Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latinoaméricaines et caraïbes
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Genealogy of a social movement: the Resistencia in Honduras Tyler Shipley To cite this article: Tyler Shipley (2016) Genealogy of a social movement: the Resistencia in Honduras, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes, 41:3, 348-365, DOI: 10.1080/08263663.2016.1225686 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2016.1225686
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Date: 14 November 2016, At: 09:45
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES, 2016 VOL. 41, NO. 3, 348–365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2016.1225686
Genealogy of a social movement: the Resistencia in Honduras Tyler Shipley Department of Liberal Studies, Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Toronto, ON, Canada ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
This article considers the emergence of the social movement in resistance to the military coup in Honduras as a logical continuation of a movement that had been gaining momentum throughout the 2000s. Contrary to much mainstream analysis, this paper insists that it was the strength of the social movement that actually pushed former President Manuel Zelaya towards a project of reform in the first place, which eventually prompted the Rightwing coup in response. Instead of a spontaneous rising of people in support of a deposed president in 2009, then, the resistance is here understood as a continuous struggle against neoliberalism in various forms. Drawing heavily from interviews and research in Honduras, this is one of the first systematic English-language analyses of the roots of the current Honduran social movement.
Received 20 May 2015 Accepted 1 June 2016 KEYWORDS
Honduras; Honduran social movement; Honduran coup; social movement studies; neoliberalism; globalization; coup d’etat
RESUMEN
Este artículo considera el surgimiento del movimiento social en resistencia al golpe de estado en Honduras como una continuación lógica de un movimiento que había ido ganando impulso en toda la década del año 2000. Al contrario de muchos análisis convencionales, este artículo insiste en que era la fuerza del movimiento social presionó al ex presidente Manuel Zelaya hacia un proyecto de reforma, y que fue principalmente este aspecto lo que finalmente llevó al golpe como respuesta. En lugar de una espontánea creciente de personas en apoyo a un presidente depuesto en 2009, la resistencia se entiende aquí como una lucha continua contra el neoliberalismo en diversas formas. Utilizando en gran medida de las entrevistas y la investigación en Honduras, este es uno de los primeros análisis sistemáticos en inglés sobre las raíces del movimiento social hondureño.
Introduction In the dramatic days following the June 2009 coup d’etat in Honduras, observers across the Americas were surprised and impressed by the immediate emergence of a massive, national movement of people resisting the overthrow of the social-democratic government. That movement, which called itself the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP), appeared as a spontaneous reaction against a violent and anti-democratic intervention by the Honduran military; the FNRP CONTACT Tyler Shipley © 2016 CALACS
[email protected]
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mobilized demonstrations which numbered as many as 100,000 people and has maintained its organized defiance of the coup for almost six years. This article offers an alternative perspective on the emergence of the FNRP, arguing that far from being a spontaneous reaction to the coup, the FNRP was a logical continuation of a social movement that was built over two decades of struggle against the imposition of neoliberalism in Honduras. Beginning in regional organizations in the 1990s, the Honduran social movement coalesced into a national body following very successful demonstrations in the early 2000s, and was the most significant factor in pulling the government of Manuel Zelaya (2006–2009) to the Left, which arguably prompted the military coup in 2009. The emphasis I place on the social movement should not imply that it was the only factor in Zelaya’s mounting confrontation with the oligarchy; I will touch briefly on some of the other dynamics at play, including the rising tensions within Zelaya’s Liberal Party in the years preceding the coup. Nevertheless, I will focus on the growth of the social movement and, indeed, the research for this work draws significantly from interviews with leaders and organizers in the FNRP, conducted over four visits to Honduras between 2009 and 2015. I was fortunate, in my first visit directly following the coup in 2009, to connect with Karen Spring, then with the non-governmental organization (NGO) Rights Action and now an organizer in the Honduras Solidarity Network. Karen’s long-term commitment to supporting the social movement – she has lived and worked in Honduras for most of the last six years – earned her the trust and solidarity of wide sections of the movement. It is through Karen that I became acquainted with activists in the social movement, accompanied them in demonstrations, documented their encounters with security forces, attended large conferences and small meetings and, in sum, acted as a participant observer at various moments in their struggle. I also conducted formal interviews with activists, politicians, lawyers, teachers, indigenous leaders, women’s rights advocates, artists, peasant organizers, environmentalists and many other Hondurans and their allies. Those interviews, combined with participant observation and a thorough engagement with the historiography of Honduras in English and Spanish, form the basis for the arguments that follow. In particular, it is the revision of the mainstream narrative of the Honduran resistance (“Repression breeds resistance” 2012) that is of central importance here, not just for the insights it offers into the dynamics of movement-building, but also for its implications for our understanding of the contemporary moment in Honduras. The situation facing the social movement at present is perhaps as challenging as it has been since 2009; understanding the social movement to have been a key source of Zelaya’s Left-turn, rather than simply a reaction to it, has significant consequences for the movement today, as it reorganizes in the aftermath of fraudulent elections in 2013 and the increasingly dictatorial Presidency of Juan Orlando Hernández.
Manuel “Mel” Zelaya and the neoliberal road in Honduras One of the more interesting and perhaps unforeseen consequences of the June 2009 coup d’etat was the way that it transformed Manuel Zelaya into a popular figure, “Mel”, in Honduras. He was elected President in 2005 as a member of the Liberal Party, which has traditionally functioned – along with the National Party – as one of the two competing factions of the oligarchy, neither known for any history of radicalism.
