It’s rare for Honduras to make headlines during a US national election. But after Honduran human rights activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home in the early hours of March 3, observers raised the connection between her assassination and Hillary Clinton’s support for the 2009 coup that unseated President Manuel Zelaya and unleashed a wave of violence against activists in the country. To many, Cáceres’s death was emblematic of everything wrong with Clintonite foreign policy: a toxic confluence of investor and commercial interests with an uncomfortably high tolerance for shady regime change.

But Clinton’s position on Honduras is more remarkable for how little it deviates from the United States’s previous history in the country. The relationship has long been defined by American support of ruthless, antidemocratic domestic elites in the service of transnational commercial interests and continued US domination in the region.

Now, with Donald Trump set to enter the White House, the situation looks even worse. To discuss the current moment in Honduras in the context of of its long history under the United States’s thumb, Jacobin spoke with Dana Frank, a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert on the country.