Honduras had always been the poorest country in the region—“the country of the seventies,” a former Honduran president once called it. “Seventy percent illiteracy, seventy percent illegitimacy, seventy percent rural populations, seventy percent avoidable deaths.” During the height of the Cold War, the US sent roughly $750,000 a day in aid—some $2 billion over the course of the 1980s—but the money went directly to the military and its business holdings.
