Why Hondurans Set Fire to the U.S. Embassy
Ten years after a US-backed coup handed Honduras over to big business, the
country is rising up. A leader of deposed ex-President Manuel Zelayas party
explained to The Grayzone whats behind the protest wave.
By Alex Rubinstein
The streets of Honduras were filled with protesters and clouds of tear gas
as the month of June began. The national police fanned out through the
country to crush the protests with heavy-handed tactics at the direction of
President Juan Orlando Hernández, the US-supported neoliberal leader who won
power in elections marred by documented fraud.
As the protests peaked, fire was set to the doors of the American embassy in
the capital, Tegucigalpa, in an apparent act of retribution against the
United States for its role in propping up the widely unpopular president. It
was a striking act of symbolic resistance that recalled events in 1988 when
Hondurans burned the vehicles of US embassy personnel to protest
Washingtons dirty war against Nicaragua. The fortifications installed
around the US embassy after that incident may have prevented the latest
burning from consuming the rest of the building.
Ten years ago, the democratically elected center-left Honduran President,
Manuel Zelaya, was whisked away from his residence in a brazen military raid
supported by the United States. Zelayas removal cleared the path for the
interests of big business across the country. As the ten year anniversary of
the U.S.-supported coup approaches, Hondurans are rising up against
neoliberal austerity measures imposed by Washington and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) that have triggered mass public sector layoffs and
raised prices on basic goods.
Following mass demonstrations on Friday, May 31 which were especially
sizable in the capital of Tegucigalpa, The Grayzone spoke by phone with
Gerardo Torres, Secretary of International Affairs for the Liberty and
Refoundation Party (LIBRE), the new party to which Zelaya now belongs.
Yesterday and today we declared a national strike, which was successful.
The estimate is that there were over a hundred demonstrations in Honduras in
the last two days, he said.
Throughout the month of May, healthcare workers and educators organized
widespread demonstrations against decrees by Hernández that put their
livelihoods in immediate jeopardy. Honduran citizens have followed these
public sector workers into the streets, infuriated by IMF loans that
required the government increase electricity costs while slashing healthcare
and education. Anger about the abuses of foreign mining companies was also a
major factor in the protest grievances.
Honduran people went out in the streets. And not only the health workers
and teachers, but all of the workers and political organizations and people
that are fighting against mining companies; the people that are fighting for
land and for the defense of their territories; for their natural resources
we all got together with the teachers and the health workers, LIBREs
Torres explained. We have been in a struggle for more than a month. In
recent days, the demonstrations have increased.
In early May, the IMF and the Honduran government reached a staff-level
agreement on a USD $311 million loan, meaning that it still requires
approval from the IMF executive board. According to the IMF, the agreement
reforms the public electricity company, Empresa Nacional de Energía
Eléctrica (ENEE). Energy distribution was privatized in 2014 and sold off to
the highest bidder: the Honduran Commercial Finance Bank. It isnt clear
what reforms the new IMF deal will bring on.
Torres said that the IMF is demanding that education and healthcare the
public system should pass to the control of intervention boards that would
oversee and manage a change to the system. The problem is that those
agreements that the government has already signed allowed them to fire many
people.
A key objective of the economic program is to maintain macroeconomic
stability, while enacting economic and institutional reforms to foster
inclusive growth. Policies will build on previous achievements to strengthen
the policy and institutional framework, the IMF says.
By touting its previous achievements in Honduras, the IMF has signaled how
out of tune it is with the countrys poor and working class, who have
experienced no such gains in their own livelihoods. While the IMFs
macroeconomic agenda has fostered economic growth, it has been anything
but inclusive; restricted to countrys elite and the drug cartels they work
with. The conditions faced by the poor majority have only worsened.
Negotiating a Neoliberal Nightmare
While the measures that would be imposed under the new IMF deal remain
unknown, the effects of neoliberalization on Hondurass health and education
sectors have brought economic punishment down on the countrys workers.
The governments spending on education, nearly a third of the overall budget
one year after the coup, has been slashed to less than a fifth, according to
Honduran economist Hugo Noé Pino. Healthcare spending was slashed by 20
percent, meanwhile.
Honduras has the highest poverty rate in the continental Americas: 65.7%, by
the last available official government count in 2016, with a staggering
42.5% of the entire population classified as living in extreme poverty.
The harshest austerity measures were meted out by Juan Orlando Hernandez, a
US-friendly politicians whose election in 2013 violated the Honduran
constitution and was marred by fraud. Following his first year in office,
Hernández oversaw the layoffs of 2,000 employees of the government-owned
electric company known as ENEE. Thousands of sanitation and public
telecommunications workers have also been let go under the government of
Hernández.
