Worker Resistance in the Formation of the Maquiladora Enclave in Honduras

• Author: Mateo Crossa Niell
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221114808
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221114808

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 16–32

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221114808

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

16

Worker Resistance in the Formation of the Maquiladora

Enclave in Honduras

by

Mateo Crossa Niell

Translated by

Victoria Furio

In contrast to the triumphalist corporate view that regularly champions the maquiladora

industry as a lever of economic progress for Honduras, the maquila has caused fragmenta-

tion of production and widespread pauperization of social life, epitomizing an enclave econ-

omy aimed at international markets and threatening the very lives of workers. Substantial

worker resistance has been characteristic of the maquila throughout its history.

Contra la visión empresarial y triunfalista de la industria maquiladora como una

palanca de progreso económico para Honduras, la maquila ha provocado la fragmentación

productiva y una pauperización extendida de la vida social, representando de esta manera

el galardón de una economía de enclave volcada a los mercados internacionales que pone

en entredicho la vida misma de los trabajadores. Importantes experiencias de resistencia

obrera se han desarrollado en la maquila a lo largo de su historia.

Keywords: Enclave economy, Maquila industry, Superexploitation, Dependency,

Underdevelopment, Worker resistance

The maquila is an industrial export activity positioned as the backbone of

dependent capitalism in Honduras, Central America’s major exporting country.

It produces 62 percent of the country’s total exports and has 140,000 employees.

This pivotal role is vaunted in business narratives as the driver of national

development, where the corporate media have been insistently saying that,

because of the export-led industry, Honduras has reached global standards of

productive competitiveness capable of promoting the welfare of workers and

the population as a whole (AHM, 2017: 9). However, this discourse, drawing on

what Pine (2009: 71) has called “development rhetoric,” conceals the profound

contradictions that underlie the country’s economic and social life and the

exploitation and labor precarity that predominate in this industry. Contrary to

the official triumphalist view and far from being an engine of domestic welfare

as it is portrayed by corporate discourse and commonly heard from the coun-

Mateo Crossa Niell is a research professor at the Instituto Mora. He holds doctoral degrees in Latin

American studies and development studies and is the author of Honduras: Maquilando subdesar-

rollo en la mundialización (2016) and various articles on the maquiladora industry in Mexico and

Central America. He thanks Maritza Paredes for sharing valuable ideas and information. Victoria

Furio is a conference interpreter and translator located in Yonkers, NY.

1114808LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221114808Latin American PerspectivesNiell/The Maquiladora Enclave in Honduras

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Niell/THE MAQUILADORA ENCLAVE IN HONDURAS 17

try’s political class, the maquila has been configured under conditions of an

export-led enclave that causes productive fragmentation and a generalized pau-

perization amongst the working class.

In the first section of this article I show that the maquiladora industry origi-

nated and developed under the umbrella of a prolonged and violent deployment

of neoliberal economic policies serving the interests of transnational corporations

in organic alliance with the Honduran oligarchy. In the second section I demon-

strate that it drew upon the migratory diaspora resulting from the abandonment

of rural areas and the seizure of campesino and communal lands, feeding on

migration and poverty. In the third section I highlight the central role of job dis-

crimination against women and the complete lack of concern of corporations and

the state about providing the workforce with education and skills, revealing a

complete lack of interest in promoting economic development. The fourth sec-

tion describes the predominant wage precarity in this industry and the impor-

tance of low wages as a mechanism of labor control and intensification, pointing

to a labor-related health emergency affecting maquila workers as a consequence

of their long and exhausting workdays. The final section examines the significant

worker struggles that have unfolded in the maquilas since the 1990s and the

solidarity and support extended by organized groups of workers toward other

unions and other political struggles in the country.

Neoliberal Policy iN the coNsolidatioN of the Maquila

exPort eNclave

Over the past 40 years Honduras has experienced an enormous economic

transformation stemming from the changes fostered by the global crisis of cap-

italism that began in the 1970s. In this new phase of the global economy, com-

monly called globalization (what Osorio [2004] has called mundialización), the

Honduran economy discontinued its incipient industrialization in favor of

import substitution in the 1950s. Under the influence of neoliberalism, the

world economy was reorganized on the basis of exports that revived the old

dependency and underdevelopment organized around an enclave economy.

The predominant activity was now the maquiladora industry (Crossa, 2016;

Pérez, 1998). Starting in 1980, a new export pattern was forged under the impe-

rialist impetus formalized in the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the economic

policies of “Reaganomics for Honduras” (Hernández, 1985), which turned the

country into the U.S. geopolitical base for halting the advance of the popular

and armed movement spreading throughout Central America and made

Honduras the laboratory for the launch of neoliberal economic policies that

deregulated the national market and promoted the country’s economic open-

ing to international trade. Ronald Reagan told the U.S. Congress, “We can show

the world that we conquer fear with faith, we overcome poverty with growth,

and we counter violence with opportunity and freedom. And now we're mak-

ing good on our promise. I'm proud to stand with you for this celebration of the

long-awaited first stage of implementation of the Caribbean Basin Economic

Recovery Act” (Reagan, 1983).