As another country in Central and Latin America struggles to contain the fallout from the expansive ‘War on Drugs’, questions must be asked about how much this war really has to do with drugs
The history of the United States in Central America is littered with military interventions, political interference, and economic manipulation, and like many of the region’s republics, if not all, Honduras has suffered from all three at the hands of its self-appointed overseer to the north. The United States has, for more than a century, seen Central and South America as its backyard – where political, economic, and military experiments can be tried and improved, national power can be projected with ease, and economic benefits can be accrued. To say the least, the political consensus in Washington was that the region had to be utterly dominated. For Honduras, and most notably Colombia before and alongside it, the latest manifestation of U.S. policy and posturing over recent decades has assumed the guise of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’, a declaration that has drawn comparisons to the similarly meaningless and dangerous notion of the ‘War on Terror’.
But the U.S. has a long history in Honduras. At the start of the twentieth century, fruit corporations from the United States flooded into the impoverished country and turned it into a huge banana plantation, facilitated by what William Howard Taft called “dollar diplomacy”, the State Department policy of extending U.S. interests through private corporate activity. Honduras was the original ‘banana republic’. With commercial interests firmly rooted in a history of more than a century, the U.S.’s relentless hold on the country is less than surprising, with military invasions, occupations, and regime change – all trademarks of U.S. hegemony. In the 1980s, military instructors and advisers from the United States worked closely with the Honduran military, which carried out torture, kidnappings and extrajudicial killings, to defeat leftist opposition groups that threatened the collaborationist status quo in the country and the wider region (most notably Nicaragua). More recently, the U.S.’s role in the overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 was also bitterly criticised, and it is since that the situation in the country has worsened drastically to its present condition.
Honduras is today the murder capital of the world, with 86 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants, in a small country of just eight million people. On average, there is a violent death every 74 minutes. This state of affairs is not a result of arbitrary anarchy or a Honduran predisposition to chaos and violence, but must be seen within the framework of the U.S.’s role within the country and the ‘war on drugs’. The similarities to the Colombian experience over the last decade and more are remarkable, and so a broad understanding of what Colombia has been going through can be instructive.
Beginning in the late 1990s, the United States bankrolled a fresh campaign by the Colombian state to combat drug and guerrilla activity. U.S. collaboration and involvement in this project, known as Plan Colombia, was far-reaching and deep – it was, by all means, a joint U.S.-Colombian effort, with the former being the single largest non-Colombian stakeholder in the operation (politically, financially, and militarily). The battle against drugs was militarised: torture by Colombian military and security forces was widespread; homicides and violence drastically increased; and, perhaps most notoriously, Colombian state and security officials colluded on a huge scale with paramilitary groups that could only be described as “death squads”. All made possible through mass direct U.S. funding. One of the most curious trends of the campaign was the killing of those criticising or outright opposing the government and its policies, including human rights activists, community organisers, journalists, and even judges.
And now it seems to be Honduras’ turn. Since Manuel Zelaya was ousted as president in 2009, the campaign has intensified under the conveniently cooperative President Porfirio Lobo, with the most devastating consequences now beginning to materialise. In the four years before Lobo came to power in January 2010, one journalist was killed in the country. In just the last two years under him, 22 journalists have been killed. What do journalists have to do with the ‘war on drugs’? Or, as some have suggested is the more appropriate question, what does the ‘war on drugs’ have to do with drugs?
Many commentators suspect that, much like in the Colombian case, the supposed battle against drug activity has morphed into a wider campaign against opposition to the government. It is, essentially, a facade. Over the last few years much of Latin America has formed an integrationist, leftist front to the dismay of the United States. Perhaps this is just what it looks like when the U.S. tries to cling on – violent and brutal. In Honduras, even farmers who have tried to push for the redistribution of land have been targeted. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, and the UN Commission on Human Rights have all expressed concern about the regressive, repressive trends taking hold of the Honduran state under Lobo. The U.S. has remained bizarrely silent.
The current violence in Honduras must be seen within the wider framework of the regional ‘war on drugs’ sponsored by the United States, as well as historical U.S. intervention in the region. The consequences in Honduras could potentially eclipse those in Colombia and Mexico. It would seem that if drug activity and consumption were the key concerns of the United States and Lobo’s administration, the emphasis would be on a development-centred program that focused on socio-economic issues such as land reform, rather than military conflict, as many commentators and experts have insisted over the years. But, it is arguably becoming more urgent that we question the foundation underlying this assumption: is this really even about drugs?
Image from: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/11/world/americas/honduras-operation-anvil/index.html