It must be made clear at the outset that the following discussion is not a defense of continuismo, the continuation of Daniel Ortega in power in Nicaragua. That question is not for any outside force or group to decide. It is solely the prerogative of the Nicaraguan people. My concern here is with the merits of the question of “intervention” my own government, the United States. What might happen if we try to resolve the current crisis in Nicaragua with such an intervention, instead of leaving the question where it rightly belongs—with the Nicaraguan people and not the U.S. government or, for that matter, the Salvadoran gangs or the regional drug traffickers or even international “solidarity” groups? This article shows what has happened to a neighboring country, Honduras, in which the United States has intervened and which it has virtually dominated for many years.
In the midst of ongoing turmoil and violence in Nicaragua in recent weeks there have been veiled and not-so-veiled calls for the United States to intervene in Nicaragua, and a series of actions that seem to portend or pave the way for such an intervention. Articles in such media outlets as the Havana Times have made the argument that there are times when the situation in a country becomes so chaotic and violent that the international community should intervene, and asks whether upholding the sovereignty of a government is more important than ending the killing of its citizens.
In the abstract, the question may be a good one. In a particular, practical situation it becomes problematic and raises crucial questions. Who should intervene? Under what authority? What does intervention mean? It could mean anything from diplomatic or economic sanctions to military invasion. How long would “intervention” last? What is the endgame, the withdrawal criterion, the measure of “success?” Regime change? What would be the likely result, the aftermath of intervention for regime change? Who would rule? Perhaps most tellingly, do the people of the affected country really want intervention, and what kind? Or is this the call of a vocal minority that has the ear of powerful governments and international organizations?
U.S. Interventions and Regime Change?
The history of United States interventions with the purpose of regime change in foreign countries since the 1950s has been marked by a trail of disaster and misery.
The costs to the country’s people and institutions of intervention in Vietnam and in Iraq are still felt today. The U.S.-aided ouster of the first democratically elected president of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeh (1953) gave that country decades of the Shah’s rule that was so brutal it spurred the Islamic revolution of the late 1970s and hatred for the U.S.
The CIA-engineered overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala (1954) led to decades of military rule and repression and genocide against the Mayan majority. The overthrow (again with CIA and criminal help) of the first president of an independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in the 1960s generated such political turmoil that the country has never fully recovered. This was a particularly dramatic U.S. contribution to the long history of European colonial interventions in Africa. In Guyana (South America) in 1964, the CIA used the American Institute of Free Labor Development (affiliated with the CIA) that was allegedly educating Guyanese about labor rights, to foment violent demonstrations, strikes, and unrest to topple the government of Cheddi Jagan. This intervention (aided also by the British government, the former colonial master) deliberately played on the racial divisions between Blacks and East Indians and left a legacy of racial conflict and animosity that affected life in Guyana for decades.
When U.S. copper companies wanted the elimination of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, the CIA and agencies of the U.S. government obliged and actively supported the military coup that overthrew Allende in 1973, producing seventeen years of brutal military dictatorship and thousands of deaths and “disappearances.” Then there was the “destabilization” of Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government in Jamaica in the 1970s—I was there at the time—an intervention desired by U.S. aluminum companies and carried out not as a military exercise but as an economic starvation of the country by international financial agencies (IMF, World Bank) largely controlled by Washington. The result was ongoing political conflict, poverty, and a weakening of Jamaican political and social institutions against the onslaught of gang violence and the drug traffickers who arrived with a vengeance beginning in the 1980s.
The Sad History of United States Intervention in Nicaragua
Historically, politically, economically, militarily, even culturally, calls for intervention in Latin America have almost always involved the United States, the major power in the region. In the case of Nicaragua, the United States has hardly stopped intervening in some form since the 1850s, when William Walker and a band of Californians intervened in local political conflict to gain power. Walker proclaimed English the official language, Protestantism the official religion, and slavery legal in Nicaragua—all contrary to the country’s culture and mores. By 1900, the United States was intervening militarily to collect taxes and levies, and by the 1920s, the Marines were in the hills of the Segovias in northern Nicaragua fighting against Augusto Sandino and his “army of free men,” symbols of Nicaraguan nationalism and sovereignty. As it withdrew the Marines, the U.S. trained the Nicaraguan National Guard and its leader, Anastasio Somoza Garcia to rule the country in faithful (and brutal) alliance with U.S. Administrations—seven Administrations from 1934 to 1979. When the Nicaraguan people finally overthrew the Somoza dictatorship, the United States did not allow them to pursue their own sovereign destiny without interference.
