5 A Brief History of Honduras

Pre-Columbian Era

[W]e can conclude that the Valley of Naco in the period between 1300 and 1500 BCE had been converted into a multi-ethnic territory, where a probable Pipil Nahua predominance existed before the Conquest. The chontales [Náhuatl word for “foreigner”] from the 1539 document could be speakers of Maya, Lenca, or both, since we have already seen that with this name, both groups were included by the Pipil Nahua, and this was also in agreement with the indication already discussed about the three languages spoken in the Naco Valley in 1525.^[1]

Honduras was home to Copán, a major city in the Mayan kingdom that flourished between 150 and 850 CE. In addition to Maya, the Lenca, Nicarao, Miskito, and Pipil Nahua peoples made up portions of the Indigenous population living in Honduras. There is evidence of bustling agricultural production with communities cultivating crops such as cotton, indigo, and agave.^[2] Other products, such as honey, fish, and peppers were also traded, along with crafted products like pots and pitchers, and the trade of these items continued even through the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

The Nicarao and Pipil Nahua societies had many similarities, from their class divisions of nobles, “common Indians” (commonfolk), and enslaved people to their governmental system, which saw officials from noble lineages working with a council of elders.^[3] There was also a hierarchical system within their religion, designating a high priest or religious leader who oversaw the other priests, all of whom lived in temples or other specially designated buildings. Many of the place names still used today in Honduras have their roots in Nahuatl.^[4]

Colonization and Spanish Rule

In 1535 Andrés de Cerezeda, the acting governor and contador [accountant] of the Provincia de Higueras and Cabo de Honduras, wrote a letter to the Spanish Crown in which he described a 50 league corridor that led southward from the Central American isthmus’ Atlantic coast to its Pacific coast. He recommended that a settlement be established at the corridor’s midpoint, and that an interoceanic road be constructed linking the two coasts. He envisioned the settlement as the region’s administrative and commercial center after the road had supplanted the Panamá crossing as the empire’s primary overland conduit. Cerezeda’s plan dominated the life of the Honduran corridor during the early colonial period.^[5]

In 1502, Christopher Columbus made his fourth and final voyage to the region, landing on the island of Guanaja, one of Honduras’ Bay Islands. Shortly after, he made it to the mainland. He called the region Honduras, meaning “depths,” in reference to the region’s deep coastal waters. Columbus eventually moved on from Honduras to explore other parts of Central America.

Twenty years later, in 1524, Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, ordered captain Cristóbal de Olid to colonize Honduras. Olid landed in Triunfo de la Cruz and declared himself governor of the territory, establishing his own power independent of Cortés. Cortés sent his cousin, Francisco de las Casas, to re-assert his power over Olid and the colony. In addition to de las Casas, Olid was also fending off attacks from Spaniard Gil González Dávila. There are conflicting histories over whether Olid’s soldiers won in the conflicts, or if de las Casas overcame them and ultimately beheaded Olid, reclaiming the territory. Cortés marched from Mexico to Honduras, and dubbed de las Casas governor of the colony in 1525.

Following conflict in 1528 over who should lead the territory, settlers in Honduras requested that Pedro de Alvarado—a conquistador who had taken part in the colonization of Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, and Guatemala—come to Honduras to restore order. He arrived in 1536 and the situation calmed. In 1537, Francisco de Montejo was made governor, and after disagreement over who ought to be governor, Montejo moved to Chiapas, Mexico, and Alvarado replaced him as leader of Honduras.

There were many Indigenous revolts during the beginning of Spanish attempts to establish a colony. Alvarado smothered an attack led by Chief Çocamba based on the Ulúa River.^[6] Lenca chief Lempira led uprisings in 1537 and 1539 “throughout Higueras and San Miguel (that) paralyzed Montejo’s development efforts.”^[7] However, both of these uprisings were quickly stamped out by Alonso de Cáceres, one of Montejo’s captains. Under Alvarado, there were many Indigenous people from Honduras’ northern coast who were kidnapped and enslaved, forced to work in Spain’s Caribbean territories.

Along with the slave trade, the colony of Honduras was involved in mining operations, particularly of gold and silver. In fact, the mining industry became so central to the colony that they began to bring in enslaved people from Africa; by 1545, it was estimated that the colony had two thousand enslaved Africans. Nearing the end of the sixteenth century, the silver boom that Honduras experienced diminished and gave way to an economic depression.

