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'Honduras Is a Country Still Recovering From a Coup the US Helped Enable': Janine Jackson ([link removed])


Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR's Alex Main about the Honduran election for the December 5, 2025, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

[link removed]


BBC: “As Lead Changes in Knife-Edge Honduran Election, Will Trump Fail to Get His Way?”

BBC (12/2/25 ([link removed]) )

Janine Jackson: The BBC's December 3 headline ([link removed]) drops us right in: “As Lead Changes in Knife-Edge Honduran Election, Will Trump Fail to Get His Way?” What's going on in the Honduran general elections, and what does it have to do with Trump? And, also, what do we lose when media report other country's elections through the lens of US power?

Here to help us make sense of things is Alex Main. He's director of international policy ([link removed]) at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Welcome back ([link removed]) to CounterSpin, Alex Main.

Alex Main: Thank you. Good to be back.

JJ: We are recording the morning of December 4. Folks will be hearing it later, and I trust they'll understand that we are talking about what we know now, and whatever the outcome, the same factors are still in play.

So we can't do it total justice, but if you could just set the stage a little, these elections in Honduras—yes, for president, but they're much broader than that—have been very fraught. Why is that? What is at stake here, and what makes it so hard to read, especially from outside Honduras?
Why We Emigrate: The Fruit Companies Era: Becoming Banana Republics

Why We Emigrate ([link removed])

AM: Yes, Honduras has had a fraught history, really, and a lot of it has to do with the US, and its role in Honduras, which is often referred to, or has been referred to in the past, as the quintessential "banana republic," where basically US corporations and the US military have essentially had their way for well over a century now.

It started with bananas and the United Fruit Company ([link removed]) , and today, I think, Honduras is seen as a very geostrategic location for the US. They have their most important military base, with Task Force Bravo ([link removed]) , in Soto Cano ([link removed]) , which is not far from the capital city of Honduras, Tegucigalpa. And that base has been active since the 1980s, when it was a launchpad for the US and its interventions in Central America, and primarily in Nicaragua, where of course it was supporting the Contra insurgency ([link removed]) against the Sandinistas, who came to power in 1979.

And beyond just Soto Cano the base, there were lots of airfields in remote parts of Honduras where the CIA flew weapons and munitions to Contra forces in Nicaragua throughout the war there in the 1980s. And that was done with the complete acquiescence of the Honduran government. And I think Honduras, perhaps more than any other country in that region, had historically been the most pliant government ([link removed]) towards the US, really allowing the US to use it very freely to intervene throughout the region.
Real News Network: USS Honduras, Under the Shadow

Real News Network (2/13/24 ([link removed]) )

JJ: Someone reminded me that people used to call it USS Honduras ([link removed]) , so much was it seen as a staging ground for US actions in the region.

AM: Yes, that's right. And that may seem anachronistic, and sort of a relic of the Cold War, but we're currently seeing a remilitarization of the region under this Trump administration. I mean, it was already heavily militarized, but now it's reaching really new levels, with close to 20% ([link removed]) of US naval forces now concentrated in the Caribbean, these threats of war ([link removed]) against Venezuela; and the US has been very aggressively seeking the support and the infrastructure of countries in the region to, again, serve as a launch pad to intervene militarily, currently, potentially, in Venezuela, but also other countries: That could include Colombia, that could include Mexico. It really depends on the whims of the current president of the United States, but all is a part of this new war on "narco terror
([link removed]) ."

So I would say Honduras remains perhaps more geostrategic than ever, in the eyes of the folks in charge now in Washington, DC. And that has had a huge influence on what happens in the country, because the US has just an enormous amount of economic influence there. Honduras is heavily dependent, not just on trade with the US ([link removed] United States is Honduras,Free Trade Agreement (FTA).) , but also on remittances from Hondurans ([link removed]) that are in the US. They're a big part of the annual GDP of the country.

And so every little thing that the US does and says regarding Honduras really has huge effects in the country, effects that are very rarely noted here in the US in the media and so on. But in these elections, they have gotten some notice.

JJ: I've seen some attention. I mean, I'm looking at this BBC piece ([link removed]) , but not because it's special, more because it's not special, and it states straight out, "Many in Honduras see the US president's fingerprints all over this election.” So what are they talking about there?
Reuters: Trump backs conservative Asfura in Honduras' tight presidential race

Reuters (11/26/25 ([link removed]) )

AM: Yeah, absolutely. And at this point, we don't know who the winner of the election is, today, on December 4. But we do know who has not won the election, and that is Rixi Moncada ([link removed]) , from the left-wing LIBRE Party that rules the country under President Xiomara Castro, currently. She is in a distant third place, and it's currently a toss up between [Nasry] Asfura ([link removed]) from the National Party and Salvador Nasralla ([link removed]) from the Liberal Party, and the National Party and the Liberal Party are the two parties that shared power ([link removed] essentially has had two,extended alliance with the military.) in Honduras for decades following the end of the military dictatorship
in Honduras in the mid-1980s.