Enter the familiar history of the so-called Contra War (1981-1990) in which the U.S. so blatantly and destructively intervened in revolutionary Nicaragua that the World Court accused the U.S. of violating a variety of international laws, and demanded that Nicaragua be compensated for some of the damage (the many lives lost and maimed were beyond compensation). This ten-year war left an estimated 30,000 Nicaraguans dead, many more physically and/or psychologically injured for life, hampered the revolutionary government’s attempts to extend basic services to the rural areas, and cost the country millions in lost resources.
Even after the Reagan Administration and the Contras seemed to have succeeded in effecting “regime change” with the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, Washington continued to intervene directly and indirectly in Nicaraguan affairs in desperate efforts to ensure that Daniel Ortega and the Frente Sandinista did not return to power in succeeding elections. Since the 1990s, U.S. agencies and private nonprofit organizations affiliated with the U.S. government (AID, NED, some missionary groups, others) have multiplied in Nicaragua to “promote democratic principles” and “development,” always with the aim of making Nicaragua more docile to U.S. investment and values and more willing to abandon the dream of sovereignty nourished by Sandino in the 1920s and by the 1979 revolution, or more willing to imagine that U.S. intervention can help regain that dream.
Intervention in Honduras to Intervene in Nicaragua
Aside from the hardship and destruction this history of U.S. intervention has caused the Nicaraguan people, there is another trail of damage and destruction—“collateral damage”— such intervention has done to Nicaragua’s neighbors, especially Honduras. With the departure of Somoza and the triumph of the revolution in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration played on the concern of some Hondurans to pressure the Honduran government and military to allow a large U.S. military presence in Honduras on the (false) pretext that Nicaragua would try to invade Honduras and spread communist rule throughout the region. The real fear was not that Nicaragua would invade, but that the revolution—the ability of the people of a small, poor country to overthrow a dictator supported by the U.S.—would become an inspiration to others in the region.
Putting aside the long history of U.S. dominance of Honduras during the golden age of the “banana republic” in the early 1900s, U.S. intervention in that country reached a new level in the 1980s, in conjunction with the U.S.-supported war against Nicaragua. From Honduras, the U.S. trained, equipped, and shielded the Contras, a military force of Nicaraguans who sought to eliminate the revolutionary government in their home country. The training camps and secure bases in southern Honduras from which the Contras launched campaigns of death and destruction into Nicaragua displaced an estimated ten thousand rural Honduras in their own country. To get around a Congressional ban and U.S. laws, U.S. agents also engaged in illegal arms-for-drugs trade with regional gangs and drug traffickers. The drugs were sold in U.S. communities where they created more “collateral damage” in people’s lives. The money from drug sales bought more arms for the Contras and also helped supply the gangs with arms. This pattern helped create the conditions of gang and drug trafficking, police corruption, and armed violence that has made Honduras today one of the deadliest countries in the world. A member of the Honduran Congress in the mid-1980s said that every Honduran knew that the country was run by the U.S. embassy, not the Honduran government. Even Honduran military officers quietly expressed concern for the sovereignty of the country.
Honduras: Economic Intervention Backed by Lethal Force
In another sense, Honduras offers a stark example of what may be in store should the U.S., the Salvadoran gangs, and others succeed in wresting control of the current situation in Nicaragua. The real lesson here concerns something apparently more mundane than gangs, drug traffickers, and arms sales—the model of economic
development that the United States has imposed on Honduras since the early 1990s. “Imposed” is the proper description. In 1981, Honduras elected its first civilian government in almost thirty years. A group of wealthy Honduran entrepreneurs and military officials sent the new president (Roberto Suazo Cordova) and his still weak government a memo (the so-called Facussé Memorandum) outlining a development plan that would emphasize foreign export agribusiness, greatly expand extractive industry in mining, logging, and tourism, and privatize important public assets and services. This group, the Association for the Progress of Honduras (APROH), effectively dominated Suazo’s government. At the same time, the U.S. Embassy sent Suazo a memorandum outlining almost exactly the same development plan as that proposed by APROH, and warned that this was the only way forward for Honduras. This became popularly and derisively known as “Reaganomics for Honduras.”
The wars and conflicts in Central America during the 1980s postponed implementation of the plan, but it was finally and fully adopted by the Honduran government in 1990 in a series of unpopular laws and policies known (again derisively) as el paquetazo (the package). This was imposed on a population that was already suffering from hunger at the end of a long decade of regional conflict. “The package” elicited much criticism from popular organizations and from the Catholic bishops of Honduras who warned that it would result in displacement of self-reliant rural communities, more poverty and unemployment, and increased crime, gang activity, and violence in the cities—exactly what has occurred over the past few decades, and what we see in Honduras today.
Successive Honduran governments, always in consultation with the United States, continued to implement this model of development throughout the 1990s and 2000s. By the time Manual Zelaya became president in 2006, hundreds of thousands of acres of Honduran land were under contract to foreign companies and Honduran entrepreneurs for mining and logging concessions that had the effect of increasing conflict between the companies and many rural communities that were forced off their land by pollution from these extractive industries and/or by violent state-sponsored or condoned removal. In the cities, more people began arriving, displaced from their self-reliant way of life as small farmers. Their children, growing up in poor neighborhoods, fell prey to the gangs, drug traffickers, and arms dealers who were already well established there after their part in the U.S. plans to control the region going back to the 1980s.
Zelaya’s efforts to re-examine and redirect some aspects of the development model—such as declaring a moratorium on mining concessions while listening to the concerns of rural communities—provoked the coup d’etat that removed him from power in June 2009. It became clear after the coup that the Honduran elite that had illegally forced Zalaya’s removal had the support of the United States government, specifically voiced in the person of Secretary of State Clinton, and the tacit support of the U.S. military in the Southern Command. Zelaya was flown into exile from the U.S. air base in Honduras. The U.S. government was also unhappy with Zelaya’s developing relationship to Venezuela, and his failure to demonstrate the requisite concerns about Nicaragua’s government and specifically its president, Daniel Ortega.
What Are the Results?
With the encouragement and support of the U.S., successive post-coup Honduran governments (2009-present) returned with a vengeance to the model of development that had seemed briefly challenged by Zelaya. The moratorium on mining was abandoned and a flood of new concessions was issued. Honduran government functionaries and politicians made money selling concessions. Today, more than 750 concessions are spread across Honduras covering hundreds of thousands of acres, polluting land and water and driving rural communities off their land. Hydroelectric projects and tourist enclaves are expanding, as are palm oil and other agricultural plantations owned by a few wealthy Hondurans or foreign companies. These developments, enabled by a combination of legal chicanery and state-sponsored or approved violence, have ignored both Honduran and international law. This form of “development” has robbed people not only of their land and economic livelihood, but it also scatters communities, destroys traditional ways of life, and even assaults the human spirit. In one community, a mining company was trying to enter to bulldoze the land and start mining. The people resisted, the elders saying that as long as the great old mango tree stood on the hillside near the community, their spirit would resist. One morning, the people awoke to find the hillside bulldozed and the mango tree is gone.
The U.S. supported model of development pursued in Honduras represents a massive transfer of Honduran wealth and resources from the people and the nation into the hands of a few. This is aided by another core element of the
plan—privatization. In Honduras, privatization really has a double meaning. It is the systematic delivery of the country’s sources of wealth—land, water, minerals, and more—into private ownership by a few. It also means that the government abandons its responsibility to provide essential services—utilities, education, healthcare, even security—so that individuals and local communities are forced to find ways to secure these themselves. Public functions become the private responsibility of individuals. The privatization of security means that the state security forces are used increasingly to repress dissent, not to protect the population. “Security” in poor neighborhoods is often left to the gangs who exact “protection payments” from local residents and businesses in return for “protecting” them from rival gangs.
Widespread official corruption is also a product of this model of development. Raiding the public funds is but another form of privatizing the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few. Honduras has been rocked with massive corruption scandals in recent years. In 2016, courageous Honduran journalism revealed that members of the ruling National political party had diverted an estimated $US 300 million from the country’s public health and social security budget to finance their party’s electoral campaigns.
This resulted in months of peaceful but massive popular protests, especially when people realized that the gutting of the public health budget would cause the deaths of poor Hondurans who could not afford private health care. This was only one in a long series of scandals over official corruption involving all branches of the Honduran government, the police, and private organizations connected with the government. Even the president’s Vida Mejor campaign—which was supposed to address the rising levels of poverty—was implicated in corruption scandals, and its effectiveness has been questioned. The popular resistance that these development policies have enflamed is met with official repression. To date, there are literally thousands of big and small examples of the death, injury, defamation, and destruction caused by this repression.
Undoubtedly the most (in)famous is the assassination of Berta Cáceres in March 2016. Cáceres was the leader of the Indigenous Lenca organization COPINH, and an internationally recognized environmentalist who had been leading the struggle of the Lenca communities to stop construction of a hydroelectric dam across a river of much importance to the physical and spiritual life of the communities. She had been awarded the Goldman Award in 2015, an award made to internationally recognized leaders in Indigenous environmentalism. In the months before her killing, she had reported to police thirty-three threats against her life and even named one of her threateners. The police did nothing. The government strongly supported the construction of the dam as part of the national development plan, and it deployed the army to protect the project—apparently at any cost. The result was the killing of at least three people (Cáceres, her successor in COPINH, and COPINH member Tomás Garcia, killed by a soldier) and some seriously injured (including a Mexican environmentalist who was accompanying Cáceres when she was killed, and Garcia’s sixteen-year-old son).
The Honduran government that carries out such “development” is actively encouraged and supported by the United States in the form of economic aid and investment, political cover—such as certifying that the Honduran government is making progress in human rights even as it uses live ammunition to repress popular demonstrations—and supplying the Honduran police and military with “security aid” that enables them to repress dissent more effectively. In the popular protests that followed the highly irregular presidential re-election of Juan Orland Hernandez (one of the leaders of the 2009 coup) the military police attacked the protesters using tear gas made in Pennsylvania.
Dismal Statistics
What this model of development, imposed by a Honduran elite with the active support and direction of the U.S., has meant for the Honduran people is reflected in the statistics. Honduras is now ranked by international organizations as the poorest country in the hemisphere, displacing even Haiti. Both Honduran and international organizations report that 60 percent of Hondurans are classified as living in poverty, with forty percent in “extreme poverty,” and the poverty rate continues to increase. Honduras also has one of the widest gaps between wealthy and poor in the hemisphere. The murder rate continues to be among the highest in the world, three to four times that of Nicaragua—at least until the current conflict erupted in Nicaragua. Honduras also has the highest rate of femicide in the world for any country not at war. Honduran and international women’s organizations estimate that a woman is killed every fourteen hours in Honduras. Honduran teachers’ organizations report that twenty thousand students drop out of school each year because of concerns about security and poverty.
Honduran children’s advocacy organizations estimate that at least two Honduran youth under the age of twenty-three are killed every day in Honduras, a country with a population of a little over nine million. On a local level, a Catholic parish priest reported that forty-six young people had been killed by gangs or young people in his parish alone in the first six months of 2016. His parish is only a small area of the city where it is located. Estimates of the number of Hondurans leaving the country in the past few years to seek asylum elsewhere have ranged from 60,000 to 100,000 each year.
What Does Honduran Sovereignty Mean?
Honduras will observe the two hundredth anniversary of its independence in 2021. For many Hondurans, the extensive concessions to foreign companies to extract the country’s wealth, the large U.S. military presence, and the influence of the U.S. Embassy continues to raise the highly sensitive question of national sovereignty. What does sovereignty mean after many years as the “banana republic” of the United States, years during the 1980s as the base of U. S. operations in the region (“U.S.S. Honduras”), and years under the current U.S. sponsored development model?
Exacerbating the problem of national sovereignty is the Honduran government’s embrace of plans to invite construction of one or more Model Cities projects in coastal areas. Model Cities are enclaves constructed by international interests that are allowed to make their own laws, enforce their own security, and develop their own export-oriented international businesses—a country within a country. The idea has many critics at all levels who see it as an affront to the country’s laws, culture, and sovereignty. Hondurans are by now so used to governments that acquiesce in the sale of the country’s resources to foreign interests that they have a word for it and for those who do it—vendepatria (selling the country). In use, the connotation of the word ranges from disgust to treason.
A Reasonable Question
For almost thirty years, and especially in the past ten years, the small Honduran elite has aggressively pursued the development model imposed and strongly supported by the United States. The country has hosted a large and growing U.S. military presence, bolstered by other U.S. agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). It has received millions in “security aid’ for its own police and military. Honduras has also had to deal with the legacy of gangs and drug traffickers that the U.S. used in Central America during the 1980s. Poverty and insecurity are pervasively experienced across the country. The government stands accused by Hondurans and international organizations of illegally retaining power, establishing a de facto dictatorship, engaging in massive corruption, and promoting impunity for a few while criminalizing popular protest and repressing protest with the aid of equipment and training paid for and largely supplied by the United States. International organizations lament the crisis of human rights unfolding in Honduras, while U.S. officials applaud the “progress” being made in Honduras. One must ask if perhaps Honduras would be better off today if it were less dominated by the United States. Many Hondurans are asking that question.
What about Nicaragua? The United States already has many projects and interests in Nicaragua, some specifically aimed at “promoting democracy.” But what would more intervention mean? What form would it take? Whose interests would be served, beyond those of the U.S.? And would it be instrumental in turning Nicaragua into something like Honduras today? Are there any lessons to be learned from history?
At this point, no one can know for sure what will emerge from the turmoil in Nicaragua. But United States intervention in Latin America comes with a sorry and often deadly track record and enough baggage to warrant skepticism if one is looking for a solution to a country’s internal conflicts.
James Phillips is a cultural anthropologist who has studied social change movements, human rights, refugee issues and the social cost of economic development practices in Central America for many years. He is the author of Honduras in Dangerous Times: Resistance and Resilience (2015) and many articles and book chapters.