How the U.S. Sowed the Seeds of Its Border Crisis
How the U.S. Sowed the Seeds of Its Border Crisis
Migrants turn themselves in to border agents in El Paso, Texas, after
crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. (Cedar Attanasio / AP)
One of the first casualties of the 2009 Honduras coup was the 19-year-old
son of a pastor, who was shot in the back of the head by U.S.-outfitted
snipers.
On July 5 that year, Pastor Jose David Murillo, a well-known
environmentalist, attended a rally in Tegucigalpa to welcome home the
rightful Honduran president, Manuel Mel Zelaya, who planned to repatriate
himself. Murillo, his wife and children had come to Toncontín International
Airport to meet Zelayas plane a week after he was deposed. When the charter
plane was denied landing rights, with trucks and a grounded 737 blocking the
runway, the celebration turned to protest.
Unbeknownst to Murillo, who had taught his children the value of peaceful
resistance in his work against deforestation, Honduran military snipers had
taken position on the airports roof. Watching the presidents plane return
to its embarkation point, the crowd that had come to welcome himmany of
whom wore crimson and carried banners that read Bloque Popularbegan
shouting and pushing toward the runway. Thats when the snipers shot live
rounds and tear gas at the protesters, who were unarmed. I stood up in
front of the soldiers and cried, What are you doing? Do not attack us. We
had done nothing to provoke them, Murillo recalled. In the chaos, he was
separated from his sons, including his 19-year-old, Isis Obed Murillo, the
youngest of five. An hour later, he got a call from his oldest, who said
that Isis had been shot in the back of the head by snipers. Ten minutes
later, he was dead. When they identified their son that evening, Murillos
wife, Sylvia, said they did not have any words sufficient to our grief.
It was an eventful and tragic week for Hondurans. Zelaya had been arrested
in the early morning hours the Sunday before and whisked out of the country.
Like Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz 55 years prior, Zelaya was sent into
exile in his pajamas. (Whispering in Zelayas ear at the airport, perhaps,
had been the ghost of CIA agent Enno Hobbing, who told a Central American
official in 1954, You just arent convenient for the requirements of
American foreign policy.)
The day of the coup, a referendum on reforming the Honduran constitution had
been scheduled. If approved by voters, a constitutional convention, or
constituyente, would have designed a more inclusive constitution. Zelaya
was trying to re-create recent constitutional conventions in Ecuador,
Bolivia, and Venezuela that had approved new constitutions expanding
democratic rights and the power of Indigenous people, women, small farmers,
and others at the bottom, according to Dana Frank, a history professor at
the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Though the right-wing media in Honduras and the U.S. painted it as an
attempt to win Zelaya a constitutionally banned second term, the convention
wouldnt have taken place until long after his term was up, Frank writes. In
her 2018 book, The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror and the United
States in the Aftermath of the Coup, Frank tells of being blindsided by the
overthrow, especially after it was certified by the Obama administration.
Frank was an activist with the labor rights nonprofit USLEAP at the time of
the coup. She said that the protests organized by a coalition of groups,
what she calls the resistance, were what most sustained her and her
Honduran friends in the coups aftermath, and deaths like those of Isis Obed
Murillo were what haunted and motivated her.
The Honduran coup turns 10 this summer, and the list of the dead grows, both
inside Honduras and at the U.S. border. The worlds great democracy is
debating whether children forcibly separated from their parents and placed
in cages with no access to showers, and limited due process, rises to the
definition of concentration camps. The white supremacist president lends his
words for immigration (invasion!) to a mass shooter, and the former vice
president points to his role in a failing plan to save Central America,
alongside a long-failed plan in Colombia, as being among the reasons he
should be president. Against this backdrop, Franks book is useful for
understanding the United States role in the tragedy at the border and its
origin in Honduras. While one accusatory finger in Franks pages points to
the distortions of the American right, a few more point back at the previous
Democratic administration for enabling the violence that helped send so many
Hondurans into flight in the first place.
From the Outset Let Us Bring You News of Your Protagonist
If the U.S. has Lorraine Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun and Norman
Mailers Armies of the Night among the literary depictions of its
political struggles, Honduras has Prision Verde (Green Prison), by Ramon
Amaya-Amador. Born in 1916 of a relationship between a priest and his secret
lover, Amaya-Amador wrote his first book as a schoolteacher in Olancho
Province. According to one scholar, because he lacked the self-discipline
to conform to small-town ways, he abandoned the classroom and began working
in Honduras banana fields in the north. When the industry stalled during
the Depression and a yellow sigatoka blight, Amaya-Amador joined the
Communist Party and launched a political magazine, Alerta. Serialized in his
magazine, Prision Verde became Amaya-Amadorsand, in Franks words,
Hondurasmost famous novel.
