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Honduras

Latin America and the Caribbean

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There Has Never Been a Better Time to be Forced into Exile for Being Gay in Honduras

That seems to be the take-away in the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) front-page story on asylum claims from Honduras, which alternatively ran with the headlines “If You’re Seeking Asylum, It Helps to be Gay” and “The Battle for Gay Asylum: Why Sexual Minorities Have an Inside Track to a U.S. Green Card.” In his news story for WSJ on Honduras, Joel Millman tells a familiar story in which some members of a persecuted minority, namely LGBT Hondurans, can find some relief from their situation thanks to the U.S.’s liberal values and “a growing willingness by Americans to embrace alternative lifestyles,” though they must leave their countries of origin in order to benefit from enlightened asylum laws.

While much of the piece is offensive and inaccurate (Nathaniel Frank has great take-down in Slate that is worth reading), the main problem is that it ignores the most significant event in recent Honduran history: a successful military coup in 2009 that ousted President Manuel Zelaya and triggered a wave of human rights violations and widespread political repression. Attacks on LGBT Honduras increased greatly after the U.S.-supported coup – organizations in Honduras count at least 25 murders of LGBT individuals between 1990 and 2005, but more than 116 murders since 2008 – and so while it might be true that many Hondurans have benefited from successful asylum applications and are now living in the United States, this is clearly not the full story.

The U.S.-backed coup in 2009 sparked a wave of violence against activists, the political opposition, and members of the LGBT community, with as many as 5,000 reports of human rights violations last year in the northern region alone. LGBT activists point out connections between violence perpetrated against them for their identity and for their involvement in resistance to the dictatorship and its successor regime. Indeed, while targeted hate crimes are often not overtly related to targets’ political involvement, LGBT activists note that it’s important to recognize the embedded nature of coup-opposition activism in many LGBT advocates’ work. Members of the LGBT community, including activists, are obvious targets for right-wing violence.

CEPR, Eileen O'Grady and Stephan Lefebvre / June 20, 2014