Elections in Honduras have resulted in an apparently decisive victory for the leftist opposition candidate, Xiomara Castro, 12 years after a coup that ousted her husband, Manuel Zelaya, from power.  The junta that followed was fortunately less than completely successful in crippling Honduras’s fragile democratic institutions. Its people were finally able to vote for a change in rulership from the traditional oligarchs and their military allies whose greed and indifference have allowed  Honduras to slide ever more deeply into the hellhole of crime, corruption and general misery that has propelled thousands of Hondurans toward the US border in search of a livable life.

Let’s hope that the regime change will be enthusiastically embraced by the Biden administration, which can use all the help it can get in tackling the roots of our border crisis. Let’s hope, because such an embrace goes against longstanding habits of our policymakers, who have generally viewed entrenched eco-military oligarchies in Latin America as the natural allies of US power.  That was the way Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently viewed the 2009 coup. After an initial rebuke, the coup soon enjoyed the effective strong support of the US government.  (Clinton’s role was evidently critical; Obama in 2009-10 was preoccupied with domestic policy and politics.) Wouldn’t it be nice if the US for once took a strong stance in favor a popular left government fighting for genuine social change?  Is that really too much to hope for?