So we're seeing a return to the past, in a sense, with these two parties that are really very closely aligned. They're both quite conservative, they're very close to the US, and have always deferred to the US in terms of its foreign policy agenda, in the region and in the world. And of course that's how US administrations, whether this one or previous ones, have always liked it in Honduras. That, to them, represents stability—not stability for Honduras, necessarily, but stability for US interests in that country and in the region.

So what we've seen that's very striking is just a level of interference that I don't think we've ever seen in a Honduran election before, where President Trump, just days before the election took place, this last Sunday, November 30, he publicly endorsed ([link removed]) the National Party candidate, Asfura, and he announced as well that he was going to be pardoning Juan Orlando Hernandez ([link removed]) , the former National Party president of Honduras, who served, illegally, two terms as president of the country, from I think 2014 to 2022, and who was heavily involved in corruption and in drug trafficking, and ended up extradited to the US and sentenced to over 40 years in jail.

JJ: Can we just put a pin in the drug trafficking? Just put a pin there in the “convicted of drug trafficking,” which is, I mean, irony is dead, but please, continue.
Truth Social: Democracy is on trial in the coming Elections in the beautiful country of Honduras on November 30th. Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela? The man who is standing up for Democracy, and fighting against Maduro, is Tito Asfura, the Presidential Candidate of the National Party.

Truth Social (11/26/25 ([link removed]) )

AM: Yes, absolutely. So that was, again, the most heavy interference that we've seen from a US president in an election in Honduras, perhaps in Latin America, at least publicly. There's always, of course, a lot going on behind the scenes, and that, I'm sure, has certainly been the case in these elections.

But this is overtly, through Truth Social posts ([link removed]) , backing this candidate, accusing both of the other candidates of being Communists, one supposedly openly a Communist, which I guess is maybe the most bad word in Trump's political lexicon, but accusing Rixi Moncada of the LIBRE Party of being a Communist, and then also accusing Nasralla of being a Communist in disguise, who was there to thwart the chances of the National Party candidate.

Anyway, absurd claims, but in any case, any sort of statement like this was bound to have huge repercussions in Honduras. I think it's a country that's still recovering from a coup that took place ([link removed]) back in 2009, a coup that the US helped enable during the Obama administration.

JJ: And I wanted to actually do a little revisit to that, because when I say "USS Honduras," when you say "banana republic," people may think, “that's before I was born,” but, first of all, it's not. And then, also, we have very recent, salient history. And I really just would like to take the moment to go back to that 2009 coup against Mel Zelaya, because then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a role ([link removed]) , but she scrubbed that role from her memoir, “Hard Choices” (give me a break). When that memoir came out in paperback, Hillary Clinton chose to erase ([link removed] the account Clinton offered,disappeared from the paperback edition.) her role in the 2009 coup in Honduras. And I think that's fascinating. If you're proud of it, why erase it?
ITT: How Hillary Clinton and “American Power” Paved the Way for Shocking Violence in Honduras

In These Times (8/17/16 ([link removed]) )

AM: Yes. Well, it was a very revealing chapter that was taken out of the paperback edition, one where she proudly explained her role in preventing the elected president of Honduras—who hadn't finished his term and had been ousted in a coup and forced into exile—from getting back into office. And by doing that, essentially it allowed this coup against Mel Zelaya, the elected president, to succeed.

And the election that took place ([link removed]) , that was supported by the US and virtually no other country in the hemisphere, was carried out in extremely unfair conditions, extreme repression that was going on following the coup, extreme censorship and exclusion of candidates. And, of course, in a situation where there was a de facto government: There wasn't a democracy, the democracy had not been restored, even though that's what all the other countries in the region were calling for.

But the US essentially prevented that from happening, because they didn't want someone like Mel Zelaya, who was from one of the two traditional political parties, from the Liberal Party, but who had essentially gone rogue and aligned himself with left-wing social movements in the country, demanding some very deep reforms, particularly to the constitution, which had been written during the military dictatorship of Honduras, and is very conservative and had a lot of constraints, and helped maintain a kind of neoliberal system in place.

So he represented a real threat to the perceived interests of the US. His social movement base was very much opposed to a continued US military presence in the country. And I think that's still, today, a very thick red line for a lot of US policymakers, certainly those that have directed US policy towards Latin America from the State Department, Department of Defense and so on, for decades.

JJ: I'm going to ask you to come back to social movements in Honduras in just a second, but I did want to, first of all, read Hillary Clinton's own words ([link removed]) . She's talking about conversations with Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa after the 2009 coup:

We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.

I just—the perversity of the language.
NYT: Trump’s Threat Against Maduro Unites Latin America, Against U.S.

