Honduras: The Immortal “Monroe Doctrine”, and its Bananas, Drugs, Gangs and Pardons

 The question isn’t whether Honduras can escape its role as Washington’s most obedient client state; it’s whether the United States will finally accept a sovereign partner rather than a subordinate platform for regional intervention.

Tamer Mansour

Picture this: a country so compliant to foreign interests that its very name became synonymous with corruption. That’s Honduras. For over a century and a half, this Central American nation has earned a dubious gold medal for being Washington’s most reliable yes-man in Latin America. From the banana plantations that birthed the phrase “banana republic” to today’s narco-state accusations, Honduras tells the same story on repeat, just with different actors wearing updated costumes. But something’s shifting.

In the last couple of years, new political forces emerged to push back against this very subordination, bringing the same old questions to the front pages once more:

• What does real sovereignty mean?
• Is the so-called war on drugs real, or is it just a stage prop?
• Did the Monroe Doctrine ever really die, or did it just get better PR?

But the list of questions does not stop here:

From United Fruit to Narco-Presidencies

Let’s be clear about what “banana republic” meant. This wasn’t some cutesy marketing term; it was a brutally accurate description of economic colonialism. American fruit giants like United Fruit and Standard Fruit didn’t just operate in Honduras. They were Honduras.

The question is whether the United States, after more than a century of treating Honduras as its most obedient servant, can finally imagine a different relationship

Political elections? Well, maybe more like employee performance reviews.

These corporations wielded the kind of political power that made democracy look like a suggestion box. Whenever those corporate interests faced threats, US intervention arrived with the reliability of a Swiss watch. Here’s the thing though: this pattern never disappeared.

It just evolved into something darker. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got US-backed governments tangled up in the very drug trade they’re supposedly fighting.

Juan Orlando Hernández -or JOH, as he’s known- personifies this absurdity. Washington embraced this former Honduran president as a dependable ally for years. Then his brother Tony got convicted in a New York federal court for drug trafficking.

The evidence trail included ledgers maintained by Nery Orlando López, a trafficker whose conveniently timed prison murder silenced someone with direct lines to the presidential palace.

But here’s where it gets truly surreal:

Donald Trump recently announced on Truth Social that he’d pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, while simultaneously backing Nasry Asfura, former mayor of Tegucigalpa and National Party candidate for presidential elections.

Hernández himself had been labeled a co-conspirator in US court documents.

This scene begs the question: if the very governments the US is propping up so they can wage a “war on drugs”, are themselves allegedly involved to the brim in drug trafficking operations, how do you expect anyone with two communicating brain cells to believe in such a fraud?

2009: The Coup That Pulled Back the Curtain

The military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 was more than a usual Latin America-style power grab; it was actually a revealing incident that exposed the US hypocrisy, as everybody sees it, putting economic interest over democracy in an instant, once its bottom line is even mildly threatened.

Zelaya’s crime? He started pivoting Honduras away from neoliberal orthodoxy and toward the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA), the alternative integration framework led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

This represented a fundamental challenge to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) model that the US had been pushing across the hemisphere. Zelaya joined Petrocaribe, Venezuela’s subsidized oil program. He pursued energy sector nationalization. These moves threatened entrenched economic interests, including elite families like the Rosenthals (Jamie and Yani Rosenthal), who controlled vast banking and business empires through institutions like Banco Continental.

The Obama Administration’s response? A masterclass in diplomatic double-talk. Officially, Washington condemned the coup. But unofficially, Washington wanted/supported exactly what the coup plotters sought, which is installing a right-wing government in power.

What came next? Economic collapse, a drug trafficking pandemic, and extreme violence. Not to mention a migration problem that will unavoidably throw Honduran families into the hands of ICE at the US borders, the very same country that created the conditions they are fleeing from with the help of its global financial institutions.

But it was former President Zelaya who was labelled “unstable” and “dangerous”, in a synchronized campaign to “manufacture consent” around his overthrow in the media. Well-funded mainstream outlets magnified this anti-Zelaya narrative, overwhelming poorly-funded alternative news sources like “Telesur”, and using delegitimization smear campaigns to scare into silence all these voices who would dare defy the mainstream narrative.

Let’s Address MS-13: The Rarely-Highlighted Blowback

The explosion of gangs like Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang can’t be divorced from broader US policy disasters. These weren’t homegrown Honduran creations; they formed in Los Angeles and got exported to Central America through deportation policies. They flourished in the chaos of the Northern Triangle, where weak governance and economic desperation created perfect recruitment conditions.

The US response? The Central America Regional Security Initiative, which funnelled funding and training to security forces.

The US then built the largest military installation near Comayagua in Honduras, the “Palmerola Air Base”. An operation central designed to act as a hub for versatile operations in the region. The FBI and the US military were providing training to Honduran security forces to ostensibly fight drug trafficking and gangs. While in reality, this security apparatus co-existed with drug trafficking networks, which were operational through the highest echelons of the Honduran government.