Frank doesnt dwell on the books importance. But scholar Janet Gold recalls
the 1950 novels prophetic thrust. By dramatizing the contrasting
situations of local landowners who are convinced
to sell their land and
one
who refuses, Gold writes, Amaya-Amador creates sympathy for the
independent-minded character only to then reveal that government troops in
league with the foreign company force him off his land.
The unhygienic living conditions in the camps, the dangers of working with
pesticide-laden fruit, the absence of educational facilities for workers
children, the governments corruption and complicity in the exploitation of
Honduran citizens are just a few of the injustices
[depicted] in the
novel. A leader emerges
to lead a strike
and the leader is killed, but
his memory lives on to inspire a glimmer of hope.
Beyond the novels litany of exploitation, Prision Verde was uncannily
prophetic, Gold writes, for on May 2, 1954, some 25,000 United Fruit Co.
and 15,000 Standard Fruit Co. workers began a strike that lasted sixty-nine
days. Workers from other sectors joined
which finally resulted in official
recognition of the right of workers to unionize, the creation of an
eight-hour workday, overtime compensation, and paid vacations.
Using fears of another Hugo Chavez in Honduras, all these and other gains
would be targeted after the 2009 coup.
The Waffling Obama Administration
Elected in 2006, Zelaya was moving to the left when he was ousted. He
brought Honduras into regional coalitions like Petrocaribe and the
Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), founded by Cuba
and Venezuela in 2004. He was on the verge of signing over land to 300,000
small farmers to grow the countrys working-class base. These moves were
beyond the pale, and he was removed because of them.
The interim government of Roberto Micheletti that followed immediately began
a program of repression to consolidate and legitimize the coup. But the
countercoup, in the form of massive protests, sit-ins and occupations of
various offices, was immediate and widespread. A collision was coming. The
terror escalated, Frank writes; one by one, activists disappeared or were
assassinated. The message was clear; dissent would not be tolerated. During
those first days of the coup, CNN, Radio Progresso and Cholusat SUR were
shut down, the government shut off electricity to neighborhoods where
protests were particularly strong. In Olancho, where [ousted President]
Zelaya came fromas had Amaya-Amadorthe military reportedly began
breaking into houses and capturing young people, forcing others to flee into
the hills.
On July 11, two weeks after the coup and six days after Isis Obed Murillo
was shot, Roger Bados, local union president and anti-coup activist in San
Pedro Sula, was shot to death by armed men. That same night, three men
boarded a bus in Santa Bárbara, ordered opposition activist Ramon García off
the bus and murdered him. A month later, police grabbed 25-year-old Irma
Melissa Villanueva from a protest in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, and,
according to Frank, took her away to a remote location, where four
policemen gang-raped her for hours. Now, bitch, youre gonna see what
happens to you for being where you shouldnt be, they told her. She told
her story three days later. For her courage, she faced a second rape, this
time with her family forced to watch. Well see if you report us this
time, her attackers told her.
During the autumn after the coup, Micheletti suspended four articles of the
constitution, restricting freedom of transit, banning public meetings not
authorized by security forces, and barring the media from criticizing the
government[while] thirty-five hundred to four thousand people had been
illegally detained for peacefully demonstrating.
On Sept. 26, on the 36th anniversary of the use of the national stadium in
Chile to house political prisoners after the U.S.-sponsored coup there, the
BBC published a photograph of a Honduran stadium being used to detain more
than 600 political prisoners. Wondering what she can do to assist, Frank
begins by staying informed. Could the Obama administration, sworn in just
five months before the coup, help? We knew that a coup attempt had been
stopped in Bolivia the year before and that in 2002 a coup in Venezuela had
been reversed after two days, she writes. We could feel how surprisingly
strong the Honduran resistance was. We knew that the Organization of
American States and dozens of countries throughout Latin America and all
over the world had condemned the coup ferociously and called for Zelayas
immediate restoration. Barack Obama, after all, was the Yes, we can!
president. Was he cause for hope?
In fact, the administration waffled. The day of the coup, Obama spoke in
general terms about respecting the rule of law. The day after, Frank
writes, the administration was willing to call it a coup, but by mid-week
the State Department had backed off from demanding Zelayas immediate
return.
Despite the obviously criminal and illegitimate nature of the
regime
the Obama administration began treating de facto President
Micheletti as Zelayas legitimate diplomatic equal. Ten days after the
coup, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States
had persuaded both sides to negotiations in San Jose, Costa Rica, thereby
successfully transferring power over the situation onto US-controlled
terrain [sic] and away from the Organization of American States (OAS), a
majority of whose members were adamant that Zelaya had to be returned to
full powers.
