“Hondurans Break the U.S.-imposed Narco Siege of their Government by Electing Xiomara Castro as New President”, Nov. 29, 2021, Patricio Zamorano, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, at < https://www.coha.org/
“Washington Tried to Destroy Honduras’s Left. Now It’s Back in Power”, Dec 3, 2021, Branko Marcetic, Jacobin Magazine, at < https://www.jacobinmag.com/
~~ posted for dmorista with introduction by dmorista ~~
The Zamorano article takes a relatively idealistic internationalist point of view on the Honduran Elections and their potential aftermath and finishes with:
“... The retrograde, feudal elite that continues to run the country must give real space to allow the 50% of the population languishing in poverty to have representation. Groups in social movements over issues of gender, peasant and indigenous rights, trade unions, and cultural associations must be able to win seats in Congress, in the political parties, and be part of the presidential cabinet.
“The international community could play a vital role in encouraging the democratization that Honduran voters are clearly demanding by giving the new Xiomara Castro administration room, support, and financial aid to make the necessary changes without suffering the economic and political attacks from the U.S. that some leftist governments in Latin America face. It can also put pressure on the entrenched local elites. The Honduran people have suffered enough, as witnessed by the humanitarian tragedy on the U.S. southern border. It is ethically incumbent on all parties that purport to believe in democracy to respect the wishes of the majority of Hondurans to take their country back from the drug lords and organized crime, and build their own form of democracy free from outside interference.”
The house organ of Democratic Socialists of America, published an article, “Washington Tried to Destroy Honduras’s Left. Now It’s Back in Power”, Dec 3, 2021, Branko Marcetic, Jacobin Magazine, at < https://www.jacobinmag.com/
The Jacobin article notes that while Zelaya instituted some limited but important reforms for the working people of Honduras, he apparently supported the Death Squad campaign during the 1980s, and he did not make any attempt to improve the lot of the maquiladora factory workers,. The Hondruan Maquiladoras are set up to encourage foreign investment and are a major element from which the Honduran Elite extract their profits. But Zelaya's increasingly friendly relations with Venezuela his cooperation with Hugo Chavez's “ Petrocaribe, Venezuela’s program for selling subsidized oil to friendly governments, and (Zelaya) joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the People of Our America (ALBA) trade bloc” were the step across a line the U.S. ruling class would not tolerate. Zelaya was deposed by a U.S. coordinated and sponsored coup in 2009 and the harsh new “Neo-Liberal” regime smashed dissent and imposed horrific austerity.
During the tough 12-year long reign by various right-wing political figures the Jacobin Article notes that:
“Whatever anyone thinks of Zelaya and his halting reform program, his ouster set off a more-than-decade-long nightmare for the country. ….
“Death squads returned to the country, picking off environmentalists, indigenous land activists, and any other “terrorists” standing in the way of the rapacious business interests unleashed by the government. With more than 120 killed between 2010 and 2017, the country has consistently ranked at the top of the list of most dangerous countries to be an environmental activist. The victims include Berta Cáceres, the famed activist murdered in her home in 2016 after her name ended up on a military hit list and who blamed Clinton before her death for enabling a 'counterinsurgency' on behalf of 'international capital.'
“This state violence was directly facilitated by Washington in another way as well: the hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid that’s been funneled to military and police under post-coup governments, some of it in a plan expressly designed and sold by Joe Biden when he was vice president, and which Biden has used as a model during his own administration.”
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and the Jacobin Magazine articles are both guardedly optimistic about the prospects for Honduras and the role of electoral politics in general. This is an important issue. Is electoral politics at all worth while for the Left or is it a dead end and a deadly trap. My next article reposting here at The Class Struggle will look at developments in electoral politics here in the U.S. itself while addressing this important question.
Hondurans Break the U.S.-imposed Narco Siege of their Government by Electing Xiomara Castro as New President
Brian Nichols, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, visited Honduras the week before the presidential elections. His stated purpose was to “encourage the peaceful, transparent conduct of free and fair national elections.” He did not meet with the de facto President, Juan Orlando Hernández.
The gesture was clear and illuminating on two levels.
