Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras

"Ottawa and Empire is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarly research that exposes the bourgeois lie about Canada’s benign internationalism, and it is capped off with a stimulating discussion of the radical political implications of the country’s marauding imperialist agenda."

—Thom Workman, professor of political science, University of New Brunswick

"We have lived through a very long period of myth-making about Canada’s place in the world as peacekeeper and promoter of human rights and democracy. Ottawa and Empire is a punchy, compelling, and utterly myth-busting account of Canada’s role in ‘building democracy’ in Honduras. No one reading this book will ever jump on the ‘support the troops’ bandwagon again."

—Greg Albo, professor of political science, York University

Canada’s growing economic involvement in Honduras has had devastating implications for human rights, democracy, and the health and safety of the population. Shipley raises important questions about this new Canadian imperialism and provides a much needed examination of the rise of Canadian interests in Central America and elsewhere in the world.

—Lynn Holland, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, Colorado

"Ottawa and Empire is a major contribution to the study of Canadian foreign policy and political economy. By combining rich historical materials with astute political theory and substantive empirical evidence, Shipley demonstrates convincingly that Canada’s role in Honduras has been exploitative and violent—a case study of imperialism in action."

—Jerome Klassen, author of Joining Empire: The Political Economy of the New Canadian Foreign Policy

"The overthrow of Honduras’s elected government in 2009 was a swift, brutal reminder of the limits of freedom that a small country is allowed. The murders of pro-democracy activists in the years since have ensured that low-key terror is a part of political life. Based on close engagement with the people struggling for their rights in Honduras, Ottawa and Empire tells the story of the coup and the regime that followed. It reveals the continuity between Canada’s role in the coup and its foreign policy from Haiti to Afghanistan. Tracing the profits flowing to Canadian corporations and describing the bizarre colonial fantasies of Charter Cities, Shipley’s book will dispel any illusions readers may hold on to about Canada’s benevolent role in the world."

—Justin Podur, author of Haiti’s New Dictatorship

Tyler Shipley’s well-researched and probing work focuses on Canadian involvement in the overthrow of the reformist liberal President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya. In doing so, Shipley has produced an illuminating case study of the new Canadian imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere.

—Henry Heller, author of The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective

Based upon meticulous fieldwork, including dozens of interviews with activists in resistance communities, this book is a compelling account of the nefarious effects of Canada’s foreign policy in Central America and elsewhere. Shipley shatters the illusion that the Canadian government is dedicated to keeping ‘peace.’ This book is a must-read for activists and academics interested in international relations, international development, and social movements.

—Susan Spronk, associate professor of international development and global studies, University of Ottawa

"Remarkably well-researched, cogently argued, and engagingly written, Ottawa and Empire is obligatory reading for all interested in Canadian foreign policy, and not only in the shameful conduct of our government and corporations in Honduras. Shipley sets his analysis into historical perspective and provides us with a first-hand account of the ways in which Canada has buttressed the Washington-led reversal of progressive change in the proverbial ‘banana republic.’"

—Liisa L. North, professor emeritus, York University

"Shipley gives a devastating critique of Canada’s support for the violent oppression that accompanies the process of making Honduras ‘right’ for Canadian capital. Ottawa and Empire contributes to the critique of modern neoliberal globalization as an essentially neocolonial process that perpetuates and deepens the misery of much of the world for the profit of others."

—James Phillips, assistant professor of anthropology and international studies, Southern Oregon University

The 2009 coup in Honduras in which the military overturned the elected government of President Manuel Zelaya has been followed by years of popular unrest and widespread human rights violations. Based on extensive interviews with a wide range of Hondurans, Shipley recounts the events leading up to and following the coup and the surprising support for the post-coup regime by the Canadian government. Shipley’s analysis presents an important critique of Canadian economic interests in Honduras and the implications for understanding Canada’s role in the hemisphere.