Furthermore, Obama and Clinton pointedly refused to ever use the phrase
military coup, which would have legally obligated the United States to
stop almost all foreign aid to Honduras immediately, Frank writes. She
addresses a question that has hung in the air: Was the U.S. involvement
premeditated? We dont yet have concrete evidence that the United States
promoted the coup or approved it in advance, Frank acknowledges. We do
know that the plane in which the Honduran military flew Zelaya out of the
country stopped to refuel at Soto Cano Air Force Base, a joint US-Honduran
base, and we can presume that it would not have done so without US
permission. Is that all? No. We know that four of the six top generals who
oversaw the coup were trained by the United States at the School of the
Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Fort
Benning, Georgia, and that it is unlikely that they would have perpetrated a
coup without U.S. approval. From The Intercept, Frank reports, we know
further that top Honduran military officials attended a party thrown by the
US Embassys defense attaché. At nine oclock that night, Kenneth Rodriguez,
the commander of US forces in Honduras, left the party to meet with
[Honduran] General Romeo Vazquez Velasquez, then returned to the
festivities. The next morning, Vazquez led the coup.
But Frank appears to miss that the Obama administration admitted to knowing
about the coup in advance, claiming it did its best to discourage it.
Writing in The Guardian, Mark Weisbrot wonders what that discouragement
might have sounded like: Did administration officials say, You know that
we will have to say that we are against such a move if you do it, because
everyone else will? Or was it more like, Dont do it, because we will do
everything in our power to reverse any such coup? The administrations
actions since the coup indicate something more like the former, if not
worse.
Media Blockade, North and South
Like some of their U.S. counterparts, many Honduran newspapers loved the
coup, Frank writes. They were full of fantastic, alarmist fictions: Zelaya
is a drug dealer! The Venezuelan and Nicaraguan armies are amassed at the
Honduran border, ready to invade to restore him! As the U.S. media has done
with anti-leftist demonstrations in Venezuela, the Honduran media weighted
small gatherings in support of the coup as significant, while ignoring
protests denouncing the coup attended continuously by hundreds of thousands
of Hondurans. The unabashedly false rose to levels that could almost make
Fox News blush. To its eternal shame, Frank writes, [the newspaper] La
Prensa even ran a doctored photo of the men at the airport carrying the body
of Isis Obed, the young man killed by government snipers, in which the blood
streaming down from his head had been airbrushed out.
While the interests of the elite were voiced over a spectrum of fake news
forums, President Micheletti continued to preside over a regime of violent
censorship. He confiscated the equipment of broadcast stations that
questioned the official narrative of the coup plotters, closing down such
stations as Radio Progresso or ordering them off the air, as happened with
three radio stations and television Channel 36. The opposition called this
media blockade the cerco mediatico, and Frank recalls that in the U.S., she
initially ran head-on into our own cerco mediatico.
Although she estimates that about half of the coup opponents protesting in
its aftermath had been opposed to Zelaya during his incumbency, media
outlets like The Associated Press reduced the opposition to Zelaya
supporters, or even (in the case of the AP), die-hard supporters of ousted
President Zelaya, implying that the opposition was merely fanatical
groupies who should have politely given up long before. That Zelaya had
sought a second term was the right-wing shibboleth that U.S. media would not
let die. Frank cites Newsweek for leaping into the future, writing that the
magazine even uncritically quoted Jorge Castaneda of Mexico claiming Zelaya
was illegally trying to get a third term, a nonexistent second term
notwithstanding.
Indeed, the dishonesty of The Wall Street Journals Mary Anastasia OGrady,
unmentioned by Frank, stands out. With such headlines as Honduras Defends
Its Democracy: Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton Object and opening
paragraphs that read, It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when
he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo [Chavez] in
reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking, one sees the paralytic
wing of establishment media pushing a newly elected Obamawho had other
projects on his to-do listto the right, while the left was mostly silenced.
On the reticence of Honduras scholars, Frank writes that those few
academics who did have knowledge of Honduras seldom stepped in to
challenge the administrations narrative. Was this the result of timidity
after high emotions surrounding Obamas election, or of the slow caution
with which academics work, or both?
Dont Be Shy, Madame Secretary
With the president getting hammered by the right-wing media for its gestures
toward following the law, and with little support from the already
marginalized left, the administration began to stall for elections coming
that fall. But given Honduras media blackout, its abridgement of the
constitution and its war on the opposition, the outcome, Frank and other
observers note, was a foregone conclusion. Ongoing repression of basic
civil liberties made a free and fair election clearly impossible, she
writes, while the very same army that perpetrated the coup controlled the
physical ballots. All international bodiesincluding the United Nations, the
Carter Center, and the OAS, with the exception of the U.S. Republican Party
and a few delegates from the Democratic Partyrefused to observe the
process.
Emerging from one of two right-wing parties that dominated Honduras
two-party systemit hardly matters whichPorfirio Pepe Lobo assumed the
presidency. The signal this sent? That violence and impunity may continue.
With the administration looking for an escape from the trap it found itself
in, given its legal obligations to oppose the coup, Assistant Secretary of
State Thomas Shannon wrote Secretary Clinton to suggest the U.S. merely wash
its hands. As we think about what to say, I would recommend that we not be
shy. We should congratulate the Honduran people, we should connect todays
vote to the deep democratic vocation of the Honduran people, and we should
call on the community of democratic nations (and especially those of the
Americas) to recognize, respect, and respond to this accomplishment of the
Honduran people. This, for a victory that was only as legitimate as the
coup that preceded it was illegal? There was nothing shy and everything
shameless about it.
