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‘Women Have Been at the Forefront of the Resistance’ — FAIR [1]

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Date: 2025-02-06 18:19:35+00:00

Janine Jackson interviewed ID’s Suyapa Portillo Villeda about the Honduran election for the December 24, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Lots of excitement right now around Chile, where the election of Gabriel Boric indicates what the Wall Street Journal laments as a “hard left turn” for the country. Boric, who will be Chile’s youngest president at 35, defeated far-right candidate José Antonio Kast.

But Honduras also had an election recently, and elected its first woman president, Democratic Socialist Xiomara Castro Sarmiento Zelaya. Notably, Castro’s National Party opponent acknowledged her victory immediately. And US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says he looks forward to working with her. Our guest says Castro’s victory does not signal the end of Honduras’ longstanding problems, but it does bring the Honduran people a new feeling of hope.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda is an advocate and organizer, as well as associate professor of Chicana-Latina Transnational Studies at Pitzer College, and the author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras, out now from University of Texas Press. She joins us now by phone from California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Suyapa Portillo.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Context is very important here. People in the United States need to see the role the US played in shaping Honduras 2021 to see the meaning of this election. So if you would, please, just fill in some of the history from 2009 or before.

SPV: Yeah, I think it’s important to think about the role of the United States in the region, not just Honduras but in Central America, for the last 200 years, right. First with capitalist enterprises such as United Fruit Company, the Standard Fruit Company, these banana companies that dominated, which still exist, Dole and Chiquita brands. And they may have different corporate owners now, but the legacy of what these companies left there was a legacy of expropriation of land, of land theft, of controlling elections. Because, for example, John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state during Eisenhower, had been an attorney for the United Fruit Company, and so he had this reach and connection to the United Fruit Company that affected Guatemala, that affected Honduras. That’s the period I write about, in the mid-1950s, as a period of hope. Since the mid-1950s, Honduras has not had a period of hope, despite efforts and organizing, until after 2009.

So it’s weird for me to talk about 2009 as a period of hope, because it was also the worst time in history for Honduras. It was the first coup in the 21st century executed by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, because, as we learned later, in 2011 with WikiLeaks, the United States and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were deeply involved in the support, execution of the coup and the support of the Nationalist Party, which had brought Juan Orlando Hernández.

So for 12 years, the Nationalist Party, after the coup dominated Honduras, stole from public coffers, stole from public institutions, linked to narco trafficking, corruption. All of this was evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the hurricanes Iota and Eta in November 2021, where people were actually in the streets without any medication, without housing, without food.

But I talk about 2009 also as a moment of hope, because a national resistance movement was born, kind of like the 2019 student movement in Chile, the Arab Spring in the Middle East. And it was this moment where Hondurans had had enough of military government. They wanted democracy, and they wanted the president, Mel Zelaya at the time, reinstated, to return to the rule of order.

And, of course, these processes take a lot of organizing, that goes way beyond 2009, and comes from a long history of organizing in the region. But somehow, after the coup, it culminated in the National Resistance Front, which in 2011 became the Libertad y Refundación.

Now, there’s a lot of controversy about how the party was founded, because there were people who believed in social movements bottom-up, and then there were people who thought the best way was to do an electoral movement. As the Hondurans wrestled with that response, I consider that a moment of hope, because we hadn’t seen that level of organizing since the late ’40s, early ’50s, which led to the 1954 Great Banana Strike, which is what my book is about.

So we hadn’t seen that level of massive protest in Honduras, right? There were sporadic guerrilla movements in the ’70s and ’80s. There was a robust student movement in the ’80s. All of it crushed by Reagan’s politics of counterinsurgency, and the internal-enemy politics developed by the Honduran military.

So that’s the context in which Xiomara Castro evolved as a leader, because her husband has been ousted since 2009, and she was all of a sudden in the streets with people protesting the ousting of her president, the coup, right? Everybody called it a coup, all over the world, except at the US State Department, and President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It was sort of like a Twilight Zone episode, right, because the world knew it was a coup.

In fact, the way that Mel Zelaya was ousted, where he was kidnapped from his home by the military, put on a plane—which refueled at Soto Cano Air Base, a US air base—and then was flown to Costa Rica, was almost exactly the same pattern used against Ramón Villeda Morales in 1963. And then, from then on, a military government took over until 1980. So Honduras was under military rule from 1963 to 1980. And basically military juntas were like trading power, right?

