Honduras

In 1823 the short-lived Mexican Empire, which had incorporated Central America after the rupture with Spain, collapsed. The failure of the Spanish and Mexican empires in rapid succession prompted Honduras, in many ways the poorest of Spain's former American provinces, to join the United Provinces of Central America. With fewer than 150,000 inhabitants widely dispersed in small villages tucked away in isolated mountain valleys, Honduras seemed more an administrative designation than a nation in gestation. Cattlemen running large herds on the savannas of Olancho in the east and on the coastal plains of Choluteca in the south had little in common, or contact with the indigenous and mestizo peasant smallholders in the western borderlands with El Salvador and Guatemala, or with the gangs of mahogany cutters on the North Coast. Treacherous mule tracks winding over mountains and through rivers comprised the only links among these diverse communities. Municipal rivalry between Comayagua, the run-down seat of provincial government during the colonial era, and Tegucigalpa, an insurgent mining and commercial town thirty miles to the south, further divided the province. Nevertheless, a sufficient sense of national identity had taken root; in time the province became the nation of Honduras.

As Spanish, Mexican, and, somewhat later, Central American dominions successively fell away due to circumstances largely beyond their control, the prospect of national independence, ready or not, reverberated across Honduras. These events inflamed the longstanding rivalry between Comayagua and Tegucigalpa. Men of means in both these dusty towns and throughout Honduras—generally government bureaucrats, soldiers, lawyers, church officials, mine operators, retail merchants linked to mercantile houses in Guatemala and Belize, and cattle ranchers and exporters—tried to discern the implications of this devolution of power to the province and took whatever steps they deemed expedient to protect their interests. Elites in Tegucigalpa briefly tried to end their subordination to Comayagua by becoming a separate province within the Central American confederation.

Soon, however, events in the neighboring provinces of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua began to dictate the Honduran political agenda. Two native sons, José Cecilio del Valle, a poor but ambitious lawyer and self-taught philosopher originally from Choluteca, and Francisco Morazán, an equally ambitious military and political man of humble Tegucigalpa origins, quickly emerged as leaders, respectively, of the Conservatives and Liberals in the confederation. Both were elected president of Central America: Morazán in 1830 and again in 1834 after del Valle, elected earlier that same year, died before taking office.

These early struggles between Liberals and Conservatives kept the provincial government at Comayagua in a constant uproar as one provisional head of state succeeded another, but the rest of Honduras was generally spared serious upheaval. Morazán's supporters in Comayagua sought to impose on Honduras the variant of liberalism then in vogue in Guatemala and El Salvador, which advocated the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church. Such enlightened iconoclasm goaded Conservatives to revolt. As Morazán's impending defeat became evident in 1838, Conservatives took control and helped dismantle the Federation by declaring Honduras an independent republic on October 26, 1838.

CONSERVATIVE HEGEMONY (1838–1875)

During the subsequent forty years, Conservatives, such as Francisco Ferrera (1840–1847), Juan Lindo Zelaya (1847–1852), Santos Guardiola (1885–1862), and José María Medina (1864–1871), elaborated a republican facsimile of the colonial regime. The resurrected and renovated colonial institutions were familiar to, and aptly suited, the mestizo and indigenous peasant majority in Honduras. Nonetheless, unreconstructed Liberals, such as Trinidad Cabañas (1852–1855) intransigently refused to abandon the liberal agenda. All too often, the ideological struggles degenerated into personal feuds between rival caudillos (warlords) and their small, poorly armed bands of retainers. As a result, endemic civil anarchy and widespread social banditry persisted year after year.

