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'The US State Department Is Complicit With Juan Orlando Hernández' Janine Jackson ([link removed])


Janine Jackson interviewed Pitzer College's Suyapa Portillo Villeda about the conviction of Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández for the March 15, 2024, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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AP: Former president of Honduras convicted in US of aiding drug traffickers

AP (3/8/24 ([link removed]) )

Janine Jackson: The lead on AP's March 8 piece ([link removed]) told the story:

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in New York of charges that he conspired with drug traffickers, and used his military and national police force to enable tons of cocaine to make it unhindered into the United States.

US Attorney Damian Williams said he hopes the conviction “sends a message to all corrupt politicians who would consider a similar path: Choose differently.” Heady stuff.

The US attorney added that Hernández "had every opportunity to be a force for good in his native Honduras. Instead, he chose to abuse his office and country for his own personal gain." Well, that sounds horrible, not caring about the good of everyday Hondurans.

Nowhere in AP’s account is the role of the United States, here presented as bravely bringing criminal Central Americans to justice for their efforts to pollute our country with their drugs, nowhere is the role of the US in shaping the political landscape in Honduras.

So that's the storyline corporate news media are selling right now. But what is missing from that, that might complicate it, or deepen our understanding of current events?

Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an advocate, organizer and associate professor ([link removed]) of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College. She's also author of Roots of Resistance ([link removed]) : A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back ([link removed]) to CounterSpin, Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda: Thank you for having me.

JJ: First and foremost, I would ask you to please fill in some missing history for us, in terms of US involvement in Honduran elections and Hondurans’ ability to choose their own political future. And you can go back as far as you want on that timeline.
Suyapa Portillo

Suyapa Portillo: "The United States, through the coup d'etat, was in cahoots with elite power in Honduras that replaced a democratically elected president."

SPV: I'm glad that you're raising and questioning corporate media, because they don't really tell you the story of US involvement in Honduras. And I'm a historian, so whenever I teach about this, I go back 200 years, 300 years, to the US becoming the neo-colonial power over Latin America after independence movements, and being involved in Central America, throughout the 20th century, through warships, financial deals, through dollar diplomacy ([link removed] followed a foreign policy,best promote American commercial interests.) , the United Fruit Company ([link removed]) . We can go on and on and on.

But I wanted to, specifically with the Juan Orlando Hernández case, talk about how the US put him in office for two terms. We don't know what the inside machinations were, but we do have WikiLeaks that do tell us that the United States, through the coup d'etat, was in cahoots with elite power in Honduras that replaced a democratically elected president, or actually kidnapped a democratically elected president. The US embassy was involved, during President Obama and Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, were involved in the kidnapping of the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, putting him on a plane to Costa Rica in his pajamas.

What's eerie about this whole scenario in 2009 is that a similar thing happened with President Ramón Villeda Morales, who was also a Liberal Party member, in 1962, was also kidnapped in his pajamas and taken out of the country ([link removed]) . So the US has its hands all over this kind of activity in Central America, and all over the world, the developing world and the South.

When this happened, President Obama denies the coup d’etat, denies it, and we academics, scholars all over Latin America, as well as the United States, spent a lot of time talking to press and anybody who would listen, and US Congress, as well as news media outlets all over the world, about why this was a coup d’etat. And it almost felt like we were in the Twilight Zone.
HuffPost: Hillary Clinton's Response To Honduran Coup Was Scrubbed From Her Paperback Memoirs

HuffPost (3/12/16 ([link removed]) )

But then later in 2011, we saw WikiLeak cables ([link removed]) that revealed that the US embassy was definitely in cahoots with the elite and the military in Honduras, who wanted to oust Manuel Zelaya Rosales for his “connections” to Hugo Chávez ([link removed]) in Venezuela at the time.

And that coup d’etat changed everything in Honduras. And it spearheaded the decline of human rights, and the decline in civil and political rights for people, for women and children specifically. It was extremely violent for women and children, and has led to the 2017, 2018 migrant caravans that people have been seeing on TV.

The femicides ([link removed]) have increased. We're looking at 700 women killed per year. We're looking at transfemicides ([link removed]) also. We're looking at 200, 300 women killed per year, trans women. So it's an incredible level of violence against young people who fight for their rights.

What that does is then it opens a door for someone who would've never been elected as president, who had run two or three times before, and that's Porfirio Lobo ([link removed]) . And Porfirio Lobo, who's also been linked to narco trafficking and the whole apparatus, gets into power through sham elections, which the State Department supported and the US embassy supported. But over 68% of the Honduran population abstained, because they felt, why should we vote if we had a democratically elected president? Why should we go to an election after this coup? What needs to happen is a reversal of the coup.
CounterSpin: 'Her Life Hung by a Thread Because of This Work'

CounterSpin (5/1/15 ([link removed]) )

And something really important gets born then. And some of the proponents were Xiomara Castro Zelaya, Zelaya's wife, who's now in power, but also Berta Cáceres ([link removed]) , Miriam Miranda, leaders of the Afro-Indigenous and Indigenous movements, began to propose this notion of refounding ([link removed]) the country. So while there was a lot of calamity happening, a lot of violence, there was also a resurgence in popular movements. The idea that you could have a different Honduras was also born in 2009, out of this calamity.

When Juan Orlando Hernández was elected, it was a contested election. I was an observer at the time, and it was the first time the Libertad y Refundación ([link removed]) party ran. The party itself was just beginning to organize. The resistance movement had gone through a split. There were some people that wanted to continue the social movement aspect, and then there was another group that wanted to organize it into a political party. And there were fierce debates about this.

