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LIVE BLOG — Honduras election results coming in: both Juan Orlando, Xiomara declare victory

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Good morning from Jerusalem, where it’s 5 a.m. Monday morning.honduras flag icon

1:17 am — On Facebook, some activity from both Hernández and Villeda.

Hernández is thanking Villeda for a telephone call congratulating him for his victory; Villeda is thanking his supporters for two years of support, in what amounts to something of a concession (though Villeda doesn’t actually concede in the post).

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12:39 am — With 54% of the results reported from the TSE, Hernández retains a 90,000-vote lead:

Hernández now leads with 556,333 votes (34.27%), followed by Castro de Zelaya with 466,537 votes (28.67%), Villeda with 339,919 (20.94%) and Nasralla in fourth with 251,224 (15.47%).

Vásquez has fallen back — he’s still in fifth place, but just barely and with hardly any material support with 3,339 votes (0.21%).

To recap, however, both Hernández and Castro de Zelaya have declared victory, Nasralla has alleged TSE fraud, and there’s not exactly a lot of public trust in Honduran public institutions, so don’t expect this to end anytime tonight.

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12:17 am — The fourth candidate in the race, Villeda, is obviously not declaring victory, but neither is he alleging fraud.  In character, he’s cautioning patience on Twitter and awaiting more communications from the TSE.

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12:08 am — Nasralla is now calling the vote’s integrity into dispute, arguing that 25% of tallies from the TSE ‘have different totals than when transmitted to parties’ according to Honduras Culture and Politics, per Twitter.  Nasralla has now called the results fraudulent — remember that though Nasralla’s the fourth-place candidate, he pulls a lot of support from relatively conservatives voters who might otherwise support Hernández.

It seems increasingly likely that this won’t be sorted out tonight, even if the TSE reports more than the 43% of provisional results that it’s already announced.

* * * * *

11:21 pm — One reason why I’m not quite convinced that fraud won’t be an issue is that there’s been a fair amount of intimidation against certain parts of the electorate throughout the campaign, especially LIBRE activists and candidates.  As La Prensa reported earlier and the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes, two LIBRE candidates were assassinated late Saturday outside the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa:

Yesterday, Saturday two leaders of the Libre party were assassinated after leaving a party meeting in the community of Carbón in the municipality of Canta Rana, department of Francisco Morazán.

The incident occurred at 8:50 pm. Braulio Almendares, general secretary of the National Agricultural Workers Central PNPP, denounced, on Globo TV, that the leaders were ambushed by two individuals wearing ski masks and heavily armed.

The now deceased individuals are the Hondurans Julio Ramón Araujo Maradiaga (67) and María Amparo Pineda Duarte (52), who is a leader of the campesino cooperative group Carbón.  “The woman had already received death threats which leads us to believe that the crime had a dual meaning”, said the complainant. Wilmar Alexander Solórzano, son of María Ampara, assures that she and her family have enemies and that they don’t know where the killing comes from.

While it doesn’t mean that Hernández’s lead, if it holds up, is fraudulent, the vast campaign of intimidation against LIBRE and the Honduras left (among others, including journalists) certainly means that an eventual victory for Hernández will always be tainted with unfairness.  That’s especially troubling in light of the human rights abuses that have increased with greater impunity since the June 2009 coup.

If Hernández does win with a 5% or 6% margin over Castro de Zelaya, it may well be that he could have won the election, even in conditions more openly ‘free and fair’ than the current conditions.

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10:59 pm — No word yet on which party will win the National Congress, and by what margin. That’s almost as important as the presidential election.  If Hernández does win the election with around 32% or 34% of the vote, he’ll do so with the smallest mandate since the return of regular democratic elections to Honduras since 1981 (though that outcome has been almost a certainty since the summer, if not earlier). There’s no guarantee that the National Party will win a majority in the 128-member congress, especially given the open-list proportional representation system, so Hernández will likely have to find a way to form an alliance.

* * * * *

10:54 pm — Now Hernández is declaring victory, and promising, once again, ‘Voy a hacer lo que tenga que hacer para devolver la paz y la tranquilidad en Honduras,’ or ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to return peace and tranquility to Honduras.’ His military police force has been at the center of the National Party’s campaign. Continue reading LIVE BLOG — Honduras election results coming in: both Juan Orlando, Xiomara declare victory →

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‘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.

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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 →

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Will the Honduran general election be conducted fairly?

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TEGUCIGALPA — In the shadow of the June 2009 coup that ousted leftist president Manuel Zelaya from office, Hondurans will vote on Sunday to determine whether Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya will become the Central American country’s new president.honduras flag icon

Despite a polarizing three-way campaign that pits the Zelayas against the two traditional Honduran political parties, with stark divisions over economic and security policy, how secure can Honduras and the region be that the vote will be essentially free and fair — and that the ballots will be counted fairly?