During this period there remained strongholds in the northern part of the region, along the Caribbean coast, where Indigenous groups continued to resist colonization. The Miskito Kingdom, in particular, fiercely defended their territory, ruled by a king. In addition to the Miskito and other Indigenous groups, the Spanish faced tensions with British forces that had begun to populate northern Honduras, which would later become British Honduras and then Belize. Tensions worsened when the Miskito king made an alliance with the English crown in 1633.^[8] In 1670, the Godolphin Treaty, also called the Treaty of Madrid, established recognition for “all lands then currently occupied by the English in North America and the West Indies as their possessions,” which was intended to settle territory disputes that were ongoing at the time, especially a war that had begun in 1654 over the rightful ownership of Jamaica.^[9] The English claimed that this recognition included settlements in Belize and on the Mosquito Coast, particularly because of the trade relations they had already established with the Miskitos. In 1797, the British forced the Garifuna population of St. Vincent into exile on the Honduran island of Roatán. Initially comprised of 2,000 Garifuna who arrived in Roatán, today the pan-Garifuna community numbers 300,000 to 400,000, with 200,000 in Honduras.

Independence

Honduras is a particularly useful case study because it has been subject to many different forms of imperialism, ranging from the direct colonial occupation by the Spanish in the sixteenth century to the neocolonial control exercised by Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century and the regional domination of the cold war American ‘sphere of influence’ in the twentieth. In every case, political and especially economic power were held by the foreign metropole, assisted by a small cadre of local elites, and the levers of state power were twisted to the benefit of metropolitan conquerors and businesses seeking to exploit Honduran land and people in order to extract profits.^[10]

After the creation of the United Provinces of Central America, Honduras gained its first elected president, a lawyer named Dionisio de Herrera. Herrera’s government established the first constitution. Despite their desire to work together jointly, Honduras soon experienced social and economic tensions with the rest of the region. General Francisco Morazán, president of the United Provinces, made strong, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempts at keeping the five territories together as a nation. In the end, Honduras separated from the United Provinces in 1838, becoming an independent, sovereign state. The United Provinces of Central America later completely dissolved in 1840.

As an independent nation, the Republic of Honduras’s first elected president was Conservative General Francisco Ferrera, who had led an army to combat president of the United Provinces and ruler of El Salvador, General Morazán. During this post-United Provinces period, the states in the region were experiencing conflict between the Liberals and Conservatives within the countries as well as suspicions about their neighbors. Ferrera attempted to depose the Liberal Morazán from his seat in El Salvador, but failed.

In 1859, Honduras gained sovereignty over the Bay Islands, a group of islands off the coast that were previously claimed by British settlers. The treaty was contested by said settlers, who enlisted the help of William Walker, an American who had arrived in Central America in 1855 and dubbed himself president of Nicaragua in 1856. Walker arrived in Honduras with the expectation of receiving support from Honduran Liberals; instead he was greeted with opposition from both the Hondurans and the British. In 1860, Walker was put to death in front of a firing squad in the city of Trujillo, and Honduras retained rights over the Islands.

The Bay Islands were fundamental to the burgeoning banana industry in Honduras, which had begun to export bananas in the 1870s, setting it apart from other Central American economies: “Unlike neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador where a national oligarchy has enhanced its wealth through an extensive coffee industry, Honduras first emerged in the international economy through its foreign-owned banana enterprises which still are a leading source of foreign exchange.”^[11] In 1889, the Vaccaro brothers, who were based in New Orleans, founded the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company, which would eventually become Dole. From there, the industry gained momentum, and the Honduran government began making concessions for fruit companies to stimulate their growth. Soon the banana industry became so dominant that it earned Honduras the nickname “the Banana Republic.” Though the original meaning of a “banana republic” was, most literally, a country (republic) that specialized in the export of bananas, the rapid growth of the industry in Honduras became so entwined with the country’s political, social, and economic development that the term soon took on new connotations: both “a country dominated by foreign interests, represented by a few companies that own large concessions” and “a country with an unstable government, usually dictatorial, in which frequent revolutions occur and has a consistent military presence in its politics.”^[12]

The success of the sector attracted workers from the West Indies, particularly Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, in search of work on the fruit plantations. They were well-received by the companies because “they spoke English, were more highly educated and skilled than their Honduran counterparts, and often had previous experience with the fruit industry in Jamaica and elsewhere.”^[13] This influx of West Indian laborers soon created tensions with the Hondurans, especially due to racial prejudice: “[F]or Honduran elites influenced by contemporary trends such as eugenics, black came to mean undesirable.”^[14] By the turn of the century, Honduras saw mass deportations of West Indians based on these racist fears and biases.

