In June 2009, Honduras faced a devastating coup that shattered the country’s fragile democracy and sunk the country into violence, repression, and a decade-long narco-dictatorship.
But the people fought back.
In this episode, host Michael Fox dives into the tremendous resistance to the 2009 coup. He also looks at the government of Manuel Zelaya, the Latin America Pink Tide movement of the 2000s, and the push back from Honduran elites and the United States.
This is Part 1 of a two-part episode looking at the 2009 coup in Honduras and the aftermath.
Under the Shadow is a new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened — a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.
This podcast is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA.
Guests: Bertha Oliva, COFADEH
Grahame Russell, Rights Action
Adrienne Pine
Felix Molina
Jesse Freeston
Karen Spring
Alex Main, CEPR
Edited by Heather Gies.
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Follow and support journalist Michael Fox or Under the Shadow at https://www.patreon.com/mfox
Click here, to watch Jesse Freeston’s documentary, Resistance, about the campesino struggle in the Aguan Valley.
Karen Spring is currently covering the New York trial of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez. Visit Honduras Now for updates, or follow @springkj and @HondurasNow on Twitter.
Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi, I’m your host, Michael Fox.
Three things I want to say before I begin: First, you may have noticed that it’s been two weeks since our last episode came out — Episode 6: “USS Honduras”. That is on purpose. We’ve decided to slow down the release of each new episode to every two weeks, because, well, to be honest, I need time to make them. In other words, a new episode of Under the Shadow will drop every second and fourth Tuesday of the month until early May. I promise they will be worth the wait.
Second, we have decided to split this episode into two parts. There is just so much to say. There’s a ton of backstory, and, frankly, you can’t talk about the 2009 coup in Honduras without getting into everything that’s happened since, up until today. It’s another sign of the neverending legacy that US-backed coups leave on a place. So, we’re bringing you part one this week and part two next time.
Finally, many portions of today’s episode deal with harsh themes from the weeks and months following the 2009 coup, such as killings and disappearances. If you are sensitive to these things or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen.
OK. Here’s the show…
[Music]
[Traffic noise] Toncontín International Airport, Tegucigalpa, Honduras. It’s this big, long rectangular building, glass windows out front, with several gray-silver circular columns out in front of it. It’s right in Tegucigalpa — It’s on the outskirts, but it’s a major highway running just adjacent to it, a five-lane highway.
Fast food stores right in front: Pizza Hut, Burger King, Little Caesars, Church’s Chicken, Cinemark, Dunkin’ Donuts, a big mall outside.
This is not a huge airport. They say the runway, in fact, is relatively small. And so they’ve opened up the Palmerola International Airport just north of here.
It’s a windy day. Blue sky. I’m here because this was the location of one of the most intense — And would become one of the most emblematic moments of resistance against the 2009 coup against Manuel Zelaya here in Tegucigalpa.
Thousands of people have marched to the airport from across Tegucigalpa. They’re there to greet president Manuel Zelaya, who is attempting to fly back into Honduras five days after he was ousted.
In the early hours of June 28, 2009, the military had taken the president out of his home at gunpoint and put him on a flight to Costa Rica still in his pajamas. People have protested in the streets ever since.
Now, on the tarmac, soldiers and riot cops amass in long rows. In a corner of the runway, a group of protesters face off against the security forces.
People are protesting, and the Honduran police open fire with live rounds against protesters right here on the tarmac. Zelaya isn’t able to land. His plane turns around.
Isis Obed Murillo. He was shot there on the runway, hit square in the back of his head. The first protester to be killed by state security forces following the coup. The first martyr. One of so many.
In pictures and video from that time, he looks like a boy. And he is — Only 19. Grey shirt, covered in blood. Several protesters grab him and carry him off to an ambulance, hoping he is still alive.
Bertha Oliva: I have never seen a situation like the one we experienced in the 2009 military coup.
Michael Fox: That’s Bertha Oliva. Remember, I spoke with her in the last episode. Her words carry a lot of weight. She’s a founder and director of COFADEH, the Committee of the Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras, and she witnessed the moment her husband was abducted in the 1980s, never to be seen again.
She and other relatives of the disappeared organized to demand the return of their loved ones and to fight against the brutal repression decades ago. And they had to relive it following the 2009 coup.
Bertha Oliva: To see how protesters fell in the street, how they lost their lives in the moment, shot by the military. For us, that was shocking. For example, to see how they picked up Isis Obed amid the crossfire from the military, amid the multitude of thousands of people. How the military dispersed the crowd with firearms, some seriously hurt. One dead — Isis Obed.
