States of Exception and the Invisible Honduran Crowd, 1890–1924

Between 1890-1956, Honduran political elites declared an estado de sitio (i.e., a state of exception) on at least seventy-four separate occasions. In the name of upholding the law, a declaration of estado de sitio allowed Honduran government officials to suspend the guarantees of the law. An estado de sitio permitted the president and congress to legally ignore due process and habeas corpus, as well as the rights to private property, free speech, and freedom of assembly. In addition to the suspensions of the law under an estado de sitio, Honduran executives and legislators suspended the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and private property at least twenty-nine times and signed five different constitutions. Insofar as personal liberties and basic civil rights were concerned, most of the time the Honduran constitution was not even in effect.*

By examining the systematic pattern of governing under an estado de sitio, I also show how rival caudillos, workers, and campesinos constantly threatened the sitting government officials. In addition to revealing the paradigm of early twentieth-century Honduran governance, this examination of the uses of the legal mechanism of suspending the law opens a space for reconsidering the lives of those set outside the law, the lives of those people that governing officials decided could be legally killed or exiled, silenced or conscripted. During the period that began with the Reforma Liberal and continued through the 1954 banana workers’ strike, the repeated and prolonged suspensions of the law demonstrate the utter failure of the Honduran elite to constitute a Honduran “people.”

*To sketch the broader pattern of declarations of a state of exception, this paper will allude to the period 1890-1956. But the primary focus will be on the uses of this legal mechanism from the Reforma Liberal up through the Civil War of 1924.