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Zelaya himself was a junior member of the oligarchy, son of a wealthy landowner from the eastern department of Olancho, whose father, José Manuel, was implicated in the murder of several campesinos and two Catholic priests who were supporting escalations of agrarian activism in 1975 (Lapper 1985, 67). José Manuel avoided any culpability in the Los Horcones massacre, and his son’s political career was not held up in the slightest, as he rose to the top of the Liberal Party in the early 2000s and won the elections of 2005. Indeed, Manuel Zelaya’s political career showed no initial signs of significant divergence from the standard trajectory of Honduran politics. It is instructive to note that Adolfo Facussé, a prominent member of the Honduran oligarchy that orchestrated Zelaya’s overthrow, later described him thus: “Mel Zelaya is one of us and – well – it just got out of his control” (Lee and Olson 2009). In fact, the factor that most distinguished Zelaya from those who would later overthrow him was that he recognized the growing strength of the movements for social reform and chose to work with them. Zelaya’s presidency became increasingly responsive – at least in relative terms – to the sharp demands from trade unions, campesinos, women, indigenous and Garífuna and other marginalized communities for change. But, in spite of the way that he was later characterized by many observers – from a variety of political stripes – Zelaya was not a hero to Honduras’ poor; his Presidency and his role in the social movement are, instead, complicated and inconsistent and need to be carefully unpacked. Zelaya won by an exceptionally narrow margin in the 2005 elections, and was immediately subjected to a show of strength and defiance from many of those who had supported his campaign, who launched some 200 protests in Zelaya’s first year in office (“Rocky First Year” 2007). These strikes and mobilizations did not materialize out of thin air, nor were they spontaneous expressions of discontent; they were a manifestation of the growing strength of the new social movements that had begun to coalesce in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it is that movement that is the focus of this article. Very briefly, in order to contextualize the current moment, it is worth noting that radical organizing in Honduras was kept mostly disarticulated and regional prior to the 1950s. Honduras did not develop the same kind of pressures on land that emerged in Guatemala or El Salvador, for instance, and so Honduran peasants were able to maintain their smallholdings in much greater numbers than elsewhere, forestalling much of the conflict that emerged elsewhere (Bethell 1986, 223). This, combined with a strong repressive state apparatus under the Tiburcio Carias dictatorship, kept a lid on significant resistance movements in the country until the great mobilizations on the banana plantations in the 1940s and 1950s. Workers in the enclave plantations organized to push back against exploitation during that period, which culminated in a massive strike in 1954 that spread to become a general strike across the entire banana coast. The strike was ended by a combination of coercion and cooptation, of which a major role was played by the US-based American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which moved into Honduras to take over and weaken the nascent Honduran labor movement (Dunkerley 1988, 530–2). But the period between the strike and the civil war in the 1980s was, nevertheless, one of increased mobilization on the part of Honduran peasants and workers. This mobilization was related to the first serious attacks on peasant access to land; in the 1960s and 1970s, the banana plantations mechanized and laid off workers, who
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would return to their inland communities to find their lands being seized by cotton, sugar, and cattle barons. This problem was aggravated by an influx of dispossessed campesinos fleeing conflict in El Salvador, and by the late 1960s Honduran peasants had created powerful organizations, with strong links to communist parties, that were capable of standing firm in the face of state repression. The Honduran state – still controlled at arms-length by the military in the 1960s and 1970s – was acutely aware of the destructive consequences of the guerrilla wars elsewhere in the region, and engaged in a project sometimes described as “progressive Bonapartism”, whereby the military state navigated a careful line between the oligarchy and the peasantry, enacting minor land reform projects to dampen the impetus towards radical organizing and the formation of guerrilla armies (Barahona 2005, 220–6). As such, Honduras was relatively tranquil in terms of social conflict during this period, compared to elsewhere in the region. I want to emphasize that this was relative; scholarship on the region has a tendency to unintentionally cast Honduras as a panacea of social harmony and this is patently false.1 In fact, there was mounting pressure on access to land throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and the placidity of this period was always maintained in part by the threat of more serious violent repression, which manifest in incidents such as the massacre at Los Horcones in 1975, as mentioned above. The victims in that case had their eyes gouged out, their testicles cut off and their fingernails and teeth ripped off and out, before being buried alive in a mass grave. I include these graphic details in order to emphasize that, just like the resistance, the hyperviolence of contemporary Honduras did not emerge spontaneously. Of course, Honduras was changed permanently by the US occupation in the 1980s, and the repression and death-squad activity that accompanied it. Using Honduras as a base for its savage regional wars, the United States made certain that the country would be ruled by a cooperative regime that would suffer no internal troublemakers. As such, during the 1980s, the radical Left and the peasant mobilizations were significantly weakened or even destroyed. US Ambassador John Negroponte essentially ruled the country, in conjunction with General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez – an admirer of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet – who introduced Honduras’ first death squads, notably the notorious Battalion 3–16, to break any local threats to the US capacity to win the regional wars. As such, US military aid poured into the country to build up its capacity to repress the opposition, even while pressure over land increased as so much territory was being used or damaged by the US military and the Contra fighters. The violence of the occupation claimed hundreds of lives, saw thousands of Hondurans jailed and tortured and terrorized by the state and left the organizations of resistance totally broken and exhausted (Acker 1988, 121–30).
The emergence of the CNRP As a result, there was limited capacity to muster up opposition to the imposition of neoliberalism in the early 1990s. The hammer of that process – which manifest as structural adjustment, privatizations, foreign concessions, theft of campesino and indigenous land, cuts to social and state services and infrastructure, and other austerity measures – fell hard on Hondurans, who were already reeling from the violence and insecurity of the 1980s. In 1990–1992, per capita income in Honduras