First, it showed that the U.S. government had already accepted the irrefutable truth that the center-left coalition led by Xiomara Castro would earn the votes of the Honduran people (as we go to publication, she was in the lead with 53.6%).[1] Honduras’ 5.1 million voters would also elect three vice-presidents, 298 mayors, 128 deputies to the national legislature, and 20 to the Central American Parliament.
Second, Nichols’ gesture of not meeting with the de facto president once again made clear that Honduras’ future continues to be overwhelmingly determined by the United States. The U.S. maintains its largest military base in Latin America[2] at Palmerola and supported the narco-government of Juan Orlando Hernández for eight long years, with a clear electoral fraud in the middle of it.
The sanctions on Honduras that never happened
Supporting a third electoral fraud in Honduras would have been a political indecency that even the Northern superpower couldn’t stomach this time, as it did in 2017.[3] In 2014 there were serious accusations of fraud to which the international community turned a deaf ear. And in 2017, even the Organization of American States (OAS) certified there was fraud when it publicly stated that it could not declare Hernández to be the winner and called for new elections.[4] But the pressure for “hemispheric democracy” stopped there; the OAS never suspended Honduras from its Permanent Council in Washington, kept its country office in Tegucigalpa open, and basically gave the de facto Hernández government completely normal treatment. There were never any U.S. sanctions against Hernandez’ narco state. If that is not a scandalous double standard, what is?
In the meantime, the U.S. courts did not follow the Trump and Biden script. An investigation by New York prosecutors into drug trafficking by the de facto president’s brother, Tony Hernández,[5] has placed Juan Orlando Hernández himself on the record as protecting drug traffickers, paying bribes, and engaging in organized crime.[6]
Military presence of the United States in a narco-state
The levels of violence, crime, and corruption in Honduras have reached historic levels, causing the massive migration of thousands of desperate families to the United States’ southern border (Honduras has the third highest homicide rate in the Americas per 100,000 population[7]). All of this is occurring under the watchful gaze of the U.S. military in Honduras, including troops and intelligence personnel who, for some reason, are almost comically ineffective against the organized crime that uses Honduras as a trans-shipment point for illegal drugs coming out of Colombia—another U.S. ally.
How is it that Juan Orlando Hernández’ family and dozens of drug cartels can operate so comfortably in the country while under the sophisticated technological surveillance of the U.S. government on Honduran soil? The United States, the biggest consumer of illegal drugs on the planet, is feeding the criminal network that has been rocking Honduras and all of Central America. This crisis also directly impacts Mexico, which has had to deal with major migration pressures at its own borders. Policies from the new Xiomara Castro administration will have influence in this area.
Political and economic feudalism kills thousands
Honduras’ history is one of political feudalism that continues to keep the country trapped among old political forces that have not been able to complete the urgent task of re-founding the country with a new social contract. Each day that the country remains in chaos, dozens of Hondurans lose their lives, are kidnapped, wounded, or forced to flee their country.
The United States and the OAS are directly responsible for the debacle of the past 12 years. The 2009 coup d’etat that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya exposed the fragility of Honduras’ political institutions. One of the justifications of the coup was that the Zelaya administration was discussing the possibility of reforming the Constitution to democratize it, including opening the possibility of re-electing the president. Just a few years later, the constitutional branch of the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hernández to allow that exact thing to happen; it issued a de facto authorization, without amending the Constitution, so that Juan Orlando Hernández could be re-elected even though Article 239 of the Constitution forbids it.[8] This time there was no coup or complaint from the U.S.
In 2021 the U.S. and OAS seem to be washing their hands of this scandalous past, eliminating from the equation an undesirable de facto president who is no longer capable of serving the northern country’s geopolitical strategy when his party’s candidate, Nasry Asfura, from Partido Nacional (National Party) only garnered 34% of the vote.
A new stage of uncertainty
The isolation to which the U.S. subjected Juan Orlando Hernández these past few months simply reflected how unpopular the de facto president had become.
The big question is how the U.S. will behave toward the new president, Xiomara Castro. She is the wife of deposed president Manuel Zelaya, a large landholder who underwent a major ideological shift while in office, establishing close relations with the Bolivarian countries and becoming an ally of Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela during the deceased president’s halcyon years.
