The United States and Honduras, a small Central American country and the original “banana republic,” are on a roll, having recently elected a new president, the right-wing Nasri Asufura, to the delight of America’s sociopathic chief executive, Donald Trump.
The gringo leader even took credit for Mr. Asfura’s victory and threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Honduras if he did not like the election results.
Let’s call it democracy at its finest.
Last weekend, President Trump invited his “friend” and businessman Asufura to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and the two pledged to work together to fight drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
The deal might have been a little less hypocritical if President Trump hadn’t just pardoned former right-wing Honduran president and Asufura ally Juan Orlando Hernández, who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States – what else? – Drug trafficking.
And, of course, there is the fact that the United States played a major role in creating the violent conditions that led to mass immigration from Honduras in the first place. But certainly, this is not something that cannot be solved by going further with business as usual.
In fact, the wind seems right for the revival of the USS Honduras. The nickname was bestowed upon the country in the 1980s in recognition of its remarkable achievements as an imperial military base to terrorize neighboring Nicaragua, which committed the egregious crime of demanding gringos usurp and crush its capitalist system.
About 50,000 Nicaraguans died in the U.S.-backed Contra war, while CIA mercenaries raked in drug-trafficking profits to support the war effort, he said of the U.S. track record on this front.
Life aboard the USS Honduras was also nothing to write home about. Throughout the 1980s, a CIA-trained death squad known as the 316th Battalion made life hell for hundreds of Hondurans, kidnapping, torturing, and murdering them on suspicion of improper political orientation.
And the United States was in the lead in almost everything. Journalist Stephen Kinser, writing for the New York Times in 1988, detailed imperialist intrigues in Honduras with a candor not typical of an American newspaper. “[In Honduras]under the guise of formal democracy, military leaders make all important decisions and they respond to instructions from the U.S. embassy.”
Kinser said the embassy is “one of the largest State Department outposts in the world,” adding that “American diplomats have more control over Honduras’ internal affairs than any other country in the hemisphere.”
However, the USS Honduras had a rough road ahead. Especially when the 2006 elections elected President Manuel Zelaya, who had always been a little left-leaning, he had the courage to raise the minimum wage in urban areas to $290 a month or else stab international companies in the back.
With the metaphorical naval ship thus decisively veered off course, the Honduran military had no choice but to, quite democratically, kidnap Mr. Zelaya in the early hours of June 28, 2009, take him to Costa Rica in his pajamas, and never allow him to return to his elected post.
The U.S.-sanctioned coup ushered in an era of increased impunity in Honduras, as domestic law-and-order forces reacted violently to unarmed anti-coup protesters, and murders soared, setting the small country on its way to becoming the murder capital of the world.
In other words, when everything went well from a capitalist perspective and the elections were rigged by the coup regime in Honduras, then-US President Barack Obama’s Democratic government immediately spent its time recognizing the electoral victory of right-wing Porfirio Lobo, who declared Honduras “open for business.”
Then, with the reign of the aforementioned drug president Juan Orlando Hernández, things got even better. His re-election in 2017 was swiftly recognized by the first Trump administration amid widespread fraud allegations, unmindful of the subsequent massacres of Hondurans protesting the election results by U.S.-funded security forces.
Now that President Trump is back at the helm of the USS Honduras with Asfura as his first mate, it would be remiss if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not also appear on deck.
When he visited Jerusalem in January to kiss Israel’s genocidal backside, Mr. Asufura made a truly disgusting mockery of his Palestinian origins and responded with enthusiasm to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s declaration that he was “looking forward to cooperating with your government in any field that appears before us, both in the economic field, in agriculture, and in the technological field.”
The man, who may have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on his hands, reassured the Palestinian Honduran head of state: “He must know that as far as Israel is concerned, there are no limits.”
Under Asfura, Honduras’ renewed status as a key nexus of U.S. power and influence in the hemisphere is certain to give President Trump even more room to wreak havoc in Venezuela, Cuba, and wherever else he sees fit, and perhaps ensure even more spectacular violence in Honduras itself.
And as the USS Honduras vigorously sets out on its latest voyage of imperial servitude, you might say the sea is the limit, too.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