Twentieth Century

In the past 30 years, no chief of the Honduran armed forces has retired without having been President of Honduras. Regardless of formal status, all regimes since 1963 have in practice been civil-military regimes. Military dominance in the Honduran political system even has a constitutional basis: the 1957, 1966, and 1981 constitutions ceded progressively greater amounts of autonomy to the military.^[15]

The beginning of the twentieth century also saw an increase of U.S. government intervention in the country during the so-called Banana Wars. Workers of the fruit industry throughout Central America and the Caribbean began staging protests to contest the conditions they were being subjected to. The United States had a large stake in this brewing uprising due to the fact that many of the fruit businesses were U.S.-owned; therefore, the U.S. government responded to the unrest by sending in the U.S. Marines, beginning a series of occupations and interventions that would span three decades. U.S. troops were sent into Honduras beginning in 1903. During this time, General Manuel Bonilla was serving as president. Bonilla had originally been a liberal but later converted to being a conservative; he is credited as the founder of the National Party of Honduras, Honduras’ dominating conservative political party. As president, Bonilla granted many large concessions to the banana industry, giving generous tax exemptions and permits to construct roads and railways.

In 1913, the United Fruit Company created the Tela Railroad Company and the Trujillo Railroad Company, which were made possible because of the concessions from Bonilla and his successor, General Miguel Dávila. The railroad companies were granted additional land subsidies by the government, who anticipated they would construct a general national rail system in addition to the system made specifically for the fruit companies’ use. However, the companies continued to expand their own interests, building railways to reach new cultivable land instead of connecting major Honduran cities. The banana industry began to wield so much power and authority over the coastal cities of Tela and Trujillo that they superseded even the local governments, thus laying the foundation of the monopoly the industry still has over the Honduran economy.

This ascendency was met with turmoil and contention; the Banana Wars persisted, and labor movements continued to organize and mobilize. The first major strike in Honduran history happened in 1917 against Cuyamel Fruit Company. Although the protest was quickly stamped out by the military, the momentum continued, and another strike occurred a year later in La Ceiba against Standard Fruit Company. A general strike was held in 1920, which earned responses from the governments of both Honduras and the United States. The first Communist party was also created around this time: “Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union, the newly formed comintern [Communist International organization], and regional leadership of Communist Parties, a small group emerged in Honduras to engage the aspirations of the working class. The railroad workers were seen as the most militant workers within that iteration of the Communist Party.”^[16] Seventeen coups were attempted between 1920 and 1923, clearly reflecting the general unrest and instability that was growing within Honduran society.

Conservative candidate Tiburcio Carías Andino was elected in the relatively calm presidential election of 1932, amidst the economic disaster that the Great Depression had wreaked on Honduras’ banana industry. This was the beginning of a seventeen-year dictatorship, the longest continuous period of time an individual has held power in Honduras’ history. Carías made moves to improve and strengthen the military, and allied himself strongly with the banana companies, as well as other Central American dictators, such as Guatemala’s General Jorge Ubico and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza García. He outlawed the Communist Party of Honduras and censored the opposition press. He drew up new constitutions in 1936 and 1939, in order to extend his term as president until 1949. The Liberal Party attempted several failed coups against Carías and the National Party throughout his rule. In 1944, encouraged by the ousting of Ubico from Guatemala and Maximiliano Hernández Martínez from El Salvador, a group of students and women, including daughter of Liberal Party leader Policarpo Bonilla, Emma Bonilla de Larios, gathered in front of the Presidential Palace to demand Carías release political prisoners.^[17] Carías complied, if only to dissipate the tension; instead, the opposition became emboldened, and another coup was attempted by a group of exiles. The coup, again, was unsuccessful. Then, in 1948, the United States, fearing even more unrest and instability in the region, petitioned Carías to allow free elections as the end of his term loomed ahead. Carías complied, and in 1949, National Party candidate Juan Manuel Gálvez took power.