Candidates on both the left and the right bluster that they don’t fear electoral fraud, confident that their mandate will be strong enough for a clear victory.  But though international observers and representatives from each of Honduras’s political parties will be on hand to observer the counting on Sunday, there remains a nagging fear that a narrow election victory by any of the major presidential candidates would cause a political crisis, given the low level of public trust in Honduran public institutions.  Recently, U.S. congressmen Raúl M. Grijalva, Mike Honda and Hank Johnson wrote a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry warning of possible fraud:

“We are particularly alarmed to learn that the ruling party, and its presidential candidate Mr. Juan Orlando Hernández, now dominates all the key institutions of the government, including the country’s electoral authority and the military, which distributes the ballots,” they wrote, “leaving scarce recourse for Honduran citizens should fraud be committed in the electoral process, or human rights violations continue to threaten open debate.  This is particularly troubling given the long history of electoral fraud in Honduras, including allegations of widespread fraud during the primary elections in November of 2012.”

In those primary elections, Hernández narrowly defeated popular Tegucigalpa mayor Ricardo Álvarez for the presidential nomination of the conservative National Party, but refused to brook the ballot recount that Álvarez’s campaign requested.  Though the two candidates have long since united, no one can say with certainty that Hernández actually won the vote, and that’s left some doubt about the capacity of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to guarantee ballot sanctity in Sunday’s general elections.

Though Central America isn’t necessarily always on the front pages, Honduras’s election is especially important to the United States.  The 2009 coup was one of the first foreign policy crises for U.S. president Barack Obama, and the United States has devoted increasing military aid in the attempt to combat drug trafficking in Honduras.  Moreover, Honduras’s general election is the first of four that will be held over the next six months in Central America – El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama will all choose new presidents between now and May 2014.

Dr. Leo Valladares, a former Honduran commissioner of human rights and a former member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, agreed with the warnings about potential ballot abuse.  “There are possibilities for fraud,” Valladares admitted. “In theory, the National Party could win without fraud. But they’re not secure, so they might commit fraud. Whatever the outcome of the election, it will be very conflicted.”

Hernández’s chief rivals in Sunday’s vote are Mauricio Villeda, the candidate of the more centrist Liberal Party, a Tegucigalpa attorney and the son of former president Ramón Villeda Morales (1975-63), and Castro de Zelaya who, with her husband, left the Liberal Party to form the new leftist Party of Liberty and Refoundation (LIBRE) in 2011.

Jacobo Hernández Cruz, a former vice president and former TSE head, however, argued that over the past decade, Honduran electoral authorities have made great strides toward enhancing electoral transparency.

“The only way there can be fraud [previously] is in null votes,” Hernández said.  “But now when they count, everyone can see.  This has been the case for eight years.  Open doors and open windows, everyone can see.  It’s out in public.”

Historically, transparency and observation of the vote count represents the greatest check against vote fraud in Honduran elections.  But other concerns remain, especially over how the ballot boxes arrive to the polling stations.

“The boxes come with the electoral custodian,” Hernández said. “The armed forces bring them. There is always trust in the armed forces.  The ballots are going to be scanned. There’s a procedure for how this will be done.” Continue reading Will the Honduran general election be conducted fairly? →

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LIBRE, Nasralla could leave no party with majority in Honduran Congress

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TEGUCIGALPA — One of the most interesting aspects of the birth of the new leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation) in Honduras has been the way it’s opened the door to a new multipolar political system where there had once been just two traditional parties.honduras flag icon

The general consensus is that LIBRE is here to stay, no matter if its presidential candidate Xiomara Castro de Zelaya wins the November 24 presidential election.  One of the reasons for its staying power is the likelihood that LIBRE remains very much in a three-way fight for seats to the Congreso Nacional (National Congress), Honduras’s 128-member unicameral legislature.

In the past, the predominance of the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) and the centrist Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party) meant that the winner of the presidential election could typically count upon a narrow victory in the National Congress as well.

But this year’s multi-party race means that there’s a real chance no party will win absolute control of the National Congress.  While parties have failed to win an absolute majority in the past, the leading party has always fallen short by just a handful of seats.  This year, the largest bloc could fall 10 or 20 seats short, given Honduras’s electoral system.

That means that the ultimate winner of the presidential election will face an immediate challenge of assembling a majority coalition.  Given that many members of the Liberal Party and the National Party teamed up to support the 2009 coup against former president Manuel Zelaya and the ensuing interim regime of Roberto Micheletti, that could mean trouble if Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the former president, wins on Sunday.  If the two traditional parties team up against her for the next four years, she would face a presidency of gridlock and a narrower mandate.

Other Hondurans believe that the ultimate winner could easily trade economic or political favors to buy — or at least rent — a congressional majority.