More Spaces for Our People?
High on the list of Lobos spoils, Frank writes, was a radical revanchist
economic agenda. Land was a key part of this. Another hard-won advance for
Honduran citizens, the Land Reform Law dates to the decade after the 1954
strike, with the result that the years 1973 to 1977 were sometimes dubbed
the Golden Age of land reform. In fact, 120,000 hectares of land were
redistributed to campesinos during those four years. According to one
scholar, Over three decades a total of 409,000 hectares (the equivalent of
12.3% of the agricultural area of Honduras) were handed over to 60,000
peasant families (the equivalent of 13% of the rural population). But in
the post-coup atmosphere, campesinos were murdered, their homes within lands
legally redistributed were burned, and thugs forced them out on one or two
hours notice with the threat of armed violence, although the leadership
hoped to overwrite this violent expropriation with a legal screen.
To speed up the theft of these lands on behalf of the market, a scheme was
born that Frank calls so far-fetched it seemed unthinkable. Spread via a
viral TED talks brainstorm, the model or charter cities proposal sought to
redraw cities as outside a nations usual rule of law or sovereigntythink
charter schools for whole urban areasand into which others could migrate,
or vote with their feet. The initiative would, in practice, appear to
liberate markets from human, labor and civil rights protections won via
historic struggles and inscribed into the Honduran constitution or reflected
in other laws, such as the Land Reform Law.
The mastermind behind the proposal was Paul Romer, a New York University
economist, who argued that cities in the developing world should be allowed
to develop, free of regulations, under the watchful eye of an already
developed, first-world economy, a Big Brother economic protectorate, if you
will. (Romer would later head up the World Bank as chief economist.) On his
advisory committee for model cities sat Grover Norquist, the
archconservative, no-regulation mastermind behind the Tea Party, out of
which Trumps birther narrative against Obama emerged.
The curtain-raiser came in the spring of 2010, with the Honduras is Open
for Business conference. Mexican entrepreneur Carlos Slim was slated to
talk, as was former President Bill Clinton, who eventually pulled out.
Whether the event generated any actual investments was unclear, but it
certainly generated a host of mocking parodies in the solidarity world up
North: Honduras, Open for Repression. Honduras, Busted Open for
Business. Frank writes.
A few weeks later, presidents Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Chavez of
Venezuela announced a deal they had finalized with the Lobo regime, which
allowed for Zelaya, who had been holed up in the Brazilian embassy, to
return legally to his homeland. The Cartagena Accord, as it was known,
contained three key provisions: first, all criminal charges against Zelaya
and his top ministers, still in exile as well, would be annulled. Second,
the government of Honduras would commit itself to protecting human rights.
Thirdand here the plot thickensa legal path would be made clear for the
National Front of Popular Resistance to become a political party. Also
known as the FNRP, this was the coalition of labor, land reform advocates,
government opposition and former establishment figures around the ousted
Zelaya. Unfortunately, rank-and-file members had recently voted not to enter
electoral politics, but rather to work outside the party apparatus; this
third provision, then, took members very much by surprise, and threatened a
rift in the coalition.
But Zelaya finally came home and Honduras was back in the OAS. When Obama
appeared with Lobo in the Oval Office, the U.S. leader proclaimed, Today
begins a new chapter in the relationship between our two countries. In part
because of pressure from the international community, but also because of
the strong commitment to democracy and leadership by President Lobo, what
weve been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and commitment to
reconciliation that gives us great hope. The presidents optimism would
prove premature. Lobo responded by noting, We have affirmed our democratic
vocation. We have reaffirmed the road to democracy that we are on and that
we will be continuing on. We will be opening even more spaces for our people
to be able to express themselves.
In fact, just a month after the accord, even more spaces were closing off
to Hondurans, certainly to members, for instance, of the Campesino Movement
of Rigores, a town in the northern Aguan Valley where peasants were being
brutalized into leaving their homes. During a typical incident on June 24,
Frank writes, the Honduran police and the military destroyed almost the
entire campesino community
turning a seven-room schoolhouse, three
churches, a community center, and more than a hundred houses into burnt-out
rubble in a single afternoon. The nearly 500 residents had an hours notice
to pull out their belongings, then watched as their homes were torched by
security forces and crushed by a bulldozer. And because no judge was
present at the site, the order was illegal.