—Laura Macdonald, professor of political science and political economy, Carleton University

OTTAWA

AND

EMPIRE

Canada and the

Military Coup

in Honduras

TYLER A. SHIPLEY

Between the Lines

Toronto

Ottawa and Empire

© 2017 Tyler Shipley

First published in 2017 by

Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West

Studio 281

Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8

Canada

1-800-718-7201

www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 56 Wellesley Street West, Suite 320, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Shipley, Tyler, author

Ottawa and empire: Canada and the military coup in Honduras / Tyler Shipley.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77113-314-2 (softcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77113-315-9 (EPUB).-- ISBN 978-1-77113-316-6 (PDF)

1. Honduras-- History-- Coup d’état, 2009. 2. Canada-- Foreign relations-- Honduras. 3. Honduras-- Foreign relations-- Canada. 4. Honduras-- Politics and government-- 1982-. I. Title.

Cover and text design by Maggie Earle

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

Our Job is to Kill People

1IMPERIAL LEGACIES

Five Centuries of Foreign Domination in Honduras

Civilizations Lost

Haughty Defiance

The Bells of Freedom?

The Banana Republic

1954 and the Fountain of Honduran History

Agrarian Struggles Emerge

The USS Honduras

The Imposition of Neoliberalism

Maras and Vigilantes

Glimmers of Resistance

2THE PRESIDENT IN HIS PYJAMAS

The June 2009 Coup d’Etat

The Genealogy of a Social Movement

Manuel Zelaya and the CNRP

Constituyente

Sunset on the Zelaya Era

Golpe de Estado

La Resistencia

Pantomime Elections

3THE VIEW FROM OTTAWA

Seeing and Unseeing the Demise of Democracy

Canada and the Coup

Breaking the Social Movement

Truth and Reconciliation?

The Cartagena Accord

The Movement and the Party

The FNRP Persists

4A FRUITFUL PARTNERSHIP

Canadian Investments in the Banana Republic

Extracting Profits

Condemned to Death

Workshops of Canadian Capital

The Banana Coast

Making Honduras Right for Ottawa

The Insecurity State in Honduras

Grand Strategies

5MIDDLE POWER OR EMPIRE’S ALLY?

Canada’s Place in the World Today

Capitalism and Imperialism

A Helpful Fixer?

Holding the Bully’s Coat?

A Short History of Canadian Foreign Policy

The Contemporary Turn: Militarism and Imperialism

Reorganizing the Imperial Machine

A Very Canadian Engagement

6CONCLUSION

Mythologies Old and New

¡Berta Vive!

Don Cherry and Canadian Militarism

Support the Troops

We’re Better than You

Colonial Past, Imperial Present

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is only due to the enormous generosity and support I received over the past decade that this book has seen the light of day. I owe more thanks than can be fit in the space I have and, as such, this list is far from exhaustive and has no particular order. But, since Marx begins his study of capital with the commodity form, I will start by thanking Amanda Crocker and everyone at Between the Lines for helping me transform this research into an actual book, a physical commodity which I hope will be purchased, read, marked up, dogeared, celebrated, denounced, loaned, and borrowed by many.

There are a few people whose influence on this work was indispensable and to whom I am deeply thankful. My doctoral supervisor, David McNally, has been a mentor in the best possible way. His impact on my work has always been positive and productive, and his moral support and guidance over the past ten years has been a major component of everything I have achieved. Greg Albo’s rigorous work is one of the most important intellectual influences behind this book and he has also been a kind and supportive friend over many years of academic and activist pursuits. Across my eight years of research in Central America, I have had no greater ally than Liisa North, who is as generous with her time and energy as she is committed to truth and justice. I also owe a particular note of thanks to my good friend and comrade, Josh Moufawad-Paul, for reading an early draft of the book and offering detailed and helpful editorial feedback.