The alliance that got Xiomara Castro elected includes center-left forces that will face the arduous task of building a government and counteracting the penetration of drug traffickers and organized crime. The alliance includes the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, whose coordinator is former President Zelaya), and the “Savior of Honduras” party, chaired by the presidential candidate from whom the election was stolen in 2017, Salvador (Savior) Nasralla. The coalition also includes the Partido Innovación y Unidad-Social Demócrata (PINU-SD), the Alianza Liberal Opositora, and others.
First urgent task: re-found the country politically and socially
But the most important task is to resume the process that was truncated by the 2009 military coup d’etat. The Honduran constitution is profoundly anti-democratic. It still contains articles that Hondurans say are “set in stone”—institutional areas that cannot be reformed (except through dubious acts such as when the Supreme Court allowed Hernández to stand for re-election).
The biggest challenge for Honduras is the new social contract between the State and the citizens, to “democratize access to democracy.” The retrograde, feudal elite that continues to run the country must give real space to allow the 50% of the population languishing in poverty to have representation.[9] Groups in social movements over issues of gender, peasant and indigenous rights, trade unions, and cultural associations must be able to win seats in Congress, in the political parties, and be part of the presidential cabinet.
The international community could play a vital role in encouraging the democratization that Honduran voters are clearly demanding by giving the new Xiomara Castro administration room, support, and financial aid to make the necessary changes without suffering the economic and political attacks from the U.S. that some leftist governments in Latin America face. It can also put pressure on the entrenched local elites. The Honduran people have suffered enough, as witnessed by the humanitarian tragedy on the U.S. southern border. It is ethically incumbent on all parties that purport to believe in democracy to respect the wishes of the majority of Hondurans to take their country back from the drug lords and organized crime, and build their own form of democracy free from outside interference.
Patricio Zamorano is an international analyst and Director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)
Jill Clark-Gollub contributed as co-editor.
Translation by Jill Clark-Gollub
[Main photo: President-elect of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, shows her ink-stained finger during the presidential election on November 28. Photo credit: Alina Duarte, COHA Senior Research Fellow, from Honduras]
Sources
[1] “Elecciones Nacionales de Honduras,” https://resultadosgenerales2021.cne.hn/#resultados/PRE/HN
[2] “Max Blumenthal drops by the largest US military base in Latin America,” https://thegrayzone.com/2019/07/20/max-blumenthal-palmerola-air-base-honduras/
[3] “US recognizes re-election of Honduras president despite fraud allegations,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/us-recognizes-re-election-of-honduras-president-despite-calls-for-a-new-vote
[4] “Statement by the OAS General Secretariat on the Elections in Honduras,” https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=E-092/17
[5] “US court sentences Honduran president’s brother to life in drug case,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/30/honduras-president-brother-sentenced-life-drug-trial
[6] “Is the President of Honduras a Narco-Trafficker?,” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/is-the-president-of-honduras-a-narco-trafficker
[7] “Homicide rates in selected Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2020,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/947781/homicide-rates-latin-america-caribbean-country/
[8] “Hernandez receives green light to run for reelection as Honduras president,” https://www.efe.com/efe/english/world/hernandez-receives-green-light-to-run-for-reelection-as-honduras-president/50000262-3125310
[9] “Honduras Poverty Rate 1989-2021,” https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HND/honduras/poverty-rate
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Washington Tried to Destroy Honduras’s Left. Now It’s Back in Power.
BRANKO MARCETICXiomara Castro won Honduras’s presidency pledging to tax wealth, expand the welfare state, and end the country’s “failed neoliberal model.” Her win was also a defeat for the US, which backed a coup that overthrew her husband Manuel Zelaya 12 years ago.
Iraq is still in flames, Henry Kissinger will probably live to 100, and the world’s nations are pockmarked with the irreversible damage of countless capital-driven military coups. Yet as Xiomara Castro’s win in Honduras should remind us, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule that the world’s many wrongs are destined to never be righted.
This past week, the socialist Castro won the Honduran presidency in a landslide, ending twelve years of right-wing rule in the country and becoming its first female president in the process. That Castro won on a platform to tax wealth, create a new welfare payment for the poor and elderly, and overhaul the country’s “failed neoliberal model” is significant enough. But Castro’s win is also a symbolic reversal of the US-backed right-wing coup that threw her husband, Manuel Zelaya, from power twelve years ago.