“The correct thing would have been to reform the electoral law, and to create a second round so that alliances could be formed,” said Germán Leitzelar, a former labor minister between 2002 and 2006 and a congressman representing the Partido Innovación y Unidad (PINU, Innovation and Unity Party).  “Now, there won’t be any alliances, but there will be ‘economical understandings.’  It will be an agreement based on convenience, and not based on the best interests of the country.”

The National Party’s presidential candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández, is currently the president of the National Congress, where the National Party controls 71 seats to just 45 seats for the Liberal Party.  Hernández’s wide majority makes him, in key ways, more powerful than outgoing Honduran president Porfirio Lobo Sosa, and he’s used his perch as congressional president to push through key legislation, including the ‘charter city’ law (subsequently overturned by the Honduran supreme court), a new security fee and the creation this autumn of a new military police.

But that’s not atypical.  Since the return of regularly scheduled elections in 1981, the party that’s won the presidency has also won the largest share of seats in the National Congress.  Between 2006 and 2009, Zelaya could count on 62 seats in the National Congress, just shy of an absolute majority.  Between 2002 and 2006, former president Ricardo Maduro’s National Party controlled 61 seats.

What’s more, the congressional presidency has long been a stepping stone to the presidency — Lobo Sosa held the office between 2002 and 2006, Liberal president Carlos Flores held the office for four years prior to his election in 1997, and Rafael Pineda, the 2001 Liberal presidential candidate, also held the office.

If Hernández wins the presidency and the National Party claims dominance over the National Congress as well, the top two candidates to become the next congressional president are Lena Gutiérrez (pictured above, center) and Rigoberto Chang Castillo (pictured above, left).

Gutiérrez, at age 36, is a rising star of the Honduran right, and currently the first vice president of the National Congress.  Fluent in English, Gutiérrez studied engineering at the Texas A&M University.  She entered the National Congress in 2009, and she’s focused mainly on laws boosting education and development.  Chang Castillo, a Tegucigalpa attorney, another rising star and a top Hernández ally, is the first secretary of the National Congress.  Both hold seats from the department of Francisco Morazán, which includes Tegucigalpa and surrounding areas, and which will elect 23 members of Congress, more than any other department.  The department of Cortés, which includes San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-most populous city and its industrial capital, will elect 20 members.  In each department, a voter will have as many votes as the number of seats — a voter in Tegucigalpa will be allowed 23 congressional votes, but a voter in the Bay Islands department will have just one vote. Continue reading LIBRE, Nasralla could leave no party with majority in Honduran Congress →

Honduras

Five reasons why Mauricio Villeda could still win the Honduran presidency

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TEGUCIGALPA — In the political civil war that’s pitted conservative candidate Juan Orlando Hernández against leftist Xiomara Castro de Zelaya in a zero-sum fight for supremacy, the third candidate in the race could emerge as the moderate alternative to both.honduras flag icon

Hernández is the candidate of the one of the two longtime traditional parties in Honduras, the Partido Nacional (PN, National Party).  But Villeda represents the other, more centrist party, the Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party).  It was the party to which Manuel Zelaya belonged when he was president between 2006 and 2009, though Zelaya distanced himself from the party after even many Liberals supported the June 2009 military coup that ousted him.  Ultimately, Zelaya left the Liberals to form the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation) in 2011, and he took much of the pro-labor, leftist wing of the Liberal Party with him.

There are a lot of reasons why Villeda has stumbled so far during the campaign.  He certainly has less money than the National Party and the Hernández campaign.  Veteran political reporter Jonathán Roussel referred to him as the ‘Michael Dukakis’ of Honduran politics, which is a somewhat generous interpretation of a candidate who lacks the charisma of either of his two main rivals and whose background as an attorney marks him as a colorless bureaucrat on the campaign trail.

The latest polls, which are unreliable and now nearly a month old, show Hernández and Castro de Zelaya tied for first place with around 30% support each and Villeda far back in third place with around 20%. (Polls are prohibited in Honduras in the month prior to the election, so we won’t have any public data before Sunday’s election).

In a week of talking with Hondurans in Tegucigalpa on both the left and the right, many people cautioned not to rule Villeda out.  With five days to go until Hondurans vote, here are five reasons why Villeda could still become Honduran’s next president.  Continue reading Five reasons why Mauricio Villeda could still win the Honduran presidency →

Honduras

Why gun control legislation is a non-starter in Honduras

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I write today in The New Republic about the role that firearms play in Honduras’s security issue — the country has the world’s highest homicide rate, and nearly 80% of those homicides are committed by means of small arms, such as pistols, revolvers, shotguns, and rifles.honduras flag icon

Despite some changes to Honduran gun laws in the early and mid-2000s, however, gun laws remain relative lax in Honduras.  Each person is permitted to own up to five firearms and while open and concealed carry, and the ownership of assault weapons, are both technically illegal, enforcement of gun laws is sporadic at best.  Even more troubling is a corrupt police force that’s been reported to prey on some of the weakest groups in — labor activists, LGBT activists, indigenous activists and just the downright impoverished.