US policy priorities were never simply about stopping drugs. Maintaining a cooperative government and military presence apparently took precedence over actually dismantling trafficking operations, especially when those operations implicated allied government officials.

The Debt Trap and Chicago School Economics

Institutions like the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), with its “neoliberal” economic model inflicted upon Honduras, have caused what analysts rightly term an “international debt trap”.

A neoclassical economic direction that follows Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics playbook, which infamously pushes for imposing “adjustment programs”, demand privatization, and cutting of social and welfare spending, leaving countries like Honduras wide open to foreign investments. Such policies expectedly provoked anti-privatization protests, which have erupted in Honduras, only to be met with crushing repression.

A golden opportunity for organized crime, as this economic model generates extreme inequality and poverty, conditions that lead many to either migrate, enroll in gangs, or get involved in drug trafficking.

While behind the scenes, lobbying firms like the BGR Group engage in shaping Washington’s policy in Central America. Policies that prioritize the special interests of business, and to hell with human rights and democracy, as long as they don’t serve “business” and “America”.

Honduras continued to integrate itself deeper into this framework, especially during President Ricardo Maduro’s reign (2002 – 2006), when violence and drug-linked corruption reached unprecedented heights.

So, if the model is a nightmare for ordinary Hondurans, who exactly is it designed to work for?

LIBRE and the Possibility of Something Different

The emergence of the LIBRE Party in 2011 and the win of President Xiomara Castro (Zelaya’s wife) in the 2021 presidential elections represented a tangible shift in Honduran politics and a worrying trend for those in favor of  total US control. Especially when Castro’s administration started to reorient Honduras’ foreign policy, and boost relations with Russia and China, even without losing its primary ties to the United States.

For example, Honduras expressed condemnation of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, but it later voted against UN resolutions condemning Russia, which led many analysts to point this out as a slight yet clear manifestation of foreign policy independence from Washington.

Furthermore, high-level diplomatic relations, like meetings held between Honduran officials and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, gave a diversification signal in international relations.

The relationship with Russia remains limited compared to closer Russian allies like Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega or Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro. Cooperation focuses on areas like education and disaster response rather than a deep strategic alliance. Still, the willingness to engage Russia at all represents a symbolic departure from the absolute subordination that characterized earlier periods.

It’s Honduras saying, We’re not your exclusive property anymore.

Regional Contrasts: Venezuela and Nicaragua

Honduras is a more complex political landscape, as entrenched local patronage networks and traditional party allegiances were as significant as ideologies, creating a stubborn syndrome of polarization. Unlike, for example, Venezuela, where political divisions align more simply with class and racial lines, where chances for compromise and affirmative action are higher.

Especially when adding to the complexity of the Honduran mix, with a chronic compliance to the US, the interweaving of gangs around local patronage, and the poison of drug trafficking running in the veins of the official government.

Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega presents another contrast, particularly regarding relations with Russia. Nicaragua has developed much closer ties with Moscow, including security cooperation and regular high-level contacts. Honduras under Castro maintains a more careful balance, avoiding the level of confrontation with Washington that characterizes Nicaraguan foreign policy.

The Platform State: From CONTRA to Continuity

Honduras served as the base where operations against regional socialists began. Most notably, it hosted the training of CONTRA forces that fought Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s. This history of being the platform for US interventionism throughout the region doesn’t just evaporate.

Hope for a positive shift exists, with the emergence of LIBRE conviction of US-backed leaders like JOH, who President Trump now wants to pardon, despite ongoing revelations regarding the drug trade at the highest echelons of government. Yet, there is no denial that new narratives and political currents and foreign policy shifts are occurring, even if in nascent form.

Money laundering networks that link political elites to offshore finance, as exposed in the Pandora Papers and other disclosures, are further discrediting the Honduran political status quo.

The migration crisis continues, driven by conditions that decades of US-backed policy helped create. The real question is whether the US Administration will learn from this history or continue patterns established in the banana republic era, patterns that have produced narco-states rather than stable democracies, refugee crises rather than prosperity, and deepening cynicism about the true objectives of US hemispheric policy.

The “Good Neighbour Policy” rhetoric has rarely matched the reality of intervention and domination. As Honduras attempts to redefine its position in regional geopolitics, the test will be whether Washington can accept a truly sovereign partner rather than a subordinate client state. The answer will tell us much about whether the Monroe Doctrine’s legacy can finally be overcome or whether the banana man’s doctrine simply continues under new names.

The question isn’t whether Honduras can break free from neo-colonial patterns; it’s whether the country has the political will to challenge powerful interests, both foreign and domestic, that benefit from the status quo. The question is whether the United States, after more than a century of treating Honduras as its most obedient servant, can finally imagine a different relationship.

Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher