Honduras's history: the republic that paid for its railways in land

Who built cities in Honduras before Spain arrived

Before Copán there were Lenca towns. The ancestors of the Lenca may have begun arriving around 1000 BC, and at Los Naranjos north of Lake Yojoa and Yarumela in the Comayagua valley they raised ceremonial centres during the preclassic period, almost a thousand years before the Maya cities. Their sites had access to both the Caribbean and the Pacific, and goods from Guatemala and central Mexico turn up in them.

Copán came later. UNESCO dates the first population in the Copán valley to 1500 BC and the first Maya-Cholan settlers from the Guatemalan highlands to around AD 100. In 427 a leader named Yax Kuk Mo arrived from the region of Tikal and founded a dynasty of sixteen rulers. Britannica puts the peak early in the ninth century, when the city may have held as many as 20,000 people, and dates the last of the dynasty to 822.

The count on the Hieroglyphic Stairway depends on who is counting. Britannica gives some 1,260 hieroglyphic symbols on the risers of 63 remaining steps; UNESCO gives more than 1,800 individual glyphs on a stairway 100 metres wide. The city was in decline by the ninth century. UNESCO dates the abandonment of its centre to the early tenth century, and Britannica says the Maya had left the site entirely by about 1200.

Its modern record begins with outsiders as well. Diego García de Palacio came on the ruins in 1570, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood reached them in 1839, and the Peabody Museum Expedition to Honduras photographed the site and the village beside it in the 1890s on glass plate negatives that went to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The negatives survived more than 115 years there. Once digitised they came back to the town as an exhibition, installed in the municipal hall of Copán Ruinas in 2009. The site joined the World Heritage List in 1980.

East of the Maya zone, La Ciudad Blanca, on the fringe of Mesoamerica, flourished from about AD 500 to 1000.

Why Spain never held the Honduran Caribbean coast

Columbus reached the Bay Islands near Guanaja on 30 July 1502 and landed on the mainland near modern Trujillo on 14 August, naming the country for the deep water off its coast. The conquest began as a quarrel among conquerors: Cristóbal de Olid, sent by Hernán Cortés in 1524, declared himself governor on his own account, and Cortés marched overland from Mexico in 1525 to recover the colony.

The Lenca leader Lempira led the revolt of 1537 and 1538 near the present town of Gracias, and the Honduran currency carries his name. Gracias, a gold town, was briefly the capital of all Spanish Central America from 1544; by 1548 the gold was exhausted and the seat moved to Guatemala. A silver strike in 1569 led to the founding of Tegucigalpa, which soon rivalled Comayagua; the boom peaked in 1584. By 1545 the province may already have held as many as 2,000 African slaves.

The north was never theirs in the same way. The Spanish fell back to the highlands and the Pacific side, and the Caribbean coast was left to pirates, English traders and the Miskito. An English expedition destroyed Trujillo, the main port, in 1643. The Miskito king Jeremy visited Jamaica in 1687, and by 1715 the Miskito Zambo, descended in part from shipwrecked African slaves, led the kingdom. Britain declared much of the coast a protectorate in 1740.

Spain answered with stone. The fortress of San Fernando de Omoa was begun in 1752, and Britannica dates its completion to 1779. Spanish forces retook the Bay Islands in the 1780s, and the Anglo-Spanish Convention of 1786 recognised Spanish sovereignty over the coast. Recognition on paper was one thing: the national article on Honduras dates British administration of the Bay Islands to 1850, and in 1797 the British landed about 2,000 Garifuna, deported from Saint Vincent, on those same islands. The northern part of the Mosquito Coast came to Honduras only in 1960, when the International Court of Justice transferred it from Nicaragua.

How Honduras left the federation it tried to rebuild

Honduras joined the other provinces of the Captaincy General of Guatemala in declaring independence from Spain in 1821, passed briefly under the First Mexican Empire, and in 1823 entered the United Provinces of Central America. Dionisio de Herrera, the first democratically elected president in Honduras, headed a government from 1824 that established its first constitution. The federation's most prominent defender was Honduran: Francisco Morazán, a Liberal, became its president in 1830 and spent a decade fighting the Conservatives who opposed his secular policies, before he was captured and shot in Costa Rica.

Honduras broke away in October 1838 and declared its absolute independence on 5 November 1838. Francisco Ferrera became the first constitutional president on 1 January 1841. Leaving did not end the idea: Honduras joined five attempts at reunion between 1842 and 1852, and restoring Central American unity remained the officially stated chief aim of its foreign policy into the years after the First World War.

The Liberal reform turned the country outward. Marco Aurelio Soto took office in Britannica's dating in 1876, opened Honduras to trade and immigration, and in 1880 moved the capital from Comayagua to Tegucigalpa. From 1876 the Liberal governments began granting land and tax exemptions to foreign concerns, which is where the rest of this history starts.

How Honduras paid for railways with land

How the concessions were granted

Bananas were a Honduran smallholders' crop before they were a company crop. Exports began on the Bay Islands in the 1870s, and an 1899 census found over 1,000 people tending bananas between Puerto Cortés and La Ceiba, most of them small holders.

