In February, I traveled to Honduras and was able to conduct a handful of interviews, including with San Pedro Sula Mayor Roberto “Pollo” Contreras. Since the trip was during the primary campaigns, I attended a rally and got a feel for the rhetoric.
Oft-overlooked as a backwater, Honduras merits being a foreign-policy priority:
- Honduras is the Bolivarian Alliance’s target to be the next entrenched neofeudal ally: combining autocracy and crony socialism. The incumbent Libre party is openly eager to join Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The Libre presidential nominee, Secretary of Defense Rixi Moncada, yesterday stated that she admires “the battle of the Cuban people, because that little island has continued to show Latin America that other ways are possible.” She does not admire the brave opposition to the dictatorship.
- Honduras, along with El Salvador and Guatemala, has been a top supplier of illegal immigrants to the United States. Only Mexico has more illegal immigrants in the United States than the Northern Triangle. Honduras’s descent into a Nicaragua-style quagmire would spell another million or so Hondurans in short order, doubling the number already here.
- Since the Honduran economy is in disarray, its most important industry is remittances, now a quarter of the nation’s GDP. Drug trafficking has also become a pillar of Honduran economic activity. Any confrontation with regional organized crime cannot ignore “one of the most important drug trafficking transshipment points between South America and Mexico,” as reported by InSight Crime.
Picking the outcome of the November election is difficult. See our latest investigation and news coverage. Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party—whom I have met (pictured above)—appears to be the frontrunner to unseat Libre. He has his own challenges, and the opposition are divided across the Liberal, National, and Salvador parties. This means Libre could retain power with a weak plurality.