In early 1954, a general strike was staged by United Fruit employees, ignited by the dismissal of the workers’ union leader. Their focus was on salary issues, particularly holiday pay, as they were not receiving the extra pay for working during holidays that was designated by Honduran labor law. By May 5, about a month into the strike, over twenty-five thousand workers were protesting. J.F. Aycock, the manager of United Fruit Company, stated that he was unwilling to negotiate with workers so long as they were striking; this proved to have no effect on curbing the movement, which expanded to Standard Fruit, with eleven thousand Standard Fruit employees joining in the protesting. Workers from other industries, such as the textile and beer industries, staged solidarity strikes; teachers and students joined; and railroad workers aided in the spread of the strike: “Workers from the fincas in and around El Progreso then took over a passenger train with the support of railroad conductors and rail workers, who later joined the nascent strike movement, spreading the word to workers in all the fincas and train terminals about the strike as they passed them on the tracks.”^[18] On May 16, the fruit laborers outlined their demands for J.F. Aycock, including wage increases and better working conditions; significantly, the demand for improved healthcare and an eight-hour workday “reflected the fact that the workforce was becoming family-oriented, diverging from the company’s assumption that it primarily consisted of single men.”^[19] Two days later, the strikers made gains in negotiations with Aycock and Standard Fruit, making it the first time in Honduran history that a private corporation participated in collective bargaining talks with workers. In the end, the workers did not receive all of their requests by the time they returned to work in early July, but the impact on workers’ attitudes was long-lasting, encouraging unions to organize for the first time.

In 1969, the Football War, a conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, took place. Tensions had been growing between the two countries for some time, particularly due to the large number of Salvadorans who had immigrated to Honduras escaping economic disparity; by 1969, that number was over three hundred thousand. The majority of these immigrants were there without documents. The tension finally crystalized during a soccer match between the Salvadoran and Honduran national teams in San Salvador, when Honduran team members were harassed by Salvadoran fans; the Salvadoran team had received similar treatment when they were playing in Honduras. Honduras decided to expel many Salvadorans from the country and persecute those who remained. El Salvador responded by launching an attack against Honduras, regardless of how this would affect the Central American Common Market (CACM), an agreement established in 1951 that sought regional economic integration. El Salvador invaded Honduras and launched air strikes against Honduran airports. Two thousand people, mostly civilians, were killed during the conflict, which only lasted four days, giving it the alternative name “the Hundred Hour War.” CACM collaboration was heavily disrupted in the wake of the conflict.

During the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Honduras became increasingly important to the United States due to its strategic location in the middle of Central America, though the United States had been active in the country throughout the century: “the U.S. hand has been heavier in Honduras than in any other Central American state, through investment, political intervention by private U.S. interests, military missions, and intergovernmental cooperation.”^[20] The a dministration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in its quest to oust the Sandinistas and their communist ideology from Nicaragua, funded a counter-revolutionary guerrilla army called the Contras. The United States opted to use Honduras as a base for housing and training the Contra forces, from where they could infiltrate Nicaragua. When Roberto Suazo Córdova took the presidency in 1982, he, along with head of armed forces Colonel Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, formed a close relationship with the Reagan administration: “[T]he incoming government struck a perverse bargain with the Reagan administration: in exchange for geopolitical, military, and economic obedience to the United States, Honduras would be flooded w ith U .S. economic assistance and military ‘protection.’”^[21] It is estimated that between 1982 and 1983, the United States “either gave or sold over $68 million in military equipment and supplies to Honduras”; the total Honduran military budget for 1984 was reported to be $125 million.^[22] The situation in the country during the Suazo-Álvarez regime was dire, due to overwhelming corruption. There was a rumor that Suazo and Álvarez were personally receiving almost $30 million in benefits while the country itself fell into economic and political disarray, in addition to a number of disappearances, political assassinations, and political prisoners that had occurred by 1984.^[23] The 1985 presidential elections saw the peaceful transfer of power from Álvarez to the Liberal Party of Honduras candidate José Azcona, who was critical of U.S. support to the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary forces.