How to Win Enemies and Alienate Business
Awell-off landowner from an elite family who won on the centrist Liberal Party ticket, Zelaya had been no radical. Believed to have supported anti-leftist death squads in the 1980s, once in power he backed Honduras’s entry into the neoliberal Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) despite vehement grassroots opposition to it in the country, and continued the country’s traditional military cooperation with Washington, winning praise from US military leadership.
Though he’d moved left over the course of his term — upping teacher pay, providing free lunches at public schools, topping up pensions, and abolishing school fees — even his populist moves had a firm ceiling. While he raised the minimum wage by 60 percent, it stayed at poverty level, and didn’t apply to workers in the maquiladora export industry, a neoliberal business model created to draw in foreign investment. Not that it mattered: Being forced to lose even a cent of profit to their grossly underpaid workers was an outrage to the Honduran business elite. With Zelaya pairing these moves with an increasing use of leftist rhetoric, he lost the support of his own party, and the Honduran right plotted to move against him.
Meanwhile, in Washington, despite playing ball with the US elite, Zelaya’s cardinal sin was forging closer relations with left-wing Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who visited Honduras for the first time in 2008. Under Zelaya, Honduras entered Petrocaribe, Venezuela’s program for selling subsidized oil to friendly governments, and joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the People of Our America (ALBA) trade bloc, an embryonic leftist counterweight to US-led, neoliberal free trade in the hemisphere. Zelaya called the latter “an act of freedom,” adding, provocatively, that he was “taking a step toward becoming a government of the center left, and if anyone dislikes this, well just remove the word ‘center’ and keep the second one.”
This was a step too far. Though Zelaya had cast his pivot to Chávez as a pragmatic move, born of frustration with the “moderate offers” of support from rich countries, he also took a swipe at the “decades-long relationship of dominance by the United States.” The move inflamed conservative fears in the country and anger among the US Right. “If President Zelaya wants to be an ally of our enemies, let him think about what might be the consequences of his actions and words,” Otto Reich, a former diplomat to the region under George W. Bush, told the press in 2008.
The pretext for Zelaya’s removal was his move in early 2009 to hold a nonbinding referendum on rewriting the country’s twenty-six-year-old constitution, ostensibly to reflect the “substantial and significant changes” that had taken place in Honduras. Zelaya’s insistence on holding the vote, a power grab in his critics’ eyes, put him at odds with the courts, the legislature (his own party included), and military leaders, who refused to defy the courts by lending their resources to carrying it out. The matter soon spiraled into a crisis that saw Zelaya remove two top military officials, thirty-six others resign in protest, and calls from the Honduran establishment to boycott the vote — all of it culminating in the June morning where soldiers occupied the capital and military leaders escorted Zelaya, at gunpoint, to a plane out of the country.
Making the Coup Stick
There’s no doubt Zelaya’s brinkmanship fed the crisis that ended in his own ouster. But before you side with the coup plotters, consider a few things. For one, there’s the fact that this abrogation of a democratic constitution came in response to not just a referendum whose victory was far from assured, but a nonbinding one.
Second, let’s allow that the worst thing Zelaya was accused of plotting — to change the constitution to allow himself a second term — is eminently reasonable. While not uncommon in Latin America, a single term for a national leader is comparatively restrictive in the global context, and as we’ll see, the Honduran elite changed their mind about this in a few short years. The charges also didn’t make sense: With a presidential election set only five months after the referendum was due to be held, there was little possibility the constitution could be amended in time to keep Zelaya in power (which he’d have to win a second election to secure anyway).
Nor is Honduras’s constitution some kind of sacred, untouchable document. It had been serially rewritten over the twentieth century, and the version Zelaya was operating under had been written by the country’s military dictatorship in 1982, with preserving the power of the armed forces expressly in mind: it established a weak executive and an unusually independent military hierarchy, and split the country into military regions commanded by military officials. The constitution had also been amended 130 times by decree in the intervening decades. (And if you think there’s something automatically out-of-bounds about rewriting an antiquated constitution against the wishes of a conservative political establishment, ask yourself if you feel the same way about calls to overhaul the gridlocked US political system and reform its right-wing Supreme Court).
The outrageous act sparked outrage across the hemisphere. Even US officials acknowledged the flagrantly despotic nature of the coup. “On the one instance, we’re talking about conducting a survey, a nonbinding survey; in the other instance, we’re talking about the forcible removal of a president from a country,” one anonymous official told the New York Times.
