The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup

by Dana Frank

This powerful narrative recounts the tumultuous time in Honduras that witnessed then-President Manuel Zelaya deposed by a coup in June 2009, told through first-person experiences and layered with deeper political analysis. It weaves together two perspectives; first, the broad picture of Honduras since the coup, including the coup itself, its continuation in two repressive regimes, and second, the evolving Honduran resistance movement, and a new, broad solidarity movement in the United States.

Although it is full of terrible things, this is not a horror this narrative directly counters mainstream media coverage that portrays Honduras as a pit of unrelenting awfulness, in which powerless sobbing mothers cry over bodies in the morgue. Rather, it’s about sobering challenges and the inspiring collective strength with which people face them.

Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America from Haymarket Books. Since the 2009 military coup, her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Journalism, Latin American History, Political Science

453 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 27, 2018

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I live and work as a Catholic deacon in southwest Honduras. I’ve been here for more than eleven years and thus I have lived through much of what Dan Frank writes about in her recent book, The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup.
I have not found many books written in English on Honduras and so I welcome this book. It is not a history per se, but it’s a work that combines research, advocacy, and personal experience.
Events are often related in a vacuum, with just statistics. Dr. Frank includes her own experiences accompanying people in Honduras and advocating for Honduras in US, even in the halls of Congress. This, very often, helps give a human face to statistics.
The work is clearly critical of the Honduran government and the US support of its repressive tactics, as well as of the Honduran political, social, and economic elites. This generally does not become an ideological rant, as I’ve found in some writers. I think her reflection on her many experiences with Hondurans provides a buffer to that temptation.
Her work is very well documented, with numerous footnotes.
This book helped me to reflect on these years in Honduras. I live in a relatively peaceful part of the country which, as I understand, lacks a long and deep history of political radicalism, like what can be found on the northern coast and in the larger cities. So I didn’t experience the repression to the extent that she did.
The book is worth a read – though I wonder if it will be understood well by those who don’t know the history of Honduras of this epoch.
We still need a few good histories and social analyses of the last twenty years of life in Honduras. Dr. Frank’s work is a start.

[Rachel Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

+ 3 stars: The FACTS in this book were so helpful in understanding the recent and current political
climate in Honduras, specially with the election of Xiomara Castro (the wife of the former president displaced during the coup).

- 2 stars: This book got me thinking about the difference between slant, bias, and opinion. This book is extremely slanted. When reading it, it made me feel that if you are not anti-capitalism, pro- Venezuela, pro LGTBI, etc. the author would not want to be your friend. Even though the author is a strong democrat, she didn’t have one nice thing to say about President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden. If the author didn’t like someone for their views on policy in Honduras, she seemed to not like anything else about them either.

Examples:
Page 117 overgeneralization during a trip to congress: “ The halls swelled with military men, too, pedaling who-knows-what murderous war in uniforms so dripping with metals and broad gold epaulets that their jackets look like they could stand up by themselves. And, of course, there were scary Republicans lurking in every corner and behind more than half the office doors.”

So…all republicans?

[Mary Heida Flores · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with this one and remain conflicted. The two reasons are:

1. While I appreciated the education on the situation in Honduras and all involved parties, this became incredibly repetitive. Acronyms and concepts were repeatedly explained rather than trusting the reader to follow along and remember players. We can always flip back as readers.
2. This was my biggest beef...all of Frank's lived experience is valid and her advocacy is evident. However, she is a white woman who lived and worked in Honduras. She had the freedom to come and go at will. Because of this, the way she described how personal and terrible it was for her as these events were unfolding felt superficial and a bit misplaced. All of the "I" statements didn't sit right for me.

Any thoughts on these points? Would love to hear from you all!

