A coup d'état took place in Honduras on 3 October 1963, ten days before a scheduled election. Oswaldo López Arellano replaced Ramón Villeda Morales as president and initiated two decades of military rule.
Villeda Morales had instituted progressive labor laws and an agrarian reform policy, which prompted accusations of Communist sympathies from the right wing in Honduras and the United States. His intention to expropriate land from United Fruit Company, though never carried out, was a particular source of friction.
Civil–military relations in Honduras had deteriorated since 1957. A coup attempt in 1959, suppressed by students and unionist supporters of Villeda Morales, provoked intense hostility towards the military, as well as the creation of an autonomous presidential guard. Politicians discussed abolishing the military. Modesto Rodas Alvarado, the Liberal Party's candidate for president, ran on a demilitarization platform and was expected to win the election on 13 October 1963. The military acted pre-emptively and seized control of the government.
Background
For much of the 20th century, the economy of Honduras was largely controlled by the United Fruit Company. Beginning with a successful general strike in 1954, workers pushed for better pay, shorter hours, job benefits, unionization, and land reform.: "Despite the limited gains, the 1954 strike marked a major turning point in the growing strength of the Honduran labor movement and the decline of the fruit companies over state affairs. Coupled with the 1949 labor law, the settlement of the 1954 labor strike paved the way for the full unionization of Honduran labor in 1955, when the state legalized 50 unions, including the North Coast banana workers."
Ramón Villeda Morales, a reformist physician with the Liberal Party of Honduras (, PLH) won a plurality of votes in the 1954 presidential election, but fell 8,869 votes short of a majority and was blocked from becoming president. Vice President Julio Lozano Díaz attempted to seize power, dissolving the legislature and declaring himself interim president. On 7 October 1956, Lozano Díaz held a Congressional election which both of the country's major parties declared unfair and boycotted. This election (in which Díaz's party won every seat) provoked a military takeover on 21 October. In a new election held on 22 September 1957, the PLH won a majority of seats. The new Congress appointed Villeda Morales as President for a six-year term.
Villeda Morales presidency, 1957–1963 Villeda Morales introduced wide-ranging progressive platform, including infrastructure development, school construction, labor regulations, and agrarian reform. His policies generally won him praise from the Kennedy administration, but animosity from anticommunist hardliners (i.e. landowners and business executives) in Honduras and in the United States.
Agrarian reform
Tension over land in Honduras was rising, as increasing production of bananas, cotton, cattle, and coffee drove many people off their land. Haciendas used barbed wire to enclose more and more land, provoking violent conflict with peasants.: "In contrast, the big cotton plantations and cattle ranches tended to expand outward, absorbing neighboring land by evicting tenants and squatters and fencing in their new acquisitions with barbed wire. In southern Honduras, between 1952 and 1966, two haciendas alone acquired some 54,000 acres through such 'competitive exclusion.' Moreover, as land grew more scarce, the purchase and rental price of property rose, driving even more people into landlessness. These developments could not but produce a reaction. As peasant desperation grew, agrarian conflict increased. Campesinos began to resist the encroachments of the big commercial farms. Land invasions and violence became more frequent. Peasant militancy and organization increased." The Villeda Morales government sought to quell this violence with moderate reforms, including the distribution of national land and the creation of a national peasant organization.: "In response, the government set up a colonization program. Between 1958 and 1960, some 75,000 acres of land were distributed. In 1961 a National Agrarian Institute (Instituto Nacional Agrario—INA) was established to oversee the process. A year later Villeda sponsored a new peasant union, the National Association of Honduran Peasants (Asociación Nacional de Campesinos de Honduras—ANACH), to counteract a more radical organization."
Under Villeda Morales, Honduras joined the Alliance for Progress initiated by the United States under John F. Kennedy. Enthusiastic about liberalization, Villeda promoted a land reform law to defuse the anger of peasants, restore illegally occupied land, and increase the amount of land under cultivation.: "But Villeda Morales became too acute about the Alliance's objectives. At the 1961 Punta del Este meeting, he took the Kennedy administration's rhetoric so seriously that he drafted an agrarian reform law which threatened the massive uncultivated lands owned by United Fruit and Standard Fruit." The law would have expropriated uncultivated lands owned by U.S. Companies, including the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company.