Nevertheless, military ties run thicker than any democratic commitments in Washington, and US policymakers could never be too hostile toward the coup plotters their own military had trained. (“It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government,” said an army lawyer.)In the same Times report, anonymous members of the newly elected Barack Obama administration admitted to the Times that, before Zelaya’s removal, they had discussed with the military legal methods to “remove the president from office, how he could be arrested, on whose authority they could do that.” On its way out of the country, the military plane carrying Zelaya to his exile stopped at a Honduran air base US troops used as a headquarters, supposedly to refuel; the military denied US personnel knew about the flight, despite officially sharing air traffic control duties at the site.
Once it happened, and in the days, weeks, and months ahead, the administration toed a careful line, issuing stern words of general disapproval while assiduously taking care not to undermine the ouster. They avoided calling it a military coup (which would have automatically triggered a legally mandated withdrawal of aid) and refused to condemn what was happening in the country — including repression of Zelaya supporters that involved mass arrests, torture, and killings — and Obama avoided meeting with Zelaya as he furiously lobbied in Washington, all while the administration dragged its feet on fully punishing the coup plotters.
As Washington ran out the clock, Honduras’s neighbors lost their patience. The Union of South American Nations, including US allies, unanimously declared it wouldn’t recognize a government elected under the coup government, while Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva joined hands with Mexican president Felipe Calderón, a conservative Bush ally, to say the same. The United States, meanwhile, worked to block the Organization of American States (OAS) from following Lula and Calderón’s lead.
Hillary Clinton would later boast in her autobiography of trying to block Zelaya’s return to office behind the scenes, strategizing with regional allies to “ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.” She justified the coup government’s repressive curfew and denounced his attempts to reenter the country, and her State Department pressured OAS officials to sideline him and work with the coup leaders.
Clinton wasn’t stupid. The country’s US ambassador had warned her in advance that the coup would happen and unambiguously told her it was “an illegal and unconstitutional coup,” and Clinton’s friend and underling Anne-Marie Slaughter urged her to declare it as such. But the coup government quickly hired former Clintonites as lobbyists to legitimize its democratic overthrow, used by Clinton to open communications with the interim president, whom the administration ended up advising and even editing the speeches of.
Despite loudly claiming to have punished the government, in reality, Washington kept the money flowing to Honduras, including from a development agency Clinton herself was chairing. Meanwhile, the close relationship between the two countries’ militaries proved a boon to the coup plotters. We now know that an active military official met with them the night before they acted, while a retired official helped the coup government lobby Washington after the fact.
In the end, Washington negotiated an agreement that required congressional approval of Zelaya’s return to power. When Congress of course rejected this, the Obama administration quickly said it would recognize the results of the upcoming elections anyway, isolating it from virtually the entire planet. In an election clouded by government repression and a voter boycott that saw turnout drop, and which not even half of voters viewed as legitimate, Pepe Lobo, a right-wing businessman and rancher, beat Zelaya’s vice president by sixteen points.
“The United States was the only country that maintained an ambassador in Honduras and was extremely helpful in eventually finding a path out of the crisis,” he said later.
Horror and Blowback
Whatever anyone thinks of Zelaya and his halting reform program, his ouster set off a more-than-decade-long nightmare for the country.
The Lobo government, filled with military officials who had presided over the coup, moved immediately to roll back Zelaya’s achievements. He pulled Honduras out of ALBA, gutted a wage increase meant to take effect at the start of the year, weakened labor laws, shelved Zelaya’s land reform plans, and announced privatization plans for the education and health care sectors. Declaring his government bankrupt early on, Lobo took out an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and imposed the neoliberal policies demanded in return, with more borrowing to come later.
Hardly a Scandinavian paradise before the coup, Honduran social and economic indicators have plummeted in the years since. Economic growth, unemployment, and poverty all worsened, while inequality sharply rose and violence against LGBT activists exploded. Organized crime has enjoyed a boom period, as has drug trafficking, with both Lobo and his right-wing successor, president of the congress Juan Orlando Hernández, facing serious accusations of personally working to get cocaine onto US streets.