This book is a product of much circulation and exchange of ideas, and the final work benefited greatly from many years of dialogue, debate, and collaboration with Abigail Bakan, Warren Bernauer, Annie Bird, Raul Burbano, Sandra Cuffe, Anthony Fenton, Todd Gordon, Jasmine Hristov, Dhruv Jain, Angela Joya, Rebecca Granovsky-Larsen, Simon Granovsky-Larsen, Ricardo Grinspun, Tanya Kerssen, Kole Kilibarda, Don Kingsbury, Michael Kirkpatrick, Jerome Klassen, Rodney Loeppky, Laura Macdonald, Geoff McCormack, Rajiv Rawat, Grahame Russell, Riaz Sayani-Mulji, Greg Shupak, Mike Skinner, Jessica Stites-Mor, Iselin Strønen, Caren Weisbart, and Anna Zalik.

I am also grateful to the many friends who may not have had a direct impact on this particular work but have shaped my thinking in broader ways that, inevitably, come across in a variety of unintended ways throughout this work. Among them, I would especially thank Julian Ammirante, Hulya Arik, Peter Braun, Jesse Carlson, Sarah Hornstein, Joel Irwin, Cory Jansson, Kurt Korneski, Renee Lung, Matt McLennan, Ryan McVeigh, Victoria Moufawad-Paul, Adrie Naylor, Nathan Nun, Anne Quigley-Rowley, Marc Roy, Parastou Saberi, Dale Shin, Carmen Teeple-Hopkins, Ryan Toews, Chris Webb, Jude Welburn, and Gareth Williams. I was fortunate early in my academic career to find myself among a cluster of supportive and critical scholars at the University of Manitoba. Much credit is owed to them, especially Mark Gabbert, Henry Heller, Tina Chen, David Churchill, and V. Ravi Vaithees, for first nudging me in the direction that my work has now taken. Thanks also to my many students at York University and Humber College who have embraced the critical spirit and encouraged me to continue teaching and learning every day.

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their financial contribution to the research that informs this book. I would also like to thank the Chr. Michelson Institute for commissioning a report on civil-military relations in Honduras, which gave me further opportunities to develop this research. I would also offer my gratitude to the many colleagues in CUPE 3903, past and present, whose efforts over many years produced working conditions for me as a graduate student and adjunct professor which, while not perfect, were much better than those of my colleagues at other institutions. Financial support won by CUPE 3903 helped me conduct research in Honduras and present my work at conferences across the Americas, which would otherwise have been beyond my economic means.

To those closest to me, a note of appreciation for putting up with the more-than-occasional rants that are an inevitable by-product of this kind of work. I am grateful for the support of my partner, Tina Benigno, and her family, and I am thankful to my mother, Brenda Shipley, for the example of strength that she has so often demonstrated. Along with my sister, Vanessa, and my brothers, Gavin and Chris, we said goodbye to our father last year. One of my strongest recent memories of my dad was when, in 2010, he came to Central America to visit me on one of the research trips that informs this book. What I remember most was the respect with which he listened to every person we met, and I like to think that this book is written in a similar spirit.

Indeed, it is to the hundreds of people in Honduras I have met, talked with, and listened to that this book is dedicated. Though they gained little by talking to me, every person who took the time to share their histories, experiences, and analyses made this book infinitely stronger. In particular, I would like to mention Juan Almendares, Tomás Andino, Jari Dixon, Pedro Landa, Luis Mendez, Victor Meza, Felix Molina, Berta Oliva, Gilberto Ríos, Nectali Rodezno, Raul Valdivia, and, especially, Berta Cáceres, to whose memory this work is dedicated. Their willingness to make time for me, under sometimes very difficult circumstances, is a testament to the commitment of so many Hondurans to make their country—and the world—a better place, despite all the forces stacked up against them. It is also a reflection of the faith they place in Karen Spring, a Canadian activist who relocated to Honduras in 2009 and has been a trusted ally to the social movement ever since.

