Honduras Is a Mirror for All of Latin America

[Judi Lynn]

AN INTERVIEW WITH
LUIS MÉNDEZ
TRANSLATION BY
HILARY GOODFRIEND

Honduras has been under a decade of dictatorship, its 2009 coup heralding a reactionary tide throughout Latin America. Internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity is desperately needed.

June 28 marks a grim milestone in Honduras: ten years of dictatorship, of tragedy and resistance, of protest and repression. The 2009 coup d’état that ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya carried uncanny echoes of the darkest days of US-backed war in Central America, and proved a harbinger of the coming right-wing counterrevolution in the region.

In the words of Dana Frank, “Honduras was the first domino which the United States pushed over to counteract the new governments in Latin America.” After the military ousted Zelaya, parliamentary coups unseated democratic progressive governments in Paraguay and Brazil, and reactionary ambassadors of capital have since risen to power in elections across the continent.

In 2018, Salvadoran-Brazilian researcher Aleksander Aguilar Antunes interviewed Honduran activist Luis Méndez for the e-book Golpe electoral y crisis política en Honduras (Electoral coup and political crisis in Honduras) from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Social Sciences Council – CLACSO). In his introduction, Aguilar Antunes writes:

Carmen Elena Villacorta ( . . . ) defined Honduras as Central America’s mirror. Nearly ten years after the episode that unleashed that coup process, that is, since the overthrow and expulsion from the country of president Manuel Zelaya, it is possible to think of Honduras as the mirror not just of Central America, but all of Latin America. The re-accommodation of reactionary political actors in different national contexts throughout the continent, which in practice meant broad and dangerous losses in terms of social policies and human rights, has been taking place in different forms: impeachment, electoral frauds, and coups.

. . .

More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/honduras-coup-manuel-zelaya-juan-orlando-hernandez