4 - The Making of a Reformist Coup

Summary

Of all the cases studied in this book, the 1972 coup d’état in Honduras is the one we know the least about. General Oswaldo López Arellano, the military general who led the coup, implemented a reformist agenda, the boldest in Central America – and, indeed, among the most progressive in Latin America. Given that his previous coup ended a Honduran experiment with social democracy, this shift away from repression and toward land reform and developmentalism is puzzling. To understand the political choices that led to this coup and its reformist character, this chapter chronologically reconstructs both the conjunctures in which the military could have overthrown the sitting president but did not, and the crucial months leading up to December 4, 1972, when López Arellano did overthrow President Ernesto Cruz. Hondurans anticipated the coup, but they did not know whether it would be, as one editorial writer noted at the time, “from the Left or the Right.” That it ended up being from the Left was not at all foretold by structural conditions – for similar conditions prevailed in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua – and had everything to do with the political decision to address the problems faced by a landless peasantry.