It was the early hours of the morning, and protesters who had gathered to support their deposed president were resting in the streets of the Honduran capital when the security forces attacked.
Three months after he was snatched by troops and unceremoniously expelled from the country, Manuel Zelaya had returned to Tegucigalpa and taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy. Thousands of his supporters flocked to the mission, intending to stay there until he was able to resume power.
Agustina Flores, 46, had gone in search of coffee when the shooting began. Police fired water cannons and dropped teargas grenades from helicopters into the sleeping crowds.
“The police and soldiers were firing rubber and live bullets into the crowd, beating women and the elderly. One [tear gas] grenade exploded near me; after that I blacked out.”
As Flores – a teacher and union activist – came round, she was cornered by police officers who punched and beat her with batons, then took her and hundreds of others to a nearby sports field which was converted into a makeshift detention centre.
“They hit my face, neck and body,” she said. “We were trying to defend the constitution and the democratic process.”
The violence which shook the impoverished Central American state in the months after the June 2009 military coup d’état has largely been forgotten by the international community.
But the crackdown was harsh, and the aftershocks are still being felt.
And as Hillary Clinton – who was secretary of state at the time – edges closer to the White House, there has been a renewed focus on the coup, its aftermath and America’s response. Clinton pushed for new elections, rather than the return of Zelaya, whom she considered a leftist troublemaker in the mould of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.
US ties to Honduras – and the millions of dollars of aid to the country’s security forces – have also come under scrutiny since the murder of Berta Cáceres, the celebrated environmentalist, who was murdered in March after years of battling against a hydroelectric dam project on indigenous Lenca territory.
Flores – who is Cáceres’ older sister – says that much of the violence in Honduras can be traced directly back to a sell-off of mining and hydroelectric concessions that followed the coup. “These concessions generated violence which eventually killed Berta. We’re still paying the consequences of the coup,” she said.
Honduras is the second-poorest country in the Americas and one of the most unequal. It is rich in resources, but most of its wealth is controlled by a small elite.
Zelaya oversaw modest economic and social reforms. He introduced a minimum wage, gave away energy-saving lightbulbs, and pledged to finally resolve longstanding land conflicts between peasant farmers and agribusinesses.
In June 2009, Zelaya called a referendum to decide whether an extra vote should take place in November – alongside the general election – to reform the constitution. If approved, the reform would have allowed presidents to stand again for re-election.
Two days before the vote, the army refused to deliver the ballot boxes. Zelaya tried to push on with the vote, but on the night of 28 June he was forced – still in his pyjamas – on to a military plane and taken to Costa Rica.
In a recent interview with New York Daily News, Clinton said the legislature and judiciary “actually followed the law in removing President Zelaya. Now I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it, but they had a strong argument that they had followed the constitution and the legal precedents”.
Yet the military’s actions were widely condemned as a coup by governments across Latin America, the UN, EU and the Organisation of American States (OAS), which suspended Honduras.
Hugo Llorens, the US ambassador to Tegucigalpa, agreed. In a diplomatic cable later released by WikiLeaks, he wrote that while it was possible that Zelaya may have “committed illegalities” there was “no doubt that the military, supreme court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the executive branch”.
In the hardback edition of her autobiography Hard Choices, Clinton wrote that the head of the Honduran congress, Roberto Micheletti, and the country’s supreme court “claimed to be protecting Honduran democracy against Zelaya’s unlawful power grab and warned that he wanted to become another Chavez or Castro.
“Certainly the region did not need another dictator, and many knew Zelaya well enough to believe the charges against him.”
But Zelaya would not have benefited from the proposed referendum, said Christine Wade, associate professor of political science and international studies at Washington College.
Wade, who described Zelaya as “an opportunist and pragmatist, [but] definitely not a leftist”, said: “The referendum would have had zero impact on the November elections. Zelaya could not have extended his power.”
Wade argues that Zelaya’s real crime was to incur the anger of powerful Hondurans by pushing for settlements in the country’s many land disputes.
Clinton has claimed that calling the military coup a military coup would have increased the suffering of ordinary Hondurans as it would have triggered the suspension of US aid.