You might expect each of Honduras’s top presidential candidates — perhaps, most especially, leftist Xiomara Castro de Zelaya — would be in support of a strong push to restrict gun ownership, but it’s just not the case — even though security is the top issue, by far, in the Honduran election.  In many ways, the chances for significant gun control laws in Honduras are even more pessimistic than in the United States, where even a bipartisan push earlier this year failed to enact even mild background checks in the aftermath of the December 2012 Newtown elementary school shooting.

Rasel Tomé, an activist who joined with the Zelayas to found Honduras’s new leftist party, Libre (the Party of Liberty and Refoundation), has high hopes for a wide array of progressive legislation if Zelaya wins Sunday’s election. But even Tomé doesn’t dare to list gun-control legislation on his wish list of potential policy highlights for the next four years—he argues that in a country where the government has so thoroughly and historically failed to respect human rights, the state can hardly be trusted to ask its citizens to disarm. “If the people were disarmed, they would feel vulnerable to abuses and infringements,” Tomé said. “Right now, when there’s such a culture of suspicion, what has [outgoing president Porfirio] Lobo Sosa’s government done so that people feel their human rights can be respected? Can you go to the public forces and feel that they will protect you? They won’t because there’s so much impunity. So it’s not the right moment to bring that topic to the forefront of the debate.”

The Honduran constitution doesn’t enshrine a “right to bear arms” like the 2nd Amendment does, but gun laws have been historically lax in Honduras. The chief restriction is a law that limits an individual to owning just five firearms, but that’s lightly enforced at best. Successive governments in the 2000s theoretically tightened Honduran gun laws—a national registry was created in 2002, assault weapons were banned in 2003, and it’s been technically illegal to carry guns (openly or concealed) in public since 2007. But in a country where officials lack the power even to investigate every murder, and where many citizens carry weapons for personal protection, those restrictions aren’t rigorously enforced. Moreover, those laws don’t apply to the police, who have been accused of perpetrating a troubling amount of the violence directed at Hondurans, especially the most vulnerable groups. But many Hondurans today believe that the U.S. is partially responsible for Honduras’s gun problem. They attribute the high rate of firearm ownership to the glut of weapons that flooded the country in the 1980s when the Reagan administration armed the Contras from within Honduras in an attempt to push the Soviet-backed Sandinistas out of power in Nicaragua to the south. Just as the United States gave its blessing to the transfer of weapons from Qatar to anti-regime Libyans in 2011 that may have subsequently found their way into the hands of Tuareg separatists (or worse) in northern Mali in 2012, U.S.-sourced firearms in the 1980s intended for the Contras have now found their way into the hands of the gangs that control the most dangerous parts of Honduras’s capital, Tegucigalpa, its industrial center of San Pedro Sula, and its Caribbean coast. But in recent years, a swarm of illicit arms have also entered Honduras from Mexico and other parts of Central America as part of the illegal drug trade.

Australia

Rudd’s departure from Australian politics vital to Labor’s future

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It’s hard to find anyone in Australia who lacks strong feelings about former prime minister Kevin Rudd.Australia Flag Icon

Some Australians believe that Rudd is among the most talented politicians of his era, who led Australia’s Labor Party out of the wilderness and into government in 2007, who set the stage for a landmark carbon pricing scheme (that Australia’s new center-right prime minister Tony Abbott now hopes to repeal), and who earlier this year salvaged what would have been a landslide loss of devastatingly historical proportions under Labor prime minister Julia Gillard.

Some Australians believe that Rudd, for all his political gifts, is a temperamental figure who failed to push through legislative accomplishments and  whose dysfunctional leadership inevitably led to the 2010 putsch that ousted him and installed Gillard as Labor Party leader and as prime minister.  They also believe that his constant briefing after the 2010 leadership change almost fatally wounded Gillard and Labor in the August 2010 election, and that as foreign minister between 2010 and 2012, Rudd continued to harm Gillard to the point that a desperate Labor caucus turned to Rudd at the last minute in June 2013 to save them from impending electoral doom.

That’s why there was simply no way that Labor can fully move forward from the poisonous Rudd-Gillard era while Rudd continues to sit in the Australian parliament — and that’s why Rudd stepped down on Wednesday from his Queensland seat in the House of Commons, which he had held continuously since 1998.