And so people knew that it was a coup, because they had that experience, because those people that lived in 1963 were still alive. And so they remembered this, right?

And so the protest, and the fear of returning to military rule, was making people come out. And Xiomara Castro Zelaya was one of those women who was protesting with the people. She was facing the police, tear gas. She was out there as much as possible. She was talking to the press. And she emerges as a popular leader, because of what happened to her husband, right, as a first lady.

Over the years, she became much more astute at building alliances among different groups, different social movements, at bringing together and coalescing groups. And also at speaking to women’s rights. You have to remember, Honduras is one of the most violent places for cisgender women, for transgender women. You know, there’s been 300 murders of transgender women. Very few have been investigated. Over 600 women are killed a year. There’s a high, high rate of teen pregnancy, from the ages of 10 to 18.

And just a complete disregard for women’s rights and public policy, right? Because the way a government cares about women is enforcing laws and public policy. In fact, the penal code just passed a few months ago by the Juan Orlando administration reduces sentencing for perpetrators of violence against women. I mean, this is the kind of regime that the Nationalist Party was running, right?

And so her alliance with women is critical here, because what you see in 2009 in the National Resistance Front, and the subsequent movement that emerged from that, you actually see a leadership of women. You see the emergence of Berta Cáceres, who’s a land leader, the emergence of Miriam Miranda, who’s a Garífuna, the emergence of so many other land defenders and water defenders who are women, in fact, inspiring so many people in the region and in the United States, because they were able to dialogue about, not just climate change and the environment, but also about environmental justice and racism and classism and indigeneity, right? Like protecting ancestral lands. This is all from women’s movements.

Women have been at the forefront of the resistance, from grandmothers taking to the streets to children in schools. The children of the coup are now the adults, the young adults who voted for Xiomara, because they may have been in junior high school or elementary school 12 years ago, during the coup, and now are of age to vote.

I think that that’s something really important to note here, that mostly young people voted for her, her allegiance to women proposing to depenalize abortion, proposing LGBT rights and gender-identity law. Things that we may see as basic in the United States, although in some states not the case, but definitely in California, are real basic rights that LGBT folks have, or young women have. Well, things that were unheard of in Honduras, as a country that is torn between Catholicism and evangelical Christian, and it’s a country that is deeply machista and misogynist, because of the leaders that we’ve had.

You have to remember that when you have military rule from 1963 to 1980, and then you enter a period of Reagan’s anti-Communist politics from 1980 to 1992, that those periods of authoritarianism are deeply hurtful to women. There are no public policies enacted to protect women from femicide, from domestic violence. There are no domestic violence shelters. There are no rights for LGBT people. So you begin to see that the movement that emerges in these 12 years are women who are saying, we’ve had enough. We’re being displaced from our land. We don’t have rights to our body. And this is not okay.

JJ: You’re talking about the meaning of Castro’s victory within Honduras, and I was going to ask you, why did she win with the most votes in Honduras history? But I feel like you’ve answered that. So I just want to say, you’re talking about what’s happening within Honduras, and the thinking of the Honduran people; we’re looking at it from the United States and through news media.

And so news media, for example, AP is saying, “Honduras Leftist Leader Could Present Opportunities for US,” and it says:

There will be some painful history to overcome, primarily the US government’s initial sluggishness in calling the ouster of Castro’s husband Manuel Zelaya in 2009…a coup.

OK, so “sluggishness” in calling it a coup. I don’t think that really defines the US role.

SPV: It was deliberate. It was deliberate. It was a deliberate hiding of the truth, because I lived those days, hour by hour, moment by moment, not just as a Honduran immigrant, but also as a scholar at the time, who was writing a dissertation that eventually became the book. And I was following the situation on a daily basis.

And I remember, about three months after the coup, sometime in October of 2009, Barack Obama goes to Colombia. And he accidentally called it a coup in a press conference. And it was accidental. A minute later, Hillary Clinton comes out and says, that was not true. It wasn’t a coup. And, basically, the president misspoke. So you could see that there was something very intentional.

And you can go back to any of this. This was all covered by AP and Reuters. So it’s shocking to me that they would not know this, right, because their archives should have this. And it was pretty widely publicized that Barack Obama made a mistake, according to Washington, by calling it a coup.

But it was such an interesting moment, because you could really see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton covering this up and covering it up, because at the time, in 2009, if people remember, the big issue was that Latin American nations wanted to include Cuba, I think, in the OAS, or something like that. There was a big push to bring Cuba into some summit. I can’t remember.