Meanwhile, repeated fuel price hikes since 2012 have devastated the working
class and sparked popular resentment.
Corruption has gone hand-in-hand with the austerity measures, and are now
described simply as Hondurass Operating System. Massive protests in 2015
followed the revelation that Hernándezs allies had gutted the Honduran
Institute for Social Security (IHSS), stealing healthcare funds to finance
electoral campaign and defrauding the public through selling wildly
overpriced placebos to the IHSS for vast profits.
While protesters demanded an anti-corruption body akin to the then-robust
United Nations-led CICIG in neighboring Guatemala, they were instead handed
a toothless anti-fraud mission called MACCIH.
Anthropologist Adrienne Pine, an Associate Professor at American University
who has lived in Honduras and written extensively on the country, told The
Grayzone: The MACCIH is frankly something of a laughingstock in Honduras,
seen as a technocratic tool of the U.S. government to legitimize the
Hernández regime. It has pursued mostly small, safe targets in cases that do
little to threaten the current structures of power put in place through the
U.S.-supported 2009 coup. But when the biggest example of corruption
imaginablethe blatant theft of the countrys electionhappened on its watch
in 2017, the MACCIH remained silent. And when you have violently
anti-democratic policies like IMF-led efforts to privatize healthcare and
education overriding the will of the Honduran people, that doesnt fit
within the MACCIHs narrow definition of corruption either.
Back in 2014, a paper from the Washington-based Center for Economic and
Policy Research (CEPR) think tank on a $189 million IMF loan noted that the
poor would bear the brunt of the economic shock therapy. Five years later,
with this prediction confirmed, Hernández is pushing for more austerity in
the name of reform.
As Torres explained, We have seen in the Hernández government how he has
destroyed all of our public services with the intention to transfer those
public services to private hands in a neoliberal strategy that we all know
very well: you destroy the public institutions and then you say that there
is no other way to save it unless its passed to the private sector.
Designing a de facto Dictatorship
When he was elected president of Honduras in 2009, Manuel Zelaya struck a
less radical posture than those of most of his progressive counterparts
across Latin America. He brought a minimum wage to the country and
instituted some much-needed economic reforms. It was only after he signed
cooperation agreements with Venezuela through the PetroCaribe economic
alliance and began to work towards resolutions on land disputes between poor
and indigenous populations that multinational corporations, government
insiders and U.S.-backed civil society groups began to turn up the heat.
In the lead-up to the coup, CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) were pumping $50 million a year into Honduras for democracy
promotion. US-backed civil society groups like the Honduran Council of
Private Enterprise and the Center for International Private Enterprise
focused on driving a wedge between big business and Zelaya.
By June 2009, the coup plotters were confident enough to make their move.
The night before they came for Zelaya, they met with a high-ranking U.S.
military official. The Defense Department was reportedly concerned that
Zelayas presidency gave Venezuelas then-President Hugo Chavez increasing
influence in the country.
In an early morning military operation, Zelaya was rushed onto a plane bound
for Costa Rica. The plane took a pit stop at the U.S.s Soto Cano air base,
known locally as Palmerola. Zelaya described the operation as a kidnapping
upon landing in Costa Rica.
A little less than a month later, the U.S. embassy in Honduras sent a cable
to the White House and a handful of higher-ups in the State Department,
including Secretary Hillary Clinton. The cable, later released by WikiLeaks,
declared that there was no doubt that the raid constituted an illegal and
unconstitutional coup.
Describing the coup as a kidnapping, the embassy concluded that none of
the arguments of regime change supporters had any substantive validity
under the Honduran constitution. Some are outright false.
While Clintons State Department did not openly endorse the coup, it
immediately defied the Organization of American States (OAS) unanimous
demand that Zelaya immediately return as president. Clinton unilaterally
circumvented the OAS, informally recognizing the business-friendly Roberto
Micheletti as the democratically-elected president to be.
Then-Secretary of State Clinton with coup leader Porfirio Lobo in 2010
The negotiations took place at gunpoint once Zelaya returned to Honduras,
and were designed to legitimize the coup behind democratic guise. Clintons
long-time confidante, Lanny Davis, meanwhile, was hired by the Honduran
chapter of the Business Council of Latin America to serve as the primary
Beltway lobbyist for the coup. Together with Clinton, Davis consolidated a
regime change narrative within Washington circles..
The post-coup elections in 2009, marked by fraud and violence, brought
Porfirio Pepe Lobo Sosa into the office of presidency. Lobo Sosa, like the
current president, was also adjacent to drug trafficking. His son, Fabio
Lobo, is serving a 24-year sentence in the United States for conspiring to
import cocaine into the country. Meanwhile, Lobo Sosas wife, Rosa Elena de
Lobo, is facing up to 80 years in jail for having pilfered nearly USD
$500,000 from public coffers during his time in office. Ironically, Lobo
Sosa is now calling for his successor, Juan Orlando Hernández, to resign.
Due to austerity measures ushered in by his government and enforced through
the militarization of the country, Juan Orlando Hernández quickly became a
hated figure among average Hondurans. Nevertheless, he announced he would
run for reelection, which is explicitly banned by the constitution. Whats
more, Hernandezs party was banking its success on a series of dirty tricks.
During the run-up to the 2017 election, The Economist obtained a two-hour
recording from a participant in a training session held by Hernándezs
National Party for party activists manning voting tables at polling
stations on election day.
By The Economists count, the sessions leader advocates at least five
vote-rigging methods, couching them in banal terms such as strategy and
technique, the magazine reported.
Hernandezs opponent, Salvador Nasralla was five points ahead with most of
the vote counted. But suddenly, election authorities stopped releasing
results. Almost two days later, when the vote counting resumed, Nasrallas
lead had vanished, allowing Hernández to squeak by with a tiny margin of
victory.
Election observers from the Organization for American States noted the lack
of guarantees and transparency, as well as the accumulation of
irregularities, mistakes and systemic problems that have surrounded this
electoral process during the pre-electoral phase, election day, and the
post-electoral phase, that as a corollary do not allow the Mission to have
certainty about the results.
From an on-the-ground perspective, Torres recounted the timeline of the
vote-counting process to The Grayzone:
When they had 80 percent of the votes counted we were winning by five
points, and so they shut down the system 466 times until they started
winning again. We went to the streets and we were on the streets for a month
fighting. Then the U.S. ambassador, Heidi Fulton, appeared before the nation
saying that the United States recognized Hernández as the winner. Then they
provided the support of the United States military forces and they continued
giving money to Hernández.
Repressing the resistance
Protests against the apparent fraud exploded around the country. The Office
of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that at least 22
civilians were killed in the protests, and at least 16 of them were gunned
down by police. 1,300 people were thrown in jail, many in military detention
centers.
We have two compañeros who are still in prison a year and a half after they
were accused of burning the front door of a hotel in Tegucigalpa, Torres
noted. Edwin Espinal and Raúl Álvarez await trial in the military-run,
U.S.-style maximum security La Tolva prison 16 months later.
Above: Edwin Espinal, a veteran human rights defender held by the Hernandez
government
Edwin Espinal and Raúl Álvarez are political prisoners. Edwins case in
particular is particularly egregious, as he is a well-known human rights
defender who has been threatened, arbitrarily detained, and even tortured
dozens of times by Honduran security forces since the coup for his work
organizing for social justice causes, Pine told The Grayzone. His
criminalization for standing up for human rights and democracy stands in
stark contrast to the impunity enjoyed by the violent state security forces
and death squads. The fact that Edwin has protective measures issued by the
Inter-American Human Rights Court meant nothing to the U.S.-supported
regime, which has placed him and Raúl in pre-trial detention in a prison
designed for the most violent organized criminals, putting both of their
lives at serious risk. Edwin has lost nearly fifty pounds and has been
refused necessary medical care.
Honduran prisons are notoriously inhumane due to poor sanitation,
overcrowding, and insufficient nutritional standards. The countrys prison
system is designed to accommodate 10,600 inmates, but held nearly twice that
in 2018.
The UN High Commissioners Office cites credible and consistent
testimonies that those detained during the 2017 electoral crisis were
subjected to abuse in some cases constituting torture and that the police
had fired upon protesters indiscriminately. The same report also found that
during the protests, at least six journalists were attacked by police and
broadcasts that criticized the government were shut down.
Attacks on the press during the post-electoral crisis were just the tip of
the iceberg, however. Even the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights of
Honduras, itself a part of the government, documented the murder of 25
journalists between 2014 and 2016 while Hernández was in power. In 2016 the
body has also registered 16 violent attacks on lawyers, in which 13 were
killed.
Since the 2009 coup, according to the human rights organization, Cattrachas,
more than 300 LGTTBI (Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Travesti, Bisexual and Intersex)
Hondurans have been killed. The numbers represent a dramatic increase in
violent hate crimes against the community compared with previous periods.
The below graph shows the number of violent murders against members of the
LGTTBI community per year (in red), compared with the number of cases for
which anyone has been charged with the crime.
And in 2019 alone, prior to the current uprising, the UN Human Rights Office
received 51 complaints about murders of human rights defenders in the
country, of which at least 21 have been verified by UN Human Rights Office.
