Trump’s Interference Invalidates the Presidential Election in Honduras |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
An extraordinary catalog of US interference – amounting to an electoral coup – may have destroyed what was already a struggling democracy in Honduras. Trump has succeeded in closing the door to progressive government and in all likelihood his preferred neoliberal candidate – previously trailing in many opinion polls – will be declared president when the count eventually finishes.
While Washington’s aversion to foreign interference in its domestic elections verges on paranoia, the gross hypocrisy that runs through its foreign policy leaves it free of any compunction when meddling in other countries’ elections, especially in Latin America. Perhaps no country has greater recent experience of this than Honduras. Although most accounts of this meddling begin in 2009 with the ousting by army officers of its democratically elected president, Mel Zelaya, in truth, US dominance of the country has a much longer history, as I described at the time.
The US refused to designate Zelaya’s toppling as a “military coup” or to back international calls for his rapid return to office. Washington then backed all the post-coup governments, including those established by Juan Orlando Hernández when his National Party “won” two highly manipulated elections. Rampant corruption by him and his predecessors ensured that Honduras became a “narcostate.” Nevertheless, US administrations embraced Hernández as a prime ally in the war on drugs up until the point when he left office, was extradited and committed to 45 years in a US prison. Only the large majority won by the Libre party’s Xiomara Castro in the 2021 election, and the fact that Hernández had become a liability, temporarily frustrated Washington’s customary ability to get the Honduran president that best suited its interests.
Castro’s government only partly fulfilled its progressive aims, not least because of the continuing power wielded by Honduras’s often corrupt elite, a judicial and security system still strongly........