Ottawa and Empire

Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras

Tyler Shipley

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781771133159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Imperialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In June 2009, the democratically elected president of Honduras was kidnapped and whisked out of the country while the military and business elite consolidated a coup d'etat. To the surprise of many, Canada implicitly supported the coup and assisted the coup leaders in consolidating their control over the country.

Since the coup, Canada has increased its presence in Honduras, even while the country has been plunged into a human rights catastrophe, highlighted by the assassination of prominent Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres in 2016. Drawing from the Honduran experience, Ottawa and Empire makes it clear that Canada has emerged as an imperial power in the 21st century.

1IMPERIAL LEGACIES
Five Centuries of Foreign Domination in Honduras

There is no place in the western hemisphere where history wasn’t irrevocably changed by the voyages of conquest launched by Europe in the late fifteenth century. The contemporary memory of the apocalyptic genocide that changed the fate of the world varies remarkably; north of the Rio Grande, Christopher Columbus is often presented as a hero; south of it, he is usually a villain.¹ Canada’s relationship to its own bloody heritage remains marred in denial and misdirection, with former prime minister Stephen Harper declaring that Canada “has no history of colonialism,”² in spite of the damning and widely publicized Truth and Reconciliation report in 2015 detailing Canada’s participation in the genocide.³ Indeed, Canada’s colonial past speaks quite directly to its imperial present, a point I will return to in the final chapter of this book. Suffice it to say, for now, that the legacy of the conquest still looms heavily over all the Americas.

In Honduras, that colonial legacy is ever-present. The word “Honduras,” which translates from Spanish as “the watery depths,” was given by none other than Columbus himself,⁴ as he and his crew thanked their god in 1502 for delivering their ships from the depths off the north coast of the Central American isthmus.⁵ The Honduran currency, the lempira, is named after an Indigenous Lenca leader who led a great rebellion against the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century. And nearly all of Honduran history has been forged in the fires of colonial occupation and interference: from the catastrophic enslavement of Indigenous people by the Spanish, to the stunting of Honduran infrastructure by rapacious British financiers, to the occupation of the country as a launch pad for war by the US military, to the contemporary plunder of wealth from Honduran land and labour by Canadian mining and manufacturing companies.

There are continuities across the various threads of Honduras’ five-century encounter with empire. But there have also been significant shifts, often sparked by popular resistance, which altered the direction of the small country’s history. The presence of radical and committed workers’ movements on the banana plantations compelled the Honduran elite to band together behind the dictator Tiburcio Carías in the 1930s, while the mobilization of the entire country in a general strike in 1954 forced the state to back down and adopt several reformist policies. The destruction of the organized left in the 1980s made it easy to impose neoliberal austerity measures, but the resurgence of popular resistance in the late 1990s changed the game entirely. It was precisely the growth of a sustained and defiant social movement in the 2000s, which rejected colonialism and its associated impositions, that led to the dramatic events of 2009 that are at the heart of this book. History weighs heavily in Honduras and, to understand the present crisis, we must be conscious of its roots.

CIVILIZATIONS LOST

Long before there was a “Honduras,” there were thousands of years of social, political, and cultural history, with records of human civilization dating as far back as the second millennium BCE, including civilizations like the Maya, Lenca, Pipil, Nahuatl, Jicaque, Paya, Chorotega, and Sumu.⁶ Mayan civilization, at its height around 500 CE, was among the most complex tributary societies in the world. One of its greatest city-states was Copán, located near Honduras’ western border with Guatemala, where some of the great Mayan accomplishments took place, including the development of detailed calendars and numerical systems, the construction of courts and arenas that could host over 50,000 people, and the nurturing of the study of astronomy that allowed Mayan priests to predict solar eclipses and calculate the revolutions of the planet Venus.

