At the time of writing, just hours after a military coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, the interests surrounding his forced removal from office remain unclear. Actually, they may only be unclear to me: this coup has been building quite openly for a number of days and the political and economic conflicts that led to violent regime change have been a matter of Honduran public debate for some time. Yet while the specifics are hazy, the coup’s regional connections and implications strike me as glaringly obvious, stemming from Central America‘s new transnational political economy and boding ominously for the young, weak democracies.

 

On the surface this is a political conflict, and the centrality of the armed forces in planning and carrying out the coup give it a military façade, but it stems from an economic catalyst. The Honduran armed forces may be concerned about a proposed re-write of the constitution drafted during the height of the 1980s counterinsurgent state, but President Zelaya’s own words–spoken from his makeshift office in exile at the Costa Rican airport–are directed at what he calls a small group of elite economic interests who fear the president’s proposed reforms. This elite, however, is no longer entirely Honduran in composition, backed as it is by a regional alliance which appears to be announcing a shift in strategy.

 

Since the early 1980s, the five countries of Central America have experienced a massive socio-economic transformation. The importance of agricultural exports–the pillar of all Central American economies and the cornerstone of political power since the colonial era–fell significantly as the region moved out of armed conflict and towards integration into the globalized economy. In the course of just a few years each national elite has been overhauled and repositioned, as the economic importance of primary exports has been largely replaced by financial activity, assembly production (especially maquilas), and a reliance on imported goods and cash sent from migrant workers abroad.

 

This economic transformation has also involved an integration of regional elites on an unprecedented scale. Having already shifted towards the type of economic activity that knows few borders, the liberalization of regional and international trade with the Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and numerous bi- and multi-lateral agreements has meant that all of Central America, and not just individual national settings, has become the playground of the established oligarchies. Investment and cooperation at a regional scale have become the norm for big Central American capital.

 

And where money blazes a trail, politics are sure to follow. In fact, a brief look at political campaign financing clearly shows that Central America’s most lucrative economic actors consider the political leader of each country their own concern. Nicaraguan economic groups financed the Costa Rican right-wing candidate in 2001, groups from Guatemala and Honduras helped install El Salvador‘s right-winger in 2003, Salvadorans and Hondurans paid for a Guatemalan candidate in 2003, and Salvadoran capital contributed to a Honduran conservative victory in 2001.

 

And so we come back to the Honduran coup of June 2009. President Zelaya points to the economic interests behind his overthrow, but we must realize that those interests can no longer be exclusively Honduran. The major players in the Central American economy have been collaborating in electoral campaigns, feeling safe in their "democratic" efforts to ensure that elected leaders tow the neoliberal line. With a spectrum of left- to social-democratic leaders taking power in every Central American country over the last few years, however, it may be that the new regionally-focused right wing has decided to attempt a change in strategy, a return to the imposition by force of acceptable political leadership.

 

This is not to suggest that a shadowy group of regional powers necessarily met to plan an interruption of democracy in Honduras, and I do not intend to play down the complex myriad of non-economic factors involved in the present conflict. But if the Honduran economic elite have decided that a military coup is once again an option for maintaining the status quo, then, given the acceleration of regional integration since the end of the armed conflicts, the same option has been presented across Central America.

 

In El Salvador, where the former guerrilla FSLN has assumed the presidency, and in Guatemala, where even the most minimal social-democratic programs played into an institutional crisis that verged on collapse or coup just one month ago, and even in Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega has aligned the Sandinistas with every conceivable interest, the same message is being heard: a line has been crossed, and the now-regional right is willing to defend with any available means their hoarding of economic privilege and political power. How the Honduran coup settles–whether Zelaya is reinstated, how democratic order is restored, and what legitimacy the international actors lends to the coup government–will determine just how viable an option military action will be when the new Central American economic elite faces its next challenge.

 

 

(*) For much more information, see the works of William I. Robinson and Alexander Segovia, especially Robinson’s Transnational Conflicts and Segovia’s Integración Real y Grupos de Poder Económico en America Central. The information on electoral financing above comes directly from Robinson’s Latin America and Global Capitalism, p.180.

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