[Joseph Furtick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree with many other reviewers here. It reads more as a memoir than an analysis of the aftermath of the 2009 coup. Dr. Frank, in her introduction, states that the purpose of the book is to tell the story of eight years in the aftermath of the coup and how the illegitimate rule of the post-coup government was assiduously supported by the U.S. Unfortunately, I felt it failed to live up to its purpose and she writes more frequently about her visits to Honduras post 2009 than she does about the general situation of the Honduran people as a whole (mostly lack of data). Her writing also appeared biased in several ways, specifically in her reasoning for Zelaya to approve a new constitution. She neglects to inform readers (maybe conveniently) that Zelaya’s actions to propose a constitutional referendum were struck down by Honduran courts on several occasions and he unconstitutionally demanded the military carry out his plan, and when they didn’t (as ordered by the Supreme Court) he proceeded to fire the Defense Minister and seize the ballots himself. Yes, undoubtably, the regimes that followed him committed thousands of human rights violations against its people and primed the nation for the rampant spread of organized crime, however, the book lacked details I felt I craved as a reader about the key events and the polarization of the political parties and figures in Honduras pre 2009. Dr. Frank is an incredible advocate for Honduras from within the U.S. and she has written a number of terrific pieces about the nation. For that reason, I had quite high hopes for this book.

I recommend reading the analysis written by the Congressional Research Service for a timeline of events pre and post 2009 and the report written by the Human Rights Watch regarding the human rights violations committed by both the Micheletti and Lobo administrations before diving into this book. Yes both reports are a bit dry, but chalk full of valuable information. Links below:

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/R41064.pdf

https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/fil...

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars out of 5.

I round up to 4 stars because it gave me some info on a topic I was lacking knowledge about. Frank is an American with experience in Honduras who has gotten a lot more involved there in the last decade. In June 2009, a military coup took place, and the nation has spiraled backwards since then. There have been periods of repression and clampdowns. There are occasional elections, but often conducted in an atmosphere of terror to silence dissent. In one election the powers that be were clearly going to lose - they flatly stole by faking results in 2017.

The US government initially supported the coup, and Frank argues (while admitting that she has no proof) that Washington DC green lit the coup in advance. The coup helped the US because the new government prioritized economic privitization and neoliberalism. The US could make more money and have more influence in the region. The transition from Obama to Trump has been more about continuity rather than disruption, and John Kelly was one of the key officials setting policy under Obama and then gained more prominence under Trump. There was a move to push the US government (through Congress) to adopt a harder line against the Honduras government. Progress was being made, but it was undone in 2014 when the first caravan of refugees came north and right wing media portrayed them as a bunch of gang members and terrorists and ebola cases.

The book gives an overview of Honduras, but it still has its faults. It's more a memoir than a history, and we end up with a better sense of what Frank is doing than what's going on in Honduras. The causes of the coup and what led up to it are very murky, at best. It's spotty, but it filled in a good deal for me.

[Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Strong Web of Contacts Provides Solid Insights and a Timeline of Key Events in Recent Honduran History, but It's Somewhat Overshadowed by Blatant & Gleeful One-Sidedness

Oh no! I wrote a fulsome review of this book and then, when I took the book off my "to-read" shelf, it deleted my entry! That's a real bummer, since there were several things I wanted to retain from it and quotes I included, but I can't replicate them since I've already given the book back to its owner. It's been about two weeks; let's see what I can dredge up. As a chapeau, I read this book as part of a larger effort to better understand Honduras. Though I found it a pretty good primer to the political and labor movements that continue to impact the country today (e.g., the current presidential incumbent and one of the front-runners to replace her are both "bit characters" in the book), I also had problems with the author as the messenger.

*Brief Synopsis: This book relates the history of modern Honduras (2009 - 2017) in the wake of the coup against President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Frank, a historian from UC Santa Cruz (Go Banana Slugs!) felt called to become an activist when several of her Honduran friends and contacts (with whom she worked to study Honduran unions and women's movements) conveyed to her the horrors of opposition crackdowns and alleged government-ordered killings in the wake of the coup. The novel details Frank's fact-finding trips to Honduras and her advocacy in Washington and the press, while also laying out key events in both Honduras and the U.S. that guided both countries' governments domestic and international responses.

