source: Honduras Now
In the weeks leading up to the 17th anniversary of the 2009 Honduran military coup, dozens of social movements and community-based organizations are coordinating press conferences, gathering signatures, blocking roads, and protesting in front of the Supreme Court. These actions are all aimed at denouncing a slew of laws that promote and prioritize large-scale private investments in agro-business, tourism, and energy, pushing Honduras back to the post-coup narco-dictatorship (2009-2022). Their resistance is directly related to heightened U.S. intervention in Honduras.
Seventeen years since the 2009 coup in Honduras, it is hard to understate the catastrophic impact of U.S. President Donald Trump and the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement in Honduras. Following Trump’s crude intervention in the 2025 elections, Honduran drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández was pardoned and released from prison, and all political forces with progressive positions or sympathies find themselves under political attack. This includes representatives of Honduras’ electoral institutions, the Attorney General, and the President of the Supreme Court who have been removed via threat of or direct impeachment. The National Party, with the support of the Liberal Party, have returned to power and to their traditional partnership. They are bringing back not only their conservative, pro-business policies, but also the same characters that were involved in and fundamental to the growth and structure of the corrupt narco-dictatorship of 2009 to 2021. In other words, the new government is reversing the important advances made under Xiomara Castro’s administration (2022 to 2026) and deepening the power of the wealthy oligarchs, organized crime, and transnational capital.
In the meantime, social movements are mobilizing to stop the onslaught of damaging laws approved by Congress. After a massacre of 20 campesinos on May 21, 2026 in Rigores, Colón, the National Congress promoted the Law for the Strengthening and Protection of the Agro-industrial Sector as a manipulated and fake solution to land conflicts. The law prioritizes agro-business over small-scale and subsistence farming. It also favors transnational over Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous and campesino land rights that are protected by agrarian reform laws and international treaties. Other laws and reforms, including a new definition of “terrorist association” in the Criminal Code, and the proposal to privatize the National Electrical Energy Company (ENEE), will promote further state attacks and criminalization of community organizers and social movements, and hand over public goods and infrastructure to corporate interests.
As Trump’s intervention in the elections demonstrated, Honduras remains an important country in the U.S.’s imperialist plan to re-exert its dominance in Latin America. In May, 37 audio files were released by Hondurasgate and Diario Red, featuring various Honduran political figures, including convicted drug trafficker and ex-President Juan Orlando Hernández. Among numerous scandalous revelations, the leaks outline an international and national plan to attack progressive forces and prop up right wing powers across Latin America. Hernández, a long-standing U.S. ally during his presidencies (2014 to 2022) is a central figure in the plan despite being a convicted drug trafficker who received a pardon from Trump as the U.S. continues to attack and bomb fishing boats in the Pacific and Atlantic to allegedly “combat narco-terrorism.”
From FBI participation in police operations in Honduras to visits to Tegucigalpa from Kristi Noem as part of the newly formed U.S.’s Shield of the Americas, the U.S.’s presence in Honduras is even more conspicuous now than in the years following the 2009 coup. But despite the increasing global reach of the “MAGA” movement and the U.S.’s efforts to continue consolidating its power in the region, the social movements that the Honduras Solidarity Network (HSN) has long supported continue to organize and resist:
- Campesinos that form the bases of the Agrarian Platform and the National Union of Agricultural Workers (Centro Nacional de Trabajadores del Campo, CNTC) continue to recover land stolen by large-land owners and agro-business.
- The Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña, OFRANEH) works to build ancestral health and educational centers and demand the restoration of their land rights in accordance with the rulings emitted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
- Lenca Indigenous communities with the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Indígena e Populares de Honduras, COPINH) lead extraordinary efforts to demand justice for Berta Cáceres, and challenge international finance in foreign jurisdictions.
While these are just a few examples of how la lucha sigue (the struggle continues) 17 years after the 2009 coup, these struggles of organizing and collaboration are not only sparks of hope, but active ways that Honduran groups are building alternative futures. They show how resistance, although hard, dangerous, and difficult, continues on this anniversary of the 2009 coup. As a network that formed 17 years ago, the HSN continues to denounce U.S. imperialism and call on all to resist in solidarity with social movements in Honduras, and around the world.
