Honduran Coup Research Articles

The Resonance of Church and State: “Churchstate” Geopolitics, the 2009 Honduran Coup, and the Antidemocratic Turn in the Americas

AbstractThroughout the Americas, in countries such as Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States, right‐wing governments allied with conservative Christians have increasingly pursued violent and antidemocratic means to acquire and maintain political power. Understanding the success of these regimes requires clarity about the ways that “church” and “state” both fuse and diverge. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Honduras during the 2009 coup, this article details the right‐wing de facto government and Pentecostal churches’ conjoined efforts to bolster support for the coup by focusing on a specific mode of governance: the mapping and moralizing of space. In this case, church and state were unified in both their description of Honduras as a single, bounded entity and their division of other Latin American nations into the categories of friend or enemy. Yet, church and state did not align in their temporalities, ultimate aims, and the agents they depicted as active in the political struggles after the coup. Nevertheless, rather than fragmenting the pro‐coup movement, this combination of overlap and divergence strengthened this mode of governance and brought together a broad coalition in favor of the coup. [state, Christianity, governance, geography, secular, Honduras]

Honduran Coup - The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup. By Dana Frank. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018. Pp. 336. $17.95 paper.

Honduran Coup - The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup. By Dana Frank. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018. Pp. 336. $17.95 paper. - Volume 77 Issue 2

Spirit‐Filled Geopolitics: Pentecostal Ontologies and the Honduran Coup

ResumenSituado en Copán Ruinas, Honduras, el trabajo de campo en que está basado este artículo, describe el papel de la ontología Cristiana Pentecostal en las lógicas que sustentaron apoyo generalizado de los cristianos al golpe de estado que derrocó al presidente, Manuel Zelaya, en 2009. La literatura reciente que describe cómo el compromiso de algunos movimientos indígenas latinoamericanos representa un quiebre con los marcos modernos de la “política” en aras de argumentar que la forma de hacer política de los pentecostales también es no‐moderna. Entre los elementos no‐modernos de la política pentecostal —a la cual me refiero como “Geopolítica del Espíritu”— está tanto una temporalidad apocalíptica como una noción del campo de política que incorpora “lo sobrenatural”. El artículo utiliza la literatura sobre movimientos indígenas como un marco para describir las formas en que esta política pentecostal se entrecruza, sin reducirse, con el neoliberalismo y con las prácticas e imaginarios del estado‐nación laico, en particular en lo referido a la geopolítica de la Guerra Fría en los ochenta. [Honduras, Centroamérica, cristianismo, geografía, Guerra Fría, ontología]

Report: US policy in Honduras causes migration

The delegation’s report is unusually critical of US foreign and immigration policies a return in some ways to labour condemnation of US intervention during the civil wars in Central America INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 25 Volume 22 Issue 1 2015 Although the report doesn’t mention it, the head of the dockers’ union, Victor Crespo, was forced to flee Honduras after his father was killed and mother injured, and he himself received threats to his life. A support campaign by the US International Longshore and Warehouse Union helped save his life, and eventually won guarantees that allowed his safe return to Honduras. The AFL-CIO report condemns a plan to ‘reduce the wage bill’ in the public sector by cutting jobs and privatising public services, especially in electricity. It points out that this reflects the policies of the International Monetary Fund, which called for cutting the public sector from 7.5 percent of GDP to 2 percent in four years. The resulting job loss has a clear impact on increasing poverty, forcing many Hondurans to migrate in search of survival. The report makes the case that poverty in Honduras has been deepened by the impact of the Central American Free Trade Agreement: ‘today, Honduras is the most unequal country in Latin America’. Poverty rose from 60 to 64.5 percent from 2006 to 2013. By emphasising a policy that deregulated business and used low wages as an incentive to attract foreign investment, ‘CAFTA only exacerbated the desperation and instability in Honduras’, it charges. ‘Honduran workers identified the 2009 Honduran coup d’état and the subsequent militarisation of Honduran society, and the implementation of CAFTA and its impact on decent work and labour rights, as two essential elements to understanding the current crisis’. Backing up the increasing militarisation of Honduran society is US military aid, which reached $27 million in 2012. The report notes that both Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield and Commander John Kelly of the United States Southern Command praised Honduran ‘advances in security’. In the US media, General Kelly has demonised migration from Central America, calling the movement of families and children a national security threat and a ‘crime-terror convergence’. That migration, described in the AFL-CIO report, has grown sharply. More than 18,000 unaccompanied Honduran children arrived in the United States in 2014 alone. ‘In 1990, there were approximately 109,000 Honduran migrants in the world. In 2010, that number grew close to 523,000, with the vast majority living in the United States’, it says. ‘Today, migration is seen by many families as a means to escape violence or seek employment opportunity or reunite with family, while the government has embraced the remittances from migrants as a major economic resource’. Three quarters of those migrants, arriving in the I n the wake of the political crisis in the United States last year, caused by the migration of large numbers of children from Central America to the US/Mexico border, the AFL-CIO in November sent a delegation to Honduras, the country that sent the greatest number of unaccompanied minors. ‘What we witnessed’, reported Tefere Gebre AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, ‘was the intersection of our corporate-dominated trade policies with our broken immigration system, contributing to a state that fails workers and their families and forces them to live in fear’. The report, in fact, contains a frank assessment of the history of US foreign policy in Honduras, and draws out the disastrous consequences it has created in that country today. ‘The fate of Honduras long has been tied to that of the United States’, it charges. ‘Throughout the 20th century, Honduras was key to maintaining US military and economic interests on the isthmus. The US military intervened in Honduran politics throughout the early 20th century to protect the foreign investments of large US corporations like the United Fruit Co. Later, Honduras served as a base of operations during the US-supported 1954 coup in Guatemala, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and during the years of civil war and Cold War proxy wars in Central America in the 1970s and ‘80s, the government provided support for the ‘Contra...