New York Times (8/14/17 ([link removed]) )

And then I want to pin it to the quote from current US Rep. Maria Salazar from Florida, who's describing ([link removed] those who remember how,government would steal the election.) that same 2009 military coup: “Then the Honduran democracy stood strong, thank God for that. And the armed forces abided by their duty to uphold democracy, and Mr. Zelaya was out of office.”

And I read those quotes just to alert us to the use of language, to the weaponization of the terms “democracy” and “free and fair”—because we know what happened. And then this is how it is described. And this includes news media, as late as, let me get my note here, 2017, the New York Times is saying ([link removed]) :

In 2009, after the Honduran military removed the leftist President Manuel Zelaya from power in a midnight coup, the United States joined other countries in trying to broker, albeit unsuccessfully, a deal for his return.

It's just false. In other words, if the US is so proud of their involvement in Honduras and the region, why lie about it?

AM: That's right.

JJ: Why scrub it?

AM: Well, Hilary Clinton didn't lie about it in the first edition of her book, but then realized that it became a little bit awkward, and contradicted the official narrative.

And if I may, I'd also like to point your listeners to Hillary Clinton's emails. Remember the big batches of emails that were released in 2015? Now they contained even more evidence of her very active role in preventing Mel Zelaya from returning to office. I wrote an article about this that you can find on our website ([link removed]) at CEPR.net called “Hillary Clinton's Emails and the Honduras Coup.” So we don't need to go into the details now, but there's a lot more that she did behind the scenes, and we discovered a lot more in those emails. But that got very little attention from the New York Times and other major outlets
CEPR: Honduras: US Officials Should Not Intervene in Other Countries’ Elections

CEPR (11/30/25 ([link removed]) )

JJ: And certainly isn't part of her persona now, as she reinvents herself.

Well, I said I'd bring you back to social movements, because, as your colleague Mark Weisbrot wrote recently ([link removed]) , a number of things were unleashed in the wake of that coup. And you've talked about the decline in human rights, and increase in femicide in particular, and just a number of drastic, difficult things that happened.

And then other things also happened, which were a growth in Afro-Indigenous and Indigenous movements. CounterSpin listeners will know about Berta Caceres ([link removed]) . That coup unleashed bottom-up work and social justice work as well, and that, we should acknowledge, continues.

AM: No, absolutely. And I think it'll be continuing more than ever. If there is a silver lining to this election—which, again, I think was shaped a lot by US interference—I think it's that this gives LIBRE and the social movements a time, and a moment, to reassess and rebuild themselves.

In the process of coming to power, LIBRE entered a power structure that, in a certain sense, absorbed it. It went in a direction that I think a lot of the social movements [weren't] as happy with. Even though, for the most part, I think key movements like OFRANEH ([link removed]) and COPINH ([link removed]) that represent Afro-Indigenous communities in Honduras, they absolutely called on Hondurans to vote against the bipartidismo, the bipartisan Liberal and National party alliance, but they weren't very enthusiastically supportive of LIBRE. And I think there is an opportunity now for the LIBRE Party to refind its roots, that were very much based in social movement resistance, and perhaps get more direction from that going forward.
CEPR's Alex Main

Alex Main: "If you are a right-wing Latin American government that's aligned with the US, you get a free pass in the media."

But at the same time, under another either National Party or Liberal Party government—at this stage, we don't know which it will be—there's likely to again be a lot of repression of the social movements. And so that's something that's very important to monitor, because it won't get much attention. It didn't get much attention after the coup. It didn't get much attention at all during the two terms of Juan Orlando Hernandez—again, illegal terms, because the Constitution actually prevented him from being reelected.

But also because, in 2017, there are pretty clear indications ([link removed]) that there was fraud during those elections carried out by the National Party. And there were huge protests in response to that fraud. And those protests were very violently repressed ([link removed]) . You had over 30 protesters that were killed. The military was unleashed against the protesters, and that government has a terrible human rights record, but also a record of very endemic corruption throughout the institutions.

There were huge protests against the corruption as well that didn't get much notice. And it's almost as if, if you are a right-wing Latin American government that's aligned with the US, you get a free pass in the media. Doesn't get much notice if there's a corruption scandal, if there's repression. And, of course, in the case of Juan Orlando Hernandez, there were a lot of signs of his deep involvement ([link removed]) in drug trafficking for many years. And it was only after he left the presidency that the US actively pursued him for his involvement in drug trafficking.

And now, really, he should be brought to justice in Honduras for his crimes there. But that seems unlikely to happen, with either the Liberal Party or the National Party in power. They look out for each other, and there's a long record of corruption ([link removed]) in both those parties, and a long record of impunity for the corruption that's taken place. And, unfortunately, that's likely to continue.

JJ: And no reason to look for, certainly, corporate US news media to cover that critically, or to platform the voices of the social movements that will be working to challenge it.

AM: That's right.

JJ: All right then. We've been speaking with Alex Main. He's director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can follow their work online at CEPR.net ([link removed]) . Thank you so much, Alex Main, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AM: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
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