Hondurans’ resistance to this neoliberal agenda faced more of the violent repression started by the coup government. Striking teachers, and the parents and students who lent them solidarity, were met with tear gas, beatings, and even murder. Eight journalists were killed in the new government’s first six months alone, along with ten opposition activists.
Death squads returned to the country, picking off environmentalists, indigenous land activists, and any other “terrorists” standing in the way of the rapacious business interests unleashed by the government. With more than 120 killed between 2010 and 2017, the country has consistently ranked at the top of the list of most dangerous countries to be an environmental activist. The victims include Berta Cáceres, the famed activist murdered in her home in 2016 after her name ended up on a military hit list and who blamed Clinton before her death for enabling a “counterinsurgency” on behalf of “international capital.”
This state violence was directly facilitated by Washington in another way as well: the hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid that’s been funneled to military and police under post-coup governments, some of it in a plan expressly designed and sold by Joe Biden when he was vice president, and which Biden has used as a model during his own administration. Given that it’s these very “security forces” that are responsible for the violence toward and terrorization of ordinary Hondurans, the move has been entirely counterproductive, to the extent that we take its stated goals at face value.
Meanwhile, once in power, the Honduran right seemed determined to become exactly what it once accused Zelaya of being. After winning the 2013 presidential election, Hernández and the same politicians who cried despotism over Zelaya’s attempt to amend the constitution’s single-term limit did just that, with the assent of a supreme court that suddenly did a 180 on the issue. Then, in 2017, Hernández won a second term in an election riddled with irregularities, to the point that even the right-wing, Washington-friendly OAS called for new elections. This time, the US State Department wasted little time in warmly congratulating Hernández on his victory.
None of it had bothered Washington. Even as bodies like the United Nations and European Union and other Latin American nations called the 2009 election illegitimate, Clinton had termed it “free and fair” and declared the following January that the crisis had “been managed to a successful conclusion” and “done without violence.” Full US aid was restarted, and the Obama administration worked to get Honduras back in the OAS. As violence in the country continued to skyrocket, assistance from Washington was always forthcoming. In fact, the US military expanded its presence in the country, with three new military bases.
But in a lesson worth mulling over for any aspiring liberal White House technocrats, it wasn’t just Honduras that felt the reverberations of the 2009 coup. The disruption, repression, and violence it fostered within Honduras has been and still is a major push factor in the waves of northward migration that, down the line, have fed a rolling series of domestic crises in the United States: first under Obama and now under Biden, whose inability to stem the flow of desperate people coming to the border — and whose inhumane, Donald Trump–lite response to their arrival — has become the biggest political liability of his presidency.
But the biggest US loser of the coup was, ironically, Hillary Clinton herself. Despite excising the incriminating passage about Zelaya from later reissues of her book, the matter nevertheless became one of many campaign issues in the 2016 Democratic primary that helped dent enthusiasm for the candidate come election day. Meanwhile, the human displacement unleashed by the coup she aided had also fed the growth of virulent, anti-immigrant sentiment, contributing directly to the rise of her opponent, Trump, who snatched away her presidential hopes.
Doing the right thing seven years earlier might have benefited her politically. Instead, Clinton, who did more than most people to make sure the coup and the rightist government that followed were legitimized, was left serially complaining about how unfair it was she lost her own election.
A Breeze of Change
Castro’s win only goes a small, albeit powerfully symbolic, way toward correcting the injustices of the 2009 coup. A defeat of the repressive, anti-democratic right-wing bloc that’s ruled the country since Zelaya’s removal is just the first step, and no easy feat. Now comes the even more difficult feat of governing, where Castro will have to work with a likely divided congress and a state bureaucracy shaped by and aligned with her opposition, all of which will limit what she can do.
Still, her victory is another sign of the dramatic change currently sweeping Latin America, which has already seen leftists win the presidency in Peru, and where upcoming contests in Chile — now rewriting its own constitution — and, further down the line, Brazil, could do the same. For those in the region who want to protect their land and waters from a ravenous business sector, end the widespread practice of murder with impunity, and control and benefit from their own resources, these are heartening sights.
After her husband had already been deposed at gunpoint, Castro had lost twice, once as a presidential candidate in 2013, then as vice president in 2017. Her win reminds us that, even in the murderous landscape of Latin American politics, setbacks and defeats aren’t permanent, however heartbreaking. Sometimes, wrongs can be righted.
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