As Rudd himself noted in his announcement that it was ‘time to zip,’ it’s become a precedent that former prime ministers on both the left and the right leave parliament shortly after losing elections:

“It was right and proper that I report my decision to the Parliament at the earliest opportunity. “That day is today. I have chosen to do so now to create minimal disruptions to the normal proceedings of the house.

“My predecessors as prime minister, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating, reached similar decisions to leave the Parliament before the subsequent election.  As did would-be prime ministers, Costello and Downer, perhaps prime minister Howard would have done the same had he retained the seat of Bennelong, although we will never know.”

The sharp ding at Howard was classic Rudd — Howard famously lost his seat in the 2007 landslide that ushered Rudd and Labor to power.  Rudd himself faced a difficult fight in the September 2013 election, though he ultimately survived a strong Liberal challenge (moreover, it’s not certain that Labor will retain the seat now that Rudd is resigning).
Continue reading Rudd’s departure from Australian politics vital to Labor’s future →

Honduras

Photo essay: campaign season in Honduras

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TEGUCIGALPA — It’s been a great week here in Honduras learning some more about the choice that Hondurans face on November 24, and the contextual background of Honduran history, culture and policy — and how it intersects with US policy, both present and past.honduras flag icon

But with a lull in interviews this afternoon, I have a little time to share some photos from the campaign.

From Roatán island, the largest of the Bay Islands off the north coast of Honduras, comes this small shop, with some variety of piñatas — the two at the foreground are for the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party), whose presidential candidate is Juan Orlando Hernández, the current president of the Honduran National Congress; and for the leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Liberty and Refoundation Party). which supports Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the spouse of former president Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted from power in a June 2009 coup.  Polls show that the presidential race has turned into a dead heat between Juan Orlando and Xiomara.

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On Sunday afternoon, all three major parties were out in full force.  Here are some young National Party activists driving through the streets of Valle de Ángeles, an old mining town just north of Tegucigalpa.

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Continue reading Photo essay: campaign season in Honduras →

Honduras

Juan Orlando versus Xiomara: an analysis of the Honduran election

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TEGUCIGALPA — I’ve spent some time examining why the upcoming Honduran election is so important to Central American politics regionally and, above all, to US foreign policy as it relates to Central America and Latin America.honduras flag icon

But that’s not a thoroughgoing look at the actual election campaign itself — and what to expect on November 24, when Honduras will elect not only a new president, but all 128 members of its unicameral Congreso Nacional (National Congress).

Once upon a time, you could explain Honduran politics as a two-party contest, and above all as a set of dueling  elites — the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) and the more centrist Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party).  Though both parties were founded in the early 20th century, they essentially follow from the familiar 19th century narrative of an aristocratic conservative elite matched against a more free-market liberal elite.  Both parties share in common an affinity for granting economic concessions to foreign interests throughout the 20th century, most notoriously to US-based banana companies (hence O. Henry’s christening Honduras as the original ‘banana republic,’ to state a cliché), and an even greater affinity for corruption.

Historically, the National Party really came into stride with the dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías Andino, who governed the country from 1932 to 1949 and Oswaldo López Arellano, who came to power via military force from 1963 to 1975 (with a brief interruption from 1971-72).  Honduras made a firm turn toward democratic elections in 1981 and, since that time, with the exception of the June 2009 that ousted Manuel Zelaya from power, Honduras has generally selected its leaders through elections, however imperfect.  The Liberal Party has elected five presidents, including Zelaya, and the National Party has elected three presidents, including the incumbent, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who won an overwhelming victory of 56.6% against just 38.1% for Liberal candidate Elvin Santos in the most recent November 2009 election.  Those elections were held during the interim administration of Liberal caretaker president Roberto Micheletti, who uneasily served as de facto president between the June 2009 coup and January 2010.  Critics argue that they were conducted in an atmosphere of oppression, though, and many Latin American countries refused to recognize the result.

As the Honduran constitution limits the president to a single four-year term, Lobo Sosa is not eligible for reelection.

Four years later, on the eve of the 2013 presidential election, the country remains as polarized as in the immediate aftermath of the coup.  But the advent of two new political parties has transformed the Honduran political scene, destabilizing its previously cozy two-party system.  And with Honduras’s ignominious rise as the country with the world’s highest homicide rate (just over 90 per 100,000 according to UN figures for 2011), the campaign’s chief issue is security — how to reduce crime and violence that results not only from drug trafficking, but also from the police, who themselves are corrupted by drug traffickers.

The president of Honduras’s National Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, is the candidate of the National Party, and Mauricio Villeda Bermúdez, an attorney with relatively little experience, is the candidate of the Liberal Party.

