Background to the Honduran coup: Poverty, exploitation and imperialist domination

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Background to the Honduran coup: Poverty, exploitation and imperialist domination

By Rafael Azul
9 July 2009

On June 28, a US-trained army with close links to the US Southern Command removed President Manuel Zelaya from office, kidnapped him and expelled him from Honduras. Given the close relationship between the Honduran army and the Pentagon, it is not credible that the coup took place without Washington’s knowledge and tacit approval.

Behind the coup, which installed a new president, Roberto Micheletti, is one of the most exploitative and oppressive political and economic systems in the world upon which the wealthy landowning and businesses elites, the military and the church depend for their wealth. These forces are now threatened by the escalation of the class struggle.

Social tensions that are being fueled by the global economic crisis find their expression in deep divisions within the country’s ruling elite. Zelaya’s pragmatic turn to the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez for cheap oil and loans combined with his populist rhetoric and his government’s raising the minimum wage by 60 percent have all been aimed at containing the explosive social struggles in Honduras.

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Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the American hemisphere. By most indexes that measure living standards, it lags behind its Central American neighbors, Guatemala and Nicaragua, nations that are also extremely poor. In the Americas, only Haiti is poorer than Honduras.

Honduras is also in transition from a rural, largely agricultural economy dominated by a feudal social structure—giant estates rule over peasant-owned mini-farms—to an urban economy with a significant industrial sector. It has a young and growing urban working class.

The old plantation economy, based largely on the production of bananas for export to the United States, is being transformed. Larger capital investments have resulted in redundancies among agricultural workers, increasing poverty and pushing agricultural workers into the cities, despite chronic high levels of urban unemployment. This urban reserve army of labor now depends on the export-oriented manufacturing industries, commonly known as “maquiladoras.” Sweatshop working conditions at these plants are considered to be among the worst in the world.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/hond-j09.shtml