During the last 15 years, Honduran political life has been riveted by characterizations of a narco-state, and by more than 50 extraditions to the U.S. of major political figures, police and military officers, and others, charged with participating in broad conspiracies of drug-trafficking, money laundering, and illegal arms trading. Can the deep history of the Honduran “Concessionary State” and a corresponding political culture explain the deep causes of Honduras as a contemporary “narco-state”? That is the question addressed here, grounded in my most recent book, Un hondureño ante la Modernidad de su País: la Vida de Rafael Lopez Padilla (1875-1963) (A Honduran and the Modernity of his Country: The Life and Times of Rafael Lopez Padilla). (Tegucigalpa: Guaymuras, 2022). The history of Honduran modernity, since Independence from Spain in the 1820s, was and remains subject to the vagaries of European and North American capitalism. In its long durée, it originates with Spanish colonialism, and consolidated into a postcolonial condition, with industrial capitalism as a global system from the beginning of the 19th century onwards. The Honduran version of capitalism since then was, and remains, a peripheral and clientelist capitalism, subject to a “Concessionary State” in the Central American historical context. The Concessionary State in Honduras has been one whose capacity to generate income for the administration and the exercise of bureaucratic power did not originate in tax and tariff regimes but in the marketing and sale of concessionary privileges to national resources in the broadest sense of this concept. This created a corresponding political culture among its economic and political elites that remained a central bargaining model and management strategy, associated political practices, among successive generations of Hondurans into the 21st century, indeed to the present day.