Joint US-Honduras military field training exercise Ahuas Tara II (May 22, 1984) | Public Domain
As US border policy grows ever more restrictive, the Biden-Harris administration’s “Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America” strategy is commendable for aiming to tackle the inhumane conditions in Central America that are causing so many people in the region to uproot in the first place. The strategy notes that “it is in the national security interest of the United States to promote a democratic, prosperous, and secure Central America.” However, it fails to acknowledge the historical and ongoing role of the US’s own foreign policies in fueling instability, inequality, and migration south of the border.
In the case of Honduras, decades of militarized support for corrupt regimes, coupled with deeply flawed economic policies, continue to contribute to the very displacement of Hondurans that the “Root Causes” strategy aims to ameliorate. In its current form, the strategy is not a change of course but a continued policy of prioritizing US geostrategic and corporate interests over the welfare of the Honduran population.
In the late 1800s, post-independence Honduras was in debt to foreign financiers after the construction of a new railway system. US investors rushed in to consolidate this debt in order to broker a 99-year contract that led to the privatization of railroads and much of the silver mining around Tegucigalpa. Meanwhile, the United Fruit company teamed up with railway owners to purchase as much land as possible in order to monopolize banana production.
By 1914, the US-owned banana industry controlled close to one million acres of fertile land and dominated Honduran politics and economy (a situation facilitated by multiple US military interventions in 1907 and 1911 to quell local uprisings). Decades of corruption, exploitation, and environmental degradation followed.
The historic General Strike of 1954 led to an end of the “Banana Wars” and a period of reprieve for ordinary Hondurans, but social conditions plummeted again in the 1980s, when the United States used the region as a staging ground for its Cold War doctrine and brutal Contra wars. By 1985, only seven countries worldwide were receiving more military and economic aid from the US than Honduras. The US continued to train, arm, and fund the military—including units like the notorious Battalion 3-16 death squad—throughout the decade. (As the director of the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged in the mid-1990s, the US’s role in Honduras was an example of “how not to do things.”)
Meanwhile, economic “reforms” continued to favor the interests of US corporations and a tiny Honduran elite, culminating with the US-led Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) in 2006. The trade deal would soon usher in a new wave of “free” trade zones, deregulations, privatizations, and state retrenchment, while devastating Honduran agriculture and sending poverty and inequality soaring.
But in the meantime, popular resistance had propelled left-of-center Manuel Zelaya to the presidency, and his administration quickly set about increasing the minimum wage, expanding the social safety net, and strengthening labor protections. In addition, Zelaya declared a moratorium on the granting of new concessions to foreign companies and sought to transition the Soto Cano Air Base from a US military base into a commercial airport (an “impetuous” decision, according to the then-US ambassador to Honduras).
In 2009, a group of senior Honduran military leaders led a coup d’état that saw Zelaya detained at Soto Cano before being forcibly exiled to Costa Rica. Whistleblower evidence later emerged that certain US military personnel may have provided tacit support to the military coup. The official line from Washington was that “the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras.” Not long after uttering those words, though, then-president Barack Obama formally recognized the coup regime of President Porfirio Lobo, even as most of Latin America continued to denounce him as illegitimate and push for Zelaya’s reinstatement.
Indeed, the Obama administration not only quickly embraced Lobo but presided over a dramatic increase in aid to the new de facto government. Within the first 12 months of the Lobo regime, US aid to Honduras more than doubled, helping to underwrite not only the crisis of democracy but the re-militarization of the country.
By 2010, a “state of terror” had descended on Honduras.
Nevertheless, in 2011, President Obama welcomed President Lobo to Washington, touting his “commitment to democracy.”
Lobo was succeeded in 2014 by his protégé Juan Orlando Hernández, and the crisis only deepened. Hernández’s administration dramatically curtailed social spending while looting the national health service and forging ties with kleptocrats and organized crime, leading to a surge in poverty, inequality, and unemployment.