Democratizing Constitutions: The Promotion of International Democracy after the 2009 Honduran Coup

The 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis – in which a sitting president was removed from power and the country by military force – shows that, when it comes to the promotion of democracy, constitutions need to shift to the centre of debate and diplomatic practice in the Organization of American States (OAS). The undemocratic features of member states' actual constitutions cannot simply be ignored until there is a coup d'etat. Although it is understandable that the first phase of OAS democracy promotion – undertaken as authoritarian regimes in the region waned – focused on preventing coups and the violent usurpation of democracy, the next phase ought to focus on ensuring that actual constitutions are aligned with, and supportive of, democracy.

Canadian Geopolitics in Post-Coup Honduras

On 28 June 2009 moderately left-of-centre Honduran president, Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya, was overthrown in a military coup d’etat. The coup was followed by the systematic repression of anti-coup activists and the eventual election of current president, Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo, amid that repression and in the absence of constitutional democracy. While critical scholarship on the international dynamics of the Honduran coup has discussed evidence of US involvement, Canada also actively intervened politically. Canada’s intervention has been marked by the bold promotion of the interests of Canadian capital operating in Honduras, as part of a wider geopolitical concern of the Canadian state to reproduce a political environment in Latin America amenable to the interests of Canadian investors. Using interviews with Honduran activists organizing against the coup and Canadian capital, as well as Canadian government documents obtained through Access to Information, this article explores the political-economic strategies of Canada’s post-coup intervention in Honduras.

Public opinion and conflict in the separation of powers: Understanding the Honduran coup of 2009

Formal constitutional systems of separated powers often fail to sustain meaningful systems of checks and balances in presidential-style democracies. What conditions support balance in the separation of powers and what conditions provoke instability and conflict? We draw on Madisonian political theory and research addressing the separation of powers in the United States to develop a game theoretical model of inter-institutional stability and conflict within a separation of powers system. Two factors emerge as catalysts for institutional instability and conflict among the branches of government: high-stakes institutional rivalry combined with uncertainty about the public’s relative support for various branches of government. We apply the model to the experience of Honduras in 2008–2009 that resulted in the coup ousting President Zelaya which illustrates the difficulty of developing credible checks and balances.

Canada and the Honduran Coup

The purpose of this article is to expose the part played by Canadian imperialism in Honduras before and after the military overthrow of democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, on 28 June 2009. It draws attention to the neglected role of the Canadian state's efforts to protect the interests of Canadian capital in Honduras and Latin America more generally through the constant undermining of Zelaya's attempts to return to his legitimate office, and in the ultimate consolidation of the coup under Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo in early 2010. The article simultaneously develops a critique of what has become the standard account of the Honduran coup of 2009. We show how Zelaya was neither a puppet of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, nor an autocrat seeking to entrench his power indefinitely through illegal constitutional reform when he was violently tossed out of government.

