Editorial note – we are happy to share a guest article written by a Honduran activist for The Partisan on the ongoing electoral farce in the country, which should be of interest to revolutionaries and workers in the United States as Donald Trump directly endorsed the pro-imperialist Asfura in a blatant act of violating Honduran sovereignty. The Partisan wholeheartedly support the just struggle of the people of Honduras and Latin America against US imperialism, and we gladly share information and raise awareness about them.

The Honduran elections are always an important time for our country as people supposedly decide who they believe will make changes to the country and bring us to greatness. The candidate proceeds to not change anything, makes things worse, and leads to people blaming them and complaining about them for the 4 years of their term and finding a new candidate to place their false hope on. This year’s elections have been interesting and important as current US President Donald Trump decided to make posts on social media talking about the elections in which he decides to call out the Libertad and Refundacion (LIBRE) party for being “narcocommunists” and denouncing their candidate Rixi Moncada, as well as denouncing the Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla for being a narco and saying he is unreliable, while deciding to back the comprador bourgeoisie’s National Party and their candidate Nasry Asfura – claiming that he is fighting for democracy to come to Honduras and someone “he can work with.” This is ironic for Trump, as well as unsurprising, as previous Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez (with the National Party) was found guilty in a US court for counts on narcotraficking into the US, leading to the irony in which Trump decided to give Hernandez a Presidential pardon, voiding the 45 years he was sentenced to in the US. Hernandez was a close ally to Trump’s term in 2016 and has currently been set free.

These elections have yet against raised the importance of for a New Democratic Revolution in Honduras as current plans for the US and most likely winner Nasry Asfura are going to deepen the status of Honduras to as a US semi-colony, reminding us how things have been like this for well over 100 years. Especially, since the times of the most infamous United Fruit Company and the Rosario Mining company. Even though the current party in power, LIBRE, consists of a big portion of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, they are powerless in stopping the US. LIBRE has tried to do this through cutting off the extradition treaty between the two countries, as well as trying to replace the US with China through breaking off relations with Taiwan, in an attempt to try and gain their favor which did not work out in the end. Like the other parties, LIBRE has its basis in semi-feudalism and big landownership, especially in the Honduran department of Olancho. It is also important to mention how much involvement the US has had in Honduran politics through the course of their time here, as the Tiburcio Carias, 12^th president of Honduras, under the influence United Fruit Company gave out the order to execute the first Communists in Honduras for occupying banana US-owned plantations and farms owned by the US.

The US favorites, Nasry Asfura and the National party, are infamous and widely recognized for selling out the country to the US for the past 100 years, earning a deserved title of “comprador.” There are parts of Honduras, especially around the Caribbean and The Mosquitia, owned entirely or by a big portion by the US companies and their agents, living there rich and comfortably as settlers while the Honduran workers and peasants are struggling under harsh conditions. There has also been other foreign involvement, and the reduction of Honduras into a semi-colony by other imperialist countries: for example, as soon as words got out that there was oil in Honduras, Britain came to own the right of oil mining, stripping away essential resources towards the growth of Honduras.

All of these instances of foreign involvement yet again show off how futile and ineffective bourgeois elections are, as the other candidates from these elections (Salvador Nasralla from the Liberal party and Chano Rivera from the Christian Democrat party) are just as bootlicking towards the US as Nasry Asfura and the National Party. The most notable case being Chano Rivera, whose whole campaign has been along the lines that we should become a US colony and we should unite with them. In his words, this would better our country, economy, passport, healthcare and everything else. Now Nasralla, another firm supporter and believer of Trump who was heartbroken when he was denounced as unreliable, just as Asfura has his goal on letting the US get involved here and do whatever they want to improve the Honduran economy. This shows how useless the elections are in picking a candidate and how things will not be changing – no matter who you pick.

After all that has been said, these elections yet again prove their futility and the now more than ever need for a New Democratic Revolution to end the foreign domination of the United States, to destroy semi-feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. We need the reconstitution of the Communist Party of Honduras under Maoism, to pave the way for the workers to lead the New Democratic Revolution and for Honduras to achieve genuine independence and liberation.