Honduras Coup Delivering a Bloody Return on Washington's Military Investment

Honduras Coup Delivering a Bloody Return on Washington's Military Investment
By Michael Busch, May 25, 2012


On the heels of learning that the United States has significantly scaled up its presence in Honduras in recent months, disturbing news emerged this week that suggests the country is suffering a bloody return on Washington’s military investment in the region. Last week, the New York Times reported that “A commando-style squad of Drug Enforcement Administration agents accompanied the Honduran counternarcotics police during two firefights with cocaine smugglers in the jungles of the Central American country this month, according to officials in both countries who were briefed on the matter. One of the fights, which occurred last week, left as many as four people dead and has set off a backlash against the American presence there.”

While it is still unclear just what went down and who was involved, initial reports that the US-Honduran team had killed members of a drug trafficking syndicate were almost immediately countered with claims by local politicians that those killed were all innocent bystanders. The details, if true, are horrifying: “Lucio Baquedano, the mayor of Ahuas, a small town near the incident, told El Tiempo, a Honduran newspaper, that a helicopter-borne unit consisting of both Honduran police officers and D.E.A. agents was pursuing a boatload of drug smugglers when it mistakenly opened fire on another boat carrying villagers. Four people died—including two pregnant women—and four others were wounded, he said.”

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American involvement in Honduras opens up a can of worms of questions and concerns that drive to the very heart of international relations, in theory and practice–sovereign power, authority and American hegemony, not to mention basic ethics and morality. Dana Frank has offered some good background that situated the current mess in its proper context, including the role of the 2009 Honduran coup that Washington would like to wipe clean from the imagination.

Only in the post-coup context, however, can we understand the very real crisis of drug trafficking in Honduras. A vicious drug culture already existed before the coup, along with gangs and corrupt officials. But the thoroughgoing criminality of the coup regime opened the door for it to flourish on an unprecedented scale. Drug trafficking is now embedded in the state itself—from the cop in the neighborhood all the way up to the very top of the government, according to high-level sources. Prominent critics and even government officials, including Marlon Pascua, the defense minister, talk of “narco-judges” who block prosecutions and “narco-congressmen” who run cartels. Alfredo Landaverde, a former congressman and police commissioner in charge of drug investigations, declared that one out of every ten members of Congress is a drug trafficker and that he had evidence proving “major national and political figures” were involved in drug trafficking. He was assassinated on December 7…