Honduras

D

The Banana Republic

At the start of the 20th century, Honduras was the poorest of the Central American nations. In the early 1900s U.S. fruit companies began growing bananas along the Caribbean coast of Honduras. They competed ruthlessly for grants of land from the government under favorable terms and often promised political support in return. The banana companies soon became the dominant force in the country’s political and economic life.

By 1910 U.S. firms controlled 80 percent of all banana lands, and bananas had become the mainstay of the economy. Honduras became known as a “banana republic.” When revolutions broke out in 1911 and 1913, the United States intervened on the side of the ruling elite to restore order and protect U.S. property.

The fruit companies gave Honduras a major export commodity, developed its Caribbean ports, and contributed, indirectly, to the growth of San Pedro Sula as the major population center on the entire Central American Caribbean plain, even though they contributed little to the general development of the country. Most of Honduras remained illiterate, and underpopulated.

E

Modernizing Honduras

The dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías, which lasted from 1932 to 1948, ended a long period of political disorder in Honduras. Carías governed with an iron hand and did little to advance the social welfare of his people. However, the country achieved some economic progress under his rule, and the austerity measures he introduced contributed to a balanced budget. In 1949 Carías relinquished the presidency to a successor he chose, Juan Manuel Gálvez, a lawyer for the United Fruit Company who was supported by the National Party.

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Showing surprising independence, Gálvez initiated some economic and social reforms. He stimulated the building of new roads, schools, and health facilities and promoted agricultural diversification. A program for providing water and sewer systems for the larger towns and cities was also launched. Some democratic freedoms were introduced, but too few and too slowly to suit the Liberal Party. Honduras remained the only Latin American republic without a labor law. In 1954 banana workers went on strike. As other workers joined in, a general strike paralyzed the country, forcing the government to legally recognize the labor unions. Most of the workers’ demands were not met, however.

Elections in 1954 produced a deadlock over the successor to Gálvez, and his vice president, Julio Lozano Díaz, seized power. In 1956 a military junta ousted Lozano. The junta organized elections to a constituent assembly that elected a liberal, Ramón Villeda Morales, as president in 1957. Villeda led the country into the Central American Common Market (CACM) and initiated programs for agrarian reform and education. The landowners and the army opposed the agrarian reforms, and in 1963 the army overthrew Villeda.

F

Military Governments

Colonel Osvaldo López Arellano, who led the 1963 coup, held the reins of government for 11 of the next 12 years. López halted implementation of the agrarian reforms begun by the Villeda regime and dealt harshly with militant peasant organizations. His administration did, however, continue policies of his predecessor that aimed at modernizing the economy.

Throughout the 1960s tensions grew between Honduras and El Salvador because of the large number of landless, jobless Salvadorans who moved to Honduras and because of border disputes. A brief but costly war between the two countries erupted in 1969 after a soccer match and further weakened the economy. Relations between Honduras and El Salvador remained tense until 1980, when the two countries finally concluded a peace treaty.

In 1971 national elections were held, and the leader of the National Party was elected president. Late in 1972 López Arellano regained power in a bloodless coup, suspended congress, and began governing by decree. By this time peasant unrest had flared up again. López immediately reactivated the agrarian reform program, distributing government land and legalizing peasant settlement on idle private lands. Opposition to his regime grew among both landowners alarmed by agrarian reforms and young army officers disturbed that high-level government officials had stolen money intended for hurricane relief. Hurricane Fifi, which struck Honduras in 1974, had taken 8,000 lives and damaged nearly 60 percent of the country’s farmland.

The final blow for López was the exposure in 1974 of a $250,000 bribe paid to government officials by United Brands, the leading banana grower. The army helped Colonel Juan Alberto Melgar Castro take power in 1975. Under Melgar Castro the army cooperated with landowners in violently repressing peasant dissent, and some peasant leaders were jailed. He was ousted in 1978 in another coup, led by General Policarpo Paz García.

In 1979 a revolution in neighboring Nicaragua brought the Sandinistas to power there. Honduras became a base for thousands of guerrillas fighting the Nicaraguan government, and the United States began holding regular military exercises in Honduras in an effort to bring down Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. United States President Ronald Reagan believed the Sandinistas were backing communist revolutions in Central America.

In the 1980s Honduras found itself more than ever dependent on the United States. The Honduran government first denied the presence of the Nicaraguan exiles being trained by the U.S. military. Then in 1986, the government began to ask the United States to remove its Nicaraguan rebels, as cross-border warfare and the presence of refugees were depressing the economy. In 1990 the rebel camps were closed.

G

Return to Civilian Rule

Following the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, the United States also began to put pressure on the Honduran military to install a constitutional government to increase political stability. In elections held in 1981, the Liberal Party candidate, Roberto Suazo Córdova, won the presidency. A new constitution was approved in 1982. However, the military retained considerable influence in the country.

José Azcona Hoyo, also a Liberal Party candidate, was elected president in 1985. He was succeeded by Rafael Leonardo Callejas of the National Party, winner of the 1989 presidential election. The Callejas administration was beset by strikes as it struggled with a desperate economic situation and tried to reduce government spending.

A rising cost of living and government corruption enabled Liberal Party candidate, Carlos Roberto Reina Idiaquez, a longtime human rights and political activist, to defeat Callejas in 1993. Reina investigated government corruption and past human rights violations. His presidency helped restore civilian control to the government by removing the police from the jurisdiction of the military and by implementing a plan to put the armed forces under a civilian defense minister beginning in 1999. With the approval of the Roman Catholic Church, the former archbishop of Tegucigalpa was appointed head of the national police force.

In 1995 the main political parties established a new political forum, the National Council of Convergence, which was designed to promote consensus on the social, economic, and political problems facing Honduras. Also that year Honduras joined the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), a free trade organization. The Liberal Party remained in power in the presidential and congressional elections in 1997. The new president, Carlos Flores Facusse, had been a newspaper publisher and former president of the Honduran Congress.

Honduras was one of the countries hardest hit when Hurricane Mitch struck the eastern coast of Central America in October 1998. Mitch killed over 5,000 people in Honduras, left many thousands homeless, and caused enormous damage to crops, roads, and towns and villages. Mitch was ranked as the fourth strongest hurricane of the 20th century. Some observers said that the storm had set back economic development in Honduras by decades.

In 2001 National Party candidate Ricardo Maduro was elected president. Maduro took office in 2002 and vowed to crack down on violent crime. Gang warfare had been on the rise since the late 1990s, and army units began policing the streets in 2000. A United Nations report in 2002 condemned the killing of children and young people in Honduras who lived in the streets. Estimates suggested that more than a thousand street children had been killed over a four-year period, many by the security forces. The government launched an investigation into the deaths in 2003.

In late 2003 Honduras signed on to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which was designed to improve trading relations between the countries of the region and the United States (see Free Trade). The issue of crime continued to dominate Honduran politics, however. In November 2005 voters showed their unhappiness with the government by electing the Liberal Party’s Manuel Zelaya as the country’s new president.

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