Of course this is nonsense. The overwhelming majority of Americans, along with the overwhelming majority of Haitians and Hondurans, would be absolutely delighted if Haitian and Honduran workers producing clothes for the U.S. market would be paid more. Labor costs are a small fraction of the prices that consumers face. Wages are so low because that yields even more profits for those who already have more money than they can ever spend; the low wage floor is being determined by government policy in Washington, Haiti, Honduras, and elsewhere, not by the desires of consumers. No magic formula of economics determines the minimum wage that can be sustained in Haiti and Honduras. At the margin - whether the minimum wage shall be $3 a day or $5 a day in the export sector in Haiti - it is determined politically. If you say that the leverage of the U.S. consumer market should be used to support higher wages for poor workers in poor countries, rather than the opposite, you're likely to be told that this is not allowed. This leverage has been allocated to something else. The power of the U.S. market can only be used for things like forcing developing countries to enforce the patents, trademarks, and copyrights of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and Hollywood.

I practiced liberalism as an ideological method that respects private property, private investment, and respects public freedoms. I turned—I went to a social liberalism, a pro-socialist liberalism, so that the economy benefits the people and not just the economic elites. And this irritated the economic elites. They thought it was dangerous for me to organize the social sectors, and they planned the coup d’état.

Gregorio Seltzer, the late great historian of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, described Honduras as "a county for rent" and from the 1920s on, United Fruit rented this impoverished nation of 7.2 million, transforming Honduras into the quintessential Banana Republic. During the 1980s with revolutions raging in neighboring El Salvador and Nicaragua, the CIA rented Honduras as a platform for counter-insurgency. The Nicaraguan Contras' supply lines began at Palmarola. More discreet intelligence operations were housed at Puerto Castilla where suspected insurgents were reportedly tortured, dismembered, and fed to the crocodiles.

None of these are particularly radical moves, but it was nevertheless disturbing to the country's wealthy economic and military elites. More frightening was that Zelaya had sought to organize an assembly to replace the 1982 constitution written during the waning days of the U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz. A non-binding referendum on whether such a constitutional assembly should take place was scheduled the day of the coup, but was cancelled when the military seized power and named Congressional Speaker Roberto Micheletti as president.

immigration numbers:
When we think of immigrants, we generally picture people from poor countries moving to rich ones. But only about a third of the 200 million people who comprise the global migrant populace moves from developing to wealthier nations. Another third moves between developing nations, and the remainder moves from wealthier nations to developing nations.
(...) Of the many forces that drive individual immigration from developing countries, neoliberal capitalist policies are among the most significant. They have disrupted traditional and protected economies in nations like Mexico and Guatemala. “Free-trade” agreements like NAFTA (and the impending DR-CAFTA) have lowered tariffs and abolished the government subsidy and welfare programs that have sustained the campesino classes of these nations for generations. Absorption into the competition of the “world market”—dominated by heavily subsidized American agricultural corporations—has led to the clearing of indigenous peoples from their land at a rate that reproduces the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” weekly. Displacement in rural regions is matched by urban out-migration, as the “Wal-Martization” of the economy accelerates the rate of deindustrialization.
(...) Overall, the undertow of “economic restructuring” pushes about a million workers a year to risk unauthorized migration across reinforced borders.
(...) Ironically, these same policies make national boundaries increasingly irrelevant for migration in the reverse direction. During the last decade, according to U.S. State Department estimates, the number of Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million—a quarter of all U.S. expatriates. But we don’t call these people “immigrants.” They are “retirees.” They are the “managers” and “technicians” in the maquiladoras. They are the “commuters”—the working poor of the United States, gentrified out of inflated housing markets like San Diego and seeking refuge in more affordable Tijuana.
(...) José arrived at the pick-up spot this morning, but others have been waiting here for weeks. Some are among the approximately 850,000 Mexicans who, according to the Mexican Interior Ministry, try crossing each year, get caught, and are deported. Most will try again, because about 350,000 Mexicans do successfully make it to their destinations each year. And about 500,000 people from Mexico and farther south do find work in the U.S. each year.
(...) Since 1994, the U.S. enforcement strategy has been two-pronged: criminalize the immigrants and militarize the borders. The U.S. has choked off traditional urban crossing points by building double and triple walls, increased the number of agents, and introduced military technology and personnel into routine activities. This policy has made the journey more dangerous by pushing crossing points into remote, hazardous regions in desert and mountainous terrain, or into the equally dangerous underworld of human smuggling—through ports of entry as container cargo. Funding for border enforcement has increased from $1.3 billion in 1994 to $7.3 billion in 2005, and the yearly death toll during that period has mushroomed from 23 to 473.
(...) In all, more than 4,000 men, women, and children have died in the act of looking for work in the U.S. But the rate of unauthorized crossings has not slowed.
(...) During the past year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has issued 3,667 “administrative violations,” which generally involve the apprehension of undocumented immigrants at work sites—up from 485 in 2002.
(...) Another 24,000 people were picked up separately during Operation “Return to Sender.” Although it was theoretically a plan to arrest those with criminal records, two thirds of those apprehended in this operation had committed no crimes at all but were detained as “collateral arrests.”
(...) At least 25,000 undocumented migrants are imprisoned in more than 200 immigrant detention centers across the country. But there is still an overflow. So detainees en route to deportation hearings are routinely housed in local and state prisons, integrated into the general population there, and subjected to a host of foreseeable problems. Since 1995, about 1.5 million people have been ejected from the U.S. through this process.
(...) Deportations have tragic consequences for families. They separate parents from children, husbands from wives, and same-sex partners from each other. An estimated 5 million children in the United States—at least 3.1 million of them U.S.-born citizens—have parents who are undocumented immigrants.
(...) Deported parents, hoping that they can soon return, commonly leave citizen children with relatives. But current immigration law dictates that if an undocumented person is deported or leaves the country voluntarily, he or she cannot re-enter the United States for 10 years. Worse, anti-immigrant opponents have proposed legislation to deny “birthright citizenship,” so that the children of undocumented migrants born in the U.S. would be denied the right to citizenship that has historically been granted by the Constitution to all people born in the United States.
(...) In 2006, 570 immigrant bills were introduced in 32 states, mostly to implement such restrictions. Local governments have enacted restrictions on renting or providing services to migrants without proof of residency, passed “English-only” ordinances, and empowered local police to check immigration status as part of their normal routine.
(...) Despite the virtually open borders for the migration of American capital and people into Mexico (90 percent of the 2,000 foreign-owned firms in Mexico are U.S.-based), many layers of obstruction prevent Mexicans from obtaining authorization to work in the north. For one, displaced laborers or subsistence farmers like José are categorized as “unskilled,” and the U.S. distributes only about 5,000 visas each year for unskilled workers globally. In 2005, only two of those went to Mexicans.