Michael Fox: Bertha describes another death at the hands of the Honduran military, where protesters had to wait for the gunfire and tear gas to clear before they could retrieve their companion.
Bertha Oliva: They tried to push fear into the people. It impacted the population psychologically, emotionally. Men and women were detained and tortured, they were murdered on the street in order to scare the population so that they would not demonstrate. They tried to dismantle the organizing, to stop the people from standing up, stop them from protesting.
Michael Fox: Back in the 1980s, these kinds of repressive government tactics were successful at subduing the Honduran people and forcing them into silence. After the coup, that would happen no more.
Bertha Oliva: People knew they had to protest. If they didn’t go out together to the streets, then they would be murdered in their homes. And some people who were killed, they were organizers and leaders in their communities, and the military hunted them down in their homes to kill them. So, people knew they had to stand up together.
Michael Fox: And they did, for more than 180 days in a row, across the country.
More on that in a minute.
[Under the Shadow theme music]
This is Under the Shadow — A new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America.
I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, I will take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today.
In the last episode, we traveled into 1980s Honduras. Today, we fast forward to 2009, to the coup that shattered Honduras’s fragile democracy and again sunk the country into violence. But this time, the people responded like never before.
This is Under the Shadow Season 1: Central America. Episode 7: “2009 Honduras Part 1 — La Resistencia”.
[Music]
So, before I dive back into the resistance, I want to take a step back and walk you up to 2009. And I’m gonna take a little extra time to do this because this is the only episode of this season that focuses on such recent history.
OK, so we left the last episode in 1980s Honduras. State repression. Disappearances. The overwhelming presence of the United States. Some US officials even called the country the USS Honduras because the United States used it as a staging ground for its Cold War operations across Central America.
By the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, those conflicts were starting to wind down.
Grahame Russell: The first waves of millions of Central Americans going to the US. All that history of forced migrancy and refugees and all that stuff. Oh, gee, I wonder why all this happened? It’s because the US crushed the region, and those in power in the early mid-90s were all the same ruling elites that the US had partnered with: The same military. The same political elites. The same economic elites, which is the key point. Military and economic are always the key ones.
Michael Fox: Grahame Russell is the director of Rights Action, a human rights organization that works with local communities in Guatemala and Honduras who are defending their land and territory. We’ve spoken with him often for previous episodes.
Grahame Russell: That bad guys won is the simplification. It’s very true in Honduras. The bad guys won, and by the mid-late 90s, it is neoliberalism back on track. The economic model is really no different than the last umpteen years.
The names change. We now call it neoliberalism, we don’t call it Banana Republic or whatever. But it’s the same thing. The rich in these countries use cheap labor or their rich lands or even minerals to partner with global companies, banks, exporters, etc. It’s the same economic model, but it’s now 1990s into the 2000s.
Michael Fox: And Honduras is still a top US ally in the region.
Then November 2005. Presidential candidate Manuel Zelaya wins the Honduran presidential elections. He’s a member of the Liberal Party, one of the two political forces that have traditionally traded power in Honduras.
He is no revolutionary; this is not Che Guevara. Zelaya is a member of the country’s ruling class, the oligarchy. His father, in fact, was a rich landowner who was even convicted of participating in a 1975 massacre where the Honduran military killed more than a dozen religious leaders, campesinos, and students. The bodies of the victims were found on Manuel Zelaya’s father’s ranch in the east of the country.
Regardless, as president, Zelaya takes a surprising turn, listening to the demands of social movements.
Remember, this was the heyday of the leftist Pink Tide in Latin America. By Zelaya’s second year in office, Evo Morales is in power in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Cristina Fernández in Argentina, Fidel Castro in Cuba — And, of course, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. That’s him from the podium of the UN giving his infamous speech where he compares George W. Bush to the devil.
“In this very place, it still smells like sulfur,” he says after crossing himself.
He gave that speech on Sept. 20, 2006. Manuel Zelaya had been in power in Honduras for eight months. Zelaya began to join the leftward tide. He got closer to Chavez and the region’s other progressive leaders. In early 2008, Honduras, under Zelaya, joined the Venezuelan program Petrocaribe.
