exports.9 A ‘banana republic’ is among the worst examples of capitalist hegemony: a country run like a private business for the exclusive profit of corporations and local ruling elites. The term was coined by the American satirist O. Henry in 1901 to describe the corruption and exploitation imposed by the United Fruit Company, now called Chiquita, on Central America. The company relied upon a culture of bribery, a subjugated workforce and smarts to exploit these lands for obscene profits. Under the leadership of Samuel Zemurray, dubbed ‘Sam the Banana Man’, by the 1920s United Fruit controlled 650,000 acres of the most fertile plains in Honduras, almost one-quarter of all arable land in the country, as well as major roads, railways and ports. Here the company was known as El Pulpo, the octopus, for its far-reaching tentacles permeating every aspect of life from labour rights to infrastructure to politics. ‘In Honduras, a mule costs more than a member of parliament,’ Zemurray famously once said.
In the hot and humid northern city of El Progreso, a wonderful black and white framed photograph of the 1954 huelga de bananeros, or banana workers’ strike, hangs above Jesuit priest Padre Melo’s desk. Taken a stone’s throw away on the main road known as the Boulevard, it shows hundreds of defiant-looking men and women standing together, like an impenetrable human wall. After decades of subjugation, a flourishing campesino movement decided to fight back against slave-like conditions and brought the industry to a standstill, in what was the first serious challenge to the ‘special relationship’ and US profits. The campesino uprising was spuriously blamed on agitators from Guatemala, and plans were hatched to tackle both problems using the 1954 Military Assistance Agreement, which authorized the US to treat Honduras as a military satellite.
The US used its new outpost to train and arm mercenaries against Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. United Fruit had lobbied hard for the CIA-backed 1954 military coup,10 after Árbenz proposed taking some unfarmed land from multinationals to redistribute to landless peasants. The violent intervention paved the way for a bloody thirty-six-year civil war. The 1954 bilateral military agreement was a watershed geopolitical moment for the whole region, and Honduras has hosted American bases, forces and weapons ever since.
As for the campesino revolt which promised so much it was tamed by a series of modest reforms including a new labour rights code, social security benefits, and false promises of land redistribution. Some organizers were jailed, others co-opted; the most stubborn were disappeared or killed in local crackdowns such as the Los Horcones massacre. In the words of Padre Melo, ‘at that time when serious left-wing political and guerrilla groups were developing in neighbouring countries, in Honduras they were being co-opted and the insurgency was cleverly transformed into a benign popular movement pacified with a few gains.’11 The fruit companies continued to meddle in Honduran affairs to lower costs and maximize shareholder profits. For example, in 1972 United Fruit, by then renamed United Brands, bankrolled its friend, dictator General Oswaldo López Arellano to power, again illustrating how US capital dominated the most lucrative markets by owning politicians.12 It was a special relationship that demanded docile political lapdogs, not business partners, which partly explains why in Honduras a modern-day oligarchy took so long to emerge.
The End Justifies the Means
In Nicaragua, the Sandinista victory against the US-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship in 1979 caused blind panic in the US. Cuba was regarded as a humiliation, but at least it was an island, where socialist uprising could be isolated. Nicaragua on the other hand was on the same land mass, just a few hundred miles from the Panama Canal. So when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981 on an anti-communism mandate, the US turned its number one geopolitical partner into a major Cold War proxy battleground. The big guns – the spooks, special forces and top ally Ambassador John Negroponte – were deployed to Honduras with a clear mission: do whatever it takes to stop the communist rot.
British-born Negroponte, a zealous anti-communist action figure who cut his diplomatic teeth in Vietnam under Henry Kissinger, served in Honduras during its dirtiest years. This was no unlucky coincidence. The Cold War zealot played down, in fact didn’t mention, the huge spike in human rights violations – targeted arbitrary arrests, torture, the forced disappearances, and murder of suspected dissidents and refugees – in his diplomatic cables. During his 1981–85 tenure, military aid rocketed from $4m to $77.4m a year, a pretty straightforward cash-for-turf deal in which the US gained free rein over Honduran territory in exchange for dollars, training in torture-based interrogation methods, and silence.13 This patronage created a loyal force hooked on American money, equipment, training and ideology: cheaply-bought loyalty which the US would count on again and again.
Negroponte was a cardinal figure in the Contra war, coordinating support for the anti-Sandinista mercenaries who were trained, armed and commanded from clandestine bases. But the US role was much more than merely supportive. According to covert ops veteran Mario Reyes (a Mexican-born soldier posted to Honduras during the Contra war), ‘We conducted secret night-time missions to take out targeted Sandinistas on Nicaraguan territory; the killings were blamed on the Contras, that was the point, but it was us, and the Russians knew it was us.’
Reagan spent a billion or so dollars backing the Contras, whom he referred to as the ‘moral equivalent of the founding fathers’. Some of that money came from CIA-backed drug trafficking which flooded poor neighbourhoods with cocaine, especially African-American neighbourhoods, and helped dampen post-civil rights social revolts. In the end, CIA-traded cocaine muzzled two impoverished communities thousands of miles apart, and fuelled the burgeoning international drug trade.
Another funding stream was illegal arms sales. Negroponte oversaw the approval of a new military treaty which authorized US use of the Palmerola Air Base, sixty miles north-west of Tegucigalpa. From here, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North ran the Iran-Contra operation – a clandestine effort to circumvent US law by selling weapons to Iran.14 A key ally for this operation was Juan Matta Ballesteros, the original Honduran drug capo. More about him later. What else did Honduras get in return? It was a see-no-evil approach, but Negroponte knew perfectly well what horrors the military were perpetrating on civilians. He and his superiors positively applauded the elimination of so-called subversives. This is the essence of the counterinsurgency doctrine: the end justifies the means.
Michael McClintock is tall, with a soft Ohio accent and a long, thinning grey ponytail. He was Amnesty International’s Latin American researcher during the Cold War years and became a renowned scholar on special forces and counterinsurgency doctrine. He witnessed the before and after effect first hand in Honduras. ‘With the arrival of Negroponte,’ he told me, ‘there was a sudden and huge injection of American dollars and personnel, and within a year or two the military had identified and got rid of social leaders and incipient guerrilla groups. They literally wiped them out, clearing the decks to make Honduras an American aircraft carrier for Central America.
‘It was a day-and-night change. The system changed from one of a sloppy rule of law, where powerful people get away with murder, to an organized ideological audit – a census of who’s thinking bad thoughts and then going after them. It had a hugely corrupting influence on the armed forces and weak public institutions. Then add poverty and supercharge it with cocaine, and you understand why people flee,’ he added.
The most prolific state-sponsored killing machine was without doubt Battalion 3-16, which McClintock describes as America’s ‘most glowing innovation’ in Honduras. It was created and commanded by General Gustavo Álvarez, a man the US could do business with.15 Officially it was an intelligence unit, but it also stalked, kidnapped, tortured and disappeared scores of suspected subversives. Its operatives were trained in counterinsurgency surveillance and interrogation techniques by the CIA in secret locations in the US, and at home by Argentine torture specialists on US-controlled army bases.16 In truth, the dirty war casualties in Honduras pale in comparison to its civil war-ravaged neighbours. Officially, 184 people were disappeared during the 1980s, though the exact number of people tortured
