Honduras: A Country Struggling with Internal Conflict

Honduras: A Country Struggling with Internal Conflict.

The Norwegian Refugee Council and British Broadcasting Corporation describe life in Honduras as being in a war zone. The urban metropolitan areas of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, as well as most populated areas, are in an open conflict that the government and its external democratic allies cannot comprehend, let alone control, secure, or ameliorate.

“The kinds of stories people have been telling me here in Honduras are similar to those from people in war zones like Syria, Yemen or Ukraine. Violence permeates the very fabric of life and forces tens of thousands to flee their homes…armed gangs used violence to take their land and property and threatened to recruit their children. This forced them to flee their homes and ended their livelihoods and their children’s education… Women had survived horrific violence at home, including rape and other sexual violence. A woman was murdered every 28 hours last year (2022) in Honduras.” – Jan England, Secretary General of NRC, April 24th, 2023.

The complete breakdown in Honduran law, order, and community over the past several decades is driven by psychosocial-political-historical narrative disintegration of Honduras’ population segments within the boundaries of a sovereign civil state.

 To be sure, the various levels of government (city and federal) have enough combat power to protect the Caucasian Spanish-cultural population segments that maintain the government and its security services. Government security services also serve as a backup to the privatised security that protects the national commerce structure. Most of the civil population is divided between those who identify as closed indigenous (as well as religious) communities and those who identify as neither Euro-Spanish nor Mayan-Indigenous. The latter are often armed, as are government and private security services, from the flood of weaponry infused into the region by the United States and other countries during its decades of civil war.

As a consequence, the civilian population that is unable to obtain government or private security or is not under the protection of indigenous or religious communities living in closed societies, are left to survive on their own. This takes the form of fight (join a government or private security service, or one of the armed criminal gangs), flight (join caravans out of the Northern Triangle headed north to the United States), or hide in place, hoping that they will not be killed, abducted, forced into recruitment, or fed on by the conflict parties (rape, robbery, etc.).

Honduran society can best be understood as a series of interrelated population segments that are in various states of open conflict. At the top of the socioeconomic-political and security order are the country’s elites, followed by its Western-supported indigenous, then the collectives of organised armed men, women, and families that constitute ‘gangs’. The lowest segment of Honduran society is literally everyone else. These four distinct social segments, with their differing psychosocial motivations, are individually and collectively driving the conflict that is pushing Honduras to the brink of ‘failed-state’ status. And neither the state nor the international community seems to be able to respond to this slow-motion disintegration of these three states. This underlying psychosocial-emotional driver of social disintegration and participation in violent conflict suggests that the dangers that the population segments in these three states face cannot be calculated using Western, rational logic. The psychosocial-cultural structures of the Northern Triangle countries are in the process of disintegration, and this disintegration has been increased by great-power interference and a failure to ameliorate the effects of post-colonial social ordering based on racial and cultural preference. Our professional assessment to the USA and UK foreign offices has been that these countries are in what may be thought of as a ‘free-fall’ into increasing levels of violence and disorder, which will continue until the underlying dissonance is finally resolved by those who survive.