*Liked the Message and the Web of Sources: Frank does at least one thing really well: she seems to have gained pretty fantastic access to a wide range of on-the-ground contacts in the Honduran opposition movements and done a great job at portraying them and their (highly-varied) interests and concerns. The book is full of direct quotes from banana and maquila unionists, middle-class government functionaries, opposition radio broadcasters, disenfranchised campesinos, and other human and labor rights activists. The book also shares first- or second-hand accounts of events with limited international attention, including anti-coup marches in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula and the multifaceted "congresses" that established the pro-Zelaya LIBRE party. This fantastic access to "real Hondurans" allowed her to present a well-sourced (though extremely and unapologetically one-sided) primer into the scandals, murders, political machinations, and legal reforms that moved Hondurans from so many walks of life to literally rally together and make their displeasure heard. The key events referenced in the book (most notably the 2013 and 2017 elections and the death of -Berta Caceres) are important and well-documented Honduran touchpoints that I plan to reference in the future. Just as importantly, she also helpfully places key moments in the U.S.-Honduras relationship on the same timeline, most notably the Obama Administration's response to the coup, Congressional outrage in the early 2010s about the alleged police killings, and the rise of the unaccompanied children (UAC) phenomenon in 2014 that coincided with the birth of the Tea Party movement.

*Not So Much the Messenger: I found Frank's portrayal of the events gleefully moralistic, one-sided, and problematic.
-It was particularly alarming to me that she, an academic and a historian by profession, should feel so comfortable drawing such a clear line between people whom she portrayed as unequivocally good (Zelaya, anti-coup Hondurans, and basically all Democrats) and unequivocally bad (coup instigators, the State Department, and all Republicans). Her self-righteous and judgmental writing demonstrates the extent to which she whole-heartedly believes in that paradigm, and I can't help but think the impression damaged not only her writing but also her advocacy. Things may have gone better, in some ways, had she been willing to seek engagement with the Honduran government, the American Embassy in Tegucigalpa, or Republican elected officials (she related only one instance of the latter, and it was one in which she was shocked when the official helped her). But she gleefully maintained distance from all of the above and, most unpardonably for me, seemed to take particular pleasure explaining how much of a fumbling outsider she intentionally remained, particularly as it related to her interactions with Congress and the State Department. She misrepresented many elements of those institutions' roles and functions, which I again found troubling from an academic historian.
-I was also concerned with her take on Honduran history as a whole: she portrays a very facile take on Honduras' problems by making the spurious leap that all of them stem from the 2009 Zelaya coup. She pays lip service to the centuries-long colonialist exploitation of the country and to narcotrafficking and gangs, but gets off each of them quickly enough to share a clear message that, to her, the coup is the root of the problem. This is a strange argument to make because she dedicated no time at all to the Zelaya presidency. By omission, she implicitly makes a claim that he was a wholly-innocent martyr rather than the highly controversial geopolitical figure he actually is.
-On a more stylistic note, I found the best parts of the book centered around the Hondurans themselves and their on-the-ground experiences, rather than on the twists and turns of Frank's distant anguish associated with the coup and her blow-by-blow accounts of the meetings she held with Congressional aides and media representatives. There was too much of the latter for my taste.

Again, I wish I still had the book to more fully flesh out some of the details above, but I'm glad I recalled this much! All in all, this is a good primer to recent Honduran history but is in sore need of a more balanced take or a response from those Frank so unreservedly condemns.

[Bbaron 21 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dull and disappointing. Supposed to be a "deeply personal" account but Frank's only first-hand witness is to protest marches in Honduras and lobbying efforts in Washington. Otherwise she just describes communications she got from other people about events in Honduras and relies extensively on secondary sources such as newspapers. None of the activists she met in Honduras come alive as people and I got unbearably weary from the constant barrage of acronyms. Frank is an academic. She would have been better off writing a scholarly monograph about Honduras than attempting -- and failing -- to produce a piece of personal reportage.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is most useful to think of Dana Frank's The Long Honduran Night as a memoir. Frank is Professor Emeritus of History at UC Santa Cruz and both a scholar of and activist in Honduras. The book is about her experiences with labor organizers and many others in Honduras as they dealt with the 2009 coup and all its after-effects. It is a highly personal account, with her opinions and her own life laid bare--how she celebrated, traveled, got sick, was afraid, danced, and cried.

It may sound odd given the often grim circumstances, but the underlying theme of the book is joy. She is so glad to see the energy and dedication of Honduran activists, how they persevere and overcome seemingly overwhelming obstacles. The government is trying to kill them on a constant basis but they don't stop.

