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manuel zelaya
Hillary Clinton's Man in Honduras: A Reflection on Juan Orlando Hernandéz
As head of the National Congress following the U.S.-supported coup in 2009, Hernandez—who later ascended to the presidency—was seen as particularly amenable to Washington's desires.
Apr 02, 2024
On March 8, a Manhattan federal court found Juan Orlando Hernández, president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, guilty of conspiracy to import large amounts of cocaine into the United States over nearly two decades.
Mainstream U.S. media generally framed the ex-president’s trial and conviction as a triumph of justice, a service rendered by the impartial U.S. justice system to the people of Honduras.
The great majority of such accounts, however, ignored and obscured context crucial for understanding Hernández’s rise and rule; in particular, how Washington contributed to both. Though the mainstream narrative around the ex-president rightly connects his tenure in office with massive emigration from Honduras, it has elided the degree to which U.S. influence enabled Hernández’s career and thus partially drove the migration that arose in response.
For roughly two centuries, Honduras, the original “banana republic,” has suffered a deeply unequal relationship with the far more powerful United States. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, Honduras and its people have endured frequent American military interventions, U.S.-backed coups, and a corrupt, rapacious local oligarchy closely tied to U.S. corporate interests.
Despite Hernández’s ultimate conviction on U.S. soil, he served Washington for many years as a loyal client. The single most important event in the ex-president’s political career was a 2009 coup, which overthrew center-left president Manuel Zelaya (whose wife, Xiomara Castro, won election in 2021 and currently occupies the presidency). Zelaya raised the minimum wage, subsidized small farmers, and authorized the morning-after pill, infuriating the country’s business elite and, in the last case, ultra-conservative religious leaders. Moreover, to Washington’s consternation, he made overtures toward Hugo Chavez’s socialist Venezuela and sought to convert a crucial U.S. airbase entirely to civilian use.
Joint action by Honduras’ military and judiciary — in a manner the U.S. ambassador called “clearly illegal” and “totally illegitimate” at the time — forced Zelaya to pay for these sins in late June 2009. While the White House’s reaction to the coup initially appeared confused, Washington soon recovered its footing. Even as huge protests raged, the Obama administration played a key role in ultimately compelling Honduras’ people and the region’s governments to acquiesce to the regime change as a fait accompli.
Despite widespread repression by the post-coup de facto government, accounts of fraud, and the condemnation of many countries and international organizations (including the normally deferential Organization of American States), U.S.-endorsed elections in November 2009 received Washington’s imprimatur. In her memoirs (the passage excised from the book’s paperback edition with no explanation), then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the U.S. sought to “render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.”
It was in this context that Hernández catapulted into power. After Porfirio Lobo won the 2009 presidential race, Hernández became President of the National Congress as a member of Lobo’s National Party — an institution historically closely linked to U.S. agribusiness. Lobo was Hernández’s mentor and groomed his protege to succeed him. But while Hernández enjoyed success, the coup’s consequences constituted disaster for ordinary Hondurans.
Political violence and repression became routine. The murder rate, much of it due to cartel-related gang violence, soared — it was the world’s highest for three years running. As the economic situation also deteriorated, and Lobo and his son allied with major narcotics syndicates, a huge surge of emigration swelled out of Honduras, with desperate citizens flooding northward. The total number of Hondurans apprehended at the U.S. border exploded — from less than 25,000 in 2009 to nearly 100,000 in 2014 — reaching 250,000 by 2020.
In Washington’s eyes, however, such concerns took a back seat to longstanding strategic needs: above all, Honduras’ openness to foreign investment and its role as a base for American military power. And, as head of the National Congress, Hernandez was seen as particularly amenable to U.S. desires.
“The State Department loved Hernandez,” according to Dana Frank, an expert on Honduras at UC Santa Cruz. As Lobo’s heir apparent, “he was young and could stay in power for a long time.” Frank cites a 2010 cable from the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa asserting that “He has consistently supported U.S. interests.”
The depth of American support for Hernández became clear after his 2013 election to the presidency. Despite credible reports of fraud, his National Party’s control over the counting process, and a wave of threats and sometimes lethal violence against opposition candidates and activists during the campaign, the State Department commended the election as “transparent, free, and fair.”
In 2015, a major corruption scandal centered on the misappropriation of funds from Honduras’ Social Security Institute exploded, prompting unprecedented popular demonstrations against Hernandez and calling for his resignation, “There was a real sense that Hernández could fall,” according to Alexander Main, a Latin America expert at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. Fortunately for Hernández, however, the U.S. swooped in, helping to defuse the unrest by prodding the OAS to organize a local anti-corruption body known as MACCIH.
In that same year, according to Frank, Washington gave an “official green light” to a “completely criminal” power grab by Hernández whereby his hand-picked Supreme Court ruled that he was eligible to run for a second term in clear violation of Honduras’ constitution. Washington’s complacent reaction — “It is up to the Honduran people to determine their political future” — stood in remarkable contrast to 2009, when Zelaya’s mere suggestion that the constitution might be amended to permit a second term served as the pretext for the coup that the U.S. subsequently legitimized.
In Hernández’s 2017 reelection bid, the fraud was so blatant and widespread that even the generally conservative OAS declared the incumbent’s victory an example of “extreme statistical improbability” and called for new elections. The State Department, however, stood by Hernández, prodding Mexico and other OAS members to recognize the results, even as security forces suppressed massive and prolonged protests with live ammunition.
Indeed, U.S. training and funding also proved crucial in the creation of the brutal special operations units Hernández’s government used to terrorize opposition and environmental activists. Particularly significant in the military sphere was the role of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the American combatant command responsible for Latin America. Hernández was a particular favorite of John Kelly, SOUTHCOM’s head during Obama’s second term (and then White House chief of staff for Donald Trump), who, as Dana Frank noted, once referred to the convicted drug trafficker as a “great guy” and “good friend.”
Considering the U.S. relationship with Hernández, it is perhaps unsurprising that U.S. officials seemingly turned a blind eye to his deep involvement in narcotics trafficking. As both Hernández’s recent trial — during which a witness claimed Hernandez had privately vowed to “stuff drugs up the noses of the gringos” — and that of his brother in 2019 showed, the drug trade’s reach into the Honduran government was unmistakable, with numerous high-ranking security officials repeatedly implicated.
CEPR’s Main argues that it was “highly unlikely American officials were unaware” of Hernández’s criminality. Indeed, as a document from his brother’s trial revealed, the DEA began investigating the ex-president as early as 2013. As noted in Hernández’s trial, just weeks after his inauguration in 2014, the agency reportedly obtained video evidence indicating his involvement with major drug traffickers. Even after his brother’s 2019 conviction, when it became apparent that millions of dollars in drug money helped underwrite Hernández’s political career, President Donald Trump publicly praised him for “working with the United States very closely” and for his help in “stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.”
Given all this, the U.S. media’s failure to probe the influence of American policy on Hernández’s career begins to look less like an anomalous oversight and more like a manifestation of structural dynamics that tend to reinforce the notion of American innocence. We can see the same logic apply to the frenzied media accounts detailing “caravans” of Central American migrants headed to the U.S. While mainstream news outlets rightly note the relationship between Hernández’s presidency and increased migration from Honduras, they nevertheless fail to connect the two to the impact of U.S. policymaking. Without Washington’s complicity and assistance, Hernandez might have spent 2014 to 2022 in prison, rather than the presidency. Unfortunately, it was the Honduran people who paid the price.
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On Coup Anniversary, Examining the US Role in Honduras
Today marks seven years since the coup d'etat in Honduras - the day that former President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by the Honduran army and then flown out of the country from an air field controlled by the U.S. military. That event sent shockwaves through the region and the world and was denounced by the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the European Union. Honduras was suspended temporarily from the OAS.
Jun 28, 2016
Today marks seven years since the coup d'etat in Honduras - the day that former President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by the Honduran army and then flown out of the country from an airfield controlled by the U.S. military. That event sent shockwaves through the region and the world and was denounced by the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the European Union. Honduras was suspended temporarily from the OAS.
Observers and experts warned that if Zelaya was not restored to office and the forces behind the coup were allowed to proceed without any accountability, it would be disastrous for Honduras and the region. Some feared widespread human rights violations and targeting of political opposition, harkening back to a time of CIA-trained death squads and disappearances when Honduras was a front in the U.S.'s covert war against liberation movements in neighboring countries.
Seven years and hundreds of lives later, those predictions have proven true. Opponents of the coup regime, leaders of the resistance, land rights activists, journalists, and human rights lawyers have been killed in the wake of the coup. Among the most recent tragic examples is that of Berta Caceres, a fearless, committed, and exuberant advocate for the Lenca people against the construction of a dam project at Rio Blanco. Berta was shot and killed in her home on March 3, 2016.
Three years before her death, she acknowledged the danger she faced:
The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top. I want to live, there are many things I still want to do in this world but I have never once considered giving up fighting for our territory, for a life with dignity, because our fight is legitimate. I take lots of care but in the end, in this country where there is total impunity I am vulnerable... When they want to kill me, they will do it.
Three months after her murder, a former Honduran soldier confirmed for The Guardian the existence of the hitlist, with Caceres' name on it, in the possession of a unit trained by U.S. special forces.
The U.S. has historically played a heavy-handed role in Honduras, which became an outpost from which it conducted covert action in the region during the Cold War, with disastrous results for human rights defenders and activists there. To date, there has been no real accountability for the role the U.S. played in Honduras in training and arming security forces who committed unspeakable violence against political opponents. Likewise, on the Honduran side of the equation, there has been little accountability over the years. Indeed, at least one confirmed member of Battalion 3-16, a notorious death squad trained by the CIA in the '80s, was active in the political intrigue after the 2009 coup.
Not that there weren't efforts at the time to hold the U.S. government accountable for its role in the region. Organizations like CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) were working to raise these concerns and stop economic, political and military intervention as early as 1980. The Center for Constitutional Rights, representing members of Congress and victims of human rights violations in the region, sought to bring these disastrous and harmful policies to light in court in cases like Crocket v. Reagan, challenging the administration's undeclared war in El Salvador, and Sanchez-Espinoza v. Reagan, which took aim at U.S. officials' complicity in murder, torture, rape and other human rights violations in Nicaragua. Dellums v. Smith sought to compel an investigation into credible allegations of illegality in the administration's conduct in Nicaragua, and some believe the case led to revelations about the sale of arms to Iran to fund support for the contras, who were largely trained from inside Honduras.
Then, there was the judgment of the International Court of Justice in a case brought by Nicaragua, which found the U.S. guilty of violating international law for its mining of Nicaragua's harbors and supporting and arming the contras. The court ordered the U.S. to pay reparations to Nicaragua. The U.S. ignored both the judgment and calls by the international community to comply with it.
Fast forward to Honduras after the 2009 coup: Here, the U.S. government helped to undermine democracy and the strong resistance that formed in the wake of the coup when it worked against the restoration of the democratically-elected president and pushed for the recognition of an election that was boycotted by respected election observers who saw no possibility of a free and fair process in the circumstances at the time. The U.S. was the first country to restore relations with Honduras after the controversial election officially and pushed others to normalize relations with the post-coup regime as well. Consistent with its long-standing modus operandi, the U.S. continued to provide aid and military training and support while expanding its base of operations there.
