Honduras is in pretty bad shape, but whatever our faults are in not helping Honduras, this explanation by an American academic is just ridiculous:
It is not difficult to spot the sources of the problem. A handful of entrenched elite families control the government in Tegucigalpa. They were never completely clean to begin with, but the June 2009 military coup, which toppled democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, threw the doors wide open, and the government is now corrupt from top to bottom. The judicial system is broken. According to Marvin Ponce, the vice president of the Honduran Congress, 40 percent of the country’s police are involved in organized crime.
The only problem with the analysis is the premise.
There was no military coup. In June 2009, Hondurans prevented a coup, pure and simple, as our own Congressional Research Service confirmed:
Available sources indicate that the judicial and legislative branches applied constitutional and statutory law in the case against President Zelaya in a manner that was judged by the Honduran authorities from both branches of the government to be in accordance with the Honduran legal system.
However, removal of President Zelaya from the country by the military is in direct violation of the Article 102 of the Constitution, and apparently this action is currently under investigation by the Honduran authorities.
The problem was that there was no legal mechanism to remove Zelaya for attempting his own coup. Hondurans faced the alternative of stopping Zelaya's coup without legal processes established or passivity in the face of Zelaya's plots because there were no mechanisms in place.
All in all, Hondurans did a good job with the bad hand they held.
Honduras is a poor and rough place. It was both before the Zelaya Affair. It still is. It isn't our fault for failing to go along with a pro-Venezuelan and pro-Nicaraguan coup.
Rather than blame Honduras' problems on a cabal of conservative Bush-era State Department employees, why not ask if our initial impulses to support Zelaya and his coup have stopped us from helping Honduras in the three years since that constitutional crisis?
Are we making Honduarans pay for rejecting a socialist dictatorship?