Nor would these new spaces for Honduran self-expression apply at work. In
September, the Lobo administration passed the Employment Law, breaking up
full-time jobs and turning them into part-time, temporary employment
ineligible for unionization or the governments system of healthcare and
pensions, Frank writes. In October, members of Operation Xatruch, a
military-police task force deployed to aid in fighting crime and resolving
the land conflict, captured, detained without charges, and tortured Walter
Nelin Sabillón Yanos, a campesino land activist. Sabillón testified
that
while
in detention
authorities beat him, repeatedly placed a hood on his
head, and
applied electric shock to his hands, abdomen and mouth while
interrogating him about the campesino movement, Frank writes. One of the
richest landholders, Miguel Facussé, whose private security guards exchanged
police and military uniforms for plain clothes when convenientall while
torturing and killing campesinoseven appeared in a U.S. diplomatic cable,
collaborating with drug cartels.
Having posed with the corrupt Lobo at the White House, the Obama
administration was on the hook to make this right. But after breaking
Honduras institutional safety nets, the administration didnt appear to
know how to fix things using the same dynamite with which it had broken
them. And yet it wasnt Obama himself, but one of his former Cabinet members
(and the people of Honduras) who would pay the price.
Model City Rollout Interrupted
But first, The New York Times Magazine helped Lobo roll out his plan. In May
2012, Adam Davidson of NPRs Planet Money published a profile with the
immodest but honest title, Who Wants to Buy Honduras? As Frank points out,
the article was accompanied by an outrageous cartoon that depicted a broad,
green jungle, punctuated only by a tiny city in the middle, rising amid
construction cranes. A yellow plane flew over the city carrying a banner
reading THE NEW HONDURAS, EST 2010. In front, a sign poked up out of the
jungle reading GOOD HONDURAS, with an arrow pointing toward the city, and
BAD HONDURAS, with an arrow pointing off the page. A second sign read:
WELCOME TO THE NEW HONDURAS (DONT WORRY, ITS NOT REALLY HONDURAS).
Featuring a short profile of Romer and his big idea, the article admitted
that Romer, who is expected to be chairman [of the area carved out of
Honduras], is hoping to build a city that can accommodate 10 million people,
which is 2 million more than the current population of Honduras. Whatever
euphemisms about voting with feet or other body parts, the phrase is
expected to be chairman baldly confessed the anti-democratic tendencies
behind the scheme. But Davidson adds that Romers [model] city will have
extremely open immigration policies to attract foreign workers from all
over. It will also tactically dissuade some from coming. Singapore, Romer
said, provides a good (if sometimes overzealous) model. Its strict penalties
for things like not flushing a public toilet may make for late-night jokes,
but they signal to potential immigrants that it is a great place if you want
to work hard and play by the rules. So before Donald Trump told these
citizens that they werent good enough to come across the border into the
U.S., the Obama administrations allies told them they werent good enough
for their own country, not within this Romers model city borders, at least.
Not if they wanted the freedom to walk and chew gum (or not flush) at the
same time.
But two days after the curtain was raised on Machiavellian
neo-principalities, a deus ex machina struck, giving citizens in both lands
a Hollywood-like visual for the violent mummery at play between Honduras
elite and their U.S. clients. In the pre-dawn hours of May 15, 2012, Frank
recounts, two State Department helicopters carrying Honduran security
forces and US advisors from a DEA FAST team shot and killed four
Afro-Indigenous Honduran civilianstwo of them pregnantand injured four
others. Claiming falsely that the Drug Enforcement Administration agents
had participated only in an advisory role, the State Department distanced
itself. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland deferred to an
investigation underway by Honduran authorities. Frank calls that
investigation, skewed to protect the state murders, incompetent, corrupt
and extremely limited. To wit, the government of Honduras used its autopsy
report to insist that [one of the women killed] wasnt in fact pregnant.
State Department staff even showed a selectively edited video to members of
Congress that alleged to prove that the victims fired on the agents, telling
those who hoped to analyze the video that it was classified. But five years
later, a 400-page report by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S.
Department of Justice confirmed the victims and families version. DEA
agents had in fact been in the helicopter yelling at the Honduran forces to
FIRE, FIRE, on the victims in the boat, Frank writes. Video segments, in
fact, didnt show any fire from the victims boat at allbut it did show
shots from the other boat aimed at the victims. The Inspector General
concluded that both the DEA and the State Department had misinformed and
misled Congress and the public and then obstructed the subsequent
investigation.
For a while, the U.S. press actually began to pay attention, and Congress
wrote memos threatening to withhold funds, which had been key to Franks
previously fruitless campaigns. Between early 2012 into mid-2014, the Obama
administration was largely on the defensive over its post-coup Honduras
policy, and rightly so, as Frank and other Honduras watchers published
scathing indictments of its failures; the murder rate rose (on its way to
the worlds highest), women became increasingly unsafe (with Honduras
eventually becoming the worlds most unsafe place for them), police
corruption grew rampant, and human rights failed to improved.