Remember, at that time, oil prices were high, and Venezuela had a lot of it. Basically, through Petrocaribe, Venezuela would ship oil at discounted rates that could be paid for over a long period of time. It was a huge support for many of the region’s smaller and poorer countries like Nicaragua, and even the Caribbean nations of Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Dominica, Saint Lucia and, of course, Cuba.
By 2013, Venezuela had sent over 230 million barrels of oil to its Petrocaribe partners, meeting roughly 40% of their energy needs.
Petrocaribe was a project of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA. That trade bloc included most of the region’s more progressive countries. The idea was to break with the hegemony of the United States in the region by forming their own regional group that did not bow down to US interests, like, say, the Washington-based Organization of American States, or OAS. And the bloc is still around, though it doesn’t have the same strength or prominence it once did.
In August 2008, despite criticism from the United States and Zelaya’s political opponents, Honduras joined the group. Zelaya held an international ALBA summit in Tegucigalpa to commemorate the country’s entry into the bloc.
“We are here to tell everyone,” Zelaya told a big crowd in Tegucigalpa, alongside the region’s progressive leaders. “We’re here to tell Hondurans, Central Americans, Latin Americans, and all societies on the planet that Honduras and the Honduran people don’t have to ask permission from any imperialists to sign on to ALBA.”
Back in the day, I did quite a bit of research and reporting into ALBA. I even covered an ALBA conference in Venezuela in early 2009. Zelaya was there with his thick signature mustache and his white wide-brimmed cowboy hat, arm in arm with the region’s progressive presidents. Washington called them the so-called “bad left” because they were bucking the Monroe Doctrine, carving their own path forward, away from the United States.
[Music]
Felix Molina is a well-known Honduran journalist who would play an important role in covering the resistance following the coup, which we’ll get to in a second.
Felix Molina: It became pretty clear with the opening of Manual Zelaya’s government to Petrocaribe. The role that the Zelaya government played in the end of the planned Free Trade Area of the Americas joining ALBA, and the presence of presidents at this time: Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez in the Honduran capital in August 2008. You could tell that something powerful was moving in the country.
Michael Fox: Meanwhile, at home, Zelaya was making reforms for the poor working class. They weren’t big, but they were more than any other president had done.
Adrienne Pine: He was tremendously interested in maintaining the support of the business class, but he also was trying to make minor changes.
Michael Fox: Anthropologist Adrienne Pine has spent years working in and around Honduras.
Adrienne Pine: He was responding to powerful demands from social movements. He was responding to their demands for a number of things: for increased minimum wage, for increases for protecting pensions, for improving healthcare, things like that. So he made a number of small reforms.
Then, of course, the most important reform that he agreed to consider was what was called the quarta urna, which was, basically, on June 28, 2009, he had scheduled a non-binding poll nationwide which asked people if they would like to have a referendum on the November election of that same year about whether or not there should be a constituent assembly to rewrite the Honduran constitution, which had been written under a dictatorship in 1982 and was profoundly anti-democratic.
And so that was the real motivation for the the coup, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back
Michael Fox: This idea of the constituent assembly was embraced by many of the social movements and the more progressive countries in the region. Venezuela held one in 1999, Bolivia in 2006, Ecuador in 2007.
Now, I know this might sound weird for folks from the US where our Constitution is more than 200 years old, but many Latin American countries have had multiple constitutions. They’re often revised when there’s a break from the past — Like amid dictatorship or a return to democracy. In Honduras, it’s often talked about in terms of “refounding” the country.
In the mid-2000s, constitutional rewrites were seen as a way to leave the authoritarian past behind by enshrining greater civic and human rights, labor protections, and social justice into these countries’ founding documents.
And these constitutions weren’t written by elites in secretive back rooms, but by large assemblies elected by the people. In other words, the constituent assembly process was seen as a powerful, democratic way forward.
But for protectors of the status quo, it was also very dangerous.
June 28, 2009. Pre-dawn. Hondurans are expecting to wake up and vote in the non-binding nation-wide poll asking them if they’d like to hold a referendum on whether or not to convene a constituent assembly.
But instead, military officers awaken President Manuel Zelaya at gunpoint. They whisk him away to Toncontín airport. There, they put him on a plane which flies to Soto Cano air base to refuel. You’ll remember Soto Cano from the last episode — The most important US base in Central America. The plane then flies him to Costa Rica and dumps him unceremoniously on the runway in San Jose. Congress conspires with the Supreme Court to try to paint the coup as legitimate and institutional.
