Honduras was awash with political history when Xiomara Ciudad Sarmiento Zerala, a member from the Liberty and Refoundation Party, was inaugurated in January. Castro become the Central American country’s first female president, winning 51.12 percent of the vote, compared to her closest rival Nasry Asfura who garnered 36.93 of votes in November’s election. She has promised to convene the National Constituent Assembly to revise the constitution.
“For us to have the first female president in Honduras means 67 years of struggle (since it was in 1952) that us women fought for the right to be citizens — for the right to vote and the right to be voted for,” Wendy Cruz, member of the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina?, told Truthout.
Castro campaigned for an agenda that would empower Honduran women with lower incomes. This is a sector that has been among the most affected by a country that has been governed by neoliberal policies over the past 12 years. Castro’s task of governing will be particularly hard given the high levels of corruption and ties to the drug trade that have been linked to Honduras’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández.
In recent years, the Tegucigalpa-based forces have not responded well to losing power. One week before Castro’s inauguration, a fist fight broke out in Honduras National Congress as a faction of rebel lawmakers from Castro’s leftist Liberty and Refoundation Party (also commonly known as the Libre Party) proposed Jorge Cálix as head of Congress in opposition to Castro’s nominee. The problem with Cálix, according to Castro’s supporters, was that he represents the continued power and immunity of President Hernández, who critics have accused of running a narco-state.
These allegations are supported with a lot of evidence. For example, in 2018, Tony Hernández, a former Honduran congressman and former President Hernández’s brother, was arrested in MiamiLast year, it was sentenced to life in prison in the United States for trafficking “multi-ton loads of cocaine” into the country. In that case, former President Hernández and former President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa were named as co-conspirators, with the prosecutors accusing Hernández of using the Honduran military and police to transport and guard cocaine shipments.
Both former presidents are accused of criminal acts that extend to other actors in Honduras. In Tony Hernández’s case, one of the most important witness testimonies was that of Alexander Ardón, a former mayor of El Paraíso, Honduras, and the supposed head of the AA Brothers Cartel. Currently in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking, Ardón admitted to having been involved in the murder of 56 people, as well as torture, money laundering and arms trafficking. He also confessed to trafficking between 30 and 40 tons of cocaine with Tony Hernández from 2010 until the former congressman’s arrest in Miami in November 2018.
If this evidence weren’t enough to prove the point, Ardón also testified that he was at a meeting with Tony Hernández and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel. According to Ardón, El Chapo gave Tony Hernández $1 million in cash to be given to his brother for his upcoming presidential campaign in 2013, which he won against Xiomara Castro by a narrow margin. In return, Tony promised that the future president of Honduras would protect the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug trafficking routes.
Despite Juan Orlando Hernández’s flagrant connections to the drug trade, his support from U.S. presidents never wavered during his tenure in office. That support finally ended last week, when Honduran officials arrested Hernández after the U.S. issued an extradition request. According to CBS News, “U.S. officials confirmed the extradition request,” however, they did not “give any information on the nature of the accusations against Hernández.”
“Honduran politicians have long known that Washington will grant them immunity from prosecution (with some notable exceptions, including the former president’s corrupt brother). This culture has created a Honduran [political]Class [that hasn’t] cared about the fate of their people,” independent Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who has reported on Honduras in his recent book, Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs?, told Truthout. “It usually doesn’t matter whether a Democrat or Republican occupies the White House, except perhaps the latter is more honest about his country’s real intentions towards Honduras: bribe [officials] with huge amounts of cash in the hope that they’ll do U.S. bidding.”
Noting that Honduras is a key transit point for drug trafficking in Central America, Loewenstein said that the country has “long been a U.S. client state” and that “this only worsened after the 2009 coup.”
During that year, when President Jose Manuel Zelaya, Xiomara Castro’s husband, was ousted by a U.S.-backed coupMost of the world, including the United Nations, considered his overthrow illegal and unconstitutional. With most countries in the area withdrawing their ambassadors from the EU, the Obama administration was almost the only one that kept its official representatives in Tegucigalpa. According to a, while the White House publicly stated that no military takeover was taking place, a leaked WikiLeaks memo, a U.S. embassy cable stated: “[T]here is no doubt that the military, supreme court and national congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup.”
After the coup, the UN General Assembly passed a resolutionAppelling for Zelaya’s reinstatement as president and the completion of his presidential term. Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary-of-state at the time, instead pushed for an election by the Honduran dictatorship. As she later revealed in the first edition of her autobiography, “we strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.” This startling admission from Clinton would later be redacted from the paperback edition of her book.
