Honduras Culture and Politics

Dana Frank Tells it Like it is in Honduras

2012-01-27T19:40:00.000-08:00

...in the New York Times.

Frank is among a group of scholars specializing in Honduras who have tried to get the mainstream English language media to cover what is actually happening in Honduras, during and after the coup d'etat of 2009. Even when the coup itself was fresh, we found little interest by US media in a complex story that didn't fit existing simple narratives.

As the US role in Honduras slipped from an initial stance that seemed strongly to oppose the breakdown in the rule of law, to more ambiguous statements that treated the legally elected president and self-appointed dictator as equal parties who should negotiate a settlement, to the final position of claiming an election held under a de facto regime engaging in repression of free speech and assembly was somehow a path back to legitimacy, US media showed ever less interest in publishing work that critiqued the US role.

So it is a landmark event to see such a prominent news outlet publish these words:

Mr. Lobo’s government is, in fact, a child of the coup. It retains most of the military figures who perpetrated the coup, and no one has gone to jail for starting it... the Lobo government cannot reform itself.

There is much more of substance in this extraordinary Op-ed. Among the most important: a summary of little publicized congressional actions within the last year taken once congress members understood what has happened and is happening in Honduras. To quote Frank:

Last May, 87 members signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calling for a suspension of military and police aid to Honduras. Representative Howard L. Berman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to her on Nov. 28, asking whether the United States was arming a dangerous regime. And in December, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others obtained conditions on a small portion of the 2012 police and military aid appropriated for Honduras.

These actions are important because they shine light on the actors who need to be held responsible for the situation in Honduras today. Frank deserves immense credit for tenacity in bringing these issues to the attention of policy makers and the public through her tireless work. We can hope that this NY Times piece sets a target that other media start to emulate.

For the record: Frank is a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the author of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America. Honduras represents only a small part of her impressive publication record, focused on labor history. She has contributed multiple articles of The Nation describing the political and economic forces that led to the Honduran coup, and the effects it has had.

Energy Contracts or Energy?

2012-01-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

When is an emergency not an emergency?

Westport Finance LLC is a curious company that won an "emergency" no-bid contract for electrical generating equipment and installation from the Empresa Nacional de Energia Electrica (ENEE) via Contract and Decreto 218-2011, published November 24, 2011 in La Gaceta.

Westport Finance is owned by Ira Ginsburg and his wife, Carla. Mr. Ginsburg's sole expertise is putting together financing for projects, not in supplying electricity or building generation facilities. He claims to be affiliated in some way with Wartsila, a Finnish builder of oil and natural gas generation equipment. We wrote about the contract back in November.

Under the terms of the contract Westport Finance LLC was supposed to have the first phase of generating equipment, some 50 Megawatts, up and running 60 days after the publication of the contract in La Gaceta.

So what, if anything, has Westport done to date?

Our gentle readers will not be surprised to hear that nothing has been done in Honduras since the contract was published. Westport has not imported or installed any power generation equipment of any kind.

One is reminded of Luis Larach's statement from Tim Johnson's reporting for McClatchy :

In a sign of money laundering, he said, "unknown companies are winning bids of huge infrastructure projects like highways and bridges, and no one knows where the money is coming from."

The problem here is likely that Westport Finance LLC stated to ENEE that they could install generators in 2 months at their own cost. The contract states:

Sixty (60) days after it comes into effect, the lessor (Westport) is obliged to install 50 Megawatts in total, of generating plants based on diesel (bunker) distributed in 4 of the five sites indicated in the following manner: one of 15 MW located in the city of La Entrada, Copan; another of 15 MW in Sesenti, Ocotepeque, another of 10 MW in the Coyoles Central substation and another of 10 MW in the city of Catacamas, Olancho, being responsible for the operation and maintenance of the same for a period of 12 months....

