Honduras is a republic in Central America, at times referred to as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize.
Honduras was home to several important indigenous cultures, most notably the Maya. Much of the country was conquered by Spain who introduced its now predominant language and many of its customs in the sixteenth century. It became independent in 1821 and has been a republic since the end of Spanish rule.
During the first half of the 20th century, the economy of Honduras was dominated by American companies such as the United Fruit Company, the Standard Fruit Company, and the Cuyamel Fruit Company, which established enormous banana plantations along the north coast. These companies quickly made bananas the primary export of the country in return for large land grants from conservative politicians. Foreign capital, life in the banana plantations, and conservatives determined the politics of Honduras from the mid-20th century to 1988.
Manuel Bonilla came to the presidency of Honduras through a military operation. Once in power, he became an even better friend of the banana companies than his predecessor, Terencio Sierra. He gave the banana companies tax breaks and permission to build a variety of infrastructure, including the National Railway of Honduras. One of Bonilla's greater accomplishments was the delimitation of the border with Nicaragua, especially in the area of the Mosquito Coast where there had been a long dispute after the Treaty of Comayagua and Managua with Great Britain.
Miguel R. Dávila succeeded Bonilla as president. During his administration, the United States tried to put an end to Central American conflicts through the Central American Peace Conference of 1907. However, from 1920 to 1923, there were seventeen uprisings or attempted coups d'état in Honduras. This contributed even more to the political instability of the country.
Vicente Mejía Colindres assumed power in 1929 with big hopes for his administration and his nation. Honduras seemed to direct its course toward political and economic progress. But many of Mejía Colindres's hopes were dispelled with the start of the Great Depression.
Development of an independent nation (1838–99)
For Honduras, the period of federation had been disastrous. Local rivalries and ideological disputes had produced political chaos and disrupted the economy. The British had taken advantage of the chaotic condition to reestablish their control over the Islas de la Bahía. As a result, Honduras wasted little time in formally seceding from the federation once it was free to do so. Independence was declared on November 15, 1838, and in January 1839, an independent constitution was formally adopted.
Francisco Morazán then ruled only El Salvador, and in 1839 his forces there were attacked by a Honduran army commanded by General Francisco Ferrera. Ferrera was defeated but returned to attack again in the summer, only to suffer another defeat. The following year, Morazán himself was overthrown, and two years later he was shot in Costa Rica during a final, futile attempt to restore the United Provinces of Central America.Haggerty and Millet ("The development of an independent nation, 1838–99").
For Honduras, the first decades of independence were neither peaceful nor prosperous. The country's political turmoil attracted the ambitions of individuals and nations within and outside of Central America. Even geography contributed to its misfortunes. Alone among the Central American republics, Honduras had a border with the three potential rivals for regional hegemony—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. This situation was exacerbated by the political division throughout the isthmus between liberals and conservatives. Any liberal or conservative regime saw a government of the opposite ideology on its borders as a potential threat. In addition, exiled opposition figures tended to gather in states whose governments shared their political affiliation and to use these states as launching pads for efforts to topple their own governments. For the remainder of the century, Honduras's neighbors would constantly interfere in its internal politics.
After the fifteen-month interim presidency of Francisco Zelaya y Ayes (1839–40), conservative General Ferrera became independent Honduras's first elected president. Ferrera's two-year term (1841–42) was followed by a five-year period in which he alternately named himself president or allowed the congress to name an interim president while he maintained control of the country by holding the post then known as minister of war. Ferrera's last notable act was the unsuccessful attempt to depose the liberal Morazán as president of El Salvador. In 1847 Ferrera allowed fellow conservative Juan Lindo to assume the presidency. Under Lindo's presidency, a new constitution was adopted in 1848, and some effort was made to promote education, but any effort to make substantial improvements in the country's situation was doomed by continuing turmoil.
During Lindo's presidency (1847–52), the British began pressuring Honduras for the payment of debts and other claims. In 1849 a British naval force briefly occupied the port of Trujillo, destroying property and extorting 1,200 pesos from the local government. The following year, Lindo's own vice president revolted and was prevented from seizing power only through the military intervention of El Salvador and Nicaragua. All this turmoil may help to explain why Lindo refused an additional presidential term and instead turned over power in 1852 to the opposition liberals, headed by Trinidad Cabañas (1852–55). Three years later, the conservative government of Guatemala invaded Honduras and ousted Cabañas, installing in his place the conservative leader, Jose Santos Guardiola.
The fighting between liberals and conservatives was temporarily set aside because of the 1855 appearance in Central America of an American filibuster, William Walker, who established himself as president of Nicaragua in 1856. Cabañas briefly considered seeking Walker's aid in attempting to return to power. Instead, armies from all the countries of Central America joined to oppose Walker, who was forced to abandon Nicaragua in 1857 and return to the United States.