It is through Karen that I was able to meet and connect with so many people in the movement; not only did Karen arrange interviews and translate along the way, she helped me to identify who I wanted to talk to, who would be willing to share, and how the various individuals, factions, and organizations related to one another. If that wasn’t enough, she and her partner Edwin Espinal also became great friends to me and even allowed me to stay with them in Tegucigalpa. Without Karen’s help, I could not possibly have navigated the extremely complicated and dangerous social terrain of contemporary Honduras. Over many days and nights, in hotels and offices and homes, over coffees and dinners and drinks, I was introduced to the social movement in Honduras, in all of its beauty and complexity. The experience has changed me, offering a window into both the richness of lives dedicated to social justice, and also the suddenness with which those lives can be taken away. Thus, while I acknowledge and dedicate this work to the activists whose struggles inform it, I also plead with readers to understand and heed the urgency of their calls to action.

INTRODUCTION

Our Job is to Kill People

In 2005, four years into the Canadian occupation of Afghanistan, Canadian Forces General Rick Hillier surprised a gathering of reporters by reminding them that the job of the Canadian military was to kill people.¹ The frankness of this admission suggested that dramatic changes were afoot in a country that had long imagined itself a great peacekeeper. By 2009, Canada was deeply implicated in the torture of detainees in its Afghan occupation. In the same year, the then-ruling Conservative government supported the violent military overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras, placing Canada at odds with almost every other state in the western hemisphere. This decision, which is the primary concern of this book, stood in sharp contrast to the noble mythology of Canada that is touted by its leaders. And yet, a brief scan of Canada’s recent engagements in the world suggests that it is quite representative of the new Canada.

In 2013, a journalist at The Globe and Mail reported on Canadian involvement in Africa and concluded that it did not look dissimilar to British and French colonialism:

What do we call the thing Canada is doing in Africa? It involves our largest corporations, the federal government, public- and private-sector aid agencies, and sometimes the military. And their activities are increasingly connected, sometimes by choice, often by force of circumstance … Canada is no longer simply doing business or providing aid in Africa … [it has] become something like a colonial government.²

The Globe and Mail is anything but a leftist news source; that it offered critical comment on emergent Canadian imperialism signals a serious shift in thought.

Canadians—like their southern neighbours—have long been encouraged to believe that their state is a beacon of freedom and democracy. While that discourse has been hard to sustain in the United States, it has stubbornly refused to disappear from the Canadian mainstream, where popular media and public perception still seem to reflect the belief that Canada is, more or less, one of the good guys in international affairs. Canada, according to this narrative, is a state that has perfected the arts of democracy and good governance, offers freedom to its citizens and refuge to foreigners, and promotes peace, stability, and human rights in the rest of the world. An astonishing 94 percent of Canadians think their country is well-liked internationally and 84 percent believe Canada is a force for good in the world,³ in spite of the increasing mobilizations of popular protest in foreign countries against Canadian policy.⁴ In fact, the changes that have marked Canadian foreign policy over the past decade appear, to many Canadians, to reflect simply an increased sense of Canadian self-confidence, as though Canada finally feels comfortable going out and asserting its good values in the world. The irony of a politics whereby goodness is militarized and hammered down upon the less good is, regrettably, lost in most of these assessments.

Michael Ignatieff, political scientist and former leader of the now-governing Liberal Party of Canada, is among the most articulate Canadian imperial cheerleaders. In a program for Canadian foreign policy written in 2003, Ignatieff waxed poetic about Canadian values like democracy, federalism, and pluralism. He then claimed that those values give Canada a responsibility to protect people living in failed states, explaining that Canada has a comparative advantage in the politics of managing divided societies, and must intervene, if necessary, with military force.⁵ His celebration of Canada’s commitment to good government would likely raise a few eyebrows—from Indigenous people, for instance—but he nevertheless implores Canada to intervene militarily when it feels that others are not meeting Canadian criteria for good government.⁶ His program, self-described as muscular multilateralism, would see Canada take such pride in its purported successes that it would impose them on others. Indeed, the Canadian public is consistently presented with a version of Canada that imagines itself an enlightened and benevolent force that would help the rest of the world replicate its own success. Increasingly, however, the reality of Canadian policy looks radically different from the popular picture presented.

