When US forces stormed Caracas earlier this year to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, pundits were quick to point out the brazen hypocrisy. Maduro now sits in a New York jail, awaiting trial on unsubstantiated charges of cocaine trafficking, while a bona fide narco-dictator, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández walks free, having received a full pardon from the Trump administration. But Hernández was more than just a sideshow to the Venezuela raid, and his return to Honduras, and the return to power of his conservative National Party, provide yet another example of the US Empire tightening its clutches over the Americas.
Months before his 2022 arrest, Hernández stood before cheering crowds in the National Football Stadium. Speaking on the bicentenary of Honduran independence, he raged against the modern enemies of the Honduran State. Chief among them were those who “promote the transformation of the family through same-sex marriage”.
The move was an obvious play to his evangelical base, but also a clear threat to all progressive forces in a country that has seen a staggering 572 documented murders and forced disappearances of queer people since the 2009 US-backed Coup d’État brought the National Party to power.
“Where do we turn when we are enemies of the state?”, asks Donny Reyes, a community organiser and director of the Arcoiris safe-house in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. “We are facing bullets, machetes. When we leave our safe space we have to keep watching our backs”.
“There are so many crimes that have gone unpunished,” adds J-Lo Córdova, director of the trans group at Arcoiris. “Vicky Hernández, Bessy Ferrera… How can you say their murders weren’t hate crimes when I find my comrades dead, impaled on a meat hook, or when they throw gasoline on them and burn their faces?”
The extreme state-sponsored violence against queer people in Honduras has deep roots in the country’s conservative elite, evangelical lobby, and US interests. During the Guerrilla Wars of the 1980s, Honduras was touted as the Reagan administration’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier in Central America”. Many of the top military and police officials implicated in the violence today received their training from the United States conducting anti-communist campaigns throughout the region, and in Batallón 3-16 Honduras’s brutal counterinsurgency force.
When Central America’s military dictatorships faced a spiritual threat from liberation theology, they responded with a campaign of arrests and assassinations through the CIA’s Banzer Plan, while US evangelical projects, like Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, rushed to fill the void. As Vijay Prashad notes, these “Protestant sects, particularly those with US roots, preached the Gospel of individual enterprise not social justice”.
This evangelical lobby remains powerful. According to J-Lo, “the Church has always stood in our way…. The preachers take advantage of people, they exploit people”. Now, this sector has been emboldened by the ouster of the leftist LIBRE party in last November’s elections, amid allegations of widespread fraud.
While initially trailing in the polls, National Party candidate, Nasry “Tito” Asfura, received an unexpected last-minute boost from Donald Trump. Directly intervening in the election, Trump took to Truth Social to declare Asfura “the only real friend of freedom in Honduras”, while threatening to cut off aid and investment should the LIBRE “narcocommunists” keep the presidency.
How do Honduran activists plan to resist under yet another repressive, US-backed administration? Arcoiris offers a vision of radical solidarity. Operating on scarce resources, the group provides a safe haven and vital support, like food packages, even in the most hostile environments. “We look for the most vulnerable,” J-Lo says, “the unemployed, trans women, sex workers, people living with HIV. We had no budget, but we did this to help our community”. This sense of community solidarity is what keeps Arcoiris alive. Donny reminds us that “We make our own family. J-Lo and I are brother and sister, because we decided to be”. They both make it clear: “We are against any kind of exploitation, anything that harms human dignity. That’s what an enemy of the state does. They sell out their country”.