The concessions changed who owned the coast. Governments short of money and wanting a railway to join the Caribbean to the Pacific borrowed abroad and paid in their most fertile land. In 1902 the government gave William F. Streich of Philadelphia a large concession in return for five miles of track from Cuyamel to Vera Cruz. Samuel Zemurray bought Streich's rights, sold 336,000 bunches of bananas in 1903 and 1.75 million seven years later, and founded the Cuyamel Fruit Company in 1910. Vaccaro Brothers, later Standard Fruit, came from New Orleans to Roatán in 1899 and opened offices at La Ceiba in 1901. By 1912 United Fruit held two railway concessions, from Tela into the Sula valley and from Trujillo towards Juticalpa, and in 1913 it set up the Tela and Trujillo railroad companies to run them.

The rate was 500 hectares for every kilometre of railway laid. The lines ran through the fertile north coast and stopped there, without reaching the mountainous interior or the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific side, and the capital was left with no passenger or freight service at all. La Ceiba, Tela, Trujillo, El Progreso and La Lima became company towns. Hondurans called United Fruit El Pulpo, the octopus.

What the north coast became

The companies favoured English-speaking workers from Jamaica and Belize, as labourers and as lower managers, and the arrival of West Indian workers on the coast produced tension and a growing prejudice against them. The first major strikes in Honduran history came out of the plantations: against Cuyamel in 1917, disturbances at Standard Fruit's holding in La Ceiba in 1918, and a general strike on the Caribbean coast in 1920 that collapsed when Standard Fruit offered a wage equivalent to US$1.75 a day.

Bananas made up 80% of all exports by 1929, and by 1930 Honduras produced a third of the world's bananas. United Fruit bought out Cuyamel in 1929, and Zemurray took control of United Fruit itself in 1933.

O. Henry spent six months in Honduras in 1896 and 1897, hiding in a hotel while wanted in the United States for embezzlement. His book Cabbages and Kings of 1904 is set in the fictional Republic of Anchuria, and the phrase he coined for it, "banana republic", is the one the country has carried since.

What the bankers and the marines decided in Honduras

By 1909 the Honduran debt stood at over $120 million, most of it owed to British bondholders. The Taft administration arranged a refinancing through New York bankers headed by J.P. Morgan: the bankers would control the Honduran railroad, and the United States would take control of customs revenue. A treaty on those terms was signed in January 1911 and sent to the Honduran legislature, which rejected it by 33 votes to 5. According to the University of Toronto's Visualizing the Americas, the United States Senate also refused it and the bank withdrew.

The fruit companies were already fighting over the outcome. In late December 1910 Zemurray gave Manuel Bonilla, a former president, the money for a yacht called the Hornet, which picked up the mercenary Lee Christmas and a machine gun outside New Orleans. The rebels took Trujillo on 10 January 1911. United States Marines landed, the factions were brought aboard a United States warship, and the American mediator Thomas Cleland Dawson chose the provisional president. Bonilla won the 1912 election. Christmas later commanded the Honduran army.

American troops landed in Honduras in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925. From 1920 to 1923 there were seventeen uprisings or attempted coups. After a battle in La Ceiba on 28 February 1924 left fifty dead, the settlement was again negotiated aboard a United States cruiser.

Two arrangements of the following years show where the money sat. The British bondholders agreed to redeem the old debt at 20% of face value over thirty years. And in 1931, with banana exports falling, the government borrowed US$250,000 from the fruit companies to keep paying the army.

How Carías rewrote the constitution to stay in power

Tiburcio Carías Andino of the National Party won the 1932 election by some 20,000 votes and took office on 16 November 1932. He kept paying the British bondholders through the Depression and sided with the banana companies against strikes.

The constitution was the obstacle, because it barred a president's immediate re-election. Thirteen had been written already, and the handpicked assembly of 1936 wrote another. It removed the re-election ban, lengthened the term from four years to six, restored the death penalty, cut the legislature's powers, denied women citizenship and the vote, and kept the incumbent in office until 1943. In 1939 the legislature extended the term again, to 1949. By the end of the decade the National Party was the only functioning party; opposition leaders were jailed or exiled, and some were reportedly chained and put to work in the streets of Tegucigalpa.

The regime survived 1944, when revolts removed the dictators of Guatemala and El Salvador and troops killed demonstrators in San Pedro Sula. Carías handed over in January 1949 to his minister of war, Juan Manuel Gálvez, who paid off the last of the British bonds during his term. United Fruit received a highly favourable twenty-five-year contract in 1949.

What broke the pattern came from the plantations. About 35,000 people worked for United Fruit and Standard Fruit just before the 1954 general strike, which paralysed the north for more than two months and led to reforms. After a coup by young officers in October 1956, Ramón Villeda Morales governed from 1957 until conservative officers removed him in a bloody coup in October 1963. The clause Carías struck out in 1936, the ban on re-election, is one of those Article 374 now protects.

