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Honduras

Hernández takes office with agenda already largely in place

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What’s most unusual about today’s inauguration of Juan Orlando Hernández as the next president of Honduras is that so much of his agenda is already in place.honduras flag icon

Upon taking office today, Hernández (pictured above) will face daunting security, economic and political challenges.

But on at least a few matters, he’ll take office with key elements of his agenda already in place, thanks to the efforts of the outgoing administration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the wide majority of the Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) in the outgoing Congreso Nacional (National Congress).  Hernández served as president of the National Congress from 2010 to 2014.  The transition from Lobo Sosa to Hernández marks the first time since the return of democracy to Honduras in 1981 that the conservative National Party will hold two consecutive presidential terms (Honduran presidents are constitutionally ineligible to run for reelection).

Hernández takes office today, but he does so after enacting several key security and fiscal policies in the final months and weeks of the Lobo Sosa administration, including a new, less controversial national police chief, a new military police force, landmark fiscal reforms (including a wide tax increase) and a plan to privatize Honduras’s public electricity company.  Last weekend, the new National Congress was sworn in, which means that the National Party will control just 48 seats in the 128-member unicameral parliament, a sharp reduction from the 75-seat bloc that Hernández commanded during the Lobo Sosa era.

From ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘the party is over’

Even before the election campaign reached full swing, Hernández last September pushed through legislation authorizing the creation of a new policia militar (‘military police’) that will deploy in full force early this year, and he campaigned on a slogan to do ‘whatever it takes’ (¡voy hacer lo que tenga que hacer!) to make Honduras safe.  The controversial legislation creates an elite militarized unit loyal to Hernández that (hopefully) won’t be corrupted by organized crime and drug traffickers, which have already infiltrated much of the Honduran police and military. Critics worry that the new military police could trample human rights in a country barely three decades removed from death squads.  Many Hondurans fear the police more than drug traffickers and criminal gangs.

Late in December 2013, Lobo Sosa fired the head of Honduras’s national police, Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as ‘El Tigre.’  Bonilla had become a controversial figure, given alleged ties to the death squads of the 1980s.  Since becoming the head of Honduras’s national police force in August 2012, Bonilla became linked to a trend of humanitarian violations at the hands of the national police, including beatings, illegal detentions and other harassment of gay and lesbian Hondurans, journalists and leftists in political opposition to the current administration.  Bonilla also seemed either unwilling or unable to crack down on rampant corruption within his ranks.  Given that police salaries are a pittance, however, reforming the national police force could prove just as difficult in the Hernández era as well.

Bonilla’s removal represents one less headache for Hernández, who would have continued to face ongoing skepticism  from both within and outside Honduras over Bonilla’s leadership.  But there’s no sign that the future will be any less corrupt or any more respectful of human rights — and no clear sign that Bonilla’s successor, Ramón Sabillón, previously the commander of the national police’s special investigations division, will do any better.

Stabilizing Honduras will be Hernández’s top challenge in the next four years, and he’s staked his presidency on doubling down with a military solution rather than a strategy of community-based policing.  Though the United Nations The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recorded a rate of 91.6 per 100,000 in 2011, but the Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras estimated a rate of 85.5 in 2012 and just 80 per 100,000 in 2013.  While that’s a significant drop, it still means that Honduras has the world’s highest homicide rate.

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In his inaugural address today, Hernández declared that for criminals, se le terminó la fiesta (‘the party is over), and he wasted no time in announcing a massive military operation, Operácion Morazán, named after Honduras’s founding father.  To that end, Hernández indulged a demonstration at his inauguration earlier today of Los Tigres, one unit of Honduras’s increasingly militarized network of squads and paramilitary police forces (pictured above).

Rigoberto Chang Castillo, a top Hernández ally, has become Honduras’s new interior and population minister, and rising National Party star Reinaldo Sánchez will become the minister of the presidency.

Bilateral relations with the United States and drug policy

One of the most surprising aspects to Hernández’s inaugural address, however, was a stern admonishment of US drug policy.  Declaring a double standard, Hernández spoke out against the United States for its role in Honduras’s state, noting that North American demand for drugs has fueled so much violence throughout Latin America, and that while drugs are merely a ‘health’ issue for US consumers, it’s a matter of life and death for Honduras, which fights traffickers with limited resources — and the blood of its own people: Continue reading Hernández takes office with agenda already largely in place →

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Honduran LGBT activists fear ongoing threat upon Hernández inauguration

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NOTE: This post originally appeared at Huffington Post’s Latino Voices blog.
For more of Suffragio‘s coverage and reporting on Honduras, click here. 

