Geography Archives: Honduras

If Donald Trump “crippled” the World Trade Organization, the Biden administration has recast this crisis as an opportunity to ditch the old orthodoxy and welcome new trade rules that “equip it to better tackle modern-day imperatives,” as Biden has defined them.

Apparently in a grave threat to U.S. national security, the president of Honduras attended a state banquet and actually ate Chinese food. What’s next for the country the ‘Post’ affectionately describes as “long among the most docile of U.S. regional partners?”

As the U.S. government’s Summit of the Americas opens in Los Angeles, California, the presidents of Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala have refused to attend, protesting the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

With a significant advantage over the closest contender, Xiomara Castro has emerged as the likely next president of Honduras.

Honduras is at the most important crossroads of its recent history.

On Sunday night on 21 March 2021, a gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.

On 28 June 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a coup d’état engineered by the Honduran oligarchy and the United States government. The reverberations of the coup extend into present-day Honduras, which continues to struggle to maintain its political sovereignty.

March 2, 2021 was the five year anniversary of the murder of Berta Cáceres, who opposed the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras. That date was less than one month after the deaths of dozens of people from Tehri Dam disaster in Uttarakhand, India. The two stories together tell us far more about consequences of the insatiable greed of capitalism for more energy than either narrative does by itself.

This is the third time in less than a year that the U.S. government has linked the Honduran chief executive to drug traffickers. President Hernández denies any association with narcotics smuggling.

On July 15, 2013, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), led by Berta Cáceres Flores, went to protest the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River. This river, in western Honduras, is considered to be sacred by the indigenous Lenca community. No one from the company that wanted to build the dam had talked to the Lenca.

Members of the resistance in Honduras tell MintPress how a US-backed coup – and the Neoliberalism it brought with it – have impacted their country.

The migrant caravan, which has been met with threats from Donald Trump, is the result of poverty, growing crime and repression in Honduras. The U.S. has played a key role in propping up the government of Juan Orlando Hernández, who was reelected in November through blatant electoral fraud.

Over the decades, the Atlas Network has been financing a variety of organizations that seek to influence the public and promote capitalist ideas.

The U.S. State Department has endorsed the outcome of the November 26 elections in Honduras, which was surely the most farcical electoral process in recent history.

CounterSpin interview with Suyapa Portillo on Honduras Electoral Chaos

On November 26, the Honduran people went to the polls to elect their president for the next four years. Whilst in all the other elections in Honduras where the results were released the same day or the next morning, it has been 16 days and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has yet to release the official results.

The chaos surrounding last week’s presidential elections in Honduras reflects a rightwing consolidation of power in the country, abetted by the United States.

Former President Manuel Zelaya, leader of the opposition, accused the TSE of stealing the election from the alliance.

Have we in the U.S. have forgotten what happened in Honduras? Or is that many of us believe falsehoods about that history brought to us by media like the New York Times?

  Testimony of Rev. Ismael Moreno Coto, S.J. for the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing on “Worldwide Threats to Media Freedom,” 25 July 2012 Standing up for freedom of expression is, without a doubt, one of the most uncomfortable experiences in life; and in a country like Honduras, it means living with anxiety, insecurity, […]