In the weeks following the coup, Zelaya made three attempts to re-enter the country, which Clinton described as reckless. She has said that her focus at the time was on electing a new leader in order to ensure an orderly transition.
In her memoir, she wrote: “In the subsequent days I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere … We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”
Leaked emails from Clinton’s private server which were published by WikiLeaks show that during this period, the US pushed the OAS to support new elections and sideline Zelaya.
But the ousted leader still had real support at home: tens of thousands of people took to the streets in daily demonstrations demanding his return and the cancellation of the November elections which Clinton advocated.
Meanwhile, the crackdown was brutal, said Karen Spring of the Honduras Solidarity Network. “People were beaten, tortured, disappeared, jailed illegally. There were no conditions for free and fair elections; there was no peaceful transition.”
New elections that November went ahead without any international observers – apart from a delegation from the US Republican party – and were boycotted by large sections of society. The independent candidates, and some from Zelaya’s Liberal party, pulled out.
Mass protests continued until the rightwing National party’s Pepe Lobo Sosa, was sworn in as president in January 2010.
The new government swiftly unveiled a collection of pro-business policies and aggressively pursued a sell-off of natural resources.
As community leaders like Cáceres fought back against mining, logging and agri-business projects, Honduras became the most dangerous country for environmental activists, with at least 118 killed since 2010, according to the latest data from Global Witness.
The deaths came amid a general deterioration in human rights. Between 2009 and 2015, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued 41 protective measures covering hundreds of union workers, lawyers and LGBT, environmental and indigenous activists who were facing imminent risks. Only Colombia and Mexico – both of which have much larger populations – received more during the same period.
One of Zelaya’s most controversial policies had been to order an investigation into the entrenched land conflicts in the Bajo Aguán region where campesinos were pitted against palm oil conglomerates. After the coup, campesino groups started occupying land illegally as Zelaya’s land reform plans were shelved. The region was rapidly militarised and more than 110 campesinos were murdered.
Violence against the LGBT community has also escalated since the coup. Since 2009, 229 LGBT people have been murdered – an average of 30 every year, according to the NGO Cattrachas. This compares to an average of two murders a year between 1994 and 2008.
The country’s economy has tanked. Immediately after the coup, a five-month curfew imposed by the new government cost the economy $50m a day. Wages dropped, subsidies were shelved and the public education and social security systems gutted.
Meanwhile, organised crime – which was already well-established – flexed its muscles, infiltrating all corners of the country’s weak institutions. Death squads reappeared, and the murder rate surged.
By 2010, Honduras had become the world’s most violent country outside an official war zone, a position it held until 2014. By 2012, 80% of cocaine-smuggling flights bound for the US from South America were estimated to pass through Honduras.
Honduras is not a country which has historically enjoyed strong institutions, but Clinton’s critics say if she had supported the country’s democratically elected leader, and pushed hard for his return to power, it would not be confronting the crisis of institutionality it does today.
The current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was elected in 2013, has pushed forward with his own agenda to overhaul the country’s political system – and allow him to stand for re-election.
Hernández created a new militarised police force while institutions such as the supreme court, electoral commission and congress are dominated by figures loyal to him and his party.
Jesse Lehrich, the foreign policy spokesperson for the Clinton campaign, said that the US presidential candidate “immediately condemned those responsible” for removing President Zelaya in 2009, “and got to work with our allies to remedy the situation.”
“She helped lead an international charge to isolate the coup government, revoke the visas of those responsible, and slash foreign aid to the government while continuing to provide humanitarian aid. Her strong stance and her work with regional leaders like President Arias of Costa Rica helped pave the way for a political resolution that quickly led to a democratic election and the removal of the coup government.”
But if the US had truly supported Zelaya’s return, Honduras might have taken a different course.
In the November elections, Zelaya had been expected to endorse the independent presidential candidate Carlos Reyes, a union leader, and his vice-presidential candidate, Berta Cáceres.
Cáceres’ daughter, Bertita Zúñiga, said US policies after the coup ignored the Honduran public and in effect legitimised an illegal takeover.
“Since then, we’ve lived with the militarisation of our society, serious violence and the criminalisation of social protest. My mum wanted to build a better Honduras, but that hope died with the coup.”
With additional reporting by David Smith in Washington.
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