These accomplishments are often portrayed as archaeological oddities. Consider the 2012 feature exhibit Maya: Secrets of their Ancient World at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, which presented Mayan civilization as ancient and mysterious, a relic of an era of mysticism and superstition so backward and irrational that it may hold the key to primeval secrets about the nature of humanity or the meaning of life, long forgotten by the fast-moving modern society constructed by European civilization.⁷ In fact, these religious, artistic, and scientific advances were not the product of some vaguely alien mystical force but, rather, of a complex social and political system that was able to sustain a large population and create the conditions under which some people could pursue a variety of activities that were not directly related to survival.⁸ The Mayan civilization constructed complicated agricultural systems, which many Eurocentric historians had previously deemed impossible given the supposed backwardness of their society. These systems incorporated intensive irrigation and drained field agriculture, and only went into decline following Spanish invasion and “scorched Earth” tactics.⁹ But the ancient and mystical framing, exemplified by the ROM exhibit but ubiquitous in Eurocentric scholarship and popular culture, serves only to undermine the actual complexity of Mayan society, and to turn attention away from the fact that the Mayan civilization was all but destroyed by the catastrophic European conquest.

The creation of what would be called Honduras was part of the seismic transformation of the world precipitated by the establishment of capitalist social relations and the modern state form in Europe. While much inter-oceanic travel had taken place prior to 1492, what distinguished the European arrival was the emphasis it placed on the accumulation of precious metals, which was a major piece of what Marx described as the “so-called primitive accumulation” that was an important component of the establishment of the material basis for the expansion of global capitalism.¹⁰ Spanish conquistadors’ greed for gold and silver was often matched by a terrifying savagery towards the people they encountered, who would often be forced into immediate slavery for the Spanish or, if they resisted enslavement, slaughtered. Indeed, without slipping into the Leyendra Negra—the exaggeration of Spanish brutality by Northern Europeans claiming their own colonial projects to be more civilized—it is worth noting that many of the conquistadors were veterans of the vicious wars with the Moors and did not hesitate to use extreme violence to accomplish their goals.¹¹

The Spanish colonizers quickly established themselves in what is now Mexico and Panama, and moved into Central America largely from those flanks.¹² Indigenous people living in what became Honduras were seized and set to work either in gold and silver mines or sent on ships to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, especially Cuba, to work on sugar plantations. Some were even sent to be slaves in Spain itself.¹³ Meanwhile, the Spanish conquerors were furnished with a requerimiento—a statement of “requirement” for Christian conversion—which they were to read to so-called Indians before they attacked, captured, and enslaved them. The requerimiento was designed in 1513 and explained that the only way for Indigenous people to avoid this violent fate was to immediately submit to conversion and to the Christian god. As Honduran historian Longino Becerra notes, the requerimiento was established after Spanish brutality had already begun, and was set up only out of “the necessity of justifying the manner of their conduct.”¹⁴ Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish missionary famous for his critique of Spanish brutality in the Americas, considered the requerimiento an absurdity wherein people were expected to convert on the spot to a faith they knew nothing of, and whose emissaries appeared as “cruel, pitiless and bloodthirsty tyrants.”¹⁵ Furthermore, Las Casas described a variety of occasions in which the requerimiento was read to Indigenous villages at night, quietly, from afar, in order to justify a murderous invasion the following morning.¹⁶

HAUGHTY DEFIANCE

Spanish conquest of Central America was more or less consolidated by the 1520s, and the areas that came to be Honduras were used primarily for the capture and transport of Indigenous slaves.¹⁷ By mid-century, the Indigenous population in Honduras had been catastrophically reduced. As Spanish control tightened, the conquering authorities set to work establishing more permanent dominion over the remaining people whose labour they would need to extract wealth from the earth, the fields, the mines, and the ranches.¹⁸ Three primary strategies were used to obtain Indigenous labour during the period of Spanish rule: the encomienda, the repartimiento, and, eventually, “free” capitalist wage labour. In the first, Indigenous people were “granted” to one or another Spanish colonizer, and they functioned as servants for the individual encomendero. In 1549, the Spanish Crown banned almost all encomiendas (exceptions were made for government officials and clergy) in the hopes of creating a free labour market, through which all Spanish colonists would be able to exploit Indigenous labour, but this plan did not account for the possibility that Indigenous people might choose anything—even death—over working for the Spanish.¹⁹

