The 2009 U.S.-backed coup ruptured Honduras’s three-decade-old democracy. Despite a media blockade, militarization, and deadly repression, the people took to the streets—and refused to back down.
As Honduras deals with the fallout of political scandals surrounding President Juan Orlando Hernández, ousted former president Manuel Zelaya and his LIBRE party mount their opposition.
A decade later, U.S. resolve to greenlight and back the coup d'état in Honduras remains one of the most shameful U.S. foreign policy decisions in recent memory.
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.
In its treatments of Guatemalan and Honduran violence and instability, NPR's This American Life edited out essential lines of inquiry and concealed the countries' relevance for U.S. listeners: It is as if Washington’s continuous support of the Central American countries' brutal security forces had never happened.
“Charter cities” have been promoted for years by Paul Romer, a University of Chicago–trained economist teaching at New York University. But the applicability of Romer’s radical vision in Honduras always depended on the enthusiasm of the authoritarian, post-coup government of Porfirio Lobo.
José Cárdenas has concealed the financial benefits he’s accrued from lobbying precisely because they make his espoused views both easily predictable and utterly dismissible. Fortunately for him, mainstream news organizations like The Miami Herald, Foreign Policy, and NPR accommodate this charade.
