The Long Honduran Night ― Resistance , Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup

This powerful narrative recounts the tumultuous time in Honduras that witnessed then-President Manuel Zelaya deposed by a coup in June 2009, told through first-person experiences and layered with deeper political analysis. It weaves together two perspectives; first, the broad picture of Honduras since the coup, including the coup itself, its continuation in two repressive regimes, and secondly, the evolving Honduran resistance movement, and a new, broad solidarity movement in the United States.

Although it is full of terrible things, this not a horror story: this narrative directly counters mainstream media coverage that portrays Honduras as a pit of unrelenting awfulness, in which powerless sobbing mothers cry over bodies in the morgue. Rather, it’s about sobering challenges and the inspiring collective strength with which people face them.

Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America from Haymarket Books. Since the 2009 military coup her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.

Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon, 1999); Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, 1994); Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments (City Lights, 2007), Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Haymarket, 2016), and, with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon, 2001).

Her contribution to Three Strikes has been reprinted, with a new introduction, by Haymarket Books as Women Strikers Occupy Chain Story, Win Big (2012). Frank worked for many years with the US Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP) in support of the banana unions in Latin America. Since the 2009 military coup her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament and been active in challenging US policy in Honduras