In 1998, the Caribbean coast suffered the devastating effects of Hurricane Mitch, described by United Nations officials as “the worst natural disaster to hit the region” that century.^[24] More than five thousand people died, and almost $3 billion of infrastructure was damaged. At this time, the Honduran health system was already unstable due to the constant turnover of the Ministry of Health’s management. Honduras received about $415 million in aid from the United States per year, making the government and country’s infrastructure incredibly reliant on U.S. support.^[25] Following Hurricane Mitch, the Honduran government critically studied the structure of their health system, realizing that “screening international aid is an important feature of sustaining (our) own health infrastructure,” and as a result devised a new system that would be “independently sustainable.” ^[26]

2009 Coup and Aftermath

The natural starting point for an analysis of the current crisis in Honduras is the kidnapping of the center-left president Manuel Zelaya Rosales on June 28, 2009. Zelaya was arrested at gunpoint and whisked in his pajamas to a U.S. military base and then to exile in Costa Rica, provoking 161 days of uninterrupted popular demonstrations that marked the launch of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Popular Resistance—FNRP).^[27]

Liberal Party candidate José Manuel Zelaya Rosales won the 2005 elections with a 4 percent margin. He based his campaign around political transparency and combatting the drug trade in Honduras, which was strong given that Honduras is a major transshipment point for drugs moving from South America to the United States. Zelaya also implemented several liberal reforms, including increasing the minimum wage and joining the PetroCaribe oil alliance to reduce energy costs, especially for low-income families.^[28] He also worked with regional groups that had begun organizing in the early 2000s; however, by making continued concessions to unionized workers, he began to agitate the ruling class. The tipping point was when he “tried to respond to the [workers’] movement’s call for a popular assembly to rewrite the Honduran constitution.”^[29] The result was a coup to oust Zelaya from power.

The 2009 coup is unique from other examples seen in Honduran history in that it was ordered by the Honduran Supreme Court to be carried out, which gave the coup a “veneer of constitutional legality.”^[30] The internal backers of the coup included the military, members of both the right-wing National Party and Zelaya’s own left-wing Liberal Party, and the office of the att orney general, among others, and it had the support of both the middle- and business-class and the media.^[31] Much of the frustration these groups felt likely stemmed from Zelaya’s “verbal attacks on Honduras’s ‘oligarchy’ and his alignment of the country with [Venezuelan socialist President] Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America [an allied group of states created by Chávez and Cuban socialist President Fidel Castro].”^[32] Zelaya was physically removed from office by the military in June, and exiled to Costa Rica. Head of Congress Roberto Micheletti was appointed president by natural succession. This court-sanctioned coup received immediate backlash from the international community, openly condemned by the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS). In fact, the OAS ejected Honduras from the organization, and most countries continued to recognize Zelaya as Honduras president.

Elections were held in November “in a climate of state terror and violent silencing of critical media and public protest.”^[33] National Party candidate Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, who had run against Zelaya in 2005, won the election; on his inauguration day, “some 500,000 (1 out of every 16) Hondurans took to the streets in protest.”^[34] Lobo received recognition and backing from Canada and the United States. In 2011, following Pepe Lobo’s 2010 inauguration, Honduras was officially reinstated into the Organization of American States.

In 2013, conservative National Party of Honduras candidate Juan Orlando Hernández, known as JOH, was elected president and inaugurated in 2014. During his term, Hernández faced multiple corruption accusations, including involvement with drug trafficking. Al th ough the Honduran constitution only allows one-term presidencies, Hernández (illegally) sought re-election in 2017, having won the National Party of Honduras vote to be their representative. He ultimately won the election. Despite the elections being criticized as fraudulent by both Hondurans and international observers, Hernández was instated as president in 2018.

In April 2016, the Organization of American States created MACCIH (Misión de Apoyo contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad en Honduras or Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras). MACCIH is a fully autonomous and independent body, separate from the Honduran government, and its goal is to combat private and public corruption in an attempt to strengthen the Honduran political system through improving mechanisms of judicial investigation, control of public resources, and control of power.^[35] In 2012, Honduras was dubbed the “most murderous country in the world” by a United Nations report due to rising homicide rates and common violence. Homicide rates remain one of the highest in the world outside of active war zones, according to multiple reports. Violence, gang activity, the drug trade, and poverty contribute to the emigration of Hondurans.

