The Honduran Meltdown: Made in USA

In May 2005, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick appeared at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington to rally support for CAFTA, a free trade agreement between the US, the Central American countries, and the Dominican Republic.

In his remarks, Zoellick played up the notion that, for Central America and the DR, the agreement would “strengthen democracy through economic growth and open societies based on the rule of law”, while also entailing various perks for the gringos; a T-shirt reading “Made in Honduras”, he enthused, would likely contain over 60 percent US content.

Never mind that, 20-some years ago, the United States was nurturing things like Battalion 3-16, described by the Baltimore Sun as a “CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”.

Aside from the Honduran army and similarly reactionary forces, other Hondurans benefited from the arrangement, as well. Among them was Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, the country’s most famed drug lord and owner of the contra supply airline SETCO, dubbed the “CIA airline”.

In his multitasking heyday, Matta not only assisted in supplying the contras with their logistical needs, but also contributed to the flow of narcotics to the US.

American University anthropologist Adrienne Pine has referred to the period as one of “invisible genocide”, primarily against “unemployed young men who were marked as criminals by a society that had no room for them”.

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But the post-coup era has seen soaring homicide rates, with much of the violence committed by state security forces enjoying near-total impunity. And from the looks of it, these same forces are slated for more handouts from the imperial benefactor to the north.

In a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera America, historian Dana Frank writes that, despite Hernandez’s flagrant violations of the rule of law, his excessive militarization policies, and his repression of civil liberties, “the White House is aggressively pushing for a billion dollars in aid to Central America, much of which will flow to Honduras, including a tripling of military funding.”