To stop the bleeding, Lobo flew to Miami to meet with senior U.S. officials,
then Vice President Joe Biden flew to Mexico and Honduras. Mexico and
Guatemala wanted to decriminalize cocaine, because the renewed U.S. war on
drugs was not working, so Biden had this and the corruption scandal
dominating headlines about the region. During his visit, Frank wrote, the
administration sought to adeptly reframe the police corruption scandal, the
murder rate statistics, and alarm over human rights abuses by US-funded
security forces, all within the rubric of the drug war: police killings were
subsumed under a generic security crisis, and the security crisis was
the result of drug trafficking. The devil was not into the details.
Yes, drug trafficking was a reality, but to put it in context, it helps to
recall the degree of corruption that the Obama administration tolerated and
sponsored. For example, when Honduras supreme court banned the model cities
initiative because it invalidated the Honduran constitution (arguably a
worse outcome than Zelayas protections for poor people), the legislature,
under the direction of Juan Orlando Hernandez, illegally fired and replaced
four of the justices.
By 2014, when Hernandez assumed the presidency after a highly irregular
election, he was in control of the courts (which he had filled with friendly
justices), as well as the legislature, in which hed played a leadership
role, and the military and police, which Lobo and the post-coup regime had
continuously conflated. Laws were passed shielding the government from
accountability. Eighty percent of criminal cases remained in impunity. And
the ties between drug traffickers and officials were growing ever more
evident. The director of national police, Tiger Bonilla, was leading death
squads. For the U.S. to continue working with Bonilla was a violation of the
its own Leahy law. But officials made up a Catch 22-style workaround that
effectively said, Even though he was the head of police, we will work only
with people in the force who arent him, although every single one of them,
as Bonilla told a newspaper interviewer, works for him. The U.S. turned out
to be lying about this, as it actually was working directly with Bonilla.
Corruption watchdog Sarah Chayes wrote in a report that under the post-coup
regimes in Honduras, It is no longer possible to think of corruption as
just the iniquitous doings of individuals. Corruption is the operating
system of sophisticated networks that link together public and private
networks and out-and-out criminalsincluding killers. Chayes links Honduran
emergency migration to corruption enabled by the U.S., and faults U.S.
support explicitly. Urban violence and out-migration
are by-products of
the corruption of the very government that enjoys US (and European Union)
support to combat those ills.
With this important caveat, Franks elaborately detailed tour turns to the
infamous caravans, ghosts of Obamas policy.
The Caravans
In June 2014, the website Breitbart ran a story with the headline, Leaked
Images Reveal Children Warehoused in Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol
Overwhelmed. The article reprised a U.N. report investigating why Central
American children were fleeing their countries, unsupervised by adults. The
site followed that story, seemingly motivated by humanitarian concern, with
a second titled 8 Reasons to Close the Border Now. Among those reasons, it
alleged disease, threat of terrorism, safety of U.S. citizens and
American culture is under attack. In other words, more right-wing
bullshit. A third Breitbart story came the same day: More than Half of
Central American Immigrants on Welfare. CBS News and the Los Angeles Times
followed suit and, as Frank writes, the media were soon reporting that
fifty-seven thousand undocumented, unaccompanied minors from Central
America had swarmed across the border from Mexico, with more on their way.
Frank writes, Overall, this transformation of the public conversation in
the United States about Honduras was stunning, and rapidit took only around
three weeks. She continues:
In the right-wing version, children were taking advantage of lax border
enforcement to invade the country (emphasis mine), posing a national
security threat. In the liberal version, gangs and drug traffickers were
producing terrifying violence in Honduras, making children flee northward,
where they were met with scary conditions within the US border enforcement
system.
An election year, 2014 also was a turning point. Throughout the year and
into summer, activists had been making modest progress in challenging U.S.
funding to a country ruled by illegitimate, irregularly elected or unelected
leaders who presided over a system that murdered or jailed journalists,
activists and the opposition, and whose anti-corruption measures appeared
toothless and designed to appease State Department sponsors without actually
challenging the leadership. But now, the story shifted to border crossings,
gangs and drugs.
It became a kind of obsession, the story disconnected from the United
States actual role. Indeed, Frank herself writes about the gangs and drug
traffickers. But unlike most of this newly urgent coverage of Honduras, she
adds important caveats that contextualize the gangs as having a history and
show the hard work that activists, many honest politicians, judges,
journalists, teachers and other civil society upstanders had been trying to
achieve in a society otherwise wrecked with support from the giant to the
North. But lets be clear, she writes, those gangs and drug traffickers
took over a broad swath of daily life in Honduras in part because the elites
who ran the government permitted and even profited from it. Who was the
gang, in this story?
The judiciary was [now] largely corrupt; the criminal
justice system functioned to protect the crooked and the murderous. The
police were deeply interwoven with the gangs and drug traffickers.
Ax Murderers for Allies
In New York Times op-ed titled A Plan for Central America, then-Vice
President Bidenand now a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination
for the 2020 presidential racehelped the administration manage the
destruction it had wrought, bait-and-switch-style, by promising three
things: first, security (though he alludes to his role in crafting the
punitive 1994 Crime Bill as a measure of his skills); second, transparency,
though under the leadership the U.S. had championed in the previous six
years, transparency was hampered; and third, international investment,
though the chaos wrought by the rampant impunity would make it nearly
impossible to attract such investments (remember how the model cities plan
was boosted by the DEAs helicopter killings?).