And it was upsetting to her, because Hillary Clinton is an old Cold War–ist. Like, she publicly has said that she owes a lot to Henry Kissinger, and to all of these Cold War heroes that were actually the ones executing the murder, torture and disappearances of people, not just in Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, but in Argentina, Chile, Operation Condor, right? This is well-documented situation, history, you know, history.

So that’s why I think the fact that Chile has transitioned into a leftist government and a young government is interesting and important, because we haven’t seen that since the Salvador Allende presidency.

So this is a moment where Latin America is no longer being fooled. These new generations are not being fooled. The neoliberal project has been a complete disaster for the lives of women, children, youth, Indigenous, Afro-descendant people. It’s affected and created a poverty that was unseen before that. Not that the countries were not poor before, but that the level of poverty and corruption and thriving of narco-trafficking is completely linked to these neoliberal politics brought about by the Clintons in the 1990s.

JJ: You just mentioned that Cold War frame, and I just want to end with, you know, we’ve seen how US news media impose that Cold War frame. It’s not only politicians on everything. So here’s the Washington Times (11/29/21), which, OK, it’s the Washington Times, but the headline is “Honduras Election a Cause for Celebration— in China.”

So we know, finally, that Honduras doesn’t get a lot of coverage, unless it’s in a context of undesirable migration. What should we be looking out for in US news media coverage of the new presidency, and what kind of reporting would you like to see?

SPV: What I think is interesting is that, and this is something that you’ll see for Chile and for Honduras and for other countries, is the use of social media. The Libre Party has a Twitter handle, has a Facebook handle. If you want to see official communiques from them, that’s where you go.

Reading alternative media is critical. Reading alternative media in Central America, Radio Progreso, looking at El Libertador, right? And then putting that up against a Washington Post or a New York Times article.

It’s really funny, because when American media contacts me, like mainstream media, they just want to know if she’s a Communist, and is she going to get along with the United States. And those, to me, are such antiquated questions, in the contemporary 21st century, of what is going on in Central America. Americans are still stuck in the Communist, anti-Communism of the old age, like it’s almost like Central America and Honduras have been stuck in this era.

And very interesting things are happening in Central America, around stopping climate change, and shifting the way that people look at gender and sexuality. Really amazing things are happening, in terms of talking about participatory democracy, about rewriting constitutions, things that we as Americans don’t even feel we can do here in this country. So I would like to see some of the reporting on what’s really going on.

And then I also would like to see immigration being linked to foreign policy, because when we don’t do that, we’re only seeing half the picture. The ways in which the US anti-Communist politics have operated in the region, including during the Xiomara Castro’s presidency campaigning. You know, there were ads taken out to make her out as a Communist, to make her a friend of Venezuela and Cuba, and these really comical but serious ads that attacked her womanhood, that attacked her for believing in the rights of women, for women to choose, for LGBT rights.

And I thought that that was so, you know, those ads would have worked in 1980s Honduras. But now they were just comical and antiquated and old, because the new generation has a different experience of what participatory democracy means.

And I think if news journalists spend time studying and talking to people on the ground, like the Guapinol land defenders, who continue to be in jail for protecting a river, like the Garífuna people, who have not been able to reclaim their land from elite landowners, who’ve lost five of their members, have been disappeared for protecting the most amazing beaches in the world, their homeland, their ancestral lands. I think that they would get a more contemporary view of Honduras than what the antiquated old school rap is here in the United States.

So when we think about migration, we have to think about foreign policy and the US role in creating a dependent economy in Honduras, the US role in creating a militaristic regime in Honduras, imposing all kinds of, again, the Drug Enforcement Agency continues to operate almost as a secret service in Honduras. They do whatever they want, they kill whoever they want; they don’t get investigated or prosecuted. And, really, the success rate of what they’re doing in terms of stopping narco-trafficking is questionable.

So I would like to see reporting that looks at both sides of the border, that moves beyond these anti-Communist, antiquated understandings of the region—not just Honduras, but the region—and begins to link contemporary stories.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Suyapa Portillo. Her book Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras is out now from University of Texas Press. And you can find her article, “With the Election of Xiomara Castro, a New Feeling of Hope Has Arrived in Honduras,” on JacobinMag.com. Suyapa Portillo, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SPV: Thank you for having me.

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