Portside

The Obama Administration continues to champion Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as a key regional partner and wants to send even more money to his corrupt regime. Hernández’s government, on a six-year-long march against human rights, the rule of law and civilian policing, is now embroiled in an exploding corruption scandal. Just how heinous does the Honduran regime have to be before the U.S. stops supporting it?

Enforcement is not the solution to the latest version of the United States’ immigration issue. To stem immigration, if that’s indeed what is desired, the United States needs to make Central America habitable again, especially since the U.S. government has been the major instigator in the region for at least the past century.

Washington policymakers fail to see that social movements, rather than individual leaders like Zelaya, Chávez, or Morales, are the most enduring and potent force of change in Latin America today. These movements were spurred by the very economic policies that the United States has promoted in the region, and repression won’t make them go away.

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... this social democratic culture in Latin America, this notion that democracy entails some form of economic justice, which is deep and can’t be rooted out and can’t be expunged, no matter how much Washington and local elites have tried in Latin America ...

But there is another element to the changing political landscape in Honduras, and that is the role of the country’s grassroots resistance movements, which will not give up their struggles for land, fair wages and justice even after the last votes have been tallied. The country’s public sector is in turmoil, and while doctors and teachers are currently working, fresh strikes cannot be ruled out in the new year.

After the coup, Honduras had the most rapid rise in inequality in Latin America and now has the most unequal distribution of income in the region. Over 100 percent of all real income gains in in 2010 and 2011 went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans -- the poverty rate increased by 13.2% while the extreme poverty rate increased 26%. But whoever wins next election will have ample room to increase employment, and invest in infrastructure, education and development.

Many of us here in the U.S. had entertained the notion that whatever disappointments await us after the election of the U.S. President Barak Obama, at least the reactionary U.S. policy toward Cuba might change

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