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dropped from USD534 to USD204, while prices rose throughout the decade, such that by 2003 over 75% of Hondurans lived in poverty and could not meet their daily needs (Woodward Jr. 1999, 273). The devastating social consequences of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, in which 11,000 people were killed and over 2 million were displaced, were as clear a signal as any that conditions in Honduras had become intolerable (Booth, Wade, and Walker 2010, 171). Spiralling poverty and displacement produced fertile ground for the maras, and Honduras went from one of the safest countries in Central America to its most dangerous, with one of the highest murder rates in the world alongside a state-sanctioned campaign of vigilante justice that saw thousands of urban poor youth murdered with impunity in the 1990s (Pine 2008, 60). It was around this time, in response to the devastation and disorientation of this period, that a new generation of social movements began to consolidate, and it is this organizing that lay the foundation for the contemporary resistance in Honduras. At first, this new movement was manifest in small, regional organizations based loosely around the different departments, or provinces, of the country. These included, but were not limited to: the Asamblea Popular Permanente (Permanent Popular Assembly, APP) in El Progreso; the Movimiento Ambientalista de Olancho (Environmental Movement of Olancho, MAO) in Olancho; Coordinadora de Organizaciones Populares de Valle Aguán (Coordinated Popular Organizations of the Aguán Valley, COPA) in Atlántida; Patronato Regional de Occidente (Regional Council of the West, PRO) in the west; Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares y Indígenas de Honduras (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, COPINH) in Intibucá; and the Bloque Popular (Popular Bloc, BP) in Tegucigalpa and the southern departments. Most of these groups were unions of smaller organizations that had been coming together around particular issues and gradually connecting up with larger pockets of struggle. For instance, the Bloque Popular – one of the key groups – was “a union of unions, anti-poverty groups, and juntas de agua”, activist networks organized around the protection of public access to clean water, and it also encompassed a number of small socialist and communist parties, including the Movimiento Democrático Popular (Democratic and Popular Movement), a Marxist-Leninist party, the Tendencia Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Tendency), made up of disaffected and increasingly radicalized government workers, and Los Necios, a Marxist student organization that continues to have an important presence in the resistance (G. Rios, interview, 8 May 2012). The larger regional groups, like the Bloque Popular and COPINH, began linking up in the late 1990s and organized coordinated actions in the early 2000s, including a dramatic blockade of the four main highways into Tegucigalpa in 2003. The blockade was held from 4:00 am until 2:00 pm, at which point it proceeded to the National Congress to confront then-President Maduro directly; the success of this demonstration encouraged further cooperation, and thus was created the Coordinadora Nacional de Resistencia Popular (CNRP). If this sounds familiar, it is because it was precisely this structure that was converted into the FNRP shortly after the June 2009 coup. The CNRP rotated its leadership between its different member groups, and I interviewed Juan Barahona, who was the coordinator of the Bloque Popular and became one of the central leaders of the FNRP after the coup. “The social movement was not born with the
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coup”, he explained, “but strengthened by it. We had been mobilized for a decade; we had fought against Mel Zelaya for two years” (J. Barahona, interview, 10 May 2012). Indeed, Zelaya’s inauguration as President in 2006 was met – just a few months later – by one of Honduras’ largest pre-coup demonstrations: thousands of people participated in a national strike, led by the teachers’ unions, that shut down many of the country’s major highways and was met by swift and violent repression from Zelaya’s government, which, according to Los Necios’ Gilberto Rios, only further emboldened the CNRP to redouble its pressure against Zelaya (G. Rios, interview, 8 May 2012). A few months later, in May 2006, Zelaya reached out to the CNRP in an effort to bring the wave of strikes to an end and to ask for CNRP support in his plan to join the Venezuelan-led alliance Alternativa Bolivariana para los pueblos de nuestra América (Bolivarian Alternative for the People of the Americas, ALBA) in order to participate in the PetroCaribe project to significantly reduce energy costs.2 While this ended the strike in question, it did little to satisfy the growing demands for change from the increasingly well-organized and active movements that had emerged from the wreckage of the 1990s. The reforms pursued by Zelaya’s government, then, were often concessions made in order to appease the growing social movements. It would thus be incorrect to give Zelaya complete credit for these reforms, but it is similarly inaccurate to underestimate the significance of his shift to the Left and the political risks he took in doing so. Many progressive observers have viewed Zelaya as a canny opportunist who switched sides and took on the role of the populist hero when he ran afoul of the oligarchy and was deposed in the 2009 coup (Gordon and Webber 2011). There is some truth in this: Zelaya began as a traditional politician with his roots in the oligarchy, he built his political career at the height of the neoliberal push and he often frustrated the efforts of the social movement to pursue urgent, radical change. However, there is more to the story here. Zelaya’s shift to the Left came well before the coup; his presidency was markedly different from the outset because, as Honduran sociologist Tomás Andino explained to me, Zelaya came from a fraction of the Honduran oligarchy – the traditional landowning classes – that was being left behind by the embrace of neoliberalism and transnational capital (T. Andino, interview, 9 May 2012). The structural adjustment policies imposed in the 1990s had the effect of attracting more foreign capital and reorienting the Honduran economy towards the production of exports, especially in industrial manufacturing. In addition, Hurricane Mitch in 1998 hit the traditional landowner sector – of which Zelaya was a part – much harder than the growing maquiladora sector. According to Andino, Zelaya came to represent a disaffected section within the oligarchy that was less connected to foreign capital and was not reaping the rewards of neoliberalism in the same way, especially under the government of Ricardo Maduro (T. Andino, interview, 9 May 2012). This dynamic, missed in much of the literature, adds a very important piece to the story. When Zelaya succeeded Maduro, he brought a different agenda to the front of the Liberal Party. In a deeply divided party, Zelaya represented a centrist, reforming, faction that was less committed to neoliberalism and saw social democratic reform as a viable avenue out of the deep economic and social crisis in Honduras (Peetz 2009, 183–4). While Zelaya initially tried to bridge the divides in the party, he gradually established an
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administration that reflected the centrist position and, as he became increasingly alienated from the most powerful elements of the Honduran oligarchy – even within his own party – he needed to cultivate relationships with other elements of Honduran society in order to maintain his position. This would prove to be of critical importance because it explains Zelaya’s openness to building a less oppositional relationship with the social movements that had coalesced into the CNRP.