The excuse? Those behind the coup said his poll was a veiled attempt to remain in power. See, presidential reelection is illegal under Honduras’s 1982 constitution. A constituent assembly and eventual new constitution could change that. Of course, that wouldn’t happen until after the next election, in which Zelaya wouldn’t even be allowed to compete. But for the coup plotters, it was justification enough.
The president of the National Assembly, Roberto Micheletti, takes power. He immediately orders the military to enforce a curfew. “Zelaya committed crimes against the constitution and the laws,” Micheletti would tell the international press. “He can’t come back to be president,”
Meanwhile, the country awakes to the news.
News Report: People hit the streets to demand Zelaya be reinstated as president.
Michael Fox: Journalist Felix Molina was there.
Felix Molina: Some people were still out expecting to vote. So there was this feeling that’s mixed between the consulta, or the vote that people were going to participate in, and the shock of what has happened. There was a massive military presence at the Presidential Palace. They were moments of confusion, but at the same time, a lot of passion, where we began to understand that this was serious.
Michael Fox: Felix says the people realized they couldn’t wait for the details over the radio and television because local news outlets weren’t reporting on what was happening. It was a media blackout.
Instead, Felix says, the people came together on the streets to share information, to inform one another.
Felix Molina: That’s what I really remember from that first day. It set the scene for so many days to come because it was the organized social movements that became the motor to channel the collective grassroots energy that was being expressed throughout the country.
Michael Fox: The protests would ripple on for months — As would the government backlash.
That in a minute.
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Maximillian Alvarez: Hey, everyone, Maximillian Alvarez here, editor-in-chief of The Real News Network. We’re going to get you right back to the program in a sec, I promise, but really quick, I just wanted to remind y’all that The Real News is an independent, viewer- and listener-supported, grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never, ever put our reporting behind paywalls.
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Alright, thanks for listening. Back to the show.
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Jesse Freeston: So following the coup d’etat in the capital of Tegucigalpa, there were 180 straight days of street protests.
Michael Fox: That’s Jesse Freeston. He’s a Canadian filmmaker who moved to Honduras following the 2009 coup to cover the protests and the aftermath for The Real News. He would go on to make a documentary called Resistencia, or Resistance, about the campesino struggle in the Aguan Valley.
Jesse Freeston: Every morning, everybody would start gathering outside one of the universities there, and they would march down the street. Almost every day it would get attacked in one form or another by the police. It became this repeating theater play.
But one of the things that was happening there, not just trying to keep Honduras in the news and trying to keep this coup d’etat illegitimate visually, the other thing that was happening there was that there was a school, a political science school, an economic school, happening on the streets. There’s so much news and materials being passed around, and all the graffiti and slogans being put everywhere.
And I think, in the process one, of the main things that happened is that the oligarchy’s mask fell — That’s a rough translation of something people would say — In that all of a sudden people were aware of who owned the country, and what did they own, and who had done what to make this coup happen.
Michael Fox: They founded a movement: The National Front Against the Coup, which would later become the National Front of Popular Resistance.
Jesse Freeston: There was an unbelievable amount of organization that was happening to try and bring back the overthrown regime and also to move ahead with this project that had absolutely captured the imagination of the Honduran people, which was the constituyente — The new constitution.
Michael Fox: And people were organizing not just in Tegucigalpa, but across the country.
Jesse Freeston: Committees in every single one of Honduras’s 298 municipalities, and those committees had subcommittees on like 20 different themes. Everything from LGBT rights to housing.
Michael Fox: It was in these early days with the media blackout across the local press that Journalist Felix Molina decided to found a daily radio show that would showcase the voices on those on the front lines.
That’s a clip from one of his shows a few years into the coup. He aptly called it Resistance, and later Resistances, Resistencias, to underscore the multifaceted and diverse forms of organizing and street protest across the country.
Felix says that, in Tegucigalpa, it was a largely urban resistance. Big youth presence. University students. People from the poor communities, who are not necessarily organized. Informal workers, street vendors, with a large presence of women teachers.
Felix Molina: But in the Indigenous Lenca departments, it was another type of resistance. Much more determined to fight. Body to body. People with conviction. Which was very different from the resistance on the Atlantic coast with a Garifuna component. Caribbean, with a huge presence of spiritual Garifuna symbology. There was always smoke, incense, drumming.
Michael Fox: He says their methods were different, but they were all united in their one goal of “reclaiming the dignity of the nation, rebuilding the rule of law.” The return of Manuel Zelaya, the return of democracy.
Jesse Freeston.
Jesse Freeston: The thing you need to understand here is that what Zelaya represents in this story is the first person in the history of the Honduran political class that actually paid a price for standing up for the impoverished majority in Honduras.
So it’s not just appreciation and love for this man because he’s so charismatic or whatever. What’s happening here is they’ve actually seen somebody face down the threat of saying, if you continue to do this, if you keep pushing for this new constitution, if you keep standing by this raising of the minimum minimum wage, if you keep pushing for this very meager land reform, if you keep pushing for these things, we’re going to overthrow you in a coup.
And these threats were made. And Zelaya said, bring it on. And he ended up in his pajamas on a runway in Costa Rica. And so the fact that he paid this price, being somebody who was from the oligarchy, he’s from the traditional political class, this is how he earned the respect of the Honduran people.
Michael Fox: Felix Molina’s radio show, like that of Radio Venceremos three decades before in neighboring El Salvador, became the voice of resistance in Honduras. It was available online, but also over the airwaves via the radio station Radio Globo — Although Felix and his team actually had to pay the station for the airtime to broadcast the show. When the military moved to block the signal, people in the communities played the show online and began to connect loudspeakers so their neighbors could also listen in.
Felix Molina: The elites control the telephone lines and they can cut the signals. They control the national telecommunications commission, and they can cut radio and TV frequencies. But they can’t cut the connections between people. The capacity to meet together and to invent. The people will react as they have before, like how they created a type of loudspeaker radio. They are creative.
Michael Fox: But the backlash was brutal.
Karen Spring is a Canadian human rights activist who moved to Honduras in the days following the coup. She’s been there ever since.
Karen Spring: What the coup did is that, all of a sudden, the state realized, oh no, all these poor people — Which is the majority of the country — Know who their enemies are, and it’s us.
And so what do we need to do while we are taking control of the state and ingraining, at a deeper level, this neoliberal model? We need to make the surveillance systems of the state, we need to make the intelligence structures of the military and the police more sophisticated, give them more equipment. They need to be more monitoring enemies. We need to put the military in the streets to basically keep people controlled. Like a form of social control.
Michael Fox: Bertha Oliva, the founder of COFADEH, the Committee of the Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras, says the 2009 coup was an even greater setback for the country than in the 1980s.
Bertha Oliva: It rolled us back 50 years.
When we thought we had a moment when the government was finally willing to listen to the people in 2009, that’s when they carried out the coup d’état.
And it was different from what we experienced in the 1980s, because the brutality could not be hidden as it was hidden and silenced before. In 2009, it was clear to the entire world that democratic values and the rule of law were destroyed in just a couple of hours.
Michael Fox: Bertha’s organization, COFADEH, played a key role in defending the victims and denouncing the human rights violations carried out by the state. According to one 2010 COFADEH report, in the first six months after the coup, there were 38 politically motivated killings.
Felix Molina: The police and the army repressed. They disappeared people. There are victims in the streets. People raped and dead as a result of the confrontations with the state.
The people suffered torture throughout the country. They were thrown into rivers. There was the forced disappearance of people again. Hidden in clandestine cells, brutally killed at point-blank range in broad daylight so everyone would see. Atrocious crimes.
Michael Fox: But the protests continued. On the streets, they sang one song in particular.
The words go, “They are afraid of us because we are not afraid.” It was written a few years before the coup by the Argentine singer Liliana Felipe. Her sister and brother-in-law were disappeared during Argentina’s reign of state terror of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. She fled the country. She’s lived in Mexico ever since.
Honestly, the fact that this became one of the anthems for the people on the streets of Honduras is so profound. Particularly when you think about the deep levels of violence and fear shoved on the Honduran people throughout the 1980s, as we looked at in the last episode.
Jesse Freeston.
Jesse Freeston: People would, in the middle of the march, stop and sing this song. And so actually, at least superficially, the fear was not evident. And this was a bit surprising to me, to be honest, that with all the repression that was happening, that people were still going out every day and painting the walls and marching and putting themselves at great risk.
Michael Fox: And that was, in part, a conscious decision not to dwell on the fear and the violence, but to celebrate the hope and the change that was possible.
Felix says that at the radio they intentionally focused less on the things that caused collective fear and more on what he calls, “the pro-positive discourse against fear”, like raising people’s awareness and getting them active in the growing social movement.
At the time, it was really common to hear that Hondurans, in general, “woke up” because of the coup — They became politicized.
Felix Molina: As people said, the blindfolds were taken off, the blindfolds that stopped them from seeing how power works in the country. Today, the people can identify the 10 most powerful capitalist families in Honduras. Today, the people can clearly see the role of the United States in Honduras.
Michael Fox: And Felix says the radio played an important role.
Felix Molina: The radio was central to both the mobilizations of political consciousness and the mobilizations of people into the streets. With all modesty, that was my greatest achievement as one of the directors of the program.
Michael Fox: But this work was not without risks, as we will see.
Meanwhile, the international community was adamantly against the coup. They refused to recognize the de facto Honduran government.
Felix Molina: They don’t recognize Honduras in the General Assembly of the United Nations, nor in the Organization of American States.
Michael Fox: Well… At least, that is, most of the international community.
Alex Main is the director of International Policy at CEPR, the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He has been researching and denouncing the Honduran coup and the US role since day one.
Alex Main: Well there’s still a lot of questions about what the role of the US was before the coup, how the US may have been involved in supporting the coup. And there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests that the US had to be in the know ahead of the coup, for one because the relationship between the US military and the Honduran military is so deep, and has been for so many decades.
Michael Fox: In other words, remember where the plane carrying Zelaya on the morning of the coup stopped to refuel on its way to Costa Rica? Soto Cano, or Palmarola — The largest US base in Central America. That’s the spot I visited last episode.
A colleague of Alex Main’s even found that a US military attache had met with senior commanders of the Honduran military the night before the coup.
Publicly, the US did finally come out against the coup.
President Barack Obama [recording]: Good evening, I am honored to join you here today, and I want to thank…
Michael Fox: Remember, this was the first year of Barack Obama. Just two months before the coup, Obama had promised to usher in a new era of US-Latin American relations at the 2009 Summit of the Americas
President Barack Obama [recording]: … I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations.
Michael Fox: And following the coup, the US did stand up against it… Kind of.
Alex Main: They took their time. There was a little bit of foot-dragging. They weren’t very quick at doing so, but they did eventually join the rest of the region. There was a strong resolution that came out of the Organization of American States at the time that the US supported which kicked Honduras out of the Organization of American States because of the coup that had taken place.
Michael Fox: But even though Obama did call it a coup, the United States, and in particular Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were working behind the scenes to ensure that Zelaya would not return to power.
Alex Main: Honduras had been this reliable ally for years and years. It had served as a platform for the US military, in particular for carrying out intervention in the rest of the region. But it was a country that the US was not prepared to let go of, in the sense that they were not prepared for the government of that country to start carrying out policies that went against the US agenda in the region. They did not want Honduras to fall.
Jesse Freeston.
Jesse Freeston: So if you looked at the US State Department, The New York Times, certain key communicators during this time, they were opposing the coup in words. We would find out later through WikiLeaks and Hillary Clinton’s emails that behind the scenes they were doing a lot to keep the regime in power.
But that all changed in this election that they held about four or five months after the coup.
Michael Fox: And that was by design. In the first edition of Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, she wrote, “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”
For the United States and the Honduran coup government of Roberto Micheletti, the election was the get-out-of-jail-free card, a way to shove the memory of the coup into the past and pretend like a new democratic leaf had been turned.
And that is where we will go next time. To the elections that would consolidate the 2009 coup and deepen the privatizations. To the repression and the exodus of Hondurans fleeing a failed state, and propped up with the help of the United States.
Felix Molina: The coup was an action taken by the elites to both ingrain neoliberalism in the country, and an action to strengthen the model of organized crime in the country.
Michael Fox: Human rights defender Karen Spring told me something in 2023 that really stuck with me, because it gives this 2009 coup important historical context, and it really sets the scene for the next episode.
Karen Spring: There was the actual repression after the coup, and then there was everything that happened since the coup. And Honduras entered, as a result of the coup, it entered a massive human rights crisis that started with the coup.
Certainly, there were elements before the coup, but it sparked a whole new chapter in the human rights crisis of Honduras that a lot of people linked to the ‘80s, and the disappearances in the ‘80s, and the repression against the left or anyone identified slightly as being progressive under the whole McCarthy Era Cold War rhetoric.
Michael Fox: The past is never far behind.
That’s all for this episode of Under the Shadow. Next week, I’ll bring you part 2, the conclusion.
As always, if you like what you hear, please check out my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America.
Under the Shadow is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido.
This is Michael Fox. Many thanks.
See you next time.
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