But the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP, National Popular Resistance Front), which emerged in the aftermath of the Zelaya coup in protest, formed its own new political party in 2011 — the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), a left-wing assembly of socialists, social democrats, indigenous and Afro-Honduran activists, human rights activists and women’s and LGBT activists.  It selected as its candidate for the presidential election the spouse of the former president, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, and her and her husband have long since left the Liberal Party.  Moreover, sports reporter Salva Nasralla formed the center-right Partido Anticorrupción (Anti-Corruption Party), another populist right-wing party.

That’s made for a four-way race throughout much of 2013, though polls generally show a tightening of the race — Nasralla’s support has collapsed since the summer, and Villeda has stalled in third place, leaving Castro de Zelaya and Hernández in a close two-way race.  Dueling polls show either Castro de Zelaya or Hernández in the lead, but the final poll from CID-Gallup (new polls are forbidden in the final month before the election), taken between October 9 and 15, shows Hernández with 28%, Castro de Zelaya with 27%, Villeda with 17%, Nasralla with 9%, others with 6% and fully 16% undecided or for none of the candidates — it should be noted that CID-Gallup has demonstrated a National Party bias in the past.

Though polling data should guide us, and it seems clear today that it’s a two-way race, it’s not necessarily clear that it will not be a three-way race by the time Hondurans vote later this month — especially in light of the Liberal Party’s traditional voter strength and ability to raise money, and especially because Villeda could emerge as a capable third, moderate force between the two extremes of the National Party and LIBRE candidates.

Moreover, the four-way party vote means that no party is likely to secure an absolute majority in the Congress. Since 1981, Hondurans have avoided splitting their tickets — so every time Hondurans have elected a Liberal president, they’ve elected a Liberal majority to the Congress (and the same with the National Party).  This time around, though, it will be more difficult.  In a relatively complicated system of multi-member districts, voters in each of the country’s 18 departments elect each of their representatives directly.  So in Francisco Morazán, the populous department that includes and surrounds the capital Tegucigalpa, voters will have 23 votes to select from over 200 candidates. (If they miscount and elect more than 23, all of their votes will be voided; if they elect less than 23, corrupt officials haven’t been shy in the past about filling in their own preferences).

That system has virtually guaranteed that a handful of smaller parties have always received a few seats in the National Congress.  This year, it means that each of the Liberal Party, the National Party and LIBRE will win many seats, likely enough to prevent any of the three parties from amassing a majority.  That means the next president will have to form — or buy — a multiparty alliance.

Here’s a brief look at each of the three major candidates, their backgrounds and their agendas for Honduras. Continue reading Juan Orlando versus Xiomara: an analysis of the Honduran election →

Honduras

Personal reflections on Roatán, the Bay Islands and the Garífuna

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TEGUCIGALPA — I spent part of my weekend here in Honduras on a day trip to Roatán, the largest and the most well-known on Honduras’s Islas de la Bahía (Bay Islands).honduras flag icon

The Bay Islands are so far afield from the Honduran mainland — culturally, topographically, politically, economically — that it’s perhaps  difficult to weave them seamlessly into a greater narrative about Honduran politics.   At minimum, it was a Saturday well spent at the beach reading about the history of labor, politics and business in La Ceiba, Trujillo and San Pedro Sula along Honduras’s North Coast, which developed a separate elite around bananas.  That’s separate from the history of southern Honduras, including the capital, Tegucigalpa, that developed a more conservative elite centered around mining silver.

As one of the 18 departments that comprise Honduras, the Bay Islands are a political discrete region.  But with about 50,000 residents, the Bay Islands are the least populous of the country’s 18 departments.  Francisco Morazán, the department that includes and surrounds Tegucigalpa, has nearly 1.5 million residents, and Cortés, the department that includes and surrounds San Pedro Sula, has nearly 1.6 million residents. (Together, they constitute about three-eights of Honduras’s population of eight million people.)

But the Bay Islands are different from either of those regions — they perhaps have more in common with the relatively untamed eastern part of Honduras, La Mosquitia.  That’s because of the extraordinary English (and then British) influence in both La Mosquitia and the Bay Islands.  When you think of the quintessential English pirates (yo ho ho), there’s no place more notorious than the Bay Islands, which was a haven for English pirates throughout the 17th century.   Although Christopher Columbus landed in what is today Trujillo on Honduras’s Caribbean coast in 1502 on his fourth and final voyage, and although Hernán Cortés founded the permanent settlement of Trujillo in 1525, the English didn’t give up their interest in Honduras easily.

They formed an alliance with the Moskito kingdom in northern and eastern Honduras (the word ‘Moskito’ refers not to the ubiquitous and disease-ridden insect pest, but to the muskets that the English supplied the locals), and in 1643, the English-Moskito alliance sacked Trujillo, and the British declared Honduras a British protectorate in the 1740s.  The tide turned only in the 1780s, when the Spanish regained Trujillo, and only in 1786 did the Anglo-Spanish Convention recognize Spanish sovereignty over the Caribbean coast.