That these conflicts were often succored by partisans in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua certainly helped to perpetuate them; and diplomats from beyond the isthmus meddled as well as exacerbated them. Frederick Chatfield, the first British consul to Central America (1834–1852), made a career of gunboat diplomacy to advance what he deemed to be Britain's interests. The British repeatedly took and abandoned the Bay Islands until 1859, and they bombarded and occupied North Coast ports in 1849 and again in 1873 to compel loan repayments. At mid-century, the United States, in the person of amateur archaeologist Ephraim George Squier, briefly challenged Chatfield over, among other things, coaling rights to Tigre Island in the Gulf of Fonseca. Even private filibusters contributed to the domestic turmoil in Honduras: most notably the Tennessee soldier of fortune William Walker, who in the aftermath of his astonishing saga in Nicaragua, tried to recoup his dream of empire in Honduras but ended up before a firing squad instead.

Meanwhile, Forty-Niners seeking passage to California inspired Squier to promote an inter-oceanic railway across Honduras from Puerto Cortés to the Gulf of Fonseca. Conflicting survey reports, wildly varying estimates of costs, and a soft financial market led Squier to abandon the project. Alternate routes across Panama and the continental United States soon made a Honduran interoceanic railway virtually irrelevant to the needs of world trade. Honduran elites, however, had been beguiled by the dream of opening up their nation's undeveloped hinterland by means of an interoceanic railroad. In the 1860s, President José María Medina borrowed enough money from London bankers to construct a sixty-mile section of narrow-gauge track from Puerto Cortés through and beyond San Pedro Sula. This short spur of track did little to alter the primary means of transportation for most Hondurans from what it had been since the earliest colonial days—feet, horses, and mules; but the enormous foreign debt Honduras incurred hovered over the country for almost a century and thwarted almost every bid to coax foreign capital there.

Despite the impediments of political turmoil, rural isolation, and the lack of modern means of transportation, the ordinary Honduran campesino, though poor, may actually have fared better than his counterparts elsewhere in Central America. The Honduran elites, on the other hand, were much poorer than their Central American peers. Because the peasants lived in widely scattered villages isolated by rugged mountain ranges and had ample land to cultivate, the elites found it impossible to mobilize them for export agricultural production. Moreover, widespread folk participation in diversified exports—livestock, hides and pelts, precious metals, logwood, indigo, sarsaparilla, rum, and tobacco—supplemented peasants' subsistence but never provided a large surplus for the elite.

THE NEW LIBERALISM (1875–1903)

In the early 1870s, a new kind of liberalism dedicated to order and material progress had replaced conservative doctrines in Guatemala and El Salvador. The new Guatemalan strongman, Justo Rufino Barrios, in order to secure his eastern flank against cross-border raids from sanctuaries in Honduras, masterminded the overthrow of Conservative President Medina and his replacement by a handpicked fellow Liberal. Barrios initially chose Céleo Arias (1872–1874), but when Arias was unable to maintain order, he backed Ponciano Leiva. When Leiva (1874–1876) also failed to quell dissent, Barrios replaced him too.

The third replacement, Marco Aurelio Soto (1876–1883), although a Honduran, had risen to high office in Guatemala under Barrios. As Barrios's disciple, Soto espoused the new liberal gospel of rapid economic progress and absolute social and political obedience. Soto and his chief adviser, Ramón Rosa, quickly restored order, wrote a new constitution, and drafted numerous legal codes. With order restored, they turned their attention to progress. By 1880, Soto had tied all the important towns and many small villages into a telegraph grid and connected it to international cable networks in the United States and Europe. He also began construction of the Southern Highway, a cart road designed to link Tegucigalpa, the newly designated capital, to the port of San Lorenzo on the Gulf of Fonseca.

In 1880, Soto and a New York export-import merchant established the New York and Honduras Rosario Mining Company to work an abandoned silver mine the president owned. The merchant's son, Washington S. Valentine, took charge of the company's operation at San Juancito, a few miles northeast of Tegucigalpa. The Rosario turned out to be the richest silver mine between Mexico and Bolivia, and a mining boom soon gripped the Honduran Pacific Slope. Foreign capitalists, primarily North American, formed more than one hundred companies to rework abandoned colonial silver and gold mines using modern techniques and imported machinery. Despite staunch support from Soto and his successor, Luis Bográn (1883–1891), almost all of the concerns failed before they produced any bullion—Rosario being a singular exception. Anemic capitalization, incompetent management, inappropriate technology, and steadily falling silver prices conspired to snuff the boom. Although mining failed to realize the Hondurans' high expectations, it did stimulate highway construction, wholesale and retail commerce, and a range of small-scale industries.