The contract also spells out how and where the new generating plants are to be connected to the national power grid. It in turn, requires Westport to post a bond for $1, 350, 000, which was due 15 days after the contract took effect. That would have been on December 9, 2011. In theory Westport is also subject to a $100/Megawatt/Month fine for delays, a further $5000/month from January 24, 2012 forward. Westport was also responsible for soliciting the necessary environmental approvals, as well as the departmental and municipal approvals necessary, within the first 60 days of the contract.

So Westport is in default on the second milestone. Did they find funding and pay the bond to meet the first milestone? Is the contract even still in effect?

So much for the "emergency" declared by Porfirio Lobo Sosa (PCM-064-2011) and the discriminating choice of corporate partners by ENEE.

The Generic Central America of the Miami Herald's Imagination

2012-01-25T08:01:00.000-08:00

Mike at Central American Politics took apart a Miami Herald editorial purportedly about Honduras, saving us the trouble of being the spoilsport media critic.

I read with complete disbelief the following, supposedly relevant to Honduras' current surge in murder rates:

The recent withdrawal of America’s Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras is one more sign that the security situation in that Central American country has deteriorated to crisis levels not seen since the civil wars of the 1980s. The country is quickly turning into a disaster zone.

After the tide of civil war receded, the armies went back to their barracks and the insurgents laid down their arms. But then narcotics traffickers flooded in, and the violence has spiked dramatically ever since. The DEA estimates that 25 tons of cocaine move through the country every month heading north.

What "civil war"? what "insurgents"? Honduras, as anyone capable of reading back issues of the Miami Herald could have confirmed, did not have a civil war in the 1980s. There was no historic peace accord leading insurgents to lay down there arms. It seems clear to me that what we have here is the generic Central American imaginary-- perhaps the writer is thinking of El Salvador? Guatemala?

But not Honduras, that is for sure.

And that is why, in a rare move for us, I am giving a blogger elsewhere the space for the pushback. Here's Mike, and while I could add to this, let me simply say bravo and cede the floor:

Why not talk about the US-encouraged militarization of the country during the 1970s and 1980s. How about the contras operating on Honduran soil and launching illegal attacks across the border and into Nicaragua? You could also write about US support and training for Honduran troops involved in helping to massacre Salvadorans along its border during the 1980s.

They could also avoid the 1980s Cold War rhetoric altogether since the war's been over for twenty years. If there's been a "a 250-percent increase in half a dozen years," why not look to the source of violence six years ago rather than twenty-five years ago? They could write about some of the mano dura policies first introduced in 2002 or the breakdown of the rule of law prior to, during, and after the 2009 coup?

Beans For Gas

2012-01-24T08:45:00.000-08:00

No, not that kind of gas.

Juan Artica, the Vice Minister of Agriculture and Cattle for Honduras, is proposing to grow more beans for exclusive export to Venezuela should Honduras regain membership in Petrocaribe.

You may recall that one way members of Petrocaribe can pay for the refined petroleum products that they use is with agricultural goods.

The central government reckons it has enough production and storage of beans already to satisfy the national demand, last year's shortages and the highest priced food basket in Central America (including beans) not withstanding.

They report they are in contact with producers to increase the production of beans, to be exclusively exported to Venezuela.

Artica reports that in a few weeks they will send a mission to Venezuela to bring back the kind of beans they eat there. Venezuelans eat, it seems, black beans. Hondurans eat a variety of small red/purple beans.

The fact is that in Central America, at least, each country has its own distinctive bean variety that is traditionally grown and consumed there, and local taste demands local beans. Some of this has to do with the way different beans react to cooking methods; in the past Honduran cooks have complained that imported beans did not soften up properly in the amount of time normally allowed for domestic beans.

The proposal actually seems more like an off-the-cuff speculation than a well thought out plan. How will they manage to outwit the coyotes/speculators, who created last year's artificial shortage of beans and, oh, by the way, exported Honduran beans to other Central American countries while beans were short and expensive in Honduras, when an export market is created for beans for Venezuela?

Will Honduran grown Venezuelan black beans find acceptance in the Venezuelan market? Stay tuned.