Zelaya’s biggest crime in office, of course, was that he refused to be a subservient Honduran president to the interest of local big business and the United States. For starters, Zelaya increased the minimum wage by 60 percent and placed stricter regulations on the mining sectors, which included a ban on open-pit mining — moves that were certainly noticed by U.S. corporations. Speaking to the Harvard Political Review, Rodolfo Pastor, the minister of culture under President Zelaya, noted: “American mining companies complained they were not being treated as they wanted.”
Further angering the U.S., Zelaya exercised sovereignty and entered Honduras into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), an intergovernmental trade and political group founded by late leaders Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. Despite warnings from other countries, Zelaya joined this organization in 2008. Interview with The Grayzone, Zelaya said that John Negroponte, deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush, told him that “if you sign the ALBA, you are going to have problems with the U.S.” Less than a year after joining, Zelaya was overthrown in a coup, and a few months after that, Honduras’s new leaders withdrew the country from the ALBA.
Years later, when I was questioned about Honduras, Clinton defended the Obama administration’s position in not declaring that a coup had taken place against Zelaya, although she did concede that the new regime “undercut their argument by spiriting him out of the country in his pajamas where they sent, you know, the military to, you know, take him out of his bed and get him out of the country.”
The above history is important to recall because, once Zelaya was unconstitutionally removed from office, it was large sectors of Honduran women who fought against Washington’s men in Tegucigalpa. Recently, I wrote in NACLA, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, an associate professor at Pitzer College who specializes in Honduran politics, noted, “The resistance to the 2009 coup was led by women, who filled the ranks of most social movements. Women have stood on the frontlines to defend ancestral lands and rivers, their rights as educators and healthcare workers, the right to live free of violence, and the right to make choices about their bodies and identities.”
Alongside these women, Castro repeatedly joined thousands of Hondurans on the streets calling for her husband’s return. The National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) was the name of the movement, which eventually became the basis of the Libre Party. It also helped Castro campaign for the presidency in 2013/2017. Winning the presidency after her third attempt last year, Castro during her campaign called for family planning, access to contraception such as the “morning after pill” and promised to decriminalize abortion in cases of rape. According to Portillo Villeda, Castro also committed herself to the “recognition of women’s work, support for domestic violence shelters for survivors, and the creation of centers for the reinsertion of deported women into society.”
Wendy Cruz, an organizer, believes that the path to ending the narcostate will be difficult. In her view, the crisis of the national congress was “due to the bribing of 18 congresspersons of the leftist Liberty and Refoundation party creating a crisis of governability in the national congress and one of legitimacy.” Eventually, Castro, who had expelled the rebel deputies from her party, reinstated them as it was agreed that the head of Congress would be Luis Redondo from the Savior Party, whom Castro and her supporters backed. With the crisis resolved by February 8, Cruz said the country’s elites had already begun to destabilize Castro’s government as it “will be in the eye of the hurricane by the country’s most powerful groups” — in summary, those who have ruled Honduras in recent years with U.S. backing will most likely continue to try and destabilize Castro’s government.
Gilberto Ríos Grillo, a national leader of the Castro’s Libre Party, told Truthout that any political and/or economic crisis in Honduras cannot really be separated from Honduras’s historical ties to the United States. In his view, due to the reactionary vision of the previous leaders during the last 12 years, Hondurans have been left with an “almost failed state penetrated by drug trafficking, organized crime and of course backed by the United States.”
Ríos Grillo believes that external bodies like the United Nations could play a role in tackling corruption or drug trafficking and would be supported by President Castro. However, such moves “would affect the interests of the National Party and Liberal Party” (Honduras’s main political parties) because “they have predominantly been linked to the issues of drug trafficking, organized crime and the groups which plundered public works during the 12 years and seven months of a dictatorship which we have managed to overcome during November’s election.” According to Loewenstein, President Castro “offers a possibility of change, but only if she negotiates a real shift in the relationship with her country’s imperial master.”
As Latin American leaders flew into Tegucigalpa for Castro’s inauguration, and her victory was loudly welcomed by the region’s leftist governments in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris also arrived in Honduras’s capital. While Harris eventually met with Castro and said she was “impressed with the passion with which [Castro] talked about her priority on addressing and combating corruption,” Harris’s comments should be viewed with skepticism given Washington’s close ties to former President Hernández. In fact, only this month has the State Department publicly conceded that the Biden administration placed Hernández on a classified list of officials suspected of corruption and undermining democracy.
For now, it appears Castro has survived her first crisis; however, others are likely to surface, given she plans to move forward with her proposal to revoke numerous laws which grant impunity to officials and legislators established during the Hernández administration. Castro will need to negotiate with the National Party to elect a Supreme Court chief justice as well as a new attorney general. Castro, like Zelaya may, at some point. even question how the United States uses its military presenceHonduras is able to trade and make political alliances with other countries within the country. Because of these constraints, Castro should be seen as a victory for average Hondurans with their fragile democracy and every day Castro is in power.
