ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: October 3
The Honduran Coup
Why did Trump want to build a wall? I mean besides him being the equally bigoted son of a KKK member? Because there is a crisis on the southern border. Why is there a crisis on the southern border? Because America fucked over a bunch of Latin American nations, creating myriad situations where people must flee for their very lives. This is the story of Honduras.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: October 3, 1963—
We’re getting into the area of James’s master’s thesis topic and this shit really pisses me off so buckle the fuck up. The United States of America Fuck Yeah is one giant crime against humanity. Yeah there are and have been worse nations, but don’t you go whatabouting the horrific shit the USA has done in the bullshit interests of “national security.”
Guatemala had a genocide, because America didn’t like the ever-so-slightly-left-leaning-and-democractically-fucking-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz and so the CIA overthrew his ass in 1954 and put in a military dictator. A series of murderous motherfuckers ran that nation for decades to come, all with the financial, military, and moral thumbs up from ‘Murica.
But people forget that similar shit happened in Honduras as well, and that’s why they represent the largest nationality crossing the U.S. border and seeking asylum, after completing a harrowing 1,500-mile journey.
Three years after Guatemala went to shit, Honduras elected Ramón Villeda Morales as president on a progressive platform, including agrarian and labor reform that helped poor people but who gives a shit about them because it threatened American business interests. Namely, the diabolical United Fruit Company (UFCO). JFK’s administration leaned on Morales in 1962 and he said okay fine we’ll back off on your fucking fruit company. But UFCO was all that’s fucking bullshit he’s a commie it’s gonna be Cuba all over again.
You know how comedian / incredibly insightful political and social analyst George Carlin said it’s all about “the owners” who “got you by the balls” and “spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want”?
Yeah. That.
Villeda Morales, whose election actually represented a transition away from military rule and toward democracy, freaked the fuck out about what America might do. And so, he regularly denounced communism and even cut ties with Cuba. But that wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough for America, it wasn’t good enough for the Honduran military, and it wasn’t good enough for the Honduran elite who held most of the wealth, of whom Carlin said, “They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.”
On October 13, 1963, there was to be another election in Honduras, and it looked like things might get even marginally better for the repressed and impoverished members of the nation. The Liberal Party had punted Villeda Morales for being a jam tart and offering all sorts of concessions to the military and the elite, watering down his reforms, and they replaced him with Modesto Rodas Alvarado, who was predicted to be the victor. Not only was he promising even more social reforms, but Rodas Alvarado said he was going to abolish the military.
So the fuckers in the military said yeah how about no and on October 3, 1963, they staged a violent coup, exiling Rodas Alvarado. The American ambassador to Honduras, Charles Burrows, reportedly said the coup “was justified due to the Communist infiltration into the government of Ramón Villeda Morales.” President Kennedy spoke out against the military takeover in Honduras, but he got his brains blown out a month later and LBJ was all yeah this is fine we support it.
The military controlled the nation for the next two decades, while the American corporations gained more and more economic control of the country’s fruit, mining, and banking industries. Wealth inequality became worse, Honduras went to evermore corrupt and violent shit, and for many people it became so impossible to survive that they would risk everything to travel to the nation that helped fuck them over in the first place so they could work at backbreaking labor for long hours just so their children might have a chance to live a better life.
Many of them don’t survive the journey. But build that wall, amirite?
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Teach this. Not that we are monsters now but that yes our foreign policy was often monstrous. Hopefully less now, but yes, too often. And like any government - of any trading nation - policies (even now) the line between brutality and keeping markets is blurred with blood.
We did despicable things. That other major powers also did is not the point. It’s been Corporations before humans throughout history.
I didn't know any of that. But of course it's not taught in America because it makes us look horrible. So, just pretend it never happened, and poof....gone.