It took even longer for the British to cede the Bay Islands, their long-coveted Honduran stronghold.  By the time the British ceded the islands in 1860, Spain no longer controlled Honduras, and Honduras had gone through periods as a part of the Mexican empire and as the most enthusiastic member of the short-lived federation between 1823 and 1838 of the United Provinces of Central America.

Fast-forward to the present day, and it’s still clear that the Bay Islands are quite different from the rest of Honduras.   Continue reading Personal reflections on Roatán, the Bay Islands and the Garífuna →

Honduras, United States

So what’s the big deal about Honduras’s election?

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TEGUCIGALPA — It’s not a controversial argument that the November 24 general election is the most important Central American election of the year, if not the most important since 2009, for the region.  But it’s certainly of vital importance for US foreign policy — and much more than the three additional upcoming elections next spring in Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panamá).USflaghonduras flag icon

The coup that overthrew former president Manuel Zelaya in June 2009 was in many ways the first important foreign policy crisis for the administration of US president Barack Obama.  Views differ incredibly as to whether Obama and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton succeeded in handling the crisis.  Though the US government joined virtually the entire international community in condemning the coup and voicing support for Zelaya’s return to office, the United States ultimately backed down on threats to refuse to recognize the November 2009 election, despite threatening not to recognize those elections in talks with Honduras’s interim president between June 2009 and January 2010, Roberto Micheletti.

It was clear that top US policymakers weren’t happy with Zelaya’s increasing turn toward stridently anti-American leftist regimes, including Venezuela, which was then under the leadership of Hugo Chávez, and Zelaya’s decision to join the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) was a turn away from the United States and toward Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and others in the region.  While Zelaya would be a fool to turn away the favorable terms of Chávez’s Petrocaribe scheme that subsidizes fuel (50% down, 50% to be paid far off in the future), and even his conservative successor continued to accept Petrocaribe fuel, he pulled Honduras far closer to the hardcore left than it had ever been in its history.

As the subsequent post-Zelaya elections approached, however, it was clear that the United States was more comfortable with the impending victory of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the candidate of the Partido Nacional (PN, National Party).  When Lobo Sosa (pictured above with Obama) won that election, US-Honduran relations went back to business as usual — and then some.

Honduras is, in many ways, the key to US policy in Central America.  Its Soto Cano air force base is a key military transport point between the United States and the rest of Latin America — the air base itself came into modern existence in 1981, when the US government used Honduras as a staging point for Contra incursions against the Soviet-backed Sandinista forces in Nicaragua.  Don’t let its relatively small size fool you, either.  If you think a country with a population of just eight million people can’t be relevant to US foreign policy, just look at Israel — it’s a country with just six million.

Four years after the mixed US response to the coup, Hondurans are preparing to elect a new president and all 128 members of the Congreso Nacional (National Congress), and the consequences couldn’t be greater for US-Honduran relations.

Current polls show that it’s a three person-race, with the National Party’s Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of the National Congress, essentially tied with Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the former president.  Castro de Zelaya is running as the candidate of a broad leftist movement, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP, National Popular Resistance Front), which is now organized as a full political party, the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Liberty and Refoundation Party).  Lagging behind is attorney Mauricio Villeda, the candidate of Zelaya’s former party, the Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party) and the son of a former social democratic Liberal president in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Though Castro de Zelaya isn’t going out of her way to disparage the United States, and the United States hasn’t endorsed Hernández directly, US-Honduran relations will be much trickier if Castro de Zelaya wins the election.

But that doesn’t mean relations will necessarily be worse for the Honduran people.   Continue reading So what’s the big deal about Honduras’s election? →

Uruguay

Meet José Mujica, the Uruguayan president who’s on the path to legalizing marijuana

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Although Uruguay’s austere president José Mujica grows chrysanthemums with his wife in his humble home outside Montevideo in his spare time, that’s not the kind of flower power that’s catapulted him to global headlines this week.uruguay

Instead, he’s moved forward, surpassing a key hurdle in making Uruguay, the Southern Cone nation of 3.3 million, the first country in the world to decriminalize and regulate the sale and purchase of marijuana when the lower house of Uruguay’s parliament, the Cámara de Representantes (Chamber of Representatives) passed a legalization bill by a narrow 50-46 margin late Wednesday, which will allow the bill to sail smoothly through the upper house and to enactment.

Far from transforming Uruguay into a drug haven, however, Simon Romero, writing for The New York Times, explains the highly regulated nature of what will become the Uruguayan marijuana market, which would place strict limits on the growth, use and sale of the drug:

Under the bill, which could become law as early as this month, people would be allowed to grow marijuana in their homes, limited to six plants per household. They would also be permitted to form cooperatives allowed to cultivate 99 plants. In addition, private companies could grow marijuana under the bill, though their harvests could be bought only by the government, which would market the drug in licensed pharmacies.