At the same time, Hernández remade Honduras into a darling of US financiers. (Back in 2010, a leaked State Department cable had noted that Hernández, then the president of the National Congress, “has consistently supported US interests.” In addition to a bonanza of concessions to foreign mining and agribusiness interests, the capstone of his reforms centered on selling Honduran lands to foreign investors to establish their own autonomous, for-profit fiefdoms—dubbed “start-up cities.” (As a memorable New York Times headline put it, “Who Wants to Buy Honduras?”)
The return of kleptocracy and corporate colonialism sparked nationwide protests that were met with brutality by the de facto government. Political repression skyrocketed, death squads re-emerged, and the murder rate soared to become the world’s highest. Nevertheless, US assistance to the Hernández regime, including to its notoriously unaccountable security services, persisted.
Unsurprisingly, more and more Hondurans began to flee the country’s post-coup descent into authoritarianism, with migration levels quadrupling between 2009 and 2014.
By 2015, the arrival of tens of thousands of unaccompanied Honduran children at the US border had produced a political crisis for the Obama administration. But instead of rethinking its relations with Hernández, the United States invited him to the White House, where Obama and then-vice president Joe Biden met with him to discuss deepening collaboration on migration deterrence.
This spirit of collaboration and US support continued even after the violence and impunity roiling Honduras began capturing global headlines, especially following the 2016 murder of celebrated Honduran environmental defender Berta Cáceres by a hit squad with links to the security services and extractive industries.The same approach carried over into the Trump administration. When Hernández was fraudulently reelected in 2017, senior US officials rushed to congratulate him once again, even as Hondurans took to the streets to protest the continued erosion of their democracy. Yet another brutal crackdown by US-trained security forces followed.
Toward the end of the Trump administration, the United States did temporarily suspend aid to the Hernández regime—not in reaction to the human rights abuses but as a way to pressure Hernández to take even harsher migration deterrence measures. Hernández complied, and the US resumed working alongside the Honduran military to deter Hondurans from fleeing their country.
As the International Crisis Group reported at the time, “Washington’s insistence on measures to curb emigration increasingly drowns out all other messages.”
The succession of clampdowns proved counterproductive. Border “encounters” surged from less than 25,000 in 2009 to 100,000 in 2014—and then to 260,000 in 2019, as Hondurans sought asylum at the US border in direct proportion to the militarization and corporate colonialism of their country.
Soon after the Biden-Harris administration entered office in 2021, the State Department barred Hernández’s predecessor, Lobo, as well as his wife, from entry to the United States, due to their involvement in “significant corruption.” And the moment Hernández himself left office in early 2022, the Department of Justice indicted him; three years later, a US court convicted the former president of drug trafficking and sentenced him to 45 years in prison.
This remarkable turn of events has been framed as a triumph of US justice on behalf of the Honduran people—but almost always in ways that studiously overlook how the United States enabled Hernández’s reign of terror in the first place.
Since then, in addition to curbing access to asylum, the Biden-Harris administration has pursued plans to support the Honduran military to deploy hundreds of additional troops to the country’s northern border.
Moreover, since the inauguration of Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, to the presidency in early 2022, various US interests appear to be once again working against the progressive economic agenda supported by an overwhelming majority of Hondurans. Castro had made repealing the start-up cities law (known as Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE) a centerpiece of her presidential campaign. In 2022, the Honduran Congress voted unanimously to scrub the law. “Never again will we carry the stereotype of the banana republic,” Castro told the UN General Assembly several months later.
In response, US and other foreign corporations are suing the Castro government (under CAFTA’s corporate-friendly investor-state dispute mechanisms—provisions Biden campaigned on excluding from future trade deals) to the tune of more than $12 billion, or roughly one-third of the country’s entire GDP, unless Castro relents. The US government could intervene on behalf of Honduras, but instead, US officials continue to criticize Castro for pursuing policies that threaten “investor confidence.”
If this White House or the next one is serious about tackling the root causes of migration from countries like Honduras, it must address US government and corporate complicity in the cycles of militarization, economic dispossession, and human rights abuses that fuel displacement. Honduran voters, who have endured poverty, corruption, exploitation, and violence, have proposed a solution: a progressive agenda. Whether migration slows in result depends in no small part on whether the United States will support Hondurans to reclaim their country’s economy—and their right to democracy.