Much of what was accomplished during the decade and a half of sustained peace under Soto and Bográn was undone during a bloody civil war that erupted soon after Bográn left office. Near the end of his first term in 1887, Bográn had organized the Progressive Party to withstand former president Céleo Arias's challenge to his re-election later that year. In the next election, former president Ponciano Leiva, the Progressive Party's candidate, was challenged by Dr. Policarpo Bonilla, leader of the Liberal Party since Céleo Arias's death. Leiva won the openly rigged election, but after a little more than a year (1891–1893), he was edged out of office and eventually replaced by his minister of war, Domingo Vásquez (1893–1894).

Vásquez's heavy-handed tyranny soon provoked rebellion by Liberal exiles in Nicaragua headed by Policarpo Bonilla, General Manuel Bonilla (no relation to Policarpo), and General Terencio Sierra—all future presidents of Honduras. Although Vásquez destroyed the initial invasion force, a second assault, generously supported by fellow Nicaraguan Liberal, José Santos Zelaya, dislodged Vásquez.

The victorious invaders, at Policarpo Bonilla's insistence, immediately convened a constituent assembly to rewrite the Honduran constitution according to liberal precepts. With his personal prestige at an all-time high, Bonilla easily won election as president. During his term (1895–1899), he relentlessly centralized power in the executive branch, embedded his surprisingly advanced ideas of public administration and jurisprudence in revisions of the country's legal codes, did what he could to heal the ravages of the civil war, and tried to put the country's economy on a sound footing. Bonilla was a fanatical proponent of disciplined political parties that offered voters clearly distinct choices. He also believed that regularly held democratic elections for single-term presidents would solve the bulk of Honduras's political problems. In keeping with his convictions, Bonilla refused to run for a second term. Unfortunately, his popularly elected successor, Terencio Sierra (1899–1903), shared little of Bonilla's vision for Honduras. Instead, he spent the bulk of his administration laying the groundwork for perpetuating his power.

THE BANANA REPUBLIC (1903–1956)

By 1900, bananas had already emerged as the nation's most important export product. Schooner and tramp steamer captains had begun to visit North Coast ports to purchase bananas for sale in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities. Although exports gradually rose during the late nineteenth century, large-scale commercial banana production lagged until a complex set of technological innovations were developed. After 1900 North American banana pioneers—the most prominent in Honduras being the Vacarro Brothers of New Orleans, founders of Standard Fruit Company at La Ceiba, and Samuel "the Banana Man" Zemurray, founder of Cuyamel Fruit Company and a later director of United Fruit Company—parlayed their entrepreneurial skills and access to investment capital into banana empires featuring vast plantations, fleets of cargo ships, precision marketing networks, and state-of-the-art radio communication systems. By 1930 United Fruit and Standard Fruit had made Honduras the leading banana exporter in the world, at 30 million bunches a year. Large numbers of Hondurans left their highland villages to work on the plantations, thus shifting the population center from the Pacific Slope to the North Coast. By 1940, however, the Great Depression, World War II, and Sigatoka and Panama banana plant diseases pushed Honduras behind Ecuador in production.

This dynamic banana economy further destabilized an already precarious political system. Because the banana companies needed land grants, favorable labor laws, and permission to build railroads and other facilities from the government, they increasingly meddled in Honduran political affairs. At first, however, they received spontaneous support from the government. The 1903 electoral contest, which ended with Manuel Bonilla getting the largest number of votes but not a majority, was thrown into the National Congress. When the Congress gave the election to a rival, General Bonilla revolted and took power. During his first term (1903–1907), he awarded generous concessions of every stripe to the fledgling banana companies, but his repression of opposition politicians and closure of the National Congress in 1904 ultimately led to his ouster by militant Liberals led by General Miguel R. Dávila.