In doing so, the U.S. government has helped to seal the fate of hundreds of resistance activists, journalists, campesinos, and, yes, Berta Caceres. However, Honduran and U.S. human rights activists and organizations working across national lines have sought to keep speaking truth to the power on all sides of the equation by amplifying the struggle and stories from Honduras and the impact of the U.S. on events inside. CCR has again been part of these diverse efforts by representing family members of a youth killed by the Honduran military in a case against an engineer of the coup and de facto president Robert Michelletti, representing the alternative true commission in efforts to gain access to information about the coup from the U.S. government through FOIA requests, the submission of a complaint to the International Criminal Court, and joining with others in pushing for an end to the exploitive, extractive and self-serving policies of the U.S. in Honduras.
Last week, U.S. Representative Hank Johnson introduced unprecedented legislation to stop U.S. aid to Honduras. The Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act would suspend U.S. support for military operations, equipment, and training until the Honduran government investigates credible reports of human rights violations. The legislation is an important and necessary step and should be supported.
Another momentous event is the Border Convergence organized by SOA Watch that will be held October 7-10, 2016 in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico. CCR, along with many other organizations, is endorsing this event, which looks critically at the impact of U.S. policies in the region that exacerbate repression and economic crisis on the one hand and the xenophobic immigration laws and policies encountered by migrants and refugees in the U.S. on the other. It is a way of highlighting the absurdity of decrying immigration and blaming migrants and refugees for fleeing situations we helped create and, worse, benefit from.
While there is much to be done, and hearts are still heavy with the loss of Berta and so many others, these and other efforts are cause for hope in an otherwise very dark time.
To show your support for the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, click here.
To support the Border Convergence, click here.
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How Secretary of State Clinton Enabled the Coup in Honduras
The rule of law in Honduras has still not recovered from the coup that the Democratic candidate for president enabled
Feb 19, 2016
On June 28, 2009, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, democratically elected a military coup overthrew Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. The United Nations, the European Union, and the Organization of American States condemned the coup, and on July 5, Honduras was suspended from the OAS.
Under longstanding and clear-cut U.S. law, all U.S. aid to Honduras except democracy assistance, including all military aid, should have been immediately suspended following the coup.
On August 7, fifteen House Democrats, led by Rep. Raul Grijalva, sent a letter to the Administration that began, "As you know, a military coup took place in Honduras on June 28th, 2009." The letter said, "The State Department should fully acknowledge that a military coup has taken place and follow through with the total suspension of non-humanitarian aid, as required by law."
Why wasn't U.S. aid to Honduras suspended following the coup? On August 25, Clinton's State Department justified not suspending aid to Honduras by claiming that events in Honduras were murky and that it was not clear whether a coup had taken place. Clinton's State Department claimed that State Department lawyers were studying the question.
This justification was a lie, and Clinton's State Department knew it was a lie. By July 24, 2009, the State Department, including Secretary Clinton, knew clearly that the action of the Honduran military to remove President Zelaya on June 28, 2009 constituted a coup. On July 24, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens sent a cable to top U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Clinton, with the subject: "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," thoroughly documenting the assertion that "there is no doubt" that the events of June 28 "constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup."
Why did Clinton's State Department lie and pretend that it was murky whether a coup had taken place when it knew the fact that a coup had taken place was clear-cut? Because Hillary Clinton wanted the coup to succeed. Clinton's strategy to help the coup succeed, as revealed in her emails, was "delay, delay, delay," as Donald Trump might say. Delay any action that might help force the coup government to stand down and allow the democratically elected President to be restored to office. As she later confessed in her book, her goal was to "render the question of [President] Zelaya moot."
Today, the rule of law in Honduras still has not recovered from the coup that Secretary Clinton helped enable. That's a key reason that refugees have fled Honduras to the United States, only to find themselves hunted by the Department of Homeland Security raids that Secretary Clinton supported before she opposed them.
President Obama is going to visit Cuba, and that's wonderful. Ending the embargo and normalizing relations with Cuba is a key step the U.S. must take to restore normal relations with Latin America. But it's not the only change we need. There is a two-hundred-year legacy of U.S. military intervention and subversion in Latin America that didn't stop in January 2009. It's hard to have confidence that former Secretary Clinton will end this legacy as President when she used her power as Secretary of State to turn the clock backward.
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