serious way that wouldallow for genuine participation in elections by resistance forces?

Freedom and Refoundation

On May Day 2012, hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the countryin marches of resistance organised by Libertad y Refundacin[Liberation andRefoundation, LIBRE], the new party that emerged out of the resolutions cast atthe national resistance assembly on 26 June 2011. Zelayas wife, Xiomara Castrode Zelaya, has been selected by LIBRE to stand as its presidential candidate inthe 2013 elections. It appears that the initial scepticism with which the mostmilitant popular movements inside the Frente approached the idea of a newparty of this type has at least partially given way to accepting some role for

participation within its ranks.The new partys declaration of principles is promisingly entitled RevolutionIs Inevitable. Freedom and Refoundation (LIBRE) interprets and expressesthe ideas and force of the people who urgently demand the refoundation ofthe state, the transformation of society and the political and economic system,it announces. These goals run together with the construction of a trulyparticipatory and inclusive democracy based in equality, liberty, solidarityand justice, through which there will be unrestricted and universal respect forhuman rights. Popular sovereignty appears rst in the list of principles. This

111. Libertad y Refundacin 2012.


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land, and the relatively rapid accommodation of victorious centre-left partieselsewhere in Latin America to reconstituted neoliberalism, are reasons to be

cautious about LIBRE and the current direction of anti-coup, anti-imperialistorganising in Honduras.Indeed, whether the imperialism-backed nexus of right-wing ocial politics

and the security apparatus allows this party to come to power electorally,or exercise meaningful political independence outside of a framework ofreconstituted neoliberalism and militarism, at least without a renewedgrassroots militancy driving it forward, certainly remains an open question.Honduras has become a linchpin in the US (and to a lesser degree Canadian)geo-strategic response to the emergence of left-of-centre governments in El

Salvador and Nicaragua, with their diplomatic ties to Venezuela under Chvez,and, just as importantly, to the emergent militant movements in the regionghting mega-resource development projects. It is a question, of course,of the balance of class forces; the coup clearly had a galvanising impact onsocio-political polarisation in the country, emboldening the Honduran rulingclass and its imperial backers while inciting a renewal of militancy and a newgeneration of activists. Nonetheless, the hard edges of this dynamic have beensoftened, temporarily at least, as the new electoral formation re-channelsmilitant energies towards the ballot box in 2013. Still, those energies unleashed

after Zelayas removal from power would need to be drawn upon even to sustaina victory in the electoral sphere; how Zelaya and the rest of LIBREs leadershipseek to exploit and direct that energy will be an important determinant inthe trajectory of the resistance against authoritarianism in the coming monthsand years.

112. For a theoretical discussion of reconstituted neoliberalism, see Webber 2011. See alsoWebber and Carr 2013. Such widespread accommodation across the region is recognised e

Documents

Post Coup Honduras