Hence, the creation of a system of forced labour called the repartimiento, under which Indigenous villages would be expected to give a certain quantity of tribute and labour to various Spanish enterprises at fixed wages under the supervision of one or another Spanish colonist. These conscripted labourers would be kept in a constant rotation so that Spanish colonists could count on a regular supply of labour, and employers of repartimiento workers were supposed to be responsible for providing food and decent treatment to their workers. However, overwork, malnourishment, and injury were regular parts of the work experience, and even the fixed wages set by the Crown were regularly ignored.²⁰ This super-exploitative semi-feudal arrangement amounted to slavery by another name, and it was to be a fixture of the colonial relationship throughout the three centuries of Spanish dominion, especially in mining and agriculture. Nevertheless, the repartimiento would be gradually replaced by capitalist forms of free labour, whereby Spanish landowners would hire Indigenous workers outside of the repartimiento at slightly higher wages and with large advances for housing and food, in an effort to draw Indigenous people into a form of debt-slavery.²¹

Given the shock, dislocation, and disarray that Spanish conquest had beset upon Indigenous people and their own political and economic structures, the prospects for survival outside of the newly imposed Spanish infrastructure were increasingly bleak. As a result, Spanish colonists hoped they would find a relatively steady supply of Indigenous labourers prepared to enter into profoundly unfair waged labour relations—which would perhaps be better described as debt peonage—in which the Indigenous workers would be expected to work in order to pay back the debt that they incurred when they accepted their employers’ advances.²² These “free” labour arrangements first appeared in the late 1500s, but they failed to attract many Indigenous workers. Following the historical pattern of most impositions of capitalist social relations, people chose almost any option over entering into the wage relationship, and even as the repartimiento system faltered and Spanish employers offered higher wages to draw people in, they still complained of their inability to find willing Indigenous workers.²³

The imposition of Spanish rule in Central America was not accepted without resistance. As early as 1515, Indigenous people, enslaved and sent to work in the Caribbean, were considered “unsatisfactory workers” in large part due to their refusal to accept enslavement; one group of slaves seized a ship in Cuba and sailed it back to their home on the Bay Islands.²⁴ On the mainland, resistance first mounted in the west, where in the 1530s it was co-ordinated by an Indigenous leader named Cocumba; pitched battles were fought in the Ulúa Valley, ending in a brutal massacre at the hands of the Spaniards led by Pedro de Alvarado.²⁵ The resentment sown by Alvarado blew up again in 1537–39, when a Lenca leader called Lempira—whose name is now given to the Honduran currency—raised an army 30,000 strong, refused the repartimiento, and made a dramatic stand at the Peñol de Cerquín.²⁶ This inspired Indigenous revolts across the province, centred around Comayagua and San Pedro, on such a scale that the Spanish administration had to send for help from neighbouring colonial centres. One account of Lempira’s uprising cites him calling upon all Indigenous people to drive the Spaniards out, declaring it “shameful, that so many valiant men should be held in bondage by so few.”²⁷

When even a siege of Lempira’s stronghold at Cerquín could not defeat the uprising, the Spanish turned to trickery in order to kill Lempira and dishearten the rebellion. Lempira was lured into false peace negotiations and then shot by a hidden gunman. English historian Robert S. Chamberlain describes the events, emphasizing Lempira’s “haughty defiance” and his followers’ fanaticism, leaving the implication that the Indigenous rebels were irrational and backwards, and that they needed to be defeated in order to be brought into “civilization.”²⁸ These colonial assumptions remain present even in the way Canada speaks about Honduras today, as we will see. The Indigenous civilizations in Honduras did not welcome this violent “civilizing” and continued to resist Spanish occupation.²⁹

Nevertheless, after the fall of Lempira, few uprisings would achieve significant success against the firmly planted Spanish colonial apparatus. Especially in the west, rebellions were quickly and violently repressed by colonial forces, and it was only in the eastern provinces, where Spanish settlement took place more gradually, that resistance could be sustained. From 1542 to 1546, for instance, there were a number of loosely connected uprisings in Olancho and Gracias a Dios, many of which united both Indigenous and recently arrived African slaves against the Spanish.³⁰ Nonetheless, with their own societies crumbling under the weight of the genocidal Spanish conquest, by the late 1700s, Indigenous people could find fewer and fewer alternatives to working for the Spanish. Those who survived were increasingly shifted away from the repa...