With a focus on Honduras, James J. Phillips explores the deeper causes of the massive emigration of Central Americans to the United States. Going beyond the frequently given reasons for migration, Phillips provides a detailed account of how the frenzied extraction of natural resources has created massive community displacement, dependency, poverty, and vulnerability, while encouraging corruption, violence, gang recruitment, drug trafficking, militarization of Honduran society, and systematic repression of popular protest and resistance. Highlighting how this situation is tied to the colonial (or imperial) extractive relationship of Honduras to the United States, Phillips contends that the usual policy of development aid and investment to stem migration will only worsen the conditions that create migration. With this book, Phillips depicts how the Central American immigration “crisis” shapes life in the United States and Honduras, while making clear that the effects are not what populist politics imagine.

Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras’s current crises. Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation’s seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworld—from Cold War counterinsurgency to the “War on Drugs” to the near-impunity of white-collar crime—as he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs’ transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling criminal societies, even in the National Penitentiary, where they have become political as much as criminal communities. Gothic Sovereignty reveals not only how the revolutionary potential of gangs was lost when they merged with powerful cartels but also how close analysis of criminal communities enables profound reflection on the economic, legal, and existential discontents of globalization in late-liberal nation-states.

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 Baneras: 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.