Learning the Hard Way

The Honduran coup d'etat of 28 June 2009 triggered a series of measures by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the international community to restore ousted President Manuel Mel Zelaya to office and return the country to its previous democratic constitutional order. These international actions included forms of diplomatic isolation, such as the suspension of Honduras's membership in the OAS, as weU as economic sanctions imposed by the luces ofthe European Union, the Inter- American Development Bank, the World Bank, the Central American Integration System, and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration, in addition to individual countries such as the United States. Nonetheless, international efforts failed to dislodge the interim government headed by former President of Congress Roberto Micheletti and installed by the coup conspirators. Indeed, Micheletti and company were so successful at resisting international pressures that they were able to hand over power with impunity to President-elect Porfirio Lobo seven months later, on 27 January 2010. Michelletti enjoyed congressionally approved political amnesty to boot.Almost predictably, analysts criticized the OAS for yet another seemingly dismal defence of democracy in the Americas. According to some critics, Honduras represented a resounding failure of the inter-American democratic charter. To others, Honduras signified the triumph of realism over principles in international relations. Moreover, the incident seemed to prove once again that external actors had a negligible influence on domestic processes of political change. Honduras was also deja vu with regard to the OAS' s repeated failure at preventive diplomacy.1The Honduras debacle, however, was more nuanced than it seems at first glance. Certain elements of the international intervention were praiseworthy. For one thing, there was an international effort at preventive diplomacy, albeit a belated one. For the first time ever, a head of state - Zelaya - invoked article 17 of the inter- American democratic charter, the so-called self-help clause, to trigger an emergency meeting of the OAS permanent council just days before the 28 June coup. In contrast to past crises, such as in Bolivia (2003, 2005), Haiti (2001, 2004), Venezuela (2002), or Ecuador (2004-05), there was also little or no hesitation in the Honduran case to resort to the democratic charter. In fact, Venezuela and its allies put aside their prior resistance to endorse strongly the use of the democratic charter. The residual tensions in US-Latin American relations inherited from the Bush presidency (2001-09) did not impede a rapid response by the OAS once its member states decided to act. The diverse array of isolation measures and sanctions imposed by the OAS and the international community is likely the most formidable set of punitive measures adopted against any coup government in the two-decade-long history of the inter- American collective-defence-ofdemocracy regime. And lest we forget, the response to Honduras, at least initially, was also an unprecedented display of international consensus vis-avis the pariah Micheletti government.Accordingly, the OAS's efforts in Honduras were not a total disaster. Instead of dismissing international efforts to defend democracy outright, and in the interest of getting it right next time round, it is more fruitful to seek to understand the paradox of why the Micheletti de facto government did not buckle despite the rapid, determined, united, and powerful international response. Micheletti and his supporters held on for seven months even though international sanctions took a punishing toll on them. According to Honduras's new president, Porfirio Lobo, the sanctions took effect to the tune of US$2 billion dollars in a country notorious for its aid dependence.2In this article, I identify six lessons that, in combination, help explain the Honduran paradox, as well as where the OAS and the international community need to improve their efforts in order to defend democracy more successfuUy in the future. …

A Diplomatic Theater of the Absurd: Canada, the OAS, and the Honduran Coup

A Diplomatic Theater of the Absurd: Canada, the OAS, and the Honduran Coup

The Honduran Coup and Cultural Policy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDarío A. EuraqueDarío A. Euraque is professor of history at Trinity College. This essay is taken from an upcoming book about the Honduran coup and cultural policy tentatively titled Lempira Executed Once More: Culture, National Identity, Tourism, and the Ancient Maya in Modern Honduras.

‘A New Chapter of Engagement’: Obama and the Honduran Coup

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlexander MainAlexander Main is a policy analyst and international outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

Human Rights and the Honduran Coup

Abstract:Shannon Speed is contributing editor of “Human Rights Forum,” the AAA Committee for Human Rights column in Anthropology News.

The Honduran Coup: The Specter of Democracy, and of the Past

"The Honduran Coup: The Specter of Democracy, and of the Past." NACLA Report on the Americas, 42(5), pp. 4–5 Additional informationNotes on contributorsMedea BenjaminMedea Benjamin is a co-founder of the activist organization Codepink and the international human rights group Global Exchange. She translated and edited the memoir of Honduran peasant activist Elvira Alvarado, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks From the Heart (Harper Perennial, 1989).