The question isn’t whether Honduras can escape its role as Washington’s most obedient client state; it’s whether the United States will finally accept a sovereign partner rather than a subordinate platform for regional intervention.

In the last couple of years, new political forces emerged to push back against this very subordination, bringing the same old questions to the front pages once more:

But the list of questions does not stop here:

From United Fruit to Narco-Presidencies

Let’s be clear about what “banana republic” meant. This wasn’t some cutesy marketing term; it was a brutally accurate description of economic colonialism. American fruit giants like United Fruit and Standard Fruit didn’t just operate in Honduras. They were Honduras.

Political elections? Well, maybe more like employee performance reviews.

These corporations wielded the kind of political power that made democracy look like a suggestion box. Whenever those corporate interests faced threats, US intervention arrived with the reliability of a Swiss watch. Here’s the thing though: this pattern never disappeared.

It just evolved into something darker. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got US-backed governments tangled up in the very drug trade they’re supposedly fighting.

Juan Orlando Hernández -or JOH, as he’s known- personifies this absurdity. Washington embraced this former Honduran president as a dependable ally for years. Then his brother Tony got convicted in a New York federal court for drug trafficking.

The evidence trail included ledgers maintained by Nery Orlando López, a trafficker whose conveniently timed prison murder silenced someone with direct lines to the presidential palace.

But here’s where it gets truly surreal:

Donald Trump recently announced on Truth Social that he’d pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, while simultaneously backing Nasry Asfura, former mayor of Tegucigalpa and National Party candidate for presidential elections.

Hernández himself had been labeled a co-conspirator in US court documents.

This scene begs the question: if the very governments the US is propping up so they can wage a “war on drugs”, are themselves allegedly involved to the brim in drug trafficking operations, how do you expect anyone with two communicating brain cells to believe in such a fraud?

2009: The Coup That Pulled Back the Curtain

The military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 was more than a usual Latin America-style power grab; it was actually a revealing incident that exposed the US hypocrisy, as everybody sees it, putting economic interest over democracy in an instant, once its bottom line is even mildly threatened.

Zelaya’s crime? He started pivoting Honduras away from neoliberal orthodoxy and toward the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA), the alternative integration framework led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

This represented a fundamental challenge to the Free Trade Area of the Americas........

© New Eastern Outlook