Things are quiet these days for the United States and Honduras, the small Central American nation and original “banana republic” that has just elected a new right-wing president, Nasry Asfura, to the delight of US sociopathic leader Donald Trump.
The gringo leader even took credit for Asfura’s victory, having threatened to cut American aid to Honduras if the election result was not to his liking.
Call it pure democracy.
Last weekend, Trump hosted his “friend” and fellow businessman Asfura at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where the two pledged to jointly fight drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
The deal would have been a little less hypocritical if Trump hadn’t simply pardoned former right-wing Honduran president and Asfura ally Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for — for what else? – drug trafficking.
Then, of course, there is the fact that the United States played a huge role in creating the violent conditions that cause the mass migration from Honduras in the first place. But it’s definitely nothing that can’t be fixed by continuing as usual.
Indeed, it appears that the winds are favorable for the revival of the “USS Honduras” – the catchy nickname bestowed on the country in the 1980s because of its exceptional service as an imperial military base from which to terrorize neighboring Nicaragua, which had committed the outrageous crime of telling the gringos to take their capitalist system and throw it away.
About 50,000 Nicaraguans died in the U.S.-backed Contra war, while CIA mercenaries aided the war effort by raking in profits from drug trafficking, speaking to the U.S. track record on that front.
Nor was life aboard the USS Honduras anything to write home about. During the 1980s, a CIA-trained death squad called Battalion 316 made life hell for hundreds of Honduran citizens suspected of improper political orientation and were kidnapped, tortured, and killed.
And the United States called the shots on just about everything. Writing in the New York Times in 1988, journalist Stephen Kinzer took stock of imperial machinations in Honduras with a frankness unusual for the leading American newspaper: “Behind the mask of formal democracy [in Honduras]military leaders make all major decisions and respond to direction from the U.S. Embassy.”
This embassy, Kinzer noted, was “one of the largest State Department outposts in the world,” adding that “American diplomats exercise more control over domestic politics in Honduras than in any other country in the hemisphere.”
Yet there were choppy waters ahead of the USS Honduras – particularly with the 2006 election of slightly left-wing President Manuel Zelaya, who had the courage to raise the urban minimum wage to $290 a month and stab multinationals in the back.
The metaphorical warship having been thus definitively blown off course, there was no choice but for the Honduran army – in a very democratic manner – to kidnap Zelaya in the early hours of June 28, 2009 and take him to Costa Rica in his pajamas, never to be reinstated to his elected post.
The U.S.-validated coup ushered in an era of heightened impunity in Honduras, as domestic law enforcement responded sadistically to unarmed anti-coup protesters, feminicides skyrocketed, and the small nation embarked on its path to becoming the murder capital of the world.
In other words, all was well from a capitalist point of view, and once illegitimate elections were called by the Honduran coup regime, the democratic regime of then American President Barack Obama wasted no time in signing off on the electoral triumph of the right-wing Porfirio Lobo, who quickly declared Honduras “open for business.”
Things then got even better with the reign of the aforementioned narco-president Juan Orlando Hernandez, whose re-election in 2017, amid ubiquitous allegations of fraud, was quickly acknowledged by the first Trump administration – and not to mention the subsequent massacre, by US-funded security forces, of Hondurans protesting the election results.
Now that Trump is back at the helm of the USS Honduras with Asfura as first officer, he would be remiss if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t show up on deck as well.
During a January visit to Jerusalem to kiss Israel’s genocidal backside, Asfura made a decidedly disgusting mockery of his own Palestinian origins, responding enthusiastically to Netanyahu’s statement that he looked forward to “working with your government, whether economic, agricultural, technological in any area that I think is laid before us.”
The man with his hands stained with the blood of potentially many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians continued to reassure the Honduran head of state of Palestinian origin: “You should know that as far as Israel is concerned, the sky is the limit.”
Under Asfura, Honduras is, without a doubt, on track to renew its status as a key node of US power and influence in the hemisphere, giving Trump even greater leeway to wreak havoc in Venezuela, Cuba and wherever he sees fit – and likely ensuring far more spectacular violence in Honduras itself.
And as the USS Honduras sets off vigorously on its final voyage of imperial servitude, one might say that even the sea is the limit.
The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Oltre La Linea.
date: 2026-02-11 19:31:00