A new criminal code to go into effect in November, published on May 10, lays
bare the prosecutorial priorities of the Honduran government. For one, the
law reduces the maximum prison sentence for aggravated drug trafficking by
five years. Some new penalties introduced under the law bring prison
sentences as low as four years for trafficking crimes. It also opens up the
door for traffickers who cooperate with investigations by authorities.
The legal reforms were proposed in the wake of the 2018 arrest of President
Hernándezs brother, Juan Antonio Hernández, in Miami on drug trafficking
charges. According to LIBREs Torres, the US has looked the other way while
the Hernández government has done the bidding of powerful local drug
cartels.
The United States knew in 2017 that Juan Orlando Hernandez was being
investigated over participation with drug cartels and still supported him
and allowed him to forcefully stay in power with an illegal reelection, and
without winning, he said.
Meanwhile, journalists and publishers face fresh risks under the new
criminal code, including crimes against honor and crimes against
morality. Defamation and slander may now come with increased prison
sentences, including more than a year behind bars.
Prison sentences for women who get abortions and doctors who perform them
will increase to up to six and 10 years, respectively.
Participation in illicit meetings and protests will also be punishable by
up to four years in prison, while protest leaders and financiers could face
15 years.
These draconian measures have been met with virtual silence from Washington
and little coverage in a corporate US media that served as a megaphone for
Nicaraguas right-wing opposition when it launched a coup in April 2018.
The hypocrisy is really obvious, Torres said. Nicaragua is just beside
Honduras. We are neighbors. And its interesting how in two countries that
are so close, that are in the same region, the U.S. has such different
policies.
The contradiction in treatment between Honduras and Nicaragua can be easily
understood in terms of US military interests. Just over fifty miles from
Tegucigalpa is the Palmerola Soto Cano military base, where the US army has
free reign. Hernández supported US threats against Venezuela, acceded to
Trumps call to move the Honduran Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in
violation of international law, and agreed to surges in US troops in the
countrys Northern Territory to have more control in the Caribbean and
Central America.
Even though the DEA has some investigation into Hernández it is clear that
the U.S. Southern Command wants Hernández in power, Torres explained.
The United States gave more than $80 million in military assistance to the
Hernández government between 2013 and 2017, according to the Security
Assistance Monitor.
Taking Aim at the Fountainhead
On Friday, tires were set on fire in the doorway of the U.S. embassy in
Tegucigalpa. The Associated Press reported that it wasnt clear why those
who set fire to tires at the embassys doorstep werent stopped by guards
outside the embassy.
While the uprising has been largely peaceful, acts of property destruction
have occurred. Protest leader and head of the Honduran Medical Association
Dr. Suyapa Figueroa, blamed infiltrators from this countrys dictatorial
government.
In response to a tweet Friday by reporter Gilda Silvestrucci noting that 20
minutes has passed since a group of masked individuals set and there were no
police officers or firefighters to be seen, the Black Fraternal Organization
of Honduras, OFRANEH, responded what a coincidence [that this would happen
in] one of the most surveilled and protected locations in Honduras
Earlier in the day, a National Police truck was seen transporting tires.
Pine, the anthropologist at American University, noted, The similarities
between false flag operation that took place at the Tegucigalpa Marriott and
the embassy fire are obvious. In the former instance, police
uncharacteristically disappeared from the scene. Numerous infiltrators from
the National Party were clearly identified and recorded inciting and
participating in violence; yet only longtime human rights defenders were
criminalized and are being held as political prisoners.
Pine continued: The same thing happened last Fridayyou see the
unprecedented absence of security forces at the U.S. embassy just before a
group of heavily disguised individuals set the fire, and the immediate
targeting of social justice activists, despite a similar lack of evidence
that they played any role in the vandalism.
While the fire very well may have been an act of sabotage by an agent
provocateur, it could have also been the result of the pent-up anger of the
Honduran population at the United States for its role in the coup and
dictatorship that followed. Bystanders at the scene chanted, American
trash, American trash as the fire burned.
Since May 24, the embassy had issued three security alerts and two
demonstration alerts.
It also issued a statement condemning the arson, which read: The acts of
violence that took place today at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras are
unacceptable. We are working closely with the Honduran authorities to bring
those responsible to justice.
A week later, protest leaders refused a government offer for dialogue,
vowing only to engage in talks once the governments IMF-backed scheme
targeting the healthcare and education sectors are withdrawn.
A few days later, activists announced that social security workers from the
IHSS would join the struggle.
Though the protests were triggered by the latest round of privatization
measures, Hondurans are also lashing out against the outside powers that
imposed these policies. The action against the U.S. embassy is something
that has been, historically, prepared in the mind of the people, Torres
told The Grayzone. People are aware that the United States embassy is the
only reason why Juan Orlando Hernández is still the president of Honduras.
Alex Rubinstein
Alexander Rubinstein