A Security Consultant Assigned

2012-01-23T15:03:00.000-08:00

The United States has assigned a former diplomat, Oliver P. Garza, to be a security consultant to the Honduran government. Garza was US Ambassador to Nicaragua (1999 - 2002) and interim Ambassador to Panama (1994 - 1995). He currently is a retired Foreign Service Officer, but continues to serve as a Western Hemisphere Advisor at US Department of State office of eDiplomacy.

During his tenure as Ambassador in Nicaragua, he reportedly fought with then President Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo over the levels of corruption in Aleman's government.

He won the Aguila Award from the Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association in 2010 " his dedication to country, law enforcement, and his community at large, and for exhibiting professionalism and courage beyond the call of duty."

Tim Johnson sheds light on Honduran crime

2012-01-22T16:48:00.000-08:00

Since I recently complained in frustration about the way mainstream media (using as my example the Washington Post) rely on an overly generic storyline to account for crime in Honduras, I need to applaud McClatchy reporter Tim Johnson for writing a story that sounds, for practically the first time, as if it was written by someone who has actually talked to people in Honduras.

As a result, the story he tells is one of police corruption and impunity, and the rule of law broken down; a lack of security and a lack of trust in government to provide security. Johnson writes:

Unlike other parts of Central America, where organized crime has relied on enforcers recruited from street gangs and unemployed youth, in Honduras entire units of the national police appear to work for drug and crime groups, preying on the public and gunning down foes.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/20/136474/crime-booms-as-central-americans.html#storylink=cpy

This is a far cry from the easy storyline about youth gangs which has been used in Honduras to justify fatal violence against the young, whether they are engaged in criminal activity or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My own perspective on this comes from a prior episode of repression in Honduras, when a hard working young man I knew, from a dirt poor barrio (literally dirt poor-- the kind of place where houses had dirt floors), who was as talented as any of the much better educated and privileged North Americans on our project, was shot and killed, victim of being out for a drink when someone decided to take out young men thought to be (and perhaps actually) involved in drug dealing.

My friend was collateral damage. But the crime was portrayed as a regrettable but necessary response to the danger posed by young men generically-- not young men involved in crimes, who-- again, sadly, worth underlining-- should be subject to arrest, trial, and conviction before being punished, but were seen as disposable.

We can disagree about all of the causes of the current Honduran situation. We will disagree about what steps might put Honduras on a route out of this mess. But we should all agree that Johnson proved that a reporter who approaches the story with open ears might actually find something new, and maybe even illuminating, to say.

I was astonished to read a quote from the head of the Chamber of Commerce and Industries of Cortes (where San Pedro Sula is located), Luis Larach saying that

drug lords "have bought tremendous tracts, ranches, farms (and) coastlands" in Honduras, and the drug profits have filtered into sectors such as banking, construction, sports teams, restaurants, auto sales and private security.
In a sign of money laundering, he said, unknown companies are winning bids "on huge infrastructure projects, like highways and bridges, and no one knows where the money is coming from."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/20/136474/crime-booms-as-central-americans.html#storylink=cpy

We have been covering many of these government contracts given to shell companies. Our suspicion has been that these are evidence of behind-the-scenes corruption, payoffs to decision makers, or promises of favors, but like Larach, our ultimate question has been, how do companies with no assets get these contracts?

I am glad to see a story that doesn't just say Hondurans are inherently violent. Now, the question is whether other media will start paying attention to the specifically local character of the tragedy in Honduras. Johnson quotes the rector of UNAM, Julieta Castellanos, whose perspective as a sociologist informs her comments, saying

many Hondurans [view] police corruption as a litmus test of whether the state could stave off an onslaught of gangsters.
"People are really indignant, worried, but above all frightened. If nothing happens, if the police are not purged, where is the country headed?" she asked. "Who will be governing in a few years?"

This isn't a threat entirely from outside; it isn't a cancer that can be removed with ever more security measures. This is what happens when impunity reigns, trust in institutions disappears, and the social fabric itself threatens to come apart.