President Dávila (1907–1911), despite the protection of the 1907 Central American Peace Treaties and the attendant Court of Justice, was plagued by repeated cross-border raids by political foes. His downfall, however, came when Samuel Zemurray financed an invasion by former president Manuel Bonilla in order to prevent Dávila from adopting a debt settlement plan that would have given vast power to mining magnate Washington S. Valentine and financier J. P. Morgan. Bonilla's term (1911–1913) was cut short by his death; he was succeeded by his vice president, Francisco Bertrand (1913–1919).

Bertrand was acceptable to both his fellow countrymen and the banana companies until he tried to engineer the election of his brother-in-law as president in 1919. The most popular opposition leader, General Rafael López Gutiérrez, led the resistance and ultimately won the presidency (1920–1924). The seventeen uprisings that occurred during López Gutiérrez's term were a prelude to the civil war that erupted when General Tiburcio Carías Andino won the 1923 election without a majority. Despite the presence of U.S. ships on both coasts and marines in North Coast towns and in the capital, much blood flowed before U.S. State Department special envoy Sumner Welles finally persuaded the rival factions to meet aboard the USS Milwaukee anchored off Amapala in the Gulf of Fonseca.

New elections were held, and Dr. Miguel Paz Baraona, Carías's running mate in 1923, was voted in. President Paz Baraona (1925–1929) temporarily reduced political tensions, managed to reschedule the massive Honduran foreign debt by negotiating the Lyall Plan with Great Britain, and held free elections at the end of his term in 1928, in which the opposition Liberal candidate Dr. Vincent Mejia Colindres (1928–1932) won. Mejia Colindres, in turn, also held free elections, in which the National Party leader, General Carías, emerged victorious, retaining power by various stratagems until 1948.

By 1924, the year of the last major political upheaval before mid-century, the United Fruit and Standard Fruit Companies had absorbed their lesser competition and had acquired virtually every concession they might need for the foreseeable future. Moreover, because of large profits, they were able to substitute economic pressure for strong-arm tactics. Still, the sharp plunge in employment and revenues that accompanied the Great Depression, the ravages of banana diseases, and World War II produced severe strains that would have automatically led to political disorder in earlier times. Carías (1933–1948), however, was able to surmount these difficulties (while meticulously repaying British bondholders on schedule). He even brought a modicum of prosperity to his country, put the national budget in the black, built many new roads in rural areas, and inaugurated air transport service to many otherwise isolated towns and villages. The cost, however, was high. The Carías dictatorship shelved democratic practices for the duration, reduced the National Congress to a rubber stamp, and harshly repressed labor organizations on behalf of the banana and mining companies.

In the mid-1940s, university students, taking their cue from successful student-led coups in neighboring dictatorships, began agitating for a return to democracy, and women protested outside the presidential palace seeking the release of political prisoners. Carías, finally bowing to these demands and to pressures from the United States, announced that he would not run again in 1948. He did, however, handpick his successor, Juan Manuel Gálvez Durán (1949–1954).

Despite his long association with the Carías dictatorship, Gálvez granted opposition parties and labor unions considerable latitude to organize and mobilize support. On the eve of the 1954 elections, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency agents in Honduras launched a covert operation against the leftist government of Guatemala, and more than fifty thousand North Coast workers went on strike against the United Fruit and Standard Fruit Companies. In these unsettled conditions, none of the three candidates—General Carías for the National Party, Abraham William Calderón for the National Reformist Movement, and physician Ramón Villeda Morales for the Liberal Party—received a majority. Gálvez, meanwhile, had suffered a heart attack and turned the government over to his vice president, Julio Lozano Díaz. Lozano declared himself chief of state and cobbled together an interim government with initial support from all three candidates in the 1954 election. But when it later became clear that Lozano intended to prolong his stay indefinitely, the small professional military founded by Carías acted on its own for the first time and ejected Lozano in October 1956.

