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Honduras

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? →

Honduras

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.

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 →

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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? →

Honduras

Toncontín blues: of airports and infrastructure in Honduras

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I’ve now flown into Tegucigalpa’s main airport, Toncontín, twice — once in a Embraer 190 and again in a small puddle-jumper from Roatán, part of the Bay Islands that lie just off Honduras’s North Coast.honduras flag icon

Frankly, I was expecting a much more eventful landing from everything I’d been led to believe.

Even with an expanded runway as of May 2009, Toncontín has quite a bit of notoriety — its difficult approach and relatively short runway makes it one of the world’s trickiest airports.  Opened in 1934, Toncontín featured just a 6,112-foot runway and, as expanded, it features a single runway extended to over 7,000 feet. That’s not incredibly short, necessarily — it compares to the runways at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and Washington’s Reagan National Airport.

The problem is that Teguicgalpa is a valley that lies within essentially a 360-degree ring of mountains.  So as you approach Toncontín, you approach a ridge of mountains that swiftly gives way to the valley, with sprawl following soon thereafter.  The approach takes a broad right turn that follows a counterclockwise swirl around the valley, followed by a sharp left, counterclockwise turn as you descend.  It’s a little jarring, but no more so than landing, say, essentially along the water — just like at LGA or DCA — where you descend slowly into the water until at the last moment you hit the runway.

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But it’s caused problems in the past — in May 2008, TACA Flight 390 overran the runway and crashed into a street.  The accident killed just five people, but it highlighted the dangers of Toncontín, which is routinely called one of the world’s most dangerous airports.  The TACA incident is one of a dozen of such accidents since the 1960s.

I mention Toncontín because it’s a huge infrastructure issue — historically, getting into and out of the Honduran capital has been more difficult than, say, flying into Managua or Panamá City.  That’s not in itself a reason for financial centers to develop there and not in Tegucigalpa, but it doesn’t help.

In fact, it’s an issue of unfinished business from the former administration of Manuel Zelaya, whose push to extend Toncontín’s runway was completed in May 2009, just a month before the coup that ousted him from office (for reasons other than his infrastructure goals).  But when he was pushed from power, Zelaya hoped to open a new airport at Soto Cano Air Force Base, which US military personnel have been using for decades, most infamously in the 1980s when the United States backed Contra forces based in Honduras against the Soviet-backed Nicaraguan Sandinistas — it’s also known as Palmerola, and it’s closer to Honduras’s old capital before 1880, Comayagua, and to Honduras’s second city San Pedro Sula.

But since Zelaya’s ouster, the airport move has been a less pressing issue.  Though Honduras’s outgoing right-wing president Porfirio Lobo Sosa has confirmed the long-term goal of moving the capital’s major international airport from Toncontín to Palmerola, it’s still nowhere near fruition.