Historian Dana Frank has written a refreshingly non-academic book about the last decade in Honduras. On June 28, 2009, the military deposed President José Manuel Zelaya in the first successful Latin American coup in over 20 years. Frank traces the coup's consequences for the small, poor Central American country. She eviscerates the Obama administration's policy; yet she also sees brutal post-coup repression as having invigorated resistance.
The three themes of the subtitle share more or less equal space in the book. Terror descended on Hondurans almost immediately after Zelaya's ouster, in his pajamas, and it did not relent. Frank has little patience for the argument that Zelaya's call for a constitutional convention brought about his legal removal. Instead, she sees June 28 as the “first domino” of the Western Hemisphere's right-wing constitutional coups (19). Many of those killed by the post-coup regimes were friends of hers; many more confided anonymously because they feared for their lives. Security forces raped or killed resistance leaders by the hundreds—all with impunity.
All the while, Honduras went from a poor but safe and reasonably democratic country to one whose elites suspended the rule of law, privatized state services for their own benefit, robbed its teachers’ pension fund, hiked taxes on the poor, and sparked mass migration northward.
Meanwhile, Washington's Latin Americanists, while spouting platitudes about respecting the sovereignty of Hondurans, almost completely abetted these antidemocratic processes. In contrast to much of the international community, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon, and others refused to call the coup a “military coup” and kept most aid flowing while the elites staged demonstration elections. Security aid, under the Central America Regional Security Initiative, increased as state forces beat and killed protesters.
The third theme, resistance, is the most original. Frank narrates her travels and travails, her observations and emotions as she shuttles between California, Honduras, and Washington, first to try to spread the word in the mainstream media and then to help lobby Congress. In Honduras, human rights violations awakened brave groups, adding to the campesinos and Catholics of the 1980s newer organizations of women, indigenous, Afro-indigenous, LGBTI groups, and even the well-heeled from Zelaya's Liberal Party—all now with transnational allies. The “new culture of resistance,” Frank writes, “was exhilarating” (27). The resistance also used martyrs such as Berta Cáceres to embolden itself. In the early years, the National Front of Popular Resistance eschewed party politics, but by 2013, “the first mass political party of the center-left in Honduran history,” LIBRE, gained the second-largest number of seats in Congress in a split from the Liberal Party (5).
Some of the most fascinating passages are Frank's inside-baseball narrative of lobbying the US Congress. A useful primer on nongovernmental organizations nudging congressional aides to do what is right about a neglected country, it peaks in 2011 when Congress passed restrictions on US security aid to Honduras. Frank's reporting and analysis chooses not to focus on some aspects of the story, but it usefully lays the groundwork for future scholars, who will hopefully benefit from archives and empirical data, to work in a more academic fashion on the myriad issues arising out of post-2009 Honduras: its resistance politics, its relationship with US Agency for International Development funding, and its diplomacy within the hemisphere, to name but a few.
For all of Frank's optimism, however, the story is a depressing one, where Hondurans end up with a ruthless President Juan Orlando Hernández, who has overcome any ostracism from the hemisphere's diplomats. After “stealing the election outright” in 2017, Hernández is now in his second term, emboldened to further enrich his social class at the expense of the huge masses of Hondurans (241).