Robbing Culture to Pay Copan

2012-01-19T08:48:00.000-08:00

We've said all there is to say before, but it bears re-iterating after a January 9 article in El Tiempo noted that Congress member Julio Cesar Gamez late last year introduced a bill which would assign 50% of the income from selling admission to the archaeological site of Copan to the town of Copan.

The basis of the argument advanced by the town of Copan is that they have a right to the income from admission to the archaeological site. This would take vital funding away from the Honduran Institute for Anthropology and History, responsible for all the cultural properties in Honduras, including Copan.

It's sheer greed, combined with the decreasing budgets given to municipalities by the state government in Honduras.

According to Mayor Helmy Réne Giacoman, who leads the latest effort,

"We are only left with the trash that the tourists leave",

a statement that ignores all the benefits that the town and its residents derive from those tourists. The Mayor speaks nonsense, of course.

As Victor Manuel Ramos noted last August in his column in El Tiempo, the town of Copan

receives most benefits from the Archaeological Park, because the enormous quantity of visitors also stay in the hotels of the locality, they consume food, they buy crafts, they visit the restaurants and the shops and use local transportation. All those businesses contribute taxes to the municipality. More than that, the benefits that the Institute receives are really limited if we compare them with those that the entire community and the municipality receives, since the costs for entry are very cheap and if we do an analysis of the expenditures of the visitors we will see that a tiny quantity corresponds to the Institute in the shape of tickets since the major part of the expenditures of the tourists remains in the hands of the local business people.

Just to be clear, tourism poured $650 million into the Honduran economy last year.

A 2003 study by the UN suggests that more than $60 million of that went directly to the town of Copan.

That's some trash.

Finally! A New Culture Minister

2012-01-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

The circus at the Secretaria de Culura, Artes, y Deportes (SCAD) continued all through the day yesterday, and even into the evening, but finally, Porfirio Lobo Sosa named a new Minister of Culture, only it's not who you think!

Last night around midnight, Lobo Sosa called Tulio Mariano Gonzalez to inform him he was the pick to be Minister of Culture.

The day, however, was crazy. Bernard Martinez returned to the offices of SCAD and said he was the Minister again because he had not heard anything official from Lobo Sosa. Tony Sierra issued a statement saying he had been called by a high ranking member of the Lobo Sosa staff on Friday and told to start Monday as interim Minister of Culture.

From the time of his arrival early in the morning, Martinez was accompanied by 13 Garifuna supporters, members of the Alianza 214 and Gemelos de Honduras, among others. They held dances and burned incense, smoked cigars, and beat drums on the fifth floor of SCAD's office building. El Tiempo reports that even Bernard Martinez danced for several minutes. Israel Senteno, head of the Gemelos de Honduras told the press this was an attempt to eliminate the bad vibrations of the government, and of Tony Sierra, Godofredo Fajardo, and the SCAD union in particular.

Apparently it did almost drive out many of the employees, who complained as the building filled with the cigar smoke and incense. Melba Bardales, head of the SCAD employees union said:

Enough of the circus.

But it did not drive out Tony Sierra, who showed up at the SCAD offices about midday from Comayagua where he had been inaugurating a performance of a dance group. In an attempt at re-establishing good will, went up to the fifth floor to meet with Martinez. He shook Martinez's hand, but was given a frigid reception by the Garifuna there so he left to go to Lobo Sosa's offices.

At 1:30 pm Sierra showed up for what he thought would be a swearing in ceremony at the presidential offices, making him Minister of Culture, but was informed there would be no swearing in. He was interim Minister of Culture because the law says when the Minister isn't present, a Vice Minister fills the office; they told him this and sent him on his way.

Martinez had a meeting there later in the day and was formally told of his dismissal.

Then at midnight, Tulio Mariano Gonzalez received a call from Lobo Sosa's office informing him he had been named the new Minister of Culture. He told the press:

I am sure we can move ahead to construct new agendas, perfecting the existence and elevating this ministry to the level it should have.