She hates Juan Orlando Hernández with a passion and shows frustration for how the U.S. media gives him favorable coverage (she took to using the term "axe murderer" for what he was doing in the country*). More specifically, she asks that we stop seeing immigrant flows as stemming from "gang violence" because it inaccurately suggests that the state is trying to stop it, as opposed to being deep in it as well. Giving aid to JOH is just increasing the violence.

I like the fact that she is ideologically nuanced. She apologetically is on the left, to be sure, but she show some skepticism of Manuel Zelaya and how his personality dominated the resistance so much. She is deeply critical of U.S. policy, but has a detailed understanding (based on her own hard legwork) of how the U.S. government is no monolith and how there are lots of sympathetic ears if you know how to find them. You can use those to make positive changes, even if small. She offers no simple answers, understanding there aren't any.

As an accessible book in English, you can't beat it for an informed overview of what's going on in Honduras. We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the coup and it just keeps affecting (and infecting) everything.

*This generates memorable sentences like "At a commencement ceremony at my university, I sat next to the provost, Alison Galloway, and casually mentioned my axe murderers fixation" (p. 208).

From http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/2019/...

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a mix of horror and hope. The horror of a coup (2009), of government policies that displace workers and loot funds, such as the health service funds. The horror of government sponsored repression of resistance, including murders while the US funds "reform" by giving money to those same government units to investigate themselves (continuing to the present). Of news venues telling only the official story.

The hope of peoples' resistance, people trained in union struggles and campesino land rights struggles continuing to resist the coup. The hope of human rights groups in Honduras and in the US, of some congress members speaking up against abuses and funding to military venues. Of people marching in large numbers at various moments of resistance to oppressive policies. All embodied in the slogan from Berta Caceres: She didn't die, she multiplied.

The book is readable narrative of Frank's experiences in Honduras alongside Hondurans and in the US advocating on their behalf in congress and the press. Research and history are woven in seamlessly. Endnotes provide sources.

[Alejandra Quiroz · Rating 3 out of 5]

his book took me forever to finish, close to two years. I kept picking it up and putting it down repeatedly. I definitely think readers need prior knowledge of Honduras’ political history to fully grasp this book.

As a Honduran who migrated after the coup, I wanted to read this to gain a deeper understanding of that period. However, I struggled with certain aspects of the author’s perspective. Even though they clearly care about the country, there were moments where their privilege was evident, making me roll my eyes more than once.

That said, I’m just happy I finally finished it after all these years. Despite my frustrations, I did learn a lot. As a Honduran, I feel it’s important to reflect on how, for many of us, our lives are divided into a before and after the 2009 coup.

[Kathleen Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for a book study group about Honduras. It is about the 2009 ouster of President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, and the political climate following. It was often hard to read, with all the stories of terror and harassment of people who opposed those in political power. Much of the book is about Dr. Frank's efforts to influence U.S. policy in Honduras. I think her picture of what Honduras might be like if the coups hadn't happened is a bit rosy. And although I understand her many criticisms of U.S. policy in Honduras, it is often hard to know what might be the correct thing to do with respect to Honduras.

[Jamison Nielsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the books on the JTF-Bravo Commander's Reading List. The author has undeniable biases. However, the coverage of events and people in recent Honduran and U.S. history is verifiable by outside resources. Important insights regarding an important nation both intrinsically and in terms of U.S. diplomacy. Many lessons learned regarding Honduran self-determination, regional stability, and U.S. interests. Highly recommended.

[Stan Rea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another book that discusses the disparity between what is actually going on in a country and the way it gets reported. It also touches on the US propensity to cozy up to dictators and strong men despite our (supposedly) better instincts.

[Laura Ann she-her · Rating 4 out of 5]

*4.75*

[Ocl · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provided a decent attempt at explaining the cause of the terrible current problem with respect to Honduran immigrants.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the way that this book combines both the U.S. political problems and those here in Honduras. As an American living in Honduras this book was enlightening.

[Andrés Felipe Torres · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only a political analysis but also a media evaluation of coverage.

[Joseph Nicolls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to contemporary Honduran history, beautifully mixed with memoir. Bleak, but with elements of grounded hope. At moments, can get a little repetitive.

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have used more contextual information about Honduran history.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prof. Frank does an excellent of describing her experiences (and the political reasons behind them in post-coup Honduras.