Selling Honduras Off to the Highest Bidder

[Judi Lynn]

May 16, 2011

Selling Honduras Off to the Highest Bidder
Repression and Backroom Deals in Honduras
By TANYA KERSSEN

Tear gas and rubber bullets were flying last Friday in the streets of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Nearly two years after the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected president, the new regime was knocking elbows with diplomats and billionaires at a widely publicized business convention unironically called (with no Spanish translation) “Honduras is Open for Business.” What Hondurans saw was their country being sold to the highest bidder.

This is nothing new, perhaps, in a “banana republic” long controlled by U.S. interests. Already by 1917 a few foreign companies, led by United Fruit (now Chiquita) owned a million acres of the best Honduran farmland. After 1954, the U.S. heavily built up the Honduran army—military aid exchanged for access to raw materials—ultimately leading to a military coup in 1963. By this time, the U.S. controlled 95 percent of all foreign investments, including infrastructure, key exports and the two largest banks. A boom in commercial agriculture, especially in cattle and cotton, led to waves of peasant expropriation from their lands.

With the lowest per capita income in Central America, but with a strong military, Honduras in the 80s was viewed as a “U.S. surrogate” in the region, providing a base for counter-insurgency operations. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) signed in 2005 further cemented U.S. economic influence.

But when president Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup in June 2009, with strong support from large landowners and business elites, something changed in Honduras. A national resistance movement emerged, embodied in the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, uniting virtually every sector of Honduran society, from teachers and students to peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, faith-based organizations and LGBT groups. The scale of the repression, little-publicized in the U.S., has also been intense, with regime leader Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa unleashing violence on unarmed pro-democracy protestors.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/kerssen05162011.html

Editorials:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x603023

[Bacchus39]

1. sounds like the event was successful n/t

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