MILITARY DOMINANCE (1956–1990)

The military junta, increasingly dominated by the head of the air force, Colonel Oswaldo López Arellano, negotiated a peace accord between the Liberals and Nationals in preparation for calling a constituent assembly to elect a civilian president for a six-year term. The junta also demanded that the new constitution guarantee the armed forces' political autonomy. The assembly elected the Liberal Villeda Morales, the candidate with the largest vote total in 1954. During his term (1957–1962), Villeda Morales worked to implement the Alliance for Progress, the Kennedy administration's plan to aid modernization and economic growth in Latin America. Labor unions prospered, and peasants began to acquire land through a small, government-sponsored agrarian reform which made the banana companies and the traditional landed elite nervous. Rapid population growth and the expansion of export agriculture (cotton, sugar, beef) since the 1940s had created a large landless population to which Villeda Morales promised further relief. When the Liberal Party chose as its candidate for the next elections Modesto Rodas Alvarado, a firebrand who pledged to restore civilian control over the armed forces, López seized power in October 1963, sending Villeda into exile. The Honduran military, in one guise or another, would remain the country's hegemonic political actor for the next thirty years.

In 1960 the Central American nations had formed a common market to circumvent the obstacles to economic development inherent in their small, separate domestic markets. Many Hondurans, however, later resented the fact that more aggressive Salvadoran entrepreneurs took advantage of new cross-border investment and trade opportunities to become a powerful force in the Honduran economy, the least developed in the region. In addition, shortly after López had himself named to a six-year term as president (1965–1971), acute economic problems were blamed on 300,000 Salvadoran peasants who had moved into rural Honduras because of extreme land scarcity in their own country. The continuing economic crisis and rising tensions with El Salvador over Honduran mistreatment of its citizens began to erode López's support within the armed forces and the National Party. His fall from power was postponed, however, when the so-called Soccer War erupted in mid-1969. The Honduran air force acquitted itself with distinction, but the Organization of American States intervened before the superior Salvadoran ground forces could make serious inroads into Honduras. The war stimulated popular support for the armed forces, but aggravated already poor economic conditions.

In 1971, López stood aside briefly to allow an elected bipartisan civilian government under National Party politician Ramón Ernesto Cruz to take office. When his government soon proved ineffective at controlling increasing social unrest, the military removed it in late 1972. The formerly conservative López returned to power at the head of a populist coalition composed of peasant organizations, labor unions, and progressive North Coast business groups. His government redistributed land to thousands of peasant families and increased the role of the state in the economy. However, after López was ousted in 1975 over an alleged United Brands bribe for slashing the export tax on bananas, right-wing military factions allied with the National Party and conservative economic interests regained influence under Colonel Juan Melgar Castro (1975–1978) and later General Policarpo Paz García (1978–1982).

The collapse of the Nicaraguan Somoza regime in 1979 helped the United States to persuade the Honduran military to return to the barracks and allow democratic elections. The Liberal Party won both the subsequent constitutional assembly elections (1980) and the presidential contest (1981), but the armed forces remained politically dominant. The new civilian president, Dr. Roberto Suazo Córdoba (1982–1986), formed a political alliance with armed forces chief General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, a fanatical anticommunist trained in Argentina. Vastly increased U.S. military aid expanded and modernized the armed forces while the Contras, the anti-Sandinista rebels organized and armed by the United States, took up residence on the border with revolutionary Nicaragua. Until his ouster in an internal military dispute in 1984, Álvarez presided over a brutal "dirty war" against anyone suspected of radical political sympathies in Honduras. The military employed torture, secret prisons, and political assassinations without any protest from Suazo or the United States.

Suazo's democratically-elected successor, Liberal José Azcona del Hoyo (1986–1990), was less closely tied to the military, but he was too weak to challenge its political hegemony or address widespread corruption within the officer corps as Honduras became a major transhipment point for Colombian cocaine. The military left economic policymaking to the civilian authorities, but neither Suazo nor Azcona proved able to halt the economy's deterioration despite heavy financial assistance from the United States. Fiscal and trade deficits mounted, although military spending continued to rise.