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Erick Martínez remembers exactly where he was when Erick Martínez was killed.honduras flag icon

Erick Vidal Martínez, today one of Honduras’s most high-profile LGBT activists, was supposed to meet Erick Martínez Avila at one in the afternoon on an otherwise temperate spring day in May 2012. Martínez Avila had been selected to be the representative of the LGBT community in the congressional primaries for Honduras’s new leftist political party, the Party of Liberty and Refoundation (known by its acronym, LIBRE, which is Spanish for “free”). But the LGBT community had planned to meet on May 6, 2012 to hold a full assembly in order to ensure that all voices, including transsexual and transgender members of the community, could provide input on the campaign ahead.

“The meeting was scheduled at 2:00 p.m., but we had talked about getting together beforehand.,” Martínez said. “Then 3 o’clock came around, then 3:30, and he didn’t show up. People started to believe that he didn’t want to become the candidate. So people said, ‘well, we’ll just have to find somebody else.'”

The next day, May 7, was Erick Vidal Martínez’s birthday. When the other Erick didn’t send so much as a text message to mark the occasion, the community’s brief annoyance deflated quickly into concern. Later that day, they learned the news — Erick Martínez Avila had been kidnapped off the streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras. His kidnappers ultimately strangled him to death and discarded his body in a ditch on the outskirts of town.

“My world completely changed that day, it was a 360-degree turn,” he said. “I didn’t have time to mourn him, I didn’t have time to cry.”

It was among the more high-profile of dozens of assassinations within Honduras’s struggling LGBT community — another top LGBT activist, Walter Tróchez, was shot while walking down the street in December 2009. Erick Vidal Martínez knew both of them well — as friends, as political allies, as part of his support network in a country where dissent of any stripe has become increasingly perilous. No one would have blamed him for packing his bags, filing an asylum application and catching the next flight to Ottawa. Or Brussels. Or London.

Instead, just days before Hondurans voted in a landmark general election, Erick met with me for coffee in downtown Tegucigalpa to explain why he’s picked up the fight where the other Erick, Walter and other murdered LGBT activists left off, and why he’s willing to risk his life to fight for greater rights for the diversity community in Honduras, a task that could become ever more treacherous in the years ahead, when Honduras’s new conservative president, Juan Orlando Hernández, will be inaugurated Monday, January 27.

“Everyone in Honduras has fear, but you can’t make decisions through fear and the past,” Martínez said. “I have to be smart. It would be foolish of me to expose myself. My advantage is my profile as a human rights activist. This is not a bulletproof vest, but it helps… After Erick’s murder, I gave up my social life; I gave up my private life.” Continue reading Honduran LGBT activists fear ongoing threat upon Hernández inauguration →

Honduras

Results of the Honduran parliamentary election — a gridlocked National Congress

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Even as Xiomara Castro de Zelaya continues to dispute the victory of center-right rival Juan Orlando Hernández in last month’s presidential election, the Honduran electoral commission released the final results of the parliamentary elections that were also conducted on November 24.honduras flag icon

As expected, no single party won a majority in the 128-member, unicameral Congreso Nacional (National Congress).

That means when Hernández is inaugurated as Honduras’s next president, he will do so with less power than he had as president of the National Congress over the past four years.  With just 48 deputies, his center-right Partido National (PN, National Party) will return to the National Congress not only without a majority, but with 23 fewer seats than in the previous Congress, during which the National Party controlled both the National Congress and the presidency under outgoing president Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

Since the return of regular democratic elections in 1981, each of Honduras’s presidents has also held a majority (or near-majority) in the National Congress, so there’s not a lot of precedent for coalition government to which its leaders can now turn.  Despite the novelty of coalition politics in Honduras, however, it’s about to become a vital component.

Though Castro de Zelaya (and her husband, former president Manuel Zelaya) might be disappointed by her apparent 8% loss to Hernández, they should be buoyed by the success of their party, the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), in the parliamentary elections.  By winning 37 seats in the National Congress, LIBRE has prevented any single party from winning an outright majority, a radical change to modern Honduran politics.  Although Zelaya and other left-wing activists founded LIBRE only in June 2011, taking with them many of Zelaya’s supporters in the traditionally center-left Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party), it has now displaced the Liberal Party as the second-strongest force in the National Congress.