In fact, despite coming to power on a wave of progressive rhetoric, Canada’s newest government quickly pronounced peacekeeping dead: the terminology of peacekeeping is not valid at this time…those peacekeeping days do not exist now.⁷ Arguably, Canada’s peacekeeping pedigree was always an exaggeration. During the Cold War, while peacekeeping dressed the windows, the Canadian state gradually took on the role of a secondary imperial power in the global capitalist world order. This process has accelerated since the 1980s, and as Canadian capital has looked outward in search of new profits, the Canadian state has used its considerable resources to support that expansion, successfully carving out considerable space for its economic interests. That space, and the profits that come with it, has often been taken directly from communities in the Global South. Canadian capital is now heavily invested in the world’s poorest countries, where it takes advantage of weak states that cannot—or will not—protect their citizens from dispossession and exploitation. Honduras is paradigmatic of this development, and Canada’s reaction to the 2009 coup d’état, in particular, is among the most compelling cases of the new Canadian imperialism.

This book will document Canada’s role in supporting the coup in Honduras and protecting the dictatorship that has ruled the country ever since. In the process, it will explode several of the cherished myths that Canadians are taught about their country. It will begin by providing an overview of the history of Honduras where, after centuries of foreign domination, working people were mobilizing to take back control over their destiny. But before that process could get off the ground, as the second chapter will demonstrate, it was stamped out by force. The perpetrators of the coup quickly found their closest ally was the government in Ottawa, the subject of chapter three. In exchange for Canada’s political support, the new dictatorship reasserted the conditions for foreign companies’ exploitation of Honduran land and labour and cracked down brutally on any dissent. The crackdown, which has culminated in Honduras becoming the most dangerous country in the world—with the highest homicide rate by a massive margin—was conducted with Canada’s blessing. As chapter four will document, this process has given a major boost to the profits of Canadian companies like Goldcorp, Gildan, and Life Vision Properties.

In a fitting irony, the current president of Honduras has changed the Constitution to allow himself to run for re-election; this was precisely the ambition that former president Manuel Zelaya was falsely accused of to justify his abduction and overthrow in 2009. The experience of Honduras is significant because it demonstrates that Canada has constructed a foreign policy wherein imperialism and injustice are not just potential incidental factors but, rather, are at its heart. Such an understanding grows increasingly urgent as Canada’s foreign policy becomes ever more deeply enmeshed and committed to its new role as an emerging imperial power. The final substantive chapter of this book will make explicit the connection between Canada’s behaviour in Honduras and its broader foreign policy trajectory. After all, if Honduras was an isolated case, we might be justifiably upset about it but we could not conclude that Canada was an imperialist state. However, as the book will demonstrate, Honduras is not unique; rather, it fits into the pattern that Canada has established in the twenty-first century, which has already included armed military interventions in Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, and, most recently, Syria and Iraq. Canada, it would seem, is deeply committed to the imperial path.

At the same time, I do not believe that this political situation is static or unalterable; politics can always be contested by organized social movements, a theme that runs throughout these pages. This book is partly motivated by the need to rebuild the capacities of people and movements to contest the current direction of the Canadian state. Hence, it represents both a critical intervention in the understanding and analysis of Canadian foreign policy at a crucial moment of transformation, and also a call to action for Canadians. Honduras has been thrust into the spotlight in Central America precisely because of the activist networks that built a movement capable of pushing back against the dominant neoliberal world order. The victories they won in the mid-2000s demonstrated the possibilities that can still be unleashed by collective action, and Canadians would do well to learn from the Honduran social movement that is, even now, struggling to build a better world.

In keeping with that theme, this book is informed and inspired by many long hours of conversations with activists in Honduras—teachers, electricians, taxi drivers, parents, children, artists, lawyers, farmers, feminists, socialists, democrats—who have found themselves struggling for justice against a constellation of powerful forces that includes Canadian businesses and the Canadian state. Those conversations instilled in me the gravity and urgency of building a coherent and committed opposition to Canadian imperialism; it is my hope that their voices will speak the loudest in the pages that follow, and will help to inspire the resurgent opposition that is so desperately needed.

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