And when you go to the polls, there was just a lot of corruption. It was very contested.

And so Juan Orlando gets into power. The United States supports this sort of stabilizing force; they see the National Party as a stabilizing force. So one of the first things he does is he establishes the military police, which is something that had been eradicated, with the Peace Accord post-the wars in Central America in the early '90s.

And the military police is this weird sort of police force that are military men with bayonets and war armament walking around the cities acting as police, right? So you have these multiple police entities in the city, but the military police is to be feared. These are the people that committed the disappearances. These are the people that engaged in violence against people in the '80s, during the dark years of anti-Communism.

Bringing them back was almost a suggestion of the US embassy, which then, after, came out and said, “No, no, no, we never suggested this.” But it was something that Juan Orlando Hernández did in cahoots with the US embassy.

And, in fact, the military police then comes back into power, and begins to be the entity that harms most in the cities. He also begins to work with the elites, right, with the Evangelical churches, and an agenda that's extremely anti-women, anti-children, anti-LGBT, anti-human, really, right?

Youth are the enemy of this administration. We just witnessed this extremely violent repression of young people, right? People who defended territorial rights… Berta Cáceres, one of the brightest leaders in the resistance… I think at one point, he issued 330 concessions on environmental lands that had been hard-fought protected, rivers and flora and fauna that were going to be stripped for mining.
CounterSpin: Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran Election

CounterSpin (12/24/21 ([link removed]) )

One thing I want to say is, during his elections, the second time he was reelected, there were so many inconsistencies. I've served as an election observer on all those elections, and the second time ([link removed]) , I brought students, so we could cover a larger ground in San Pedro Sula. And it was clear from all of our observations, the winning parties—because you stay till the end, til the counting—and at one point, I had to shelter with my students in one of those locations, because we had gone until one in the morning, during counting.

And the military started throwing tear gas into the voting center, and there was a skirmish there between the military and who knows who. We were kind of sheltered in a room. And with the counting, we didn't want to leave the voting machines!

I think about what an experience that was for my students, because when we think about protecting our rights in the United States, and voting rights, we rarely see that level of violence inside a voting precinct. It's completely illegal.

There was trafficking votes, there were all kinds of irregular things happening, like the National Party people were setting up offices within the voting precinct; you're not supposed to see that. Just outright mayhem. It was like the wild, wild West under Juan Orlando Hernandez. It was the most extreme dictatorship, that can only be compared to Carias Andino ([link removed]) in the '30s.

And people just wanted this man out, because of the rampant violence, the abuse of power, and stealing from the coffers. I mean, at one point, $90 million stolen from the Social Security Administration, which is sort of like what workers pay into.

But at state hospitals, there were fake pills given to people who had cancer; there was no response to Covid except extreme lockdown, which, people died because he instituted a curfew law, and anybody that was out after 10 o'clock could be shot or could be thrown in jail. And sometimes people are coming back from work, or didn't have transportation. A young woman in Berta Cáceres' hometown died because she was arrested at 10 o'clock, because she was out, and then appeared dead the next day, right?

Just the extreme violence that the police and the military all engaged with, looking back as a historian, I think these are crimes against humanity. This guy went down for engaging in drug trafficking, but really he needed to be tried for crimes against humanity, as do many other presidents, right, across the world.

But what's a little scary about this ruling is, people knew he was trafficking drugs, but you couldn't say anything, because you would be dead. And so many, many journalists died trying to tell the story, but it was held down and shut.

And in fact, many of the newspapers in Honduras cannot be trusted, because they were, first of all, not telling the story of the protest. So if you go searching those newspapers, La Tribuna, El Heraldo, right, for these years, as a historian, I think there was this complicity between the elite, the rich, the landowners, those who wanted more land and more land, taking it away from Indigenous people, and Juan Orlando profiting from narco trafficking, allowing narco trafficking to happen, and the narco traffickers, to hurt people in the areas where they did in the north coast of Honduras, the Garifuna territories, to go after leaders of those local environmentalists, protecting the environment, protecting the rivers, protecting the oceans from encroachment.

I wanted to say, yes, everybody knew Juan Orlando Hernández was a narco, but how do you challenge the Honduran people who are organizing? There needed to be more awareness from the US embassy, and I think the US embassy was complicit. And, true, maybe the DEA built this case from the beginning, and it took them many years, but they were also not in support of the resistance, and the fact that he did not win that election, the second time, and that there was a blackout right at the end that lasted a couple of hours, and all of a sudden, three days later, he's president.
Roots of Resistance

University of Texas Press (2022 ([link removed]) )

The US allowed for this man to lie to the Honduran people, to steal from the Honduran people, and to sit in that office that is the highest office for Honduras, while all these people were dying, and they committed this crime with him, they're complicit with him. The US State Department is complicit with Juan Orlando Hernández.

So when he's extradited, I think for Hondurans, it was a relief to be rid of this pseudo-dictator narco-president. But there's a concern as well. There's something kind of malignant about that, you know what I mean? That the US becomes all-powerful, and the decider of a country's fate, and that's scary.

JJ: We've been speaking with Suyapa Portillo Villeda of Pitzer College in California, and also author of Roots of Resistance ([link removed]) : A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras, where you can find much more information about what we're talking about today. Thank you so much, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, for speaking with us today on CounterSpin.

SPV: Thank you for having me.


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