Zelaya and the movement Consequently, Zelaya’s Presidency was pulled – albeit gradually and inconsistently – toward the social movements, and that shift is reflected in the series of reforms it enacted. One of these reforms, an increase of approximately 60% in the monthly minimum wage, was to provide some immediate, if inadequate, relief for Honduras’ poorest workers in the non-maquiladora sectors (Mejía 2010). Under pressure from trade unions and the CNRP, Zelaya imposed the wage increase by decree when the Honduran Congress refused to cooperate and, not surprisingly, the move elicited an angry response from the oligarchy and most of the larger media outlets they possess, not to mention those foreign companies that do not fall under maquiladora laws, including the infamous banana plantations and mining companies. The exemption for maquiladora zones is, of course, part of the broader capitulation of the Honduran state to foreign capital, but it is also worth noting that maquiladora workers are generally better paid than average working-class Hondurans, so the wage increase was still targeted to assist some of Honduras’ poorest people (Pine 2008, 135–91). Closely related were a series of reforms designed to reduce the overall cost of living for Honduras’ poor and working classes. Zelaya’s move towards ALBA, for instance, would allow him to make good on promises to improve conditions for Honduras’ poorest communities; communities upon whose support his political position was increasingly reliant. After all, Zelaya’s re-alignment towards ALBA included signing onto the PetroCaribe initiative – of which a majority of Central American and Caribbean countries are participants – under which Venezuela provides oil and gas to those countries at 40% of market price on a 25-year financing plan at just 1% interest. This decision had immediate benefits for all Hondurans, in terms of lower energy costs, and Zelaya used the USD100 million in Honduran bonds purchased by Venezuela to specifically lower energy rates for low-income families, to reduce interest rates on housing, to provide subsidies for single mothers, for equipment for small farmers and for meals in schools across the country (Mejía, Fernández, and Menjívar 2009, 22).3 With each new reform measure pursued, and with the social movement growing increasingly defiant and demanding, the internal tensions in the Liberal Party grew ever more difficult to reconcile. The acrimonious process by which Honduras joined ALBA was a particularly instructive example that may have been a critical turning point in Zelaya’s relationship with the oligarchy both outside and within his own party. In order to secure enough votes in Congress to approve the decision to join ALBA, Zelaya needed the support of the Right wing of the Liberal Party, which was not easily gained. Roberto Micheletti, who led the Right-wing faction and would later lead the coup d’etat, agreed to support the joining of ALBA on the condition that Zelaya endorse him for President in 2009 (“Wikileaks” 2011). Zelaya would go on to break this promise,
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choosing to endorse neither Micheletti nor his Vice-President Edwin Santos, whose loyalties were with the Right wing, and instead he endorsed a leader in the social movement who was running as an independent candidate. These events illustrate the mutually-reinforcing relationship between Zelaya’s concessions to the social movement and his tenuous position in his own party: each concession hastened and intensified his isolation from large sections of the party, and that isolation only encouraged him to tilt even further towards the social movement, until he found his position entirely dependent on the movement’s support. Nevertheless, Zelaya’s calculations should not lead us to downplay the significance of his concessions for poor and working people in Honduras. In legislation passed in 2007, Zelaya’s government took action to reduce the social and environmental consequences of deforestation by designating nearly 90% of Honduran territory to be protected against logging, as a direct result of protests and blockades by environmental organizations like the MAO and the Comite Ambientalista del Valle de Siria. Aware that the disastrous effects of logging on soil had had significant impact on the capacity of peasant farmers to produce enough food, these environmental activists were linked with campesino organizations and presented a significant enough force that Zelaya could not ignore them. Zelaya also resisted pressure from the oligarchy to privatize the state electrical company, Empresa Nacional de Energía Eléctrica, and the national telecommunications firm, Empresa Hondureña de Telecomunicaciones (“Honduras Politics” 2009). Zelaya’s protection of these companies from privatization would be impossible to understand without considering the intense pressure he faced from trade unions in the Bloque Popular, which launched wildcat and solidarity strikes on a number of occasions to maintain their opposition to the privatization push. One of Zelaya’s most significant actions was his enforcement of a moratorium on the granting of new mining concessions to foreign firms. Like many of Zelaya’s reformist positions, it had contradictory impulses; at once designed as a gesture to appease the social movements and, as per Tomás Andino’s analysis above, as a wedge against the dominant transnational capitalists in favor of his own fraction of the Honduran oligarchy. Nevertheless, it was a significant step, and it cannot be considered apart from the pressure Zelaya was facing from the CNRP in the context of social and environmental crises caused by mining operations, notable among them the San Martín mine in Valle de Siria, owned by the Canadian firm Goldcorp. Pedro Landa, of the anti-mining organization Centro Hondureño de Promoción para el Desarrollo Comunitario (Honduran Centre for the Promotion of Community Development, CEHPRODEC), remembers that the moratorium was first imposed in August 2004, when upwards of 4,000 anti-mining activists converged on Tegucigalpa in a seven-day Marcha por la Vida and then-President Maduro decreed a temporary suspension of approvals of new mining concessions, to take effect at the end of 2005 when his term would be over. Zelaya thus inherited the moratorium and had 30 days to uphold it; otherwise all outstanding concessions would have been granted. In the midst of major mobilizations around the country, CNRP-affiliated anti-mining groups like CEHPRODEC held meetings with Zelaya and convinced him to not only enforce Maduro’s decree but also add that there could be no consideration of any additional concessions until such time as a new set of laws governing mining in
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Honduras could be written and approved. The moratorium remained in effect until the coup (Moore 2012).4 In another important move, in May 2009 Zelaya applied a Presidential veto on a law, passed by the Honduran Congress a month earlier, which would have criminalized the use of the “morning after pill” at the request of the ultra-conservative Christian movement (“Congress in Honduras” 2009). The “morning after pill” has taken on particular significance in Honduran feminist circles because, as Andrea Nuila, a lawyer with the group Feministas en Resistencia, explained to me, “all forms of abortion are criminalized in Honduras”, making the pill an important exception to the rule of careful regulation of female bodies by the state (A. Nuila, interview, 4 May 2012). The proposed law was presented by a member of Zelaya’s Liberal Party, Martha Lorena Alvarado, and was enthusiastically endorsed by John Smeaton, the director of the US anti-abortion organization Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (Smeaton 2009). Under pressure from Honduran and international feminist groups, notably the Comité de América Latina y el Caribe para la Defensa de los Derechos de la Mujer (Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights, CLADEM), Zelaya vetoed the bill after it was passed in Congress. Before the issue of the “morning after pill” was raised, CLADEM and a number of other feminist organizations had been struggling to have women’s sexual health included in the curricula for Honduran education. Yet another example of the strength of the social movement can be found in the Valle del Aguán, where campesino communities organized massive re-occupations of land in defiance of the oligarchy, and demanded that Zelaya support their position. One group, Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguán (Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguan, MUCA), spent nearly a decade across the 1990s and 2000s building up its legal case around the land it occupied in defiance of the oligarch Miguel Facusse’s claim that he owned the land. MUCA consistently found that whenever its cases came close to bearing fruit, the prosecutors in question would be bribed and the cases would be thrown out. Nevertheless, MUCA grew in strength and continued to file lawsuits and stage demonstrations, including a dramatic 36-hour occupation by some 500 campesinos of a key stretch of highway in February 2006 just a few days after Manuel Zelaya took office (J. Rivas, interview, 3 May 2012). MUCA was able to reach an agreement with the Zelaya government to have the situation properly investigated and, unlike his predecessors, Zelaya appeared to be making good on his promises (Lackowski 2010). MUCA maintained its pressure – occupying one of Facussé’s African palm processing plants on 8 June 2009 – and as of 12 June 2009, MUCA had a second agreement with Zelaya to have a detailed legal report on MUCA’s claim to the land within 30 days. When I spoke to Joni Rivas, one of MUCA’s co-directors, he was quick to note that MUCA had been vocally and publicly demanding action from the Zelaya government, and had been getting results: on 19 June 2009, Zelaya visited the Aguán personally, to guarantee that the land would be returned to the campesinos. The oligarchy responded with an assassination attempt against Fabio Ochoa, a lawyer working on MUCA’s case, on 23 June 2009 and five days later, Zelaya was overthrown and the coup regime subsequently reversed the legal progress made under Zelaya though state violence including, for instance, the complete physical destruction of the community of Rigores (J. Rivas, interview, 3 May 2012).
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Notable for the purpose of this argument is that MUCA was able to gain Zelaya’s support not because Zelaya was generous but because MUCA was well-organized and connected with the social movement; given the nature of MUCA’s organizing against the Zelaya government, it is easy to recognize how this translated into resisting the coup d’etat after June 2009. Finally, the most significant initiative taken by Zelaya’s government was its decision to support the social movements’ call for striking a constituent assembly to consider rewriting the Honduran constitution along more equitable lines. Indeed, it is no coincidence that this was the project that ultimately provoked the full, militarized ire of the Honduran oligarchy. The push for constitutional reform came out of the determination, on the part of leading activists in the struggle, that the existing legal structures in Honduras severely restricted the possibility of more significant reform. That it was in a position to articulate and demand action on this level demonstrates how well-developed the movement was before June 2009. Recognizing that the 1982 constitution had facilitated the neoliberal pillaging of Honduras’ poor and working people, the social movement demanded, with increasing intensity in the 2000s, the right to develop a new constitution that would be a genuine social pact; a constitution written by the people for the people. Certainly some in the movement considered the emphasis on a constitution to be an inadequate long-term goal for transforming society, but many more felt it could be a significant step in creating a basis upon which broader transformation could be built. Jari Dixon was a lawyer who struggled against the corruption of the Honduran state apparatus for decades prior to the coup, who concluded that the constitution was invoked only when and how it suited the rich and powerful (J. Dixon, interview, 10 May 2012). Said Berta Cáceres of COPINH, “not one time are women mentioned in the constitution. How is that possible? How in a society where they talk of democracy and justice could women not even be mentioned?” (Cáceres 2009). Activists like Miriam Miranda, coordinator of the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (Fraternal Organization of Afro-Hondurans, OFRANEH), noted that “the poorest sectors of this country are included in the constitution only to go and vote”, and Jorge Lara Fernández, a professor of sociology at the University of San Pedro Sula, added that “poor Hondurans, women, Indigenous people, black Hondurans, people with different abilities, people with different sexual preferences are not included in our constitution” (Paley 2010, p. 62). Indeed, many Hondurans had argued, prior to the coup, that a new constitution would need to promote “a new economic model” that would build genuine social equality and promote respect for human dignity and social, environmental and cultural rights (Mejía, Fernández, and Menjívar 2009, 47–74). The Honduran social movement, then, long pre-dates the resistance that appeared briefly in North American newspapers in 2009 after the coup. In fact, it was the success of that social movement that actually pushed Honduran politics – especially under Manuel Zelaya – far enough into a project of reform that the far-Right and its international allies felt the need to effect the coup d’etat at all. Indeed, had the resistance to the coup been a spontaneous reaction to the sudden re-introduction of military rule, it would never have been able to maintain its integrity – indeed, its very existence – over the past five years of relentless violence and repression.
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After the coup: resistance, repression, and reorganization This article has said little about the post-coup resistance and the repression of that activism under the military government, as the purpose here was to emphasize the pre2009 development of the movement. I have written about those dynamics extensively elsewhere, but I will conclude with a brief discussion of the resistance that transformed after June 2009, and which has become the largest and best-organized social movement in Honduran history, with the possible exception of the general strikes of 1954 (Shipley 2012). Indeed, with well over half the country in more or less open defiance of the state, which it deems illegitimate, it is surprising that Honduras has not factored more prominently in research and discussion of the Latin American Left. In the six years since the coup, this is a movement that has lived through some of the most acrimonious debates and line struggles that the Left everywhere today grapples with: whether to take up arms or remain peaceful in defiance; whether to engage in electoral politics or reject it as a sham to buttress ruling class power; when to prioritize unity in the movement and when to denounce reactionary elements within it; how to maintain the integrity, indeed the existence, of the movement in the face of endless waves of violence, intimidation and manipulation. These are among the questions that any open movement of Left resistance will have to grapple with and the Honduran social movement has struggled through them, not always in ways that inspire confidence, but in a manner effective enough that the FNRP remains a central institution of contemporary Honduras and the space which disparate struggles across the country plug into for support. The dynamics of the past six years have been complicated and contradictory, but it is possible to identify five distinct phases since the coup. The initial period lasted some six months, in which the country was brought to a standstill by defiant mass protests in the streets in the lead-up to a sham election in November 2009. The elections were boycotted and progressive candidates withdrew their names while the regime and its allies like Canada and the United States proclaimed a successful transition back to democracy. Over the next year, recognizing that the initial energy of resistance was unsustainable, the movement entered a second phase, in which it tried to build its own capacities while appealing to the international community to isolate the military government and demand a reinstatement of democracy and rule of law in Honduras. Instead, the international Left largely ignored Honduras and the liberal international community – led by Canada in this case – worked diligently to normalize Honduras’ international position, supporting its reinstatement into organizations like the Organization of American States and participating in whitewashing exercises like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Kergin 2012, 42–5).5 This period culminated in the signing of the Cartagena Accord, brokered by Venezuela and Colombia, which ended any possibility of international pressure against Honduras while changing nothing about the situation for the Honduran movement except that it saw Manuel Zelaya return to the country from exile. His return initiated a third phase in the movement, as Zelaya sought to bring the movement under his direction with the creation of a political party to contest the 2013 elections. Acrimonious debate on this matter threatened to divide the movement irreparably, as more radical groups rejected this as a fool’s errand that would suck
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activist energy into a process that was under the control of the regime and could never produce victory. Zelaya, and the more privileged and liberal sections of the resistance, argued that street protests and strikes had proven insufficient to break the regime, and that the only way to re-start the reform process of the pre-coup era was to take back political power. Many in the movement recognized that the turn to an electoral strategy favored the relatively privileged within the movement and could lead to a co-optation of its energies by Zelaya and other opportunistic liberals. But they also recognized that the resistance was barely surviving, as its members were being killed or otherwise intimidated on a daily basis, they had no capacity for armed rebellion and had next-to-no support from outside Honduras (M. Borjas, interview, 19 February 2015). If the movement was to survive, mobilizing around a common strategy, perceived to be more winnable than open rebellion, might be the way forward. The debates concluded with the creation of the Partido de Libertad y Refundacíon (Party of Liberty and Refoundation, LIBRE), which gave an embattled movement a shot in the arm at a time that it desperately needed one, but proved to ultimately undermine the strength of the movement. The crowd that gathered to greet Zelaya upon his return marked the largest single gathering of Hondurans in one place in the country’s history, and organizers in the FNRP