Honduras - The North Coast


Book Description

This guidebook by Maria Fiallos is the best coverage of Honduras available. All the dive sites, all the restaurants, and all the hotels from budget to luxury. The author is a real expert, and the information is fresh and complete. -- Melanie, Amazon revieweraa A great new resource --Travel + Leisureaa Bursting with relevant and exciting information... -- Booklistaaa These useful travel guides are highly recommended... -- Library Journalaaa Pristine coral reefs, tropical waters, rainforests, and rivers meandering through jungles wait to be explored. Parks cover 24% of the country's area, where jaguars and giant anteaters reside. Coastal wetlands are home to monkeys, manatees, alligators and waterfowl. This guide zeroes in on the North Coast, covering Tela, Trujillo, San Pedro Sula, Puerto Cortes and beyond. The northern Atlantic coastline of the country boasts a 475-mile-long shore, characterized by humid tropical forests, lagoons, and mangrove systems. Several small bays, such as those found in Omoa, Puerto Cortes, Ulua, La Ceiba, and Trujillo, one of the deepest bays in Central America, dot the coastline, serving as harbors. In the northeast lies the Caratasca Lagoon, the largest in the country. The broad Caribbean basin known as the Gulf of Honduras is bordered by Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. off the northern coast in the Caribbean are the Bay Islands, the Hog Islands, and farther east, the Swan Islands. Weekly open-air markets offer ripe mangos, oranges, bananas, avocados and tomatoes, adding charm and color to the country villages, where most people reside in whitewashed adobe houses with red tile roofs. This guide, by a lifelong resident, tells you everything about the history, the culture, the foods, how to get around, the recommended places to stay and eat, plus the activities and adventures, from cooking classes to monkey-spotting in the cloud forests. Honduras is just south of Belize and Guatemala, north of Costa Rica and Panama."




Reinterpreting the Banana Republic


Book Description

In this new analysis of Honduran social and political development, Dar degreeso Euraque explains why Honduras escaped the pattern of revolution and civil wars suffered by its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Within this comparative framework, he challenges the traditional Banana Republic 'theory' and its assumption that multinational corporations completely controlled state formation in Central America. Instead, he demonstrates how local society in Honduras's North Coast banana-exporting region influenced national political development. According to Euraque, the reformism of the 1970s, which prevented social and political polarization in the 1980s, originated in the local politics of San Pedro Sula and other cities along the North Coast. Moreover, Euraque shows that by the 1960s, the banana-growing areas had become bastions of liberalism, led by local capitalists and organized workers. This regional political culture directly influenced events at the national level, argues Euraque. Specifically, the military coup of 1972 drew its ideology and civilian leaders from the North Coast, and as a result, the new regime was able to successfully channel popular unrest into state-sponsored reform projects. Based on long-ignored sources in Honduran and American archives and on interviews, the book signals a major reinterpretation of modern Honduran history.




Roots of Resistance


Book Description

On May 1, 1954, striking banana workers on the North Coast of Honduras brought the regional economy to a standstill, invigorating the Honduran labor movement and placing a series of demands on the US-controlled banana industry. Their actions ultimately galvanized a broader working-class struggle and reawakened long-suppressed leftist ideals. The first account of its kind in English, Roots of Resistance explores contemporary Honduran labor history through the story of the great banana strike of 1954 and centers the role of women in the narrative of the labor movement. Drawing on extensive firsthand oral history and archival research, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda examines the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention in Honduras at the onset of the Cold War. She reveals the everyday acts of resistance that laid the groundwork for the 1954 strike and argues that these often-overlooked forms of resistance should inform analyses of present-day labor and community organizing. Roots of Resistance highlights the complexities of transnational company hierarchies, gender and race relations, and labor organizing that led to the banana workers strike and how these dynamics continue to reverberate in Honduras today.




Land Grab


Book Description

This is a rich ethnographic account of the relationship between identity politics, neoliberal development policy, and rights to resource management in native communities on the north coast of Honduras. It also answers the question: can “freedom” be achieved under the structures of neoliberalism?




Coastal Marine Ecosystems of Latin America


Book Description

Coastal and marine ecosystems, some severely degraded, other still pristine, control rich resources of inshore environments and coastal seas of Latin America's Pacific and Atlantic margins. Conflicts between the needs of the region's nations and diminishing revenues and environmental quality have induced awareness of coastal ecological problems and motivated financial support for restoration and management. The volume provides a competent review on the structure, processes and function of 22 important Latin American coastal marine ecosystems. Each contribution describes the environmental settings, biotic components and structure of the system, considers trophic processes and energy flow, evaluates the modifying influence of natural and human perturbations, and suggests management needs. Although the focus of the book is on basic ecological research, the results have application for coastal managers.




Honduras


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Honduras


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Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940


Book Description

Glenn A. Chambers examines the West Indian immigrant community in Honduras through the development of the country's fruit industry, revealing that West Indians fought to maintain their identities as workers, Protestants, blacks, and English speakers in the midst of popular Latin American nationalistic notions of mestizaje, or mixed-race identity.




Honduras


Book Description

Since the retirement of longtime dictator Tiburcio Carías Andino (1932-1949), the search for institutional stability in Honduras has led to both democratically elected governments and the imposed discipline of military rule. Social and economic change has contributed to the growth of middle-class urban groups, strongly organized labor unions, and a vigorous peasant movement. The Honduran armed forces, established in modern form only after World War II, filled the vacuum of political power that developed as the Liberal and National political parties failed to address the problems created by change and national development, but the authoritarianism of military rule has been countered by historical patterns of caudillo politics. Despite the revolutionary turmoil that surrounds the country, Hondurans have successfully conducted national elections and installed a freely elected civilian government after more than ten years of military rule. It is within this mix of "traditional" and "praetorian" governing modes that Hondurans have fashioned a style of politics conducive to compromise, which accounts for the country's relative tranquillity today. In this first comprehensive study of contemporary Honduras—its land, people, economy, and politics—to be published in English, Dr. Morris also outlines the historical context that has shaped the society of this now geopolitically important nation and conditioned its political dynamics over the past three decades. His analysis illuminates the characteristics that distinguish Honduras from its Central American neighbors and that may dictate a unique course for its political evolution.