Why the Football War was fought over land

The war of July 1969 takes its name from World Cup qualifiers and its causes from the land. In Honduras, United Fruit owned 10% of the land and 8.8% of landowners held over 63% of it. More than 300,000 Salvadorans lived in Honduras by 1969, over 10% of its population, many of them farming land that Honduran law treated as illegally occupied. A land reform law of 1962, fully enforced by 1967, gave land occupied by Salvadoran immigrants to native-born Hondurans, and thousands of Salvadoran labourers were expelled.

The matches were played on 8 June in Tegucigalpa and 15 June in San Salvador, with violence around both. On 14 July the Salvadoran air force attacked Honduran airfields and its army invaded on two fronts, taking Nueva Ocotepeque on 16 July. The Organization of American States negotiated a ceasefire on the night of 18 July, and Salvadoran troops withdrew in early August. Britannica records that Honduras lost the war militarily.

Military rule framed the war. General Oswaldo López Arellano, who had taken power in 1963, removed the civilian president Ramón Ernesto Cruz in December 1972, announced a programme of land redistribution in January 1974, and resigned in 1975 over an international bribery scandal. In those years the United States handed over the Swan Islands under an agreement signed on 22 November 1971, and Honduras began exercising sovereignty there on 1 September 1972. Article 10 of the present constitution names them.

What the contra years left on Honduran soil

A constituent assembly was elected in April 1980, general elections followed in November 1981, and the constitution of 1982 returned the country to civilian rule. Under its first civilian government Honduras also became the base for the wars next door. The Nicaraguan contras used Honduran border areas to attack the Sandinista government, and the United States trained Salvadoran forces in camps on Honduran soil until Honduras banned them in 1984.

In 1983 the United States stationed about 1,200 troops, Joint Task Force Bravo, at Soto Cano air base, formerly Palmerola. United States military assistance rose from $4 million in 1981 to $77.4 million in 1984. Inside the country the CIA-trained Battalion 3-16 carried out extrajudicial killings, and trade unionists, academics, farmers and students disappeared. Declassified documents show the United States ambassador intervening to keep the crimes from being disclosed.

The 1990s were spent taking the army out of government. The national police passed from military to civilian control in 1997, Congress voted in September 1998 to abolish the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the first civilian defence minister was appointed after ratification in January 1999. By then about 500 troops remained at Soto Cano.

Hurricane Mitch struck in October 1998. The Honduran government reported 5,657 people killed, 8,052 missing and around 1.9 million affected, and the banana industry lost some 90% of its plants. Asylum requests from Hondurans in the United States rose from 850 in 2009 to more than 41,000 in 2019.

Why both modern crises met the same clause

What the fourth ballot box was

Article 239 of the 1982 constitution says that a citizen who has held the presidency under any title may not hold it again, and that anyone who advocates changing that rule shall immediately cease to hold office. Article 374 then lists the articles that may not be amended in any case: the form of government, national territory, the presidential term and the ban on re-election.

In 2009 President Manuel Zelaya pressed ahead with a non-binding poll, the cuarta urna or fourth ballot box, on convening an assembly to write a new constitution. The Supreme Court had ruled the poll illegal. It issued a secret arrest warrant on 26 June, and on 28 June soldiers took Zelaya from his residence and flew him to Costa Rica; Congress removed him the same day and installed its own head, Roberto Micheletti, as his constitutional successor. Congress and the Court held that Zelaya had acted illegally; the United Nations, the OAS and the European Union condemned his removal as a military coup. The OAS suspended Honduras unanimously on 5 July 2009, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in July 2011 that Zelaya had broken the law and that his removal was also illegal and a coup. Physicians for Human Rights documented the torture of protesters after constitutional freedoms were suspended on 26 September 2009.

In April 2015 the Supreme Court struck down the ban on a second presidential term, and the incumbent stood again in November 2017. The electoral commission declared him the winner on 17 December 2017 with 42.95% of the vote against 41.42%.

How the ZEDE zones were annulled

The second test came through territory. The National Congress passed the law on Zones for Employment and Economic Development, the ZEDEs, on 12 June 2013 by 102 votes to 26, after the Supreme Court had found an earlier version unconstitutional. It amended four constitutional articles and allowed zones with their own tax and customs regimes under 50-year concessions. Three were set up: Próspera on Roatán, Orquídea in San Marcos de Colón and Ciudad Morazán in Choloma. In June 2021 the Court itself granted them a special jurisdiction.

Congress repealed the law in 2022, but the constitutional amendment needed ratification in the next session and did not get it. On 20 September 2024 the Supreme Court declared the framework unconstitutional. Contracorriente reports that the fifteen magistrates were unanimous on that point and that a majority made the ruling retroactive to 2013; Reuters reported a majority vote, and quoted the Court's finding that the law violated articles "written in stone". The government of the day called the ruling patriotic. The secretary of Ciudad Morazán called it abusive and illegal, and Próspera, which had already taken a claim to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes after the 2022 repeal, had warned before the ruling that it would create insecurity for investors. Both positions stand on the record.

Próspera sits on Roatán, the island where Vaccaro Brothers bought their first bananas in 1899, where British pirates once harried Spanish shipping, and in the island group where the Garifuna were landed in 1797.