In March, Vice President Mike Pence had a friendly meeting with far-right Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. It wasn’t just a sign of right-wing advance in a growing number of countries, but also another chapter in an often-obscured history of evangelical Christian influence in Latin American politics.

Last year, Hernández had gathered Honduras’s leading televangelists for a day of prayer at the presidential palace to help solve the country’s multiple crises. Despite the fact that these crises are directly linked to US militarization, neoliberal restructuring, and the chaotic fallout of the 2009 Washington-backed coup, the event was directly modeled on previous national days of prayer led by an Hernandez ally, the U.S.-based evangelical NGO Association for a More Just Society (AJS).

AJS is the US State Department’s most faithful proxy in Honduras. Like Pence, Hillary Clinton (who has ties to a different far-right evangelical group called the Family), and Hernández, AJS enthusiastically supported the June 28 coup that overthrew democratically-elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.