To buy marijuana in pharmacies, Uruguayans would be required to enter their names into a federal registry, which is intended to remain confidential, and would be limited to buying 40 grams per month. And in a move to prevent foreign tourists from flocking to Uruguay to smoke marijuana, the legislation would restrict legal purchases to Uruguayans. Marijuana use is already largely tolerated by the Uruguayan authorities.

As remarkable as it seems, and despite international criticism of the Uruguayan measure, it was only a matter of time before a Latin American country takes the step to legalize the drug.  Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, neither of whom are exactly left-wing ideologues have both made strident calls for marijuana legalization, and other Latin American leaders, such as former Mexican president Felipe Calderón, have called into question the longstanding U.S. anti-drug policy that’s launched a 40-year ‘War on Drugs’ that turned out to become more a war on Latin America, wreaking havoc and escalating violence from México to Perú.  Even within the United States, public opinion is turning away from criminalization — California’s ‘medical’ marijuana industry is booming and voters in Washington and Colorado elected in November 2012 to legalize marijuana in those states.

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What’s even more remarkable is the rise of the Uruguayan president who’s likely to be the first to make it happen.  In a region with sometimes eccentric leaders, the 78-year old Mujica — or as he’s affectionately known among Uruguayos, ‘Pepe’ — stands out.

A former leftist guerrilla in the Tupamaros movement, Mujica spent much of Uruguay’s military government that spanned the 1970s and early 1980s in prison.  As Romero writes in a profile of Mujica for The Times earlier this year, prison life was about as grim as imaginable for the one-time rebel fighter:

He spent 14 years in prison, including more than a decade in solitary confinement, often in a hole in the ground. During that time, he would go more than a year without bathing, and his companions, he said, were a tiny frog and rats with whom he shared crumbs of bread.

The sometimes violent tactics of the Tupamaros, which drew its inspiration from Fidel Castro’s Cuban guerrilla effort, weren’t without controversy.  But though he rarely discusses those days, his wife, Lucía Topolansky, is also a former Tupamaro, and while he has long since eschewed the more radical elements of his past, he has retained a strikingly humble approach to material wealth.  Mujica, who drives himself in a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle, has been labeled by the BBC to label him as ‘the world’s poorest president’:

President Mujica has shunned the luxurious house that the Uruguayan state provides for its leaders and opted to stay at his wife’s farmhouse, off a dirt road outside the capital, Montevideo.  The president and his wife work the land themselves, growing flowers.  This austere lifestyle – and the fact that Mujica donates about 90% of his monthly salary, equivalent to $12,000 (£7,500), to charity – has led him to be labelled the poorest president in the world.

As president, he has presided over a strong economy, though the GDP growth rate has fallen from 8.9% in 2010 to 5.7% in 2011 and an estimated 3.5% in 2012 — a slowing growth rate, yes, but one that’s consistently overperformed Brazil’s GDP growth in the past three years, one that is now overperforming the increasingly troubled Argentine economy, and one that would make the United States or the European Union feel like it’s experiencing an economic boom.  Mujica has been an aggressive champion of freer trade, and for expanding Mercosur, the South American free trade bloc.  He’s also a proponent of wind and other forms of renewable energy, and he’s a tireless booster of Uruguay exports, half of which are agricultural products, notably beef and grain products.

But his real legacy, even before the push for marijuana legalization, has been on social policy.  Yesterday, for example, Uruguay’s same-sex marriage act took effect after the Chamber of Deputies passed the law on an 81-6 vote last December.  He’s also signed legislation legalizing abortion restrictions.  But while those measures had broad popular appeals, polls have shown that up to two-thirds of Uruguayan voters are wary of legalizing marijuana.

As Uruguayan presidents cannot run for consecutive terms in office, much of Mujica’s devil-may-care approach to controversial issues, especially drug legalization, lies in the fact that he’s not running for reelection.  But it’s also in keeping with his honest, everyman persona, which has afforded him broad popularity, even among his critics. That popularity has made it easier for Mujica to champion unpopular issues, just as it has made it easier to deflect the loquacious president’s gaffes, such as when he was caught on tape disparaging both Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband, former president Néstor Kirchner: ‘esta vieja es peor que el tuerto,‘ which roughly translates to ‘the old woman is worse than the cross-eyed one.’

But unlike the Kirchners, who have hewn a relatively populist neo-Peronista course for Argentina, which remains shut out of global capital markets, and unlike other leftists like the late Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Mujica has been firmly on the lulista left, and like former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, he’s spent his political career moving from leftist roots — even more radical than Lula’s trade union roots in Brazil — to the political center.  Continue reading Meet José Mujica, the Uruguayan president who’s on the path to legalizing marijuana →