had to take seriously the fact that – while he did not emerge from the social movement itself – the coup had made him, by far, its most popular figure and, indeed, the most popular figure in the country. The movement had been fully mobilized for 18 months and its organizers and supporters were exhausted and demoralized; if Zelaya could rejuvenate the movement, it would make a world of difference. Nevertheless, opponents of the electoral strategy – a group that coalesced into the Espacio Refundacional (Refoundational Space) within the FNRP – rightly insisted that trying to win power in a political process controlled by the very people who had defied that process to seize power was destined to fail (T. Andino, interview, 17 February 2015). Over the course of 2012, predictably, the context for the debate became ever more complicated. Manuel Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, was quickly named LIBRE’s Presidential candidate, but there soon emerged five separate currents within the party, four of which came out of the traditional Liberal Party apparatus and drew not-unfounded criticism and scepticism from the Espacio Refundacional. The presence of traditional politicians at the helm of the social movement, they argued, would facilitate the co-opting of the movement into more easily manipulated reformist politics; a point that was particularly evident to me as I met the leaders of these currents in mid-2012. One current in particular, the Movimiento Resistencia Progresista (MRP), led by a successful and wealthy public notary, Rassel Tomé, was emblematic of that concern. Tomé asserted that MRP was the backbone of the movement but, in fact, his distance from it was reflected in the ideology he proudly espoused: “other countries have globalization”, he explained, “and we want to participate in globalization […] we are not into extreme positions like socialism, which failed, or capitalism, which also failed” (R. Tomé, interview, 9 May 2012). Tomé suggested that Hondurans want globalization despite the fact that, for over 15 years, the movement had historically positioned itself against those manifestations of imperialism and neoliberalism that are most often identified with “globalization”. That Tomé was out of touch with the social movement he was claiming to lead is a point that has been evident
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in nearly every interview I conducted in Honduras, and one that is now being vocally asserted in the social movement (B. Cáceres, interview, 18 February 2015). The other three Liberal Party-based currents offered much the same as MRP. The fifth current, however, represented something quite different. This fifth group was called the Fuerza de Refundacion Popular (FRP), and it represented those elements most closely connected to the original CNRP activist networks within the political party.6 The FRP’s presence in the LIBRE party is what most distinguished LIBRE from the traditional Liberal Party, and its members were typically longstanding activists within the movement who were convinced that the electoral process was the only option for the movement at this point. Juan Barahona, one of the most recognizable faces in the movement for two decades, began as a leader of the Bloque Popular and became one of the most prominent figures in the FRP. As he explained to me, “in the 1980s, the left could take power by force. But today, we take power through popular democracy” (J. Barahona, interview, 10 May2012). Despite the electoral strategy, he and other members of the FRP remained committed to projects for radical change. When I asked if a LIBRE victory would usher in a period of social democracy, Barahona replied by pounding his desk, exclaiming: “no more social democracy, no! We want socialism!” He went on to add that he understood why people were wary of the electoral process and the LIBRE party, but that it would do no good “to sit with our arms crossed, refusing to participate” when the party had gained so much momentum and looked to be the primary alternative to the oligarchy (J. Barahona, interview, 10 May 2012). Another prominent member of FRP, Gilberto Rios, acknowledged that LIBRE was not a revolutionary party, but insisted that it was democratic and progressive, and that this made it a critically important space for the Left to find some space to build upon the more radical politics that emanated from the social movement (G. Rios, interview, 8 May 2012).
From the electoral booth, back to the streets This phase of the resistance – and the debates that came with it – ended in November 2013 when the LIBRE party was defeated in elections held in a climate of state terror and deemed fraudulent even by liberal standards. An EU representative observing the elections described “countless inconsistencies”, ranging from missing tally sheets to names on voting lists of people who were dead (Weisbrot 2013). The new President, coup-supporter Juan Orlando Hernández, had been preparing for his ascension throughout Pepe Lobo’s term: Juan Orlando was President of Congress during that time, in which he carried out the “technical coup”, replacing four Supreme Court judges in a dramatic overnight operation, and stacking the Supreme Electoral Tribunal with his supporters. Juan Orlando received some US$11 million in campaign support from Washington and, as it would be later discovered, he further financed his campaign with money stolen from the public employees’ pension fund (Weisbrot 2013). Indeed, LIBRE polled better throughout the campaign period and Juan Orlando– suspiciously – only took the lead in the final poll before the election. Nevertheless, the energies poured into the electoral process had now, perhaps predictably, been stolen by the regime and used as a demonstration that the Honduran government had the support of its people. Following this defeat, the
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movement entered a fourth phase, one characterized by disintegration, fragmentation and frustration. The electoral strategy kept the movement united – albeit with its radical sections deeply sceptical of that approach – through what could have been an earlier moment of unraveling. Following the stolen elections, the doubt expressed by those radical sections was validated, and the divisions that had been brewing finally exploded. LIBRE lost much of the prestige it was building; it has been ineffectual in Congress, in part because many of its successful candidates were the career politicians from the Liberal Party, and also because they have been outvoted and sometimes even directly attacked in the halls of Congress (Trucchi 2014). At the same time, the party has been reluctant to mobilize direct action with campesinos protecting their land, workers being laid off or public institutions privatized, though it did support the “Torch Marches” in 2015, a wave of major demonstrations against the Juan Orlando government, after the discovery of the massive theft from the public employees’ pension fund. It seemed the energy that had fueled the hope for an Espacio Refundacional had petered out, and the Espacio itself is no longer a significant force in the movement. Many Hondurans, who had been mobilized after the coup, retreated back into private life and their immediate struggles to make ends meet and to avoid the daily violence that continued to plague the country. As Berta Cáceres described it, “we feel like we have drowned, the people have lost hope” (B. Cáceres, interview, 18 February 2015). While many of the smaller bodies under the umbrella of the FNRP continued to operate within their communities, the FNRP itself waned in its significance in Honduran society, and was beset with internal factionalism, highly personalized conflicts and a general loss of hope. Many in the movement felt that this phase had set in for the long haul. Others, however, believed that a new, fifth, phase was taking shape. The failure of the electoral strategy and the de-legitimization of LIBRE – and of many of the visible figures associated with it – opened space for a more frank discussion of what went wrong in 2011–2013 and how the movement could be rebuilt. Organizations like COPINH and OFRANEH, who had opposed the electoral strategy all along, were now positioned to lead the movement into a new chapter, wherein the struggle would move back to the streets, the campos, the mines, the sweatshops. Indeed, while the visibility of the broader social movement declined, many of the struggles that it brought together continued. None are more emblematic than the battle between a foreignfinanced hydroelectric company and the Lenca communities around Rio Blanco. Led by Berta Cáceres and COPINH, the affected communities were able to successfully block the company from building a dam on the Gualcarque River, using a variety of direct action strategies including physically intervening to stop construction. This success at Rio Blanco suggested that the return to direct community mobilization could bear fruit, and this appears to be the direction in which many Honduran activists are now headed (Watts 2015). This form of resistance, however, is as dangerous today as it has ever been. In early 2016, armed assassins associated with the hydroelectric company in question broke into the home of Berta Cáceres and killed her. Berta was one of the most prominent activists in Honduras, and even had an international reputation, having won a Goldman Environmental Award in 2015. Her assassination was a message, to any who would oppose the will of the oligarchy, that no one was untouchable. Nevertheless, the energy
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and will to resist the dictatorship that rules Honduras appears to be returning: after Berta’s assassination, thousands of Hondurans took the streets and asserted that “Berta did not die, she multiplied” (Spring 2016). In the meantime, the contours within the Honduran ruling class are changing in ways that will undoubtedly alter the terrain of the social struggle. Juan Orlando Hernández is widely understood to be consolidating a personal dictatorship around himself (V. Meza, interview, 18 February 2015). Unlike the previous golpista administration, Juan Orlando seeks to rule not on behalf of a ruling class coalition but for his own faction of the oligarchy; rather ironically, he successfully pushed through a reform to the constitution allowing him to run for re-election after his term ends (Wilkinson 2015). He has, thus, done precisely what the 2009 coup was purported to be blocking Manuel Zelaya from doing. He has, furthermore, created a special military police unit that, unlike the traditional military or the national police, would be accountable directly to him. His preparations for long-term rule over the country are quite apparent, and may put him on a collision course with some discontented members of the oligarchy and, indeed, with some factions of the armed forces (M.L. Borjas, interview, 19 February 2015). What this will mean for the resistance is unclear, but it is evident that the struggle is in a period of reconstitution and will, most certainly, look very different if/when Juan Orlando makes his move in 2017. The above analysis of the development of the Honduran social movement suggests that, contrary to the way these matters are often described in many mainstream and academic studies, organized movements of average working and poor people can and do make a significant impact on political dynamics. What appeared on the surface in 2009 to be a conflict between politicians was, in fact, much more: it was the playing out of much deeper-rooted confrontations between working people and the oligarchy. Honduran people were not simply being dragged into this drama by the charismatic populist Zelaya; Zelaya was, in many respects, being forced to adapt to a radical and mobilized population. That mobilization provoked a crisis within the traditional twoparty political system, as Zelaya’s Liberal Party became fraught with internal division and its Right wing joined with the rival National Party in re-asserting the rule of the oligarchy through a coup d’etat. But they, too, underestimated the social movement, which rose up in dramatic defiance. Seven years later, the Liberal Party is in turmoil and ceases to be a significant political factor, while the National Party has had to resort to electoral fraud and violence in order to maintain its rule. LIBRE, the new party of the Left, is the most popular party but cannot win an election so long as the National Party controls the electoral process. The people, meanwhile, have lost faith in the electoral system as a vehicle for change, and recognize in Juan Orlando Hernández all of the hallmarks of a dictator (Frank 2015). The future in Honduras is very uncertain but it will, without a doubt, continue to be significantly shaped by the dynamics in the social movement.
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Notes 1. The trend in scholarship on Honduras, especially in English but also in Spanish, is to write its history in a comparative analysis with the other republics of Central America. While quite sensible and natural on a number of levels, this often has the effect of discussion of Honduras tilting on the question of how and why Honduras avoided the violent guerrilla struggles and counter-revolutionary genocides that plagued its neighbors. This is, obviously, a worthwhile and instructive question, and it is taken up in all of the key regional analyses, including those of Edelberto Torres Rivas, James Dunkerley, Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Ralph Woodward, William Robinson and the writing team of John Booth, Christine Wade and Thomas Walker. Nevertheless, this approach can inadvertently lead to the conclusion that things were altogether not bad in Honduras, an assumption that can be sustained only if Honduras is viewed in relation to those other countries. Taken out of the context of the hyper-violence characteristic of much of Central America in the second half of the twentieth century, the violence in Honduras must still be considered severe and deeply traumatic and must be central to any examination of contemporary problems, especially as the historical trajectory in Honduras has seen a slide into violence that, today, is as bad or worse than in any of the other Central American countries. 2. Launched by the Venezuelan government in 2005, PetroCaribe offers member countries the option of purchasing Venezuelan oil for reduced prices and with long-term payment options at low interest rates. 3. It is worth noting, briefly, that accusations of corruption made by the oligarchy against the Zelaya government often hinge around his relationship with Venezuela. In particular, the claim is that Zelaya was using Venezuelan money to support particular communities that backed him politically, extending loans and subsidies selectively to his allies. It would not be altogether shocking if there were some truth in these claims: every government since the end of the military dictatorship has been accused of varying levels of petty corruption. That said, the Truth Commission struck by the coup regime to whitewash the coup in 2010 worked very hard to demonstrate that Zelaya’s government was corrupt – as part of a broader project to legitimate the coup – and could only come up with rumors and hearsay. As such, it would not be a farfetched supposition that while there was some level of petty corruption in Zelaya’s government, it was not at levels that would make it a significant factor for this analysis. 4. Zelaya’s government had, in fact, prepared a draft of a new mining code that included higher taxation of foreign mining companies, a ban on open-pit mining using toxic chemicals and stricter requirements regarding community consultations. The draft was presented in May 2009, the month before the coup, and was scheduled for debate in Congress in August 2009, which, of course, was scrapped by the coup government. The post-coup Lobo government brought forward its own new mining codes – with particular support and cooperation from Canadian authorities, who described Zelaya’s draft as “antimining” and Lobo’s as “pro-sustainable mining” – which failed to enshrine any of the reforms Zelaya’s draft had proposed, protecting instead the interests of foreign companies over Honduran workers and communities. 5. The Commission was created by the post-coup Lobo government and after a year of investigations it offered little more than bland recommendations for minor reform to Honduran governance structures, expending much energy on detailed speculation around the possibility of corruption in the Zelaya government, but refusing to place any direct responsibility for the violence and repression of the coup and its fallout on any of the individuals involved in actually perpetrating it. Canada contributed one member of the Commission, Michael Kergin, a former US ambassador who now works as a consultant for a law firm that represents Canadian mining companies, a conflict of interest that was of little concern to the Commission, which clearly looked to whitewash the coup from the start and refused to cooperate with local human rights organizations trying to do similar documentation of the situation in Honduras. Kergin’s reflections on the Commission are
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instructive insofaras they demonstrate the mental gymnastics the Commission had to perform to avoid seriously condemning the military regime. 6. I am distinguishing here between the activist groups that supported and participated in the LIBRE process, as opposed to those that remained outside of the LIBRE party.
Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor Dr. Tyler Shipley completed his PhD in Political Science at York University in 2013. He teaches History, Political Science, and Economics at Humber College, and is the author of the forthcoming Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras (2017).
References Acker, A. 1988. Honduras: The Making of a Banana Republic. Toronto: Between the Lines. Barahona, M. 2005. Honduras En El Siglo XX. Tegucigalpa: Editorial Guaymuras. Bethell, L., ed. 1986. The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Booth, J. A., C. J. Wade, and T. W. Walker. 2010. Understanding Central America: Global Forces, Rebellion, and Change. 5th ed. Boulder: Westview Press. Cáceres, B. 2009. Speech in Gracias, Lempira. November 1. http://hondurasresists.blogspot.ca/ 2009/11/berta-caceres-we-only-have-one-option.html “Congress in Honduras Prohibits Abortion Pill.” 2009. Catholic News Agency. April 7. http:// www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/congress_in_honduras_prohibits_abortion_pill/ Dunkerley, J. 1988. Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America. London: Verso. Frank, D. 2015. “Just Like Old Times in Central America.” Foreign Policy, March 9. Gordon, T., and J. R. Webber. 2011. “From Cartagena to Tegucigalpa: Imperialism and the Future of the Honduran Resistance.” The Bullet, No. 524. July 6. Accessed August 10 2011 http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/524.php “Honduras Politics: Mixed Report Card for Zelaya.” 2009. Economist Intelligence Unit. London. Kergin, M. 2012. “The Honduran Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2010-2011).” Optimum Online. 42 (3). September. http://www.optimumonline.ca/article.phtml?e=mesokurj&id=402 Lackowski, P. 2010.“A State of Siege in Northern Honduras: Land, Palm Oil and Media.” Upside Down World. November 30. http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/2800a-state-of-siege-in-northern-honduras-land-palm-oil-and-media Lapper, R. 1985. Honduras: State For Sale. London: Latin American Bureau. Lee, M., and A. Olson. 2009. “Honduran Coup Shows Business Elite Still In Charge.” Associated Press. August 5. http://article.wn.com/view/2009/08/06/Honduran_coup_shows_business_ elite_still_in_charge_jl/ Mejía, J. A., V. Fernández, and O. Menjívar. 2009. Aspectos Históricos, Conceptuales Y Sustanciales Sobre El Proceso Constityente En Honduras. Tegucigalpa: Movimiento Amplio por la Dignidad y la Justicia. Mejía, T. 2010. “Honduras: Disputed Truth Commission to Investigate Coup.” Inter Press Service. May 5. http://www.ipsnews.net/2010/05/honduras-disputed-truth-commission-to-investigatecoup/
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Moore, J. 2012. “Canada’s Subsidies to the Mining Industry Don’t Stop at Foreign Aid.” Mining Watch Canada. June. http://www.miningwatch.ca/sites/www.miningwatch.ca/files/Canada_ and_Honduras_mining_law-June%202012.pdf Paley, D. 2010. “Towards Responsible Global Journalism: Transnational Theory, Foreign Reportage, and the 2009 Coup D’Etat in Honduras.” Master of Journalism Thesis, Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of British Columbia. Peetz, P. 2009. “¿De Hacendado a Revolucionario? Mel Zelaya Y El Giro Hacia La Izquierda Del Gobierno Hondureño.” Iberoamericana. 9 (33): 181–186. Pine, A. 2008. Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras. Berkeley: University of California Press. “Repression Breeds Resistance in the Central American Country of Honduras.” 2012. The Costa Rica Star. August 19 http://news.co.cr/repression-breeds-resistance-in-the-central-americancountry-of-honduras/12845/ “Rocky First Year for Zelaya.” 2007. Central American Report. February 16. Shipley, T. 2012. “Left International Solidarity in Post-Coup Honduras.” Upside Down World. September 26. http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3881-leftinternational-solidarity-in-post-coup-honduras Smeaton, J. 2009. “Honduras Votes to Ban Abortion-Inducing Morning-After Pill.” Society For The Protection of Unborn Children. April 10 http://spuc-director.blogspot.ca/2009/04/hon duras-votes-to-ban-abortion-inducing.html Spring, K. 2016. “Berta Cáceres, the Murdered Honduran Activist, Did Not Die. She Multiplied.” Huffington Post, March 23. Trucchi, G. 2014. “Honduras Finds Itself on the Edge of a Social Explosion Again.” Vice. May 19. Watts, J. 2015. “Honduran Indigenous Rights Campaigner Wins Goldman Prize.” The Guardian. April 20. Weisbrot, M. 2013. “Why the World Should Care about Honduras’ Recent Election.” The Guardian. December 3. “Wikileaks: Micheletti Made Pact with Zelaya on ALBA.” 2011. Honduras Weekly. March 21. Wilkinson, T. 2015. “A Honduran Coup Comes Full Circle.” LA Times. April 27. “Zelaya: Progressive but Pro-Business.” 2006. Central American Report. March. Woodward Jr., R. 1999. Central America: A Nation Divided. New York: Oxford University Press.
List of Interviews Andino, Tomás. 9 May 2012. Andino, Tomás. 17 February 2015. Barahona, Juan. 10 May 2012. Borjas, Marcelino. 19 February 2015. Borjas, Maria Luisa, 19 February 2015. Cáceres, Berta, 18 February 2015. Dixon, Jari. 10 May 2012. Meza, Victor. 18 February 2015. Nuila, Andrea. 4 May 2012. Rios, Gilberto. 8 May 2012. Tomé, Rassel. 9 May 2012. Rivas, Joni. 3 May 2012.