Gonzalez was most recently a member of the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) where he was Honduras's representative on the elections commission. He has also been a Vice President at the National Agricultural Development Bank. He is a National Party activist. Did I mention he's Afro-Honduran?

So, not a solution for Lobo Sosa's "government of reconciliation" problem, but we can hope more seriousness for this critical Ministry.

Honduran Congress Calls Foul over Change in Budget Bill

2012-01-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

Was it a premeditated corrupt act, or simple incompetence that caused the 2012 budget that was published in La Gaceta to not accurately reflect the budget passed by Congress. And who introduced the change?

The 2012 budget was discussed, modified, and passed on December 14, 2011, the final day of the Congressional session, when few Congress members were around. It was published as Decree 255-2011 in La Gaceta on December 22, 2011, after the current Congressional session ended and everyone was home preparing for Christmas.

However, the Honduran Congress is now up in arms because for the second, or possibly third time since the current administration took over, they say the bill that was printed in La Gaceta did not accurately reflect the bill that Congress sent to the Executive Branch.

In this case, the controversy is over Article 132 of the budget. By law, nine percent of the budget must be passed along to the Municipalities of Honduras. In the past, that has meant the full nine percent with no deductions. However, Article 132, as printed, allows the government to credit funds given to other government entities for projects in a particular Municipality as part of the nine percent. This would represent a significant decrease in their operating budget, but would greatly benefit the bottom line of the central government.

The problem is, that clause, which was supported by the Executive Branch, was considered unjust by the majority in Congress during debate on December 22, and the clause was amended to grant the Municipalities the full nine percent with no deduction for other government projects. It should not have appeared as it does in the printed version.

By definition, the printed version is the law.

So the question is, what happened so that the version printed is not what Congress says it approved and voted upon.

To understand where the error might originate, we have to understand the path of a bill after it is approved by Congressional vote.

First the bill goes to a Congressional commission which modifies the original text of the bill to incorporate any changes or amendments approved by Congress. They then send it along to the Executive Branch.

Could they have screwed up and not incorporated the amendment of Article 132? or, as El Heraldo asks, did they make a mockery of Congress by not incorporating its will?

Once the budget bill is in the Executive Branch, it is supposed to simply forward it to La Gaceta for publication, without any changes. Might someone in the Executive Branch have reintroduced the original language of Article 132 to help with closing the national budget gap?

This is not the first time this happened. The most recent example was with the motorcycle bill, which we blogged about here. The Executive Branch inserted a "clarification" not discussed by Congress, in the language when the bill came to them. As passed, the bill allowed only a driver to ride on a motorcycle. However, when published, the law "clarified" that as long as the passenger was a woman, or a child under the age of 12, that would be allowed.

Such a "clarification" is of course, a complete violation of the Honduran constitution's separation of powers, which gives the Executive Branch only the power to veto or approve bills as passed by Congress, not change the language. Interpreting the intent of Congress in legislation is supposed to happen through the court system.

Since the Executive Branch has seen fit to change the language of Congressional bills in the past, it seems quite possible that they introduced this change, since they benefit from it.

Now, the bill has become law with the original Article 132 text, meaning municipalities won't necessarily get the funding level they expected, or that Congress intended.

Congress is working with the Association of Municipal Governments to introduce an amendment to fix the problem. Meanwhile, Jose Saavedra, a member of the budget committee of Congress, promises to introduce a resolution calling on the Executive Branch to provide an explanation of how the change occurred.

Mind you, the Executive Branch has ignored previous requests for explanations.

Who needs that pesky constitution anyhow?

Showdown in Culture

2012-01-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

So who is in charge of the Secretaria de Cultura, Arte, y Deportes (SCAD) in Honduras this Monday morning?

SCAD has been run for the last month by a commission investigating irregularities in the ministry. The commission turned in its report on Friday and its commission expired Sunday evening.

Tony Sierra says that on Friday evening, Porfirio Lobo Sosