Daily Archives: November 22, 2013

Honduras

‘Whatever it takes’: A look at the militarization of Honduras’s police force

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I write for the Miami Herald/McClatchy today about the advent of Honduras’s new policia militar (military police) force, the historical and cultural context of military police in Honduras and the consequences for Honduras in its fight for greater security, for Central America and for US foreign policy in the region.honduras flag icon

Juan Orlando Hernández, the candidate of the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) and the president of Honduras’s Congreso Nacional (National Congress), spearheaded the legislative effort to create the military police in August.  The first thousand police deployed earlier this autumn, but the force is at the heart of Hernández’s campaign — he promises to put a ‘soldier on every corner’ and that he’ll do ‘whatever it takes’ (¡voy hacer lo que tenga que hacer!) to straighten out Honduras’s violent crime problem.

But there are plenty of Hondurans who worry that ‘whatever it takes’ could mean a slide backwards with respect to human rights:

“Creating a military police is a step backward,” said Leo Valladares, a former human rights commissioner in Honduras and a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. “There’s no guarantee that this newly created military police force will obey civil interests. It’s possible that once they’re in command, they will go into negotiations with the drug dealers.”

Though Honduras returned to regular democratic elections in 1981, it wasn’t until 1998 that the military came fully under civilian control and a civilian police force began to take shape.  Still, civil police are poorly paid, and many Hondurans say they fear the police as much, if not more, as the fearsome street gangs and drug traffickers.  Hernandez hasn’t dispelled the notion that protecting human rights and upholding the rule of law is less important to him that battling runaway crime.

It was also in 1998 when the much-feared military security force, Fuerza de Seguridad Pública (FUSEP), was dismantled.  As FUSEP receded, a civil police emerged, but as Honduras became an increasingly choice destination for drug trafficking, corruption increasingly corroded the civilian police force and even the military. But the petty crimes of today’s civil police pale in contrast to FUSEP’s past abuses.  In the 1980s, Honduran military forces perpetrated abuses against internal dissenters through the promulgation of ‘death squads’.   One of the most notorious was ‘Battalion 316,’ whose members were trained by U.S. Central Intelligence Agency agents, and who targeted government opponents with imprisonment, torture and death.  In this case, the past is also uncomfortably close to the present — Billy Joya, a former Battalion 316 member, is running for Congress in Sunday’s election.
To place the military police in even greater historical context, it’s important to remember that the National Party of outgoing president Porfirio Lobo Sosa hasn’t shied away from collaboration with the military in the past – the armed forces supported National Party strongman Tiburcio Carías Andino in the 1930s and the 1940s and the more recent regime of Oswaldo López Arellano, who also had links to the National Party, in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The military police force is also potentially duplicative – a new special police unit was created last year, the TIGREs, under the leadership of national police chief Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, whose civil police force itself is subject to various complaints of human rights violations.  In an interview with the Associated Press last week, Bonilla shrugged off those allegations. “I can’t be on top of everything. Sometimes things will escape me. I’m human.”
I also note that Hernández himself has done little to reassure critics that he’ll respect human rights:

Hernandez led Congress in December in a vote to depose four judges on Honduras’ top court who’d ruled that the Lobo Sosa administration’s effort to purge the police force of corruption was unconstitutional. German Leitzelar, a congressman and former labor minister in the National Party administration of Ricardo Maduro in the early 2000s, opposed the effort.  “The decision to depose the four magistrates had no justification,” Leitzelar said. “It was a technical coup against the democratic system.”

Against that background, some critics worry that Hernández could attempt to take consolidate power to nearly authoritarian levels.

“This is terrifying,” said Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz told me in an interview last week.  “If Juan Orlando wins, by whatever means, it’s going to be even more terrifying and everyone knows that, because the space for democratic opposition is going to get tinier and tinier, and it’s almost closed.”

Photo credit to La Prensa.

Honduras

An interview with Rasel Tomé, LIBRE party founder and congressional candidate

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TEGUCIGALPA — Rasel Tomé, a tall attorney with striking blue eyes, slick jet black hair and a mustache to match, and dressed in a pastel guayabera shirt, looks every part the leftist Latin American revolutionary that you might have thought belonged to a radical generation from half a century ago.honduras flag icon

Tomé, whose roots are in Olanchito on Honduras’s north coast and whose family worked in the ubiquitous banana companies that dominated the Honduran economy and captured its government for much of the early and mid-20th century, was a legal adviser to former president Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya, who was ousted by the military from the Honduran presidency in June 2009.  Ostensibly due to his push to amend the Honduran constitution to allow for presidential reelection, Zelaya spent much of his presidency edging further to the left, away from the United States and toward Venezuela and its ‘Bolivarian’ socialist allies within Latin America.

But Zelaya is back.  His wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, is one of two frontrunners in this weekend’s general election, and she represents one side of a choice so polarizing that both sides speak about the take-no-prisoners campaign as if it’s a civil war.  Even if it’s a cold civil war, there’s no doubt that the 2009 coup still dominates the political debate here.

‘In Honduras, there’s a debate of two thoughts,’ said Tomé, a congressional candidate running on the Castro de Zelaya ticket, comparing the election to the choice that Abraham Lincoln faced during the US civil war. ‘The ones that believe that this model of inequity and inequality should keep going, with the privileges to the elites, holding onto the constitution that was created in 1981 and that has been violated and destroyed by the coup d’état.  And there are the ones that consider that to move society forward, we need a new social pact… we can abide by it generation by generation into the future, that it will be the starting point for our country.’

Tomé helped found the Movimeinto Resistencia Progresista (Progressive Resistance Movement) that opposed the 2009 coup, one of five popular movements that joined forces to form the Partido Libertad y Refundación (Party of Liberty and Refoundation) two years ago — popularly known as LIBRE, an acronym that plays on the Spanish word for ‘free.’  LIBRE, in many ways, is the first truly leftist party in Honduran political history with a chance of winning power in Honduras, and its candidate is Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya.

Throughout much of the 20th century, including after the return of regular elections in 1981, Honduran politics has been mostly a contest between two competing elites — those in the conservative Partido Nacional (National Party) and those in the more centrist Partido Liberal (Liberal Party).  Manuel Zelaya, a wealthy rancher from eastern Honduras, was himself part of the Liberal Party elite when he was elected president in 2005.

Though I met several LIBRE activists over the course of a week in Tegucigalpa, none were quite as compelling as Tomé — in a country where politics has often been a cynical game of spoils between competing sets of elites (including, by the way, the Zelayas, whose family members are rumored to have profited handsomely by Zelaya’s first term in office), many Hondurans see both the Zelayas and their chief opponent, Juan Orlando Hernández, the candidate of the governing Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) as two sides of the same ineffective coin — and they have little hope for the other main candidate in the race, Mauricio Villeda of the Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party).  Tomé admitted as much.

‘Villeda is the son of an ex-president,’ Tomé said.  ‘[Outgoing president Porfirio] Lobo Sosa’s father was a congressman many times over.  Juan Orlando, his father was the governor of a sector of the country. Manuel Zelaya has been in the political running for the last 30 years.  So people who have a panoramic view see them as people who belong to the same category.’

Tomé added, however, that the Zelayas have now put themselves in the service of the people as a vector for change.

It was an impressively honest answer, but it also highlights the tension between the Zelayas and the activists who could power Xiomara into  the Honduran presidency on Sunday.  If she succeeds, she’ll have a dozen interest groups with high hopes of social and economic transformation, all of whom will want her to push for more change than any one president could possibly deliver at a time of joint security and economic crises — especially with the possibility that no party will win an absolute majority in the unicameral Congreso Nacional (National Congress).

When I met Tomé two weeks ago, he showed up with another associate, and they unfurled their campaign banner.

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Tomé held forth for nearly an hour on over a dozen issues relating to the Honduran campaign — in contrast to the controlled and stilted interviews that LIBRE’s presidential candidate has given to the media (often alongside her husband, which has done nothing to dispel notions that her candidacy represents a second term for Mel Zelaya), Tomé has a compelling style that makes you wonder if he might not be LIBRE’s presidential candidate in four years’ time.

