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There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

During the 1980s, international interest in the Nicaraguan war was intense. No conflict since the Spanish civil war had provoked such passion around the world. It was a classic good-versus-evil war.

Honduras was the original 'banana republic,' and its poverty remains extreme.

I think the difference between El Salvador and Nicaragua is that in Nicaragua you had a popular insurrection, and in El Salvador you had a revolution.

The relationship between the government of the United States and social and indigenous movements has always been difficult. Not just in Bolivia but worldwide. We need to have bilateral relations characterized by mutual respect.

In Honduras, in particular, Hillary Clinton as Obama's secretary of state was instrumental in legitimizing the coup's subsequent death-squad regime.

Well my briefing was that Honduras was a small and vulnerable country just back on the path towards democracy it was about to have just before I arrived, the first elections for a civilian president in more than 9 years.

Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.

Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 were low-hanging fruit, small countries with outsized oligarchies, where mild reformers were easily dispatched.