By 2019, roughly 3.8 million migrants had arrived in the United States from Central America, about 746,000 (19.7 percent) of whom emigrated from Honduras. Migrants who successfully establish themselves in the United States often send part of their income, called remittances, to family members back home. For example, in July 2021 alone, over US$654 million was sent in remittances to Honduras from the United States. Most recently, caravans of Central American migrants have been departing from Honduras in efforts to seek asylum in the United States, escaping the violence of their home country. People from Guatemala and El Salvador fleeing gang violence and post-war poverty have also been joining these caravans as they traverse north toward Mexico. At the border, migrants in the caravan typically have three options for how to proceed: “(1) take a number and apply for asylum in the United States; (2) stay in Tijuana indefinitely, and perhaps accept the government’s offer of Mexican humanitarian visas; and (3) hire a coyote to smuggle them across the border.”^[36] Although the journey is difficult and fraught with dangers, this persistence to migrate in the hopes of a better life is in itself an act of resistance: “By leaving the underground, deciding to emigrate collectively and visibly, walking along federal highways and sleeping in the central squares of each town on the migration route, the exodus acquired a hypervisibility that allowed it to advance in a way in which each step in itself was a demand for dignified treatment, recognition and the right of all people, without any distinction, to seek a chance at life.”^[37]

Social Movements

Social movements, and their actors, have memory. The memories social movement actors transmit from generation to generation of earlier forms of protest and resistance persist, even when every effort has been made to erase the memory of that resistance. ‘Memory’ is the appropriate term here rather than ‘history,’ because the [1954 United Fruit Company worker] strike has been erased from the official record.^[38]

As a country whose development has been fraught with social, political, and economic strife, Honduras has a consistently strong history of social movements. In addition to a strong environmentalist movement, Honduras has had a consistently growing labor rights movement, which has its real beginning in 1954 with the Tela Railroad Company workers’ strike, which lasted from May to July. Tela Railroad Company was, and still is, a primary subsidiary of the United Fruit Company. This pivotal strike demonstrated the workers’ power: “Of the initial 30 demands submitted for negotiation on May 11, 1954, the recognition of the union as a bargaining body for the workers, and their right to organize a union, were among the greatest achievements. The strike also exposed the labor legislation of the time to be unsatisfactory.”^[39] In 1955, new labor laws were put into effect as a result, including the Trade Union Organizations Law, to officially recognize the or ganization of trade unions, and the Labor Code, to outline labor legislation and offer some social benefits to workers.^[40]

Honduras is also a country with a high rate of “femicide,” which is the intentional murder of women on the specific basis of their gender. Some scholars choose to use the term “feminicide” instead: “embedded in this term [feminicide] is the role the state plays in these killings. In contexts of impunity such as Honduras, the brutal killings of women denote the complicity of the state through its unwillingness or inability to provide prevention and response mechanisms.”^[41] In January 2021, the Honduran Congress reformed the constitution to prohibit abortion under any circumstance, including rape, one of only four Latin American countries to do so. In response, there has been a mass mobilization of women’s rights activists, including the creation of the women’s rights organization, Somos Muchas (We Are Many). This is only the modern continuation of a legacy of women’s organizing efforts in Honduras. Other organizations include the Movimiento de Mujeres por la Paz (Women’s Movement for Peace), founded in 1984 and led by Visitación Padilla; the Colectivo contra la Violencia de la Mujer (Collective Against Violence Against Women); el Centro de Estudios de la Mujer (Center for Women’s Studies); el Centro de Derechos de la Mujer (Center for Women’s Rights); and la Federación de Asociaciones Femeninas (the Federation of Femi-nist Associations).^[42]

On a broader scale is the human rights movement, which has been mobilized particularly by state-sanctioned disappearances and other repressive actions committed by the government against the Honduran people. CODEH (Comité para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos or Committee for the Defense of Human Rights) was formed in May 1981, and is a cornerstone to the longevity of this particular movement. A year later, in 1982, COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos de Honduras or Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras) was formed, led by Bertha Oliva, who was married to one of the disappeared.