Since lots of money hadnt worked, the administration threw lots more at
Honduras ($1 billion newly pledged). It did so while maintaining its
decision to not hamstring the money with any real accountability. It did get
the Honduran leadership under Juan Orlando Hernandez to agree to some
on-paper anti-corruption measures, with Transparency Internationals logo
sealing them. But by now it was clear to all but the highest investors that
the worse things got on the ground, the more money the U.S. sent.
In its execution, much of the new campaign to pacify Honduras reduced itself
to scaring children with billboards promising death if they left the chaos
therewhere death also lurkedand hired a coyote to pursue life in the North
(according to Suketu Mehta, author of This Land Is Our Land, eight in 10
Central American women who migrate to the North are raped en route). But a
marketing campaign against something worse is not a viable plan to stabilize
institutions that U.S. intervention spent 10 years helping corrupt. Thats
become the American promise to oppressed peoples: However bad things may
get, we can always cloak reality under the guise of a targeted ad campaign
that rewrites them to our current needs.
While the funding ballooned, the failure of the rule of law in Honduras got
so bad that when Frank happened to see then-Secretary of State John Kerry in
a Washington, D.C., restaurant in 2016, she introduced herself and said she
was working on Honduras policy. How are we doing down there? Kerry asked.
Were supporting the axe murderers, she told him and walked off.
The Murder of Berta Cáceres
The altar carved into the rock at La Gruta in La Esperanza was offered for
the shelter these caves provided to Hondurans hiding from their enemies. In
the courtyard beneath is also where Berta Cáceres, unable to escape hers,
was given a final mass before being buried in this coldest of Honduran
cities.
Cáceres grew up during the ongoing dirty wars and disappearances in Central
America that were largely funded by the United States. In Guatemala, an
estimated 200,000 people, mostly indigenous, were killed. In El Salvador,
U.S.-fanned counterinsurgency operations contributed to an estimated 70,000
killed between 1980 and 1992. Cáceres mother, Austra Bertha Flores, a
midwife, sheltered and cared for these refugees. Later serving as mayor,
Austra Bertha taught her children the importance of solidarity in defense of
the disenfranchised.
In 1993, Cáceres founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous
Organizations of Honduras; its mission was to better the lives of indigenous
Lenca people in the face of illegal logging and regional territorial
disputes.
Cáceres work against the Agua Zarca dam began in solidarity with the people
of Rio Blanco, who told her that construction equipment had appeared, with
silence surrounding the question of what it was for. At the time, dams were
being planned all over Honduras as a means of amping up the countrys
electrical power capacity to fuel a patchwork of new mines. A joint project
of Desarollos Energeticos, S.A., (DESA) and Chinese state-owned Sinohydro,
the Agua Zarca dam targeted the Gualcarque River, a waterway protected by
indigenous rights accords because it is culturally and environmentally
crucial to the Lenca.
Using a variety of means to maintain constant pressurepetitions, court
actions, international appeals to the rule of law and the rights of the
indigenous, plus road blockades denying access to the dam sitethe
protesters were tireless, and the Chinese investors finally withdrew. Death
threats followed. In order to protect Cáceres and honor her important work,
she was given a battery of high-level meetings (with the pope, for instance)
and such awards as the 2015 Goldman prize, which honors grassroots
environmental heroesin Cáceres case for a grassroots campaign that
successfully pressured the worlds largest dam builder to pull out of the
Agua Zarca Dam, and which also resulted in a celebration at then-House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosis office. But these efforts would prove futile;
Cáceres last days could only have been a terrifying countdown.
Before her death, Cáceres witnessed colleagues like Rio Blanco community
leader Tomas García shot and killed while protesting. Other activists were
attacked by machete, discredited, arrested arbitrarily and tortured. A
February 2016 attempt on Cáceres life was aborted at the last minute but
played into suspense over an outcome few could have doubted. A month later,
Mexican environmentalist Gustavo Castro visited Cáceres to use her internet
access while on a trip to the region. When he learned she was living alone
and unprotected, he insisted on staying over. That night, in the pre-dawn
hours of March 3a day before her 45th birthdayassassins entered her house
and shot Cáceres and Castro. Having surprised the assassins, whose
surveillance had assured that she lived alone, Castro survived the shooting
by playing dead. When they left, a fatally wounded Cáceres died in Castros
arms as they awaited medical assistance.
Authorities initially tried to pin the murder on Castro, launching a whisper
campaign suggesting a crime of passion. They detained him as a suspect
rather than a victim, illegally suspending his lawyer, and his own
government was blocked from protecting his rights. But culpability
inevitably pointed back to the military and privatized security teams
associated with DESA, members of which had been trained in the United States
at Fort Benning, Ga., the former School of the Americas.