THE MILITARY IN POLITICAL DECLINE (1990–1999)

Rafael Callejas (1990–1994) was the first National Party candidate to win the presidency since elections were resumed in the early 1980s. His victory represented the first time one of the nation's two principal competing political parties had replaced the other democratically and without violence in almost sixty years. Nevertheless, the conservative Callejas was a close friend of the armed forces, which had no plan to reduce its prerogatives. Instead, he concentrated on an ambitious economic reform program demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States Embassy. Callejas reduced the nation's chronic fiscal deficit, liberalized trade, and convinced foreign entrepreneurs to invest in new maquiladora assembly industries on the North Coast. The Honduran economy improved although corruption allegations and politically-motivated overspending late in Callejas's term tarnished his economic record.

The challenge to the military was launched not by Callejas but by United States ambassador Cresencio Arcos. The end of the Cold War and the winding down of the armed conflicts in Central America reduced the Honduran military's importance to the United States. What had once been seen in Washington as a valuable anticommunist ally was now perceived as an expensive obstacle to democracy. American military aid fell dramatically, and Ambassador Arcos became one of the armed forces' fiercest critics. This abrupt, unexpected reversal of United States policy encouraged a wide range of Hondurans to mobilize against the military's power and prerogatives. Human rights organizations, unions, and students joined with the Roman Catholic Church and much of the private sector to demand an end to the armed forces' privileges. Honduran journalists added fuel to the fire by publishing a steady stream of articles implicating high-ranking military officers in corruption and other serious crimes.

Increasing political pressure ultimately forced a reluctant Callejas to appoint an independent human rights commissioner to investigate the military's 1980s suppression of opposition and an Ad Hoc Commission for Institutional Reform to examine allegations of corruption and abuse of power within the military's police branch. When these investigations concluded, the human rights commissioner's report provided evidence of the armed forces involvement in 184 specific cases of torture and political assassination, and the Ad Hoc Commission recommended that the notorious police investigative service be disbanded.

The Honduran military's decline accelerated rapidly under the two Liberal Party presidents who followed Callejas in office. Carlos Roberto Reina (1994–1998), former president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, was a politician from the left of the Liberal Party whose appointment to head the foreign ministry had been blocked by the military high command some years before. After he was inaugurated, Reina immediately implemented the Ad Hoc Commission's recommendations. In spite of strong military objections, he then persuaded the National Congress to pass amendments to the constitution that abolished entirely the military's control over the national police and ended obligatory military service. No longer able to force young Honduran men into the armed forces, the military shrank to about one-third its former size by the time Reina left office. In addition, with United States support, Reina reduced the military budget and removed the nation's telecommunications system and other lucrative public institutions from armed forces control.

Reina's administration continued the program of economic reform begun under Callejas. After a series of disruptive strikes, Reina was forced to make concessions to organized labor, but the Liberal government still met most IMF fiscal targets. Bouyed by surging maquiladora exports and increasing coffee prices, the Honduran economy was growing respectably by the end of Reina's term.

Liberal Carlos Flores Facussé (1998–2002) completed the subordination of the armed forces to civilian authority. The wealthy North Coast engineer and newspaper publisher passed a landmark constitutional reform that rescinded the formal political autonomy first granted the military in the 1957 Constitution. He appointed a civilian defense minister over military opposition and abolished the independent position of armed forces chief as well as the Superior Council of the Armed Forces, the military's collegial decision-making body. When resentment against these measures surfaced within the armed forces, Flores dismissed the armed forces chief of staff and a number of other high-ranking individuals and replaced them with officers willing to accept civilian control without question.

A TROUBLED DEMOCRACY (1999–)

The subordination of the once all-powerful Honduran military to civilian democratic control by 1999 was a major achievement. Hondurans could also be proud of the institutionalization of a system of free national elections during the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, Honduras's new democracy was marred by poverty, corruption, and rising crime.

