Post-Coup Honduras: Latin America’s Corridor of Reaction

Abstract

This article offers an historical-materialist account of the cuup in Honduras on 28 June 2009, which ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. It draws on over two dozen interviews with members of the Frente Nacional de ta Resistencia Popular [National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP]. and participation in numerous marches and assemblies over two periods of tieidwork -January 2010, and June-July 2011. The paper steps back in time to provide an historical cartography of the basic material structures of the Honduran economy and its integration into the world market, as well as tbe geopolitical role it played as a launching pad for Ronald Reagan's counter-insurgency campaigns against guerrilla forces elsewhere in the region during the 1980s. We show how the defeat of mass guerrilla insurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as the triumph over the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by 1990, allowed for the neoliberal pacification of Ontral America as a whole, including Honduras. We further demonstrate how tbe centre-leftist Manuel Zelaya, elected to the Honduran presidency in 2006, modestly encroached upon neoliberal orthodoxy and forged geopolitical alliances with left and centre-left governments elsewhere in the region, laying the bases for his violent overthrow. Finally, the paper traces the origins, trajectory, and heterogeneity of the resistance that emerged almost immediately after the coup had been carried out.

A coup foretold: Fernando Lugo and the lost promise of agrarian reform in Paraguay

“…The ousting of Lugo from office reveals the inordinate level of influence exerted by the landowning elite on Paraguayan politics, as well as the very feeble nature of the country's democracy. “The vehemence of opposition to a centre‐left president whose policies were more social democratic than revolutionary and who actually achieved very little” (Nickson, , p. 18) serves as a potent reminder that “it is hardly necessary for delete Latin American governments to adopt social‐revolutionary measures before the traditional elite … feel threatened and act violently in protection of their interests” (Gordon & Webber, , p. 36). In a country like Paraguay, where the oligarchic control of the state by landed elites is widely recognized, the prospects for redistributive land reform continue to be slim without substantial, even if partial, structural and institutional change within the state and in society.…”

State Building, Ethnic Land Titling, and Transnational Organized Crime: The Case of Honduras

“…Although previous studies have emphasized international norms and social movements as factors shaping ethnic land titling, this study focuses on the security interests of high-ranking government officials as an additional but crucial motivator. My research does so by comparing titling patterns across Honduras, bringing together in-depth subnational studies in anthropology and geography on participatory mapping projects (i.e., the practice of producing maps of customary use of land and resources with the involvement of Indigenous people) with grassroots movements' demands for guaranteeing Indigenous and ethnic land rights (Bryan 2011;Mollett 2013;Webber and Gordon 2013;Portillo Villeda 2014). Based on semistructured elite interviews, data on ethnic land titling, reports on drug-trafficking, and notes from three months of fieldwork in seven sites in Honduras-including intense on-the-ground work in its southeastern region-my study suggests that analyses of political decision-making in weak institutional environments should also consider security interests as an important factor.…”

Latino Studies, Latino/a/X futures: Provocations toward a prospectus

“…Bourgois, 2001; McAllister and Nelson, 2013; Nelson, 1999, 2009; Sanford, 2003; Zilberg, 2007; 2011; cf. Grandin, 2004), notably including the prolonged and ongoing repression ensuing from the military coup in Honduras in 2009 (Gordon and Webber, 2013), to the predatory violence of street gangs that proliferated and diversified in El Salvador and other Central American countries following the aggravated escalation in the deportation of Latino youth raised in the United States as alleged “criminal aliens” following the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 (Coutin, 2010; Golash-Boza, 2012, 2014, 2015; Zilberg, 2004, 2007, 2011), to the general impunity surrounding gender-based and sexual violence that has culminated in a prolonged escalation of feminicides, particularly in post-genocide Guatemala (Carey and Torres, 2010; Cházaro and Casey, 2010 [2006]; Menjívar, 2011; Morales Trujillo, 2010; Reimann, 2009; Sanford, 2008; cf. Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010; Wright, 2011)—as well as the more amorphous affiliated formations of violence that accrue to the status of some of these countries as the reputed “murder capitals of the world” (Swanson and Torres, 2016; Terrio, 2015a).…”