June 28 marks a grim milestone in Honduras: ten years of dictatorship, of tragedy and resistance, of protest and repression. The 2009 coup d’état that ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya carried uncanny echoes of the darkest days of US-backed war in Central America, and proved a harbinger of the coming right-wing counterrevolution in the region.

In the words of Dana Frank, “Honduras was the first domino which the United States pushed over to counteract the new governments in Latin America.” After the military ousted Zelaya, parliamentary coups unseated democratic progressive governments in Paraguay and Brazil, and reactionary ambassadors of capital have since risen to power in elections across the continent.

In 2018, Salvadoran-Brazilian researcher Aleksander Aguilar Antunes interviewed Honduran activist Luis Méndez for the e-book Golpe electoral y crisis política en Honduras (Electoral coup and political crisis in Honduras) from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Social Sciences Council – CLACSO). In his introduction, Aguilar Antunes writes:

Carmen Elena Villacorta ( . . . ) defined Honduras as Central America’s mirror. Nearly ten years after the episode that unleashed that coup process, that is, since the overthrow and expulsion from the country of president Manuel Zelaya, it is possible to think of Honduras as the mirror not just of Central America, but all of Latin America. The re-accommodation of reactionary political actors in different national contexts throughout the continent, which in practice meant broad and dangerous losses in terms of social policies and human rights, has been taking place in different forms: impeachment, electoral frauds, and coups. Honduras has been a laboratory for these reconfigurations, just as different places in Central America have been historically. If this is in part the fault of the Right, it is also the fault of the Left, which in office placed all bets on neo-developmentalism, reducing the horizon of social emancipation to progresismo. Progresismo is fundamentally based on corporate, state, or private extractivist practices that finance public policy, and extractivism is death and territorial displacement. Thus, the regression that we see today could hardly be otherwise.

As the Latin American left reckons with its failures to build a sustainable base for a transformative political project, US-backed elites have set about liberating territory for capital at the expense of the region’s most vulnerable populations and ecosystems. In Honduras, whose history and landscape were already scarred by United Fruit plantations and US military bases, this project has taken a particularly brutal form.

The post-coup regime pioneered dramatic new modes of militarized neoliberal extraction, from megaprojects and monocultures to charter cities. Rising violence from organized crime — in which the regime is deeply implicated — together with state repression against dissidents have propelled an exodus of refugees, who traveled together in a series of high-profile caravans through Mexico to seek asylum at the US border. Despite his fraudulent 2017 election, a parade of corruption scandals, and relentless popular protests, president Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) remains entrenched in power. In recent weeks, privatization initiatives have sparked a renewed wave of mass mobilization and militancy in the streets. National strikes led by teachers and health-care workers have been met with violence from US-trained security forces. In Tegucigalpa, protestors set fire to the exterior of the US embassy.

In this context, the resistance movements have given birth to a new political actor: the Plataforma por la Defensa de la Salud y la Educación (Platform for the Defense of Health Care and Education). The Plataforma brings together public sector workers, traditional and new social movements, and the leadership and members of the Libre opposition party together in a formidable new front against the regime, calling for an end to the privatization reforms as well as JOH’s resignation. In a recent piece for the Central America network-platform “O Istmo,” coordinated by Aguilar Antunes, Luis Méndez writes that the Plataforma is “creating the conditions for the construction of real popular power from below, capable of making a qualitative leap towards new scenarios of counter-power, and possibly a new episode in the dispute over power in the short term.”

Méndez has been on the front lines of the uprising in Honduras. A popular educator and artist working in political education and historical memory, Méndez helped found the political school of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Popular Resistance Front — FNRP) and its first popular resistance collectives. In his 2018 conversation with Antunes, Méndez provides insights into the shifting terrain of struggle, as well as a timely discussion of the fraught relationship between movements and the political parties created to serve them. The interview also serves as a guide to the resistance’s history and helps us understand the dynamics driving its current configuration in the Plataforma.

For the US left, the crisis in Honduras reveals the inextricable nature of foreign and domestic policy, and the urgent need for an internationalist, solidarity-centered anti-imperialism. (We can start by demanding Congress pass the Berta Cáceres Act). As this interview shows, it also offers important lessons on the challenges and possibilities of building power.

Méndez stresses that “without internationalism, without the solidarity of the peoples of the world, Honduras would be more than a catastrophe.” This somber anniversary is as good a moment as any to renew our commitment.

—Hilary Goodfriend