International financial institutions generally praised the economic management skills of Liberal presidents Reina and Flores as well as their National Party successor, former Central Bank head Ricardo Maduro (2002–2006). Flores spent most of his term rebuilding the country after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 destroyed the entire banana crop and most of the nation's roads and bridges. The Honduran economy recovered under Stanford-educated economist Ricardo Maduro on the strength of rising agricultural export prices, the success of the maquiladora sector, and mounting remittances (US$2.4 billion by 2006) from Hondurans living in the United States. The benefits of renewed economic growth, however, were distributed very unevenly, leaving most Hondurans mired in poverty. Per capita income remained under US$900 in 2006, and almost two thirds of the Honduran population of 7.3 million continued to live on less than two dollars a day. Taxes on elite and middle-class Honduras were too light to fund robust social programs to aid the poor urban majority or to restart the rural agrarian reform halted by Callejas.

Although corruption allegations against the Reina, Flores, and Maduro administrations were less serious than those that had been directed at the Callejas government, global monitoring organizations such as Transparency International judged Honduras to be one of the most corrupt countries in Latin America. Bribery and embezzlement scandals were common, as most Honduran politicians at all levels still viewed political office more as a prize to be exploited for personal gain than an opportunity to serve the public. Few corruption cases ever came to trial.

By the mid-1990s, many Hondurans began to view violent crime as the nation's number-one problem. Rates of robbery, assault, extortion, kidnapping, car theft, and homicide all exploded during the 1990s, especially in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. Many of these trends were associated with the arrival in Central America of the Los Angeles-based MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and 18th Street youth gangs. These rival organizations took root after the United States deported thousands of Central American-born gang members to the region. Both gangs recruited aggressively in Honduras; by 2005, youth gangs encompassed an estimated 35,000 to 70,000 members. These new gangs also distributed narcotics for more established criminal organizations in the region. With only 7,500 poorly equipped, poorly trained, and often corrupt police officers, Honduran authorities were overwhelmed by rising crime.

President Maduro, who lost his own son in a kidnap attempt, instituted a hard-line zero-tolerance program that made gang membership a felony, increased resources for public security, and committed the army to the battle against crime. His policy resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of gang members and led thousands of others to remove their tattoos and alter their style of dress. Analysts disagreed about the impact of Maduro's approach on crime rates, and the public security issue dominated the next presidential campaign. Liberal rancher Manuel "Mel" Zelaya (2006–), who narrowly won that contest, launched a new assault on crime early in his term that mobilized the country's large corps of private security guards to assist the police and army. He also promised social reforms to address the causes of crime as he developed closer relations with left-leaning governments in Latin America. Nonetheless, crime rates appeared to increase during Zelaya's first year in office.

See alsoAlliance for Progress; Álvarez Martínez, Gustavo; Azcona Hoyo, José Simón; Bertrand, Francisco; Bonilla, Policarpo; Bonilla Chirinos, Manuel; Cabañas, José Trinidad; Callejas Romero, Rafael Leonardo; Carías Andino, Tiburcio; Chatfield, Frederick; Comayagua; Contras; Cruz Ucles, Ramón Ernesto; Dávila, Miguel R; Drugs and Drug Trade; Ferrera, Francisco; Gálvez, Juan Manuel; Guardiola, Santos; López Arellano, Oswaldo; Lozano Díaz, Julio; Maquiladoras; Morazán, Francisco; Paz Baraona, Miguel; Paz García, Policarpo; Rodas Alvarado, Modesto; Rosa, Ramón; Soto, Marco Aurelio; Squier, Ephraim George; Standard Fruit and Steamship Company; Suazo Córdova, Roberto; Tegucigalpa; United Fruit Company; Vaccaro Brothers; Valle, José Cecilio del; Villeda Morales, Ramón; Walker, William; Welles, Sumner; Zelaya, José Santos; Zemurray, Samuel.

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                               Kenneth V. Finney

                                    J. Mark Ruhl