Imagine a place with the world’s highest homicide rate, where crimes are committed with impunity, a few powerful families call the shots, poor people get driven off land they have been awarded and prisons burn down. Sounds like the Wild West? Add in a couple more ingredients – a recent military coup and airstrips in…
It’s three years since the coup in Honduras that sent President Manuel Zelaya into exile in his pyjamas. Porfirio Lobo, who took over as president in January 2010 following highly questionable elections, is more than halfway through his term. The only grounds for optimism are offered by the resistance movement that sprang up after the…
The economist Paul Romer has been in Canada promoting his idea for a so-called ‘charter city’ in Honduras. Interviewed for TV Ontario, he said that a charter city would attract investment by offering a completely fresh administrative, legal and financial system, separate from the country in which the city is built. The proposal has started…
The fire at Comayagua on 14 February brings the number of prisoners who have been killed in prison fires in Honduras in the last decade to more than 530. The government’s inaction in the face of repeated prison massacres may well mean that it is found guilty at a hearing of the Inter-American Court of…
In Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, the protagonist Allie Fox takes a boat from Baltimore to Central America. He lands in Honduras, where he buys a place called Jeronimo, at an indeterminate location in the rainforest. Expecting virgin territory, his plans go awry when it turns out there are people there already, and the obstacles…
The government of Honduras, which justified the illegal coup that brought it to power in 2009 on the grounds that it was necessary to protect the constitution, recently amended the constitution to give itself the power to create ‘special development regions’ with their own (yet to be determined) laws. The hope is to build a…
In the early hours of Sunday, 28 June the residence of Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras, was surrounded by tanks. His supporters, anticipating a coup, formed a human shield but were quickly dispersed with tear gas. In no time at all soldiers had entered the building and disarmed the security guard. Zelaya rang the…
Which country has a railway network but never built a station in its capital city? The answer to such a quiz question would be Honduras. An extensive rail system was built a century ago by the international banana companies, United Fruit and Standard Fruit, to get their products to the Caribbean ports. Even fifteen years…