Villeda Morales resisted pressure from Ambassador Charles F. Burrows to prioritize the interests of U.S. companies.: "Charles F. Burrows, the U.S. Ambassador, had long been reviewing the projected law with Villeda Morales so that, according to State Department official Edwin M. Martin, Villeda Morales and other Honduran officials 'would be aware of our interest in ensuring that the law was both constructive in its effects on agricultural productivity and incomes and would not adversely affect the legitimate interests of the present property owners, including United States corporations.' Despite Burrow's early discussions with Villeda Morales, the liberal leader apparently still felt that he could demonstrate some independence from Washington and the banana companies. For example, he 'failed' to show United Fruit Company officials copies of agrarian legislation prior to debate in the Honduran Congress." His actions were not well-received by business interests in the United States. United Fruit president Thomas Sunderland wrote to Secretary of State Martin:
The events of today indicate that the situation in Honduras is growing more serious with the passing of time. In spite of the affirmations made by President Villeda Morales in the presence of the American Ambassador that a copy of the proposed law would be shown to us today, Honduran government officials have declined to show us the bill. ... We urgently need action by the State Department through the American Ambassador with the goal of obtaining a copy of this proposal before it is too late to take action to defend American interests.
The U.S. Senate threatened to withhold aid from Honduras if it expropriated possessions of a U.S. company. The Kennedy Administration pressured Villeda Morales directly, and after a visit to the White House in 1962 he made significant policy changes to undercut the power of the land reform law.: "Two months after signing the Agrarian Reform Law, Villeda was summoned to Washington to meet with Kennedy at the White House. After this meeting, Villeda removed the progressive director of the National Agrarian Institute (INA) and 'agrarian reform shifted drastically from expropriation of private property to colonization or resettlement projects upon state-owned land' (MacCameron 1983, 113; also see Brocket 1991). Villeda had seen what happened to Arbenz when the CIA and the UFCO decided he was a threat. Land reform continued in a watered-down version and country headed into the 1963 election." By October 1962, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Edwin M. Martin announced that Honduras had agreed to protect the banana companies interests—but United Fruit was unconvinced, insisting that with its new agrarian reform law, Honduras was travelling "on the path of Cuba and Communist China."
Politics of anticommunism
To prove his anticommunist credentials, Villeda Morales routinely denounced Communism and cut diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961.: "Starting in 1961, the president's enemies had viciously red-baited his regime, despite Ambassador Burrows's reassurances to Villeda Morales and despite Villeda Morales public denunciations of communism in general and its Cuban variety in particular. Villeda Morales suspended diplomatic relations with Cuba in April 1961—before he signed the alliance charter in August. Even right-wing opponents recognized his constant recriminations against 'Castro-Communism.' Nonetheless, by the time López Arellano ousted Villeda Morales, it was a foregone conclusion that the new regime would justify the coup at least partly because of 'the communist menace' to local civilization, property, and so forth." Many U.S. officials, however, warned that the liberal Villeda Morales government was not sufficiently hardline on Communism.: "Berle's confidence in Villeda Morales's regime actually belied, at least by 1962, a suspicion that liberals like Villeda Morales and others in the region were often still too soft on communists and 'crypto-Communists.'"
The Federal Bureau of Investigation sought to identify Communists within the Liberal Party. The Central Intelligence Agency worked actively in Honduras to alienate the country from revolutionary Cuba. When Villeda Morales cut ties with Cuba, one week after the Bay of Pigs invasion, it was probably at the urging of U.S. agents in Honduras.: "More realistically, Villeda Morales appeared to have followed explicit policy directives of the United States embassy in Honduras. Throughout Latin America, the CIA and the State Department were working assiduously to precipitate ruptures in diplomatic relations with Castro (Agee 1975:138–316, passim). The perpetration of a classic CIA ploy became evident in Honduras a month prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion, when Roberto Dominguez Argucia, supposedly a leading intellectual of the Honduran Communist Party and a member of the Committee of Friends of the Cuban Revolution, surfaced to publicly assail the 'tyrannical ambitions' of Fidel Castro. Such statements of political disavowal more than faintly resembled the actions of such CIA agents as the Guatemalan Manuel Pellcer."