Tomé spoke earnestly on several topics — economic opportunity, the role of the military, LIBRE’s position in favor of community-based policing, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, and US-Honduran relations.  When I spoke to Tomé on November 6, it was the morning after Bill de Blasio overwhelming won the New York City mayoral election, running on a platform that emphasized reversing income inequality perhaps more than any US politician in recent history.  Though inequality is a global trend, you might say Honduras is in the vanguard of that trend.  As of 2009, the World Bank recorded a Gini coefficient of 57 in Honduras, the highest in Latin America and one of the highest in the world, outpacing Brazil (55), one the poster child for income inequality, Mexico (47) and the United States (45, as of 2007).  That’s staggering for Honduras, where people once joked the country was so poor it didn’t even have a proper oligarchy.  Continue reading An interview with Rasel Tomé, LIBRE party founder and congressional candidate →

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An interview with Germán Leitzelar, Honduran congressman and former labor minister

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TEGUCIGALPA — Germán Leitzelar seems particularly spry for 68 years.  In the course of an hour’s discussion in his law offices on the top floor of the Miraflores mall in central Tegucigalpa, he’ll bound up to grab a well-worn copy of the Honduran constitution to make a point, and then point out one article after another with the tenacity of an attorney half his age.honduras flag icon

Leitzelar (pictured above) is at once both inside and outside Honduras’s political elite.

A congressman for the Partido Innovación y Unidad (PINU, Innovation and Unity Party), Leitzelar represents a small party that’s never held more than five seats in the unicameral, 128-member Congreso Nacional (National Congress).  PINU was founded in 1970, after the destabilizing ‘Fútbol’ War with El Salvador in 1969, as an alternative to the two main political parties at the time — the conservative Partido Nacional (National Party) and the more centrist Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party).

‘We have always been a party that been focused on thoughts and processes, and it hasn’t always been a party that appeals to the mass majority, but working for the mass majority, with democracy always in mind, constituting an equilibrium, a balance in Congress,’ he said.

Leitzelar opposed the June 2009 coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya from power (though he’s certainly no fan Zelaya’s), and he’s been a strident critic of the president of the National Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, the National Party’s presidential candidate.  In particular, Leitzelar spoke out against a 2012 vote by the National Congress to depose four justices of the Honduran supreme court, which he believed was unconstitutional.

But lest you believe Leitzelar is simply a good-government ninny tossing pebbles into a political system where PINU barely causes a ripple, he’s also been at the heart of Honduran power — as minister of labor in the previous National Party administration of Ricardo Maduro (pictured below) between 2002 and 2006.  Above the sofa in Leitzelar’s office is a large framed drawing of the entire cabinet in caricature, and Leitzelar believes that it represents as good a government as Honduras has ever had.

Many Hondurans view Maduro’s administration as somewhat of a success, at least insofar as that it didn’t result in a military coup (like the Zelaya administration) or preside over the deterioration of Honduran security and the Honduran economy (like the current administration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa).  It’s a view that Leitzelar shares, and he has as much disapproval for the first Zelaya administration as the current administration.

‘Maduro’s presidency was a process of conciliation with regard to the country’s economy, debt reduction, and ultimately pursued a strategy of poverty reduction from the proceeds of the debt reduction,’ he said. ‘It was a completely technical government with influence from the World Bank.  I was not a member of National Party, but the government that followed Maduro introduced new rules, and that’s when the crisis began, because they destroyed what Maduro had done.  They used the funds for another vision, and the result was the political crisis of 2009, or the coup over constitutional change, or a constitutional crisis. The name doesn’t matter — the color of the cat doesn’t matter, as they say, but whether it chases mice.’

‘The issue is that the new government modified everything, and all the funds from the debt reduction were spent in another way.  There was a high level of corruption and impunity in Zelaya’s government, and it was even worse in the six months of [interim president] Roberto Micheletti.  Not only did they accrue debt, but they also abused the national funds.  In [Lobo Sosa’s] government, with all of its defects, it has one virtue – even though it wasn’t able to grasp the financial situation, it did stabilize the crisis, it avoided further unconstitutional confrontations and it reintroduced Honduras into the international arena.  However, it has failed in a bunch of other areas, such as drugs, impunity and corruption.’

By extension, he has low expectations for either a Hernández presidency or the presidency of Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, who leads the leftist, newly founded Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), a party that Leitzelar sniffingly refers to as Liberales en resistencia (‘Liberals in resistance’). Continue reading An interview with Germán Leitzelar, Honduran congressman and former labor minister →

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An interview with Dr. Leo Valladares, former Honduran human rights commissioner

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TEGUCIGALPA — In the final moments of an hourlong interview about the situation on human rights in Honduras, Dr. Leo Valladares mentioned his upcoming trip to meet Germany’s president to discuss human rights throughout Latin America.honduras flag icon

Though it was obvious Valladares was excited about the opportunity to bring his four-decade long crusade for human rights to Berlin, his eyes sparkled when he talked about visiting his daughter, who also lives in Europe.