Present Day: Challenges, Opportunities, and Hope for the Future

Most of the water powering industrial corridors is coming from the ancestral rivers and wells of peasant and Indigenous communities.… If rivers are seen as exploitable sources of energy in the eyes of the capitalist-development complex, rivers evince a different imagination for the communities whose livelihoods and worldviews are intimately tied with them. Massive hydroelectric projects result in the violent displacement of peoples from their sources of material well-being, but also seek to cut off the lifeblood that nurtures Indigenous cosmovisions.^[43]

Following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, there was a wave of government reforms that focused on investment in energy, mining, and tourism in an effort to recover economically from the hurricane’s destruction.^[44] The majority of these tourist-oriented projects push out local communities, resulting in displacement and unemployment.^[45] This emphasis on tourism and extractivism relies on the unmitigated exploitation of natural resources and land, to the detriment of local human, plant, and animal populations. Salvadoran priest Andrés Tamayo led the environmental rights organization MAO (Movimiento Ambientalista de Olancho or Environmentalist Movement of Olancho) in three “Marchas por la Vida” (Marches for Life). These marches had the goal of raising national attention for the environmental movement, encouraging greater commitment for respecting life and fighting for the preservation of the land.^[46] The first march was in 2003, the second in 2004, and the third and final in 2008.

In Honduras, violence has also been condoned against civil society activists, particularly Indigenous leaders and environmentalists protesting megadevelopment projects. According to a Global Witness report in 2017, since 2010 state forces have murdered more than one hundred twenty people involved in protests against projects such as dams and mines.^[47] Since then, Tierra de Resistentes (Land of Resisters), a journalistic project that investigates violence against Latin American environmentalists, reported that between 2018 and 2020 at least sixty-six more Indigenous environmental activists have been murdered.^[48] One of the highest profile assassinations was Berta Cáceres. Berta Cáceres was an Indigenous Lenca leader and an influential environmental activist who defended Indigenous rights. In 2015, she won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work on a grassroots campaign that succeeded in stopping the Agua Zarca Dam from being built on the Río Gualcarque. On March 2, 2016, Cáceres was assassinated in her home, allegedly by Honduran military in collusion with Honduran business interests. The Organization of American States and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called for investigations into her death, with Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández stating that the investigation was a top priority. As of March 2018, nine people have been arrested for the murder of Cáceres, with the most recent being David Castillo Mejía, president of the company that was building the dam Cáceres campaigned against, who has been accused of being “an intellectual author” of the assassination. The targeting of environmentalists continues, as well as increasing signs of civil society protest throughout Honduras.^[49] Garifuna communities have been targeted as well for demanding legal title to their ancestral lands. In fact, OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña or the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras) claims that over 40 activists have been killed in recent years. Though Honduras was considered quiet in past decades compared to its neighbors with their civil conflicts (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) in the late twentieth century, one wonders if this is going to change in the future—and there may be bottom-up resistance coming.

In November 2021, Xiomara Castro won the presidential election in a landslide victory, making her Honduras’ first woman president. Castro was a leader in the resistance movement against the 2009 coup that ousted her husband, Manuel Zelaya. She is a member of the Liberty and Refoundation Party (“Libre”), a left-wing party founded in 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front, a coalition of leftist organizations that protested the 2009 coup. Castro has stated that she plans to promote democratic socialism during her time as president. She took office in January 2022, and many are hopeful that this will be the beginning of greater inclusion for the country.

Recommended Reading

Alvarado, Elvia. Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado. New York City: Harper Perennial, 1989.

Amaya Amador, Ramón. Prisión Verde. Tegucigalpa: Editorial Universitaria, 1990 [1950].

Brondo, Keri Vacanti. Land Grab Green Neoliberalism, Gender, and Garifuna Resistance in Honduras. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.

Coleman, Kevin. A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

Frank, Dana. The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018.

Loperena, Christopher. The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022.

Martínez, Óscar. A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America. Brooklyn: Verso, 2016.

Morris, James. Honduras: Caudillo Politics and Military Rulers. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984.

Nazario, Sonia. Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother. New York: Random House, 2007.

Pine, Adrienne. Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Portillo Villeda, Suyapa. Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021.

Rowlands, Jo. Questioning Empowerment: Working with Women in Honduras. Oxford: Oxfam, 1997.

Soluri, John. Banana Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.