U.S. policy in Honduras, particularly during the Obama
administration, is directly responsible for part of the immigration crisis now
gripping the U.S., argues Joseph Nevins.
By Joseph Nevins
Central American migrants –
particularly unaccompanied minors – are again crossing the U.S.-Mexico
boundary in large numbers.
Under the Obama administration In
2014, more than 68,000 unaccompanied Central American children were
apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico boundary. There were more than 60,000 in 2016.
The mainstream narrative often
reduces the causes of migration to factors unfolding in migrants’ home
countries. In reality, migration is often a manifestation of a profoundly
unequal and exploitative relationship between migrant-sending countries and
countries of destination. Understanding this is vital to making immigration
policy more effective and ethical.
Through my research on
immigration and border policing, I have
learned a lot about these dynamics. One example involves relations between
Honduras and the United States.
U.S. Roots of Honduran
Emigration
I first visited Honduras in 1987
to do research. As I walked around the city of Comayagua, many thought that I,
a white male with short hair in his early 20’s, was a U.S. soldier. This was
because hundreds of U.S. soldiers were stationed at the nearby Palmerola Air
Base at the time. Until shortly before my arrival, many of them would frequent
Comayagua, particularly its “red zone” of
female sex workers.
U.S. military presence in
Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely
linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first
became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in
“Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American
companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed
government officials at a dizzying pace.” As a result, the Caribbean coast
“became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of
Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans,
New York, and later Boston.”
By 1914, U.S. banana interests
owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land. These holdings grew
through the 1920s to such an extent that, as LaFeber asserts, Honduran peasants
“had no hope of access to their nation’s good soil.” Over a few decades, U.S.
capital also came to dominate the country’s banking and mining sectors, a
process facilitated by the weak state of Honduras’ domestic business sector.
This was coupled with direct U.S. political and military interventions to
protect U.S. interests in 1907 and 1911.
Such developments made Honduras’
ruling class dependent on Washington for support. A central component of this
ruling class was and remains the Honduran military. By the mid-1960s it had
become, in LaFeber’s words, the country’s “most developed political
institution,” – one that Washington played a key role in shaping.
The Reagan Era
This was especially the case
during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. At that time, U.S.
political and military policy was so influential that many referred to the
Central American country as the “U.S.S. Honduras” and
the Pentagon Republic.
As part of its effort to
overthrow the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua and “roll back” the region’s leftist movements,
the Reagan administration “temporarily” stationed several hundred U.S. soldiers
in Honduras. Moreover, it trained and sustained Nicaragua’s “contra” rebels on
Honduran soil, while greatly increasing military aid and arm sales to the
country.
The Reagan years also saw the
construction of numerous joint Honduran-U.S. military bases and installations.
Such moves greatly strengthened the militarization of Honduran society. In
turn, political repression rose. There
was a dramatic increase in
the number of political assassinations, “disappearances” and illegal
detentions.
The Reagan administration also
played a big role in restructuring the
Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms,
with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and
destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These
changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They
disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak
social safety net.
These decades of U.S. involvement
in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which
began to markedly increase in the 1990s.
In the post-Reagan era, Honduras
remained a country scarred by a heavy-handed military,
significant human rights abuses and pervasive poverty. Still,
liberalizing tendencies of successive governments and grassroots pressure
provided openings for democratic forces.
They contributed, for
example, to the election of Manuel Zelaya, a liberal reformist, as president in
2006. He led on progressive measures such as raising the minimum wage. He also
tried to organize a plebiscite to
allow for a constituent assembly to replace the country’s constitution, which
had been written during a military government. However, these efforts incurred
the ire of the country’s oligarchy, leading to his overthrow by
the military in June 2009.
Post-coup Honduras
The 2009 coup, more than any
other development, explains the increase in Honduran migration across the
southern U.S. border in the last few years. The Obama administration played an
important role in these developments. Although it officially decried Zelaya’s
ouster, it equivocated on
whether or not it constituted a coup, which would have required the U.S. to stop sending
most aid to the country.
Then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that
Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the
Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum
composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean.
Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election
aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.
Strong military ties between the
U.S. and Honduras persist: several hundred U.S. troops are stationed at Soto Cano Air Base (formerly
Palmerola) in the name of fighting the drug war and providing humanitarian aid.
Since the coup, writes historian
Dana Frank, “a series of corrupt administrations has unleashed open criminal
control of Honduras, from top to bottom of the government.”
Organized crime, drug traffickers
and the country’s police heavily overlap. Impunity reigns in a country
with frequent politically-motivated
killings. It is the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists,
according to Global Witness, an
international nongovernmental organization.
Although its once sky-high murder
rate has declined,
the continuing exodus of
many youth demonstrates that violent gangs still plague urban neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, post-coup governments
have intensified an increasingly unregulated, “free market” form of capitalism
that makes life unworkable for
many. Government spending on health and education, for example, has declined in
Honduras. Meanwhile, the country’s poverty rate has risen markedly. These
contribute to the growing pressures that push many people to
migrate, raising ethical questions about the responsibility of the United
States toward those now fleeing from the ravages U.S. policy has helped to
produce.
Joseph Nevins received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University
of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include socioterritorial
boundaries and mobility, violence and inequality, and political ecology; he has
conducted research in East Timor, Mexico and the United States-Mexico border
region.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/06/21/how-us-policy-in-honduras-set-the-stage-for-todays-mass-migration/