The web version of the New York Times piece (8/11/16) offering Honduras as an example that should bolster “faith in American power.”

“How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer” was the headline over the lead article in the New York Times‘ “Week in Review” (8/11/16), with the teaser reading, “Programs funded by the United States are helping transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?”

The piece never really got around to explaining, though, how Honduras became the most dangerous place on Earth. That’s American power, too.

Reporter Sonia Nazario returned to Honduras after a three-year absence to find

a remarkable reduction in violence, much of it thanks to programs funded by the United States that have helped community leaders tackle crime…. The United States has not only helped to make these places safer, but has also reduced the strain on our own country.

Nazario described US-funded anti-violence programs in a high-crime neighborhood in the Honduran city San Pedro Sula:

The United States has provided local leaders with audio speakers for events, tools to clear 10 abandoned soccer fields that had become dumping grounds for bodies, notebooks and school uniforms, and funding to install streetlights and trash cans.

She offered the results of this and similar programs as evidence that “smart investments in Honduras are succeeding” and “a striking rebuke to the rising isolationists in American politics,” who “seem to have lost their faith in American power.”

But Nazario failed to explain how American power paved the way for the shocking rise in violence in Honduras. http://us10.campaign-archive1.com/?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58&id=efc1cf1113&e=5867e118e3