In the weeks between La Esperanzas annual artisans festival and its Holy
Week, Cáceres final mass took place on the steps beneath La Gruta,
dedicated to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. The environmentalists
casket was surrounded by thousands of grief-stricken supporters, many of
whom vowed to continue her work, and the first of the ubiquitous photographs
of her joyous face were held up by the crowd.
The DESA-tied suspects were eventually convicted. While gratified that there
was some closure, her family, speaking through Cáceres oldest daughter,
Olivia, believed that the verdict represented only partial justice. The
Honduran leadership, funded by the United States, should be held accountable
too, if not the U.S. itself, she argued. And in a strange way, this would
come to pass.
Cáceres Voice and the Presidency
By certifying a coup eight years before, Frank argues compellingly, the
Obama administration was now stuck with and responsible for the highly
corrupt President Hernandez, who presided over the worlds highest
per-capita murder rate and the most dangerous country for women. For
Democrats, the outcome would turn to a more direct form of fiasco, though
one that was far less publicized than that other one, in Iraq. While it
would do nothing like propel the presidency of Barack Obama to the
shoe-throwing, single-percentage-polling levels of infamy that Iraq offered
to President George W. Bush, the Honduras nightmare, as Frank suggests in
her title, would nevertheless play into the embarrassing defeat of Obamas
coronated successor. Throughout the spring of 2016, while Clinton was
enjoying her superdelegate-, DNC- and media-inflated lead over the newcomer
and bankruptcy artist Donald J. Trump, the ghost of Cáceres joined the
chorus of progressive and populist murmurings, and whispered directly into
the electorates ears.
Stories of Clintons improper handling of emails and her well-paid Wall
Street speeches multiplied and echoed throughout the media. Much of the
criticism was overstated. Yet the most haunting voice inveighing against
Clintons expected succession, like the ghost of Hamlets fatherforceful
and dreamlikewas that of Cáceres. In a 2014 interview that resurfaced after
the assassination, Cáceres responds to the justification of Clintons
Honduras policies in her memoir, Hard Choices: Were coming out of a coup
that we cant put behind us. We cant reverse it. It just kept going. And
after, there was the issue of the elections. The same Hillary Clinton, in
her book, Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in
Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling [note the word choice] of North
Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a
secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here,
she, Clinton, recognized that they didnt permit Mel Zelayas return to the
presidency. There were going to be elections. And the international
communityofficials, the government, the grand majorityaccepted this, even
though we warned this was going to be very dangerous and that it would
permit a barbarity, not only in Honduras but in the rest of the continent.
And weve been witnesses to this.
The voice of the murdered environmentalist gave fodder to Clintons
opponents that lasted from just after Cáceres death in March until at least
late summer. Headlines in such mainstream and progressive media outlets as
The Nation, The Washington Post, Democracy Now! and The Guardian assailed
the administration, singling Candidate Clinton out in particular, for U.S.
policy in Honduras. Throughout the period when Clinton was solidifying her
primary victory against the dovish democratic socialist to her left and
heading into the general election, headlines asked, Did Hillary Clinton
stand by as Honduras coup ushered in era of violence? Another read,
Hillary Clinton needs to answer for her actions in Honduras and Haiti.
This despite the fact that she had long before handed over the State
Department to another robbed Democrat, John Kerry, and the Latin America
dossier had been largely given over to the proudly tough-on-crime,
gaffe-master Vice President Biden. Its astounding to read of now-
presidential candidate Bidens touting of his Central America plan alongside
his touting of his plan for Colombia, the latter widely seen by commentators
of the left, right and center as little more than a cocaine-multiplying
boondoggle.
As the 2020 presidential election approaches, Franks dizzyingly detailed
book should serve as a reminder that, to the ordinary voter, the political
center was no longer merely a place of consensus but the site of a
particular kind of consensus: where not even the worlds highest murder rate
could be worse than a socalist who wanted to give away free health care;
where archconservatives like Grover Norquist could find common ground with
their center-left counterparts in a tax shelter that need not move offshore.
Though the ordinary voter had rejected this center in 2000, 2004 and 2016,
to the elite who rubbed shoulders there it was nevertheless a utopian model
city to be achieved at all costs, where none of our paid Wall Street
speeches would be taxed, and wherethanks to the barriers keeping ordinary
voters outthe splattering blood would not reach our bespoke shoes.
Joel Whitney
Joel Whitney has written for The New York Times, The San Francisco
Chronicle, and The Baffler. He is a 2017 winner of PEN's Nora Magid Award
for Excellence in Editing, for his work on Guernica. The above essay is
adapted from the preface to the 2019 Iranian edition of his 2017 book,
"Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers," which has been called
"riveting" (Kirkus), "ingeniously researched" (Pankaj Mishra in The
Guardian), and a powerful warning (The New Republic).