from envio, september 1999:
The major source of employment nationwide, the maquila is said to have already created 110,000 jobs, with the possibility of more in the future. As in other countries, the majority of this labor force, approximately 85%, is female and between the ages of 13 and 34. In order to better understand this “world,” we spent time with young maquila workers (14-24 years old) from La Lima and El Progreso. Some of them live in the city and others in the countryside.
(...) [liberation thesis?] Many young people from both urban and rural settings dream of the day they will reach legal age and be able to work in a factory. Provoked by impatience, in many cases brought about by acute economic need, but also by a fascination—especially among young women—with the factory world, many of them find ways to get around the age requirements. There are 14-year-olds who work under false identities, for example. For these young women, the factory is the door to a whole new world. It offers them the opportunity for new experiences and adventures free of parental control—a novelty not permitted them within the family structure. “Female children are subject to stricter controls than male children. My father always says that women belong in the home, and men belong in the streets.”
(...) [internalizing stratification] The plants are organized either by modules or by classic assembly lines. Both systems strive for the highest productivity, which is measured by production targets. In the factory, a worker's value is determined by her or his capacity to produce. “Tell me how much you produce and I'll tell you what you're worth.” In the same vein, operators who reach or come closest to the production targets get better pay, in accordance with an incentive system. (...) Both organizational models create conflict and animosity among the workers, who unconsciously begin to internalize capitalist ideology: “What matters is production, not people.” A woman who doesn't keep up with the rhythm of her production line or module is often pressured by co-workers to leave the group, and in some cases, to leave the factory.
(...) [authority] Very few dare to contradict or answer back a boss, because, as at home, they are used to submitting to parental authority, and the boss is like a parent. The supervisor, on the other hand, plays a role more like that of a big sister. The women recognize that she has a certain amount of authority, but when all is said and done, she's just another “daughter,” so they have the right to question and even buck her. In other words, they experience the factory as a larger version of the home environment, where they are merely “daughters of the house” who have no choice but to accept parental controls unquestioningly. And just like at home, they have their ways of mocking authority and are punished when they get caught.
(...) A culture of fear permeates the maquila environment. Most workers are afraid to stand up to authority, and since the weight of authority is so strongly felt in the factory, they are afraid to seek the help they need to defend their rights. “Why make trouble with the bosses?” is a common response to problems in the workplace, as is “If they don't want to give me anything, just forget it, let them use it to buy altar candles.”
(...) For some of the women, the most important thing they get from working in the factory is economic independence. They are proud of no longer being a burden on their parents and happily acknowledge that the maquila has helped them remain single. “If we had stayed at home, we'd be married and have children by now,” explains one, “because young women who stay alone in the house all day have a lot of time for foolish thoughts.”
(...) The incorporation of youth—both male and female—into assembly plant work has also brought changes to the communities, especially in the countryside. The most noticeable change is the increase in rural-to-urban migration. Once young people leave the peasant world, they usually don't want to return, and even become magnets that attract other relatives and friends to the city. “I'll never go back to live in the country, because we're better off here. We can help our parents more by staying here, too, because every month we send them money. When our other sister is old enough, we're going to bring her here, and among the three of us we can help out more.”
(...) [a new consciousness?] If many of the young women are still short on a sense of nation, development and their place in all this as a class, they do seem to be developing a new sense of themselves in gender terms. The factory is a place where all kinds of women come together, where one finds a wide range of human, particularly female, experience. The convergence of this diversity combined with economic independence might just create the mold for a different model of womanhood in countries like ours. If this is so, it will take a form we cannot yet imagine, at least not here in Honduras, where themaquilaphenomenon is a couple of decades younger than, say, in Mexico, and where women have not had a revolution that began breaking old molds, as they have in neighboring Nicaragua. ... It's a tremendous paradox: at the end of the day, will the maquila’s greatest contribution to Honduras' development be the unfolding of a new gender consciousness among women?

from envio, september 1997:
This exploitation is possible because of the high national unemployment level together with the competition among businesses and countries to produce more at a lower cost. This combines with the state's compliance toward foreign maquila investment as an immediate solution to social problems, ideological defense of the maquilas by the national owners of the industrial parks and the constant threat by the foreign investors that they will fly with their business to more favorable countries—which is why they are called "swallows."
(...) Despite the obvious exploitation, the people who benefit from the workers' wages, and the workers themselves, are satisfied with this source of work. In Christian reflection groups it is not rare to hear prayers thanking God for the arrival of a new factory, and even the greatest critics recognize that it is better to be exploited than unemployed.

[note: not very critical article in general, and exclusively about honduras]