None of Valladares’s children live in Honduras now. Not any more.

He leaned in, with the same gentle tone that he’d been using for the past hour, to tell me that he, too, has lost a son.  (That son, Rodrigo, was killed in a carjacking in January 2009).

‘We all know who did it,’ he said, without rancor or bitterness — and Valladares, whose particular worldview is suffused with the Jesuit social justice teachings of his high school days, publicly told the Tegucigalpa newspaper El Heraldo two years ago that he’d forgiven his son’s assassins, which is more forgiveness than most fathers would afford, no matter whether they’re in Honduras or Berlin.

Like so many other Honduran families (in a country with the world’s highest homicide rate), the tragic violence that’s afflicted Honduras with ever greater intensity over the past decade has taken a horrific toll of Valladares and his family as well.

‘At this point of my life, I should be at home, just resting. But there’s too much left to do here in Honduras,’ he said.  ‘Human beings are perfectible, they have the power to change…. By doing little things, we can advance.’

Valladares served from 1988 to 1995 as a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and he also served as the national commissioner of the Comisionado Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CONADEH, National Commission of Human Rights).  Today, he’s formed his own non-governmental organization, Asociación para una Ciudadanía Participativa (Association for Participatory Citizens) to continue the fight for human rights in Honduras.  Like many of the Hondurans with whom I spoke earlier this month in Honduras, Valladares believes that respect for human rights has deteriorated since the 2009 coup that ousted former president Manuel Zelaya.

‘The problem of human rights in this moment remains very difficult.  It has become very, very bad,’ he said. ‘One of the hugest problems is that the authorities don’t investigate murders, they  don’t see it as a human rights violation.  The state does not have the capacity to pursue the murderers, and they cannot bring them to justice.  So we have a kind of impunity here.  It’s a precarious situation. They benefit from the collective fear, and they use it to their advantage.’

Though Valladares started his career as a member of the small Partido Demócrata Cristiano de Honduras (DC, Democratic Christian Party of Honduras), he’s essentially been a political independent since he first assumed a role as a human rights official.

Though he officially supports none of the candidates in Sunday’s presidential election, he worries that Juan Orlando Hernández, in particular, poses a special threat to human rights — Hernández has made clear on the campaign trail that he believes the need for a military police and a more secure Honduras is more important than protecting the human rights of Hondurans who too often fear the police more than the criminals. That is, if you can tell the two apart — the police are, in the estimation of just about everyone in Honduras, thoroughly corrupted.

Valladares worries also about Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the presidential candidate of the leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), and whether she can truly be an independent president from her husband, the former president who was deposed in 2009.  If she’s elected, Valladares also worries that the other traditional parties will join forces to block her agenda, causing gridlock.

‘The main thing is for the election to be held in a peaceful manner and for the results to be accepted,’ he said.

Part of the problem is a culture of corruption that tolerates a political elite that treats winning power as an invitation for personal enrichment.

‘One of the biggest problems in Honduras is the application of ethical values. Over here being thief of public goods is not socially unacceptable,’ he said.

Throughout the election, there’s no doubt that journalists and LIBRE candidates have been subject to abuses.

But in a wide-ranging conversation with Valladares, it’s clear that leftists and journalists are just the tip of the iceberg.  For example, many Hondurans who leave their country for the United States face harrowing conditions — they travel hundreds of miles to reach the Mexican border (and Mexican officials are rougher than the US border patrol), cross over hundreds of miles of Mexican territory to attempt to cross the US border, at a cost of thousands of dollars and at the risk of drowning while crossing a river or dying of thirst in a northern Mexican desert.  For women and children, the risks are even more terrifying — there’s no protection from sexual abuse or even human trafficking.  What’s more, the number of Honduran emigrants is on the rise, thanks to horrific levels of trafficking and related violence.  US official turned away more Hondurans at the US border (more than 32,000) in the first ten months of 2013 alone than in any other past year. Continue reading An interview with Dr. Leo Valladares, former Honduran human rights commissioner →