Making sense of recent events in Honduras

Jean Guerrero takes it apart:

This week, Honduras inaugurated a new president, Nasry Asfura, a construction magnate backed by seemingly strange bedfellows: members of the notorious MS-13 gang and President Trump. Mr. Trump had urged Hondurans to vote for Mr. Asfura days before MS-13 gang members posing as election observers threatened to kill anyone who didn’t vote for that candidate. Amid weeks of election uncertainty and protests, Mr. Trump warned Hondurans of “hell to pay” if they chose a different outcome. Mr. Asfura’s victory marks the success of Mr. Trump’s campaign to resuscitate a political party tainted by its widely known ties to cartels….

At first glance, it may seem like karma: The terror that the United States wrought for generations in Latin America has come home. But the victims are not the transnational elites who have long colluded with corrupt officials to take vulnerable people’s territories and feast on their oil, fruit and precious metals. The victims are the displaced migrants forced to leave their homelands and the American workers who have to compete with their criminalized labor. This isn’t an accident. It seems to be the goal: to entrench a permanent underclass across the Americas.

Read more here.