On 28 November, the Libertad y Refundación (Libre) presidential candidate, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, became the country’s first female president. It is 12 years since Xiomara’s husband, José Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown through US scheming with the armed forces in a 2009 coup. With a 70% turnout, she gained almost 54% of the total vote. Castro was one of only two women candidates confronting 12 men. The candidate for the National Party and mayor of Tegucigalpa, Nasry Asfura, won 34% of the vote, despite breaching election campaign rules. Honduran prosecutors accuse him of diverting more than a million dollars in public funds for personal use. The Liberal Party candidate Yani Rosenthal –after serving three years in a US prison for laundering drug money – received 9.2%. The other candidates collected 1% of the vote between them. Alvaro Michaels reports.
There were 13 candidates for the presidency, but imperialism could not – given their criminal record – openly stand behind Castro’s chief opponents. Also up for election were 128 deputies of the unicameral National Congress, 298 mayors and 20 deputies to the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) were chosen. 3.2 million voters of the 5.1 registered, turned out, leaving 1.9 million abstentions. This was in a large increase in the turnout compared to 2013 and 2017, when abstentions were 2.2 million and 2.5 million voters, respectively. In a process far more rigorous than in the US, poll workers verified IDs, scanned fingerprints and took photographs of voters. This was managed despite the National Election Council being deprived of the funds it needed to operate effectively.
Consequences of the 2009 coup
After the US-approved 2009 coup, Hilary Clinton publicly admitted that she worked to prevent Zelaya returning to office, despite a global chorus then demanding his reinstatement. Since then, US prosecutors have smeared him with accusations of links to bribes from drug cartels.
In 2014, after five years of right-wing rule, Mark Weisbrot reported in ALJ News ‘The homicide rate in Honduras, already the highest in the world, increased by 50% from 2008 to 2011; political repression, the murder of opposition political candidates, peasant organizers and LGBT activists increased and continue to this day. Femicides skyrocketed. The violence and insecurity were exacerbated by a generalised institutional collapse. Drug-related violence has worsened amid allegations of rampant corruption in Honduras’ police and government. While the gangs are responsible for much of the violence, Honduran security forces have engaged in a wave of killings and other human rights crimes with impunity.’ There were still 38 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 after a post-coup peak of 83 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2011.
To add insult to disaster, in 2017 the outgoing president, Juan Orlando Hernández, added another term to his 2013 tenure, provoking huge protests and allegations of fraud, with armed repression against demonstrators. The European Union Election Observation Mission was compelled to condemn the deaths of ‘at least 22 people’ (actually 30) during these mobilisations, and reiterated its call to the Honduran ‘authorities’ to respect the right to peaceful demonstration.
The fate of the country has been in the grip of US imperialism and its criminal associates. In one of the most violent countries in Latin America, in the weeks leading up to the election, at least 31 candidates, activists and their relatives were murdered in crimes related to the political campaign, with a total of 60 cases of political violence this year
Embarrassed by the life sentence imposed on Hernández’s brother, Juan Antonio ‘Tony’ Hernández, in New York in March for drug trafficking, and accusations by the prosecutors that the president financed his political rise with drug money, the US State Department is torn between protecting US business interests and condemning the corruption, drug trafficking, and violence that increase migration. President Hernández will, most probably, be indicted in a New York federal court, as a co-author in the crime of drug trafficking, either the day after he leaves office in January, or possibly even earlier, as US imperialism covers up its tracks.
In the election campaign Castro stressed that the country could not last four more years with the same Hernández party in power. ‘We have to stop these caravans of Hondurans who leave our country en masse due to insecurity, lack of opportunities, lack of work, lack of health, lack of education,’ she said. 740,000 Hondurans live abroad, and remittances provide some 20% of the Gross National Income. New Honduran electoral ID cards were issued to fewer than 13,000 Hondurans in the United States, about which the imperialist press raised not a sound, and 300,000 Honduran IDs at home lay unclaimed.
The ‘development’ that creates misery
Battered by the coronavirus pandemic, the country was devastated in 2020 by two powerful hurricanes, destroying 6,000 homes and seriously damaging 85,000 more. Many remain unhoused today. Officially, unemployment was 10.9% in 2020, the economy contracted 9% and is weighed down with $13 billion of debt. Internal displacement compounds the monthly emigration. The murder of Berta Cáceres in 2016 was only one in a series of ongoing assassinations and disappearances of activists trying to defend communities from mining, energy, and tourism projects. According to the UN, some 250,000 people have had to leave their homes due to what is labelled ‘gang violence’. So far in 2021, the Honduran homicide rate is 13% higher than in 2020.
In 2019, before the impact of both the Covid-19 pandemic and the devastating hurricanes Eta and Iota, 14% of the Honduran population lived on less than $1.90 per day. Almost half of the population of 9,600,000 – some 4,700,000 people – lived on less than $5.50 per day, the second highest poverty rate in Latin America after Haiti. Another third of the population was near-poor and vulnerable to falling back into poverty, while the size of Honduras’ middle class (18 %) was among the smallest in the region (compared to an average ‘middle class’ of 41%). This economic disaster means that Honduras drives out the most migrants of all central American states towards the US.
With the pandemic and hurricanes, poverty in Honduras increased to 70% in 2020, up 10.7 percentage points from 59.3% in 2019. Already by September this year over 32,000 Honduran migrants had been deported from the US, including more than 2,600 children. This disaster creates no shame in Washington; instead, it is the mixed economy and social programs of neighbour Nicaragua that are regarded as ‘an extraordinary and unusual threat’ to U.S. security, while Hondurans living near the Nicaraguan border were crossing to get vaccinated.
The interests of US imperialism spread across the coffee and banana exporting industries to the ‘maquiladora’, the tax-free manufacturing activities of foreign investors, which in Honduras are the third largest in Latin America. Honduras’s neoliberal economy and lax regulation allow the exploitation of the country’s natural resources at any cost to local communities. The country’s ports and frontier posts are said to be perfect for organised crime avoiding weak inspection systems to allow drugs through and equipment for processing them to be imported.
Immediate consequences of the election
Honduras is among the fifteen countries in the world that still recognise Taiwan as the Republic of China. In September, Castro proposed immediate opening of diplomatic and commercial relations with mainland China, but then backed down because of Honduras’ economic dependence on the US. Honduras depends on trade with the US and is so weak that it could not survive a month of economic isolation from Washington. However, the daily needs of the majority are the urgent issue and without a clear socialist plan, future prospects are quite bleak; the objective social reality will force ongoing conflict with US imperialism.
In a conservative country and where abortion is completely prohibited, Xiomara Castro has proposed that it be decriminalised in cases of rape, danger to the mother’s life or malformations. Castro is open to a citizen consultation on gender identity and equality. If Castro can fight to act in solidarity with the neighbouring countries where the fight for socialism is most advanced – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – her indisputable election, already a slap in the face for US imperialism, will prove to be a critical turning point.