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That leaves the Zelayas with a choice.  They can continue a path of resistance against an election that they argue was fraudulent (less in terms of ballot fraud and more in terms of fundamental unfairness in the environment of danger and fear for LIBRE candidates).  By doing so, however, the Zelayas risk losing popular support in the same way that Andrés Manuel López Obrador gradually lost steam in his protests against the 2006 Mexican election results, and the Zelayas risk alienating LIBRE from the other main political parties.  Or they can take up the mantle of Honduras’s chief democratic opposition from their relatively strong perch in the National Congress, where Zelaya (the former president) will now hold a congressional seat.

The first test will come when the National Congress elects its new president, and Hernández will almost certainly want to marshal enough support to install one of his top congressional lieutenants, former security minister Oscar Álvarez, Lena Gutiérrez or Rigoberto Chang Castillo, as his successor.  Continue reading Results of the Honduran parliamentary election — a gridlocked National Congress →

Honduras, United States

How the Obama administration is failing Honduras — and Central America

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TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – The June 2009 coup that ousted Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya from office was the first 3 a.m. call of U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration. USflaghonduras flag icon

While Obama and Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, condemned the coup and the interim government’s refusal to reinstate Zelaya, the United States returned to business as usual with the election of Porfirio Lobo Sosa later that year, and U.S.-Honduran cooperation, especially militarily, has been on the rise during the Lobo Sosa administration.  As Juan Orlando Hernández prepares to assume the Honduran presidency — like Lobo Sosa, he comes from the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party), it also likely means continuity in US policy toward Honduras, specifically, and Central America, generally.

But should it?

Though the votes aren’t even fully counted, and there are real questions about the November 24 election’s fairness, it’s hard to believe that U.S. policymakers are too upset about the apparent defeat of Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the former president, and the leader of the newly formed LIBRE, which would have pulled Honduras in a more leftist direction – and toward closer contact with Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, each of whom have challenged U.S. influence in Latin America.

There’s another risk that the Obama administration’s Central American policy could be causing more harm than good by ‘feeding the beast’ of corruption among police officers and impunity among drug traffickers, the very things that U.S. aid to Honduras is ostensibly designed to combat.

With three more upcoming elections in Central America over the next six months, it’s a particularly relevant opportunity for the Obama administration to review its policy in the region.  Guatemala’s conservative president Otto Pérez Molina came to power early last year, promptly declared the ‘war on drugs’ a failure, and issued a powerful call to legalize drug use.  Even Felipe Calderón, who militarized the Mexican fight against drug traffickers in the late 2000s, has argued that legalization might be the most effective policy weapon in combatting drug-related violence in Latin America.

Even as some libertarian Republicans in the United States increasingly believe that the four-decade ‘war on drugs’ is a failure at home, it’s easy to underestimate the damage that war has wrought in Latin America, with North American demand fueling an illicit drug supply, together with subsequent US-sponsored military efforts throughout the region, that have destabilized entire countries – Colombia in the 1990s, Mexico in the 2000s and Honduras today.  Research from Horace Bartilow and Kihong Eom, professors of political science at the University of Kentucky, finds that U.S. drug policies have caused greater levels of drug violence in Latin America.  Even when countries are ‘successful’ in their supply-side fights against drug traffickers, demand dictates that the suppliers find new countries, establishing a vicious ‘bubble problem’ – success in one country means that a new chapter opens elsewhere as traffickers search out new bases for drug operations, a tragic game of ‘whack-a-mole’ on a hemispheric level.

It’s Central America’s turn, which now sources the vast majority of known cocaine shipments to the United States.  In particular, traffickers found Honduras a particularly attractive target, in part due to the breakdown in the rule of law that resulted from the 2009 coup.  Sadly, Honduras now boasts the world’s highest homicide rate, and has a thriving arms trafficking trade to match the drug trade. Continue reading How the Obama administration is failing Honduras — and Central America →

Honduras, Nicaragua

Photo of the day: A photo op that Xiomara Castro couldn’t have pulled off

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Today, Honduras’s president-elect Juan Orlando Hernández met with the presidents of three Central American neighbors — Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panamá (two of whom will be replaced in elections that are scheduled to be held within the next five months).honduras flag iconNicaragua

But the photo that most stands out is the one above, with Hernández, the conservative leader of Honduras’s Partido Nacional (National Party) gripping and grinning with Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega.

Trade between the two countries is increasingly important, and the two counties still have strained relations over a border dispute in 2000-01. Honduras shares nearly all of its southern border with Nicaragua and, as drug trafficking becomes an increasingly insoluble problem for Honduran security, there are fears that Nicaragua (with a homicide rate that’s equal to just one-fourth of Honduras’s) could destabilize as well.  So it’s obviously important for Ortega and Hernández to have a strong working relationship.