In 1859 the British agreed to a treaty that recognized Honduran sovereignty over the Islas de la Bahía (Bay Islands). Some of the British settlers in the area objected to this transfer and appealed to Walker for help. Walker evidently thought that his return to Central America would be welcomed by the Honduran liberals, who were once again trying to oust Guardiola. Walker landed on the Honduran coast in 1860 but found little support and encountered determined opposition from both the Hondurans and the British. He surrendered to the British, who promptly handed him over to Honduran authorities. A few days later in 1860, he died in front of a Honduran firing squad.
The return of the Islas de la Bahía and the death of Walker ended the immediate threat to Honduran territorial integrity, but other Central American nations continued to be involved in Honduran internal affairs. Guardiola was assassinated by his own honor guard in 1862, and the following decade witnessed the presidency change hands almost twenty times. General José María Medina served as president or dictator eleven times during that period, but Guatemalan intervention in 1876 drove him and his conservative supporters from power.
From 1876 until 1882, liberal president Marco Aurelio Soto governed Honduras with the support of Guatemalan strongman General Justo Rufino Barrios. Soto succeeded not only in restoring order but also in implementing some basic reforms in finance, education, and public administration. But in 1883, he too fell into disfavor with Barrios and was forced to resign. His successor, General Luis Bográn, survived in office until 1891 when General Ponciano Leiva (who had ruled briefly three times from 1873 to 1876) was returned to power in a manipulated election. Although a liberal, Leiva tried to rule as an absolute dictator, dissolving the fledgling Liberal Party of Honduras (Partido Liberal de Honduras, PLH) and deporting its leaders. The result was another round of civil conflict from which the reconstituted PLH ultimately emerged victorious. The PLH was led by Policarpo Bonilla, with the support of Nicaragua's liberal dictator, José Santos Zelaya.
When Bonilla assumed power in 1894, he began to restore a limited degree of order to the Honduran political scene. Another constitution was promulgated in 1895, and Bonilla was elected to a four-year term. Bonilla's administration revised civil codes, improved communications, and began an effort to resolve the long-standing boundary dispute with Nicaragua. Bonilla also ensured that in 1899, at the end of his term, he would be succeeded by his military commander, General Terencio Sierra.
The combined impact of civil strife and foreign interventions had doomed Honduras to a position of relative economic and social backwardness throughout the nineteenth century. The country had remained overwhelmingly rural; Tegucigalpa, Comayagua, and San Pedro Sula were the only towns of any size. In the early 1850s, the total population was estimated at 350,000, the overwhelming majority of whom were mestizos. By 1914 the population had grown to only 562,000.
Opportunities for education and culture were limited at best. Mid-nineteenth century records indicate that Honduras had no libraries and no regularly published newspapers. Two universities were maintained, although their quality was questionable. By the 1870s, only 275 schools, having approximately 9,000 pupils, existed in the entire country. In 1873–74, the government budgeted only the equivalent of US$720 for education, a sum designated for the national university.
Economic situation
At the end of the colonial period, Honduras' economy was based largely on mining, cattle raising and the export of tropical hardwoods. Unlike most of its neighbors, Honduras did not develop a significant coffee industry, and one of the results of this was that much of its export wealth ended up being generated by foreign firms, often creating little local capital. For much of the nineteenth century, Hondurans looked to mining as a means of improving their economic position.Dario Euraque, Reinterpreting the Banana Republic: Region and State in Honduras, 1870–1972 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) pp. 3–13.
The mining industry had fallen into severe neglect in the first decades of the century, however. Many mines had been abandoned and flooded. During the years following independence, efforts to revive the industry were generally frustrating for both domestic and foreign entrepreneurs. Effort after effort was abandoned because of civil disturbances, lack of transportation, and poor health conditions.
Mining was revived somewhat in the 1880s, when liberal reforms made foreign investment in mining interesting. A key factor in this revival was the activity of Washington S. Valentine's New York and Honduras Rosario Mining Company (NYHRMC), which had expanded rapidly and had become a major economic and political power within Honduras, not only in silver mining, but in railroad building (the InterOceanic Railroad).Euraque, Banana Republic, pp. 9–12. Owing in part to the company's efforts, the Honduran government had allowed foreign mining companies to operate in Honduras with a minimum of restrictions and a virtual exemption from taxes. By 1889 the company was annually shipping bullion with a value of over US$700,000 to the United States. Profits from this operation were extremely high; the company's dividends for the first half of 1889 totaled US$150,000.