But Ortega, as the leader of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN, Sandinista Front of National Liberation) is a stridently left-wing president with little respect for democratic institutions.  Though he’s transformed from guerrilla-style revolution in the 1980s into more run-of-the-mill corruption today, he remains the most anti-American (pro-Venezuelan) socialist leader in Central America.

It’s been just a few days since Hernández was determined to be the winner of Honduras’s November 24 election.  That result continues to be challenged, but it seems increasingly likely that Hernández will indeed be Honduras’s next president.

But consider a parallel universe where Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, leading the campaign of the firmly leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), had posed with Ortega days after winning the election.  You’d have half of Honduras and much of the US policymaking apparatus up in arms about Honduras’s sudden left turn, and it may well have obscured Castro de Zelaya’s first week as president-elect by causing a domestic or international brouhaha.

It’s not a particular commentary on either Castro de Zelaya or on Hernández, but just a point about how critically perception matters in international affairs.  What for one candidate is a run-of-the-mill meeting with the leader of a neighboring country would have taken on a much more ominous tone for another candidate.

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Hernández edges toward Honduras presidency with no mandate, no majority and no money

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I write today at Americas Quarterly that even as Juan Orlando Hernández closes in on the Honduran presidency, he’ll do so with nearly historic obstacles to governing Honduras — in short, he’ll take over the leadership of his countryhonduras flag icon with no mandate, no majority and no money:

In light of Honduras’s single-round, first-past-the-post electoral system, [leftist party] LIBRE’s advent made it a near-certainty that the next president would win with less than an absolute majority. If Hernández wins with just 34 percent of the vote, it will mean that nearly two-thirds of Honduran voters rejected his approach.  Both [opponent Xiomara] Castro de Zelaya and fourth-place candidate Salvador Nasralla (who’s polling a higher-than-expected 15.64 percent)—a populist sports broadcaster who started a rival right-wing “Anti-Corruption Party”—have already alleged fraud.  It’s too soon to know if those accusations have any substance, but there’s certainly enough doubt—not least of all due to the National Party’s disputed 2012 primary elections—to take them seriously.

But even if it turns out that Honduras’s election was “free” in a technical sense, there’s wider doubt that it was a truly fair election.  LIBRE candidates, along with journalists and various other activists, have been killed, attacked and harassed with alarming frequency since the 2009 coup.  On Saturday night, two LIBRE leaders were assassinated near Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital. They weren’t the first LIBRE activists to be killed in Honduras and they won’t be the last—with little apparent ability to combat the world’s highest homicide rate, the Honduran state is unable to investigate murderers who can kill with impunity.

I argue further that it will also be difficult for Hernández to form (or buy) an alliance if, as expected, a four-way parliamentary election leads to the result that no party wins an absolute majority in the Congreso Nacional (National Congress):

LIBRE is certain to oppose Hernández at every step, especially if Castro de Zelaya digs in with her refusal to concede the election and especially if she has good reason for protest. Even without Castro de Zelaya, the new party seems to have sparked a genuine political realignment that isn’t likely to disappear with one election or the political stardom of the Zelayas.

With a disappointing third-place finish, the Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party) is likely to want to win back many of the supporters that left it to support the Zelayas and LIBRE.  There’s a strong argument that the last thing that the Liberals will want to do is join forces with Hernández at a time when their party’s raison d’être is under siege — instead, the Liberals would be smart to draw contrasts with Hernández.

Notably, Hernández pushed through the centerpiece of his campaign, a controversial military police force, in August, when his conservative Partido Nacional (National Party) held 71 of the Congress’s 128 seats.  Even if the National Party somehow wins an unlikely majority when the results of Sunday’s parliamentary vote are known, Hernández certainly won’t have 71 seats — it’s more likely that he’ll have a caucus in the 50s.  That comes at a time when it’s almost certain he’ll seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund, with terms that will impose spending limits on Hernández’s administration:

Honduras’ precarious finances will also clip Hernández’ wings. With a nearly 4 percent budget deficit in 2012 and a public debt of 35 percent of GDP, Honduras can barely pay its public employees.  Financial strains have also limited the ability of both the national and municipal governments to pay police and military officials enough to discourage collusion with drug traffickers.  Financing a new military police force, too, means less money for reducing poverty and unemployment, building roads and hospitals, and crafting economic policy to reduce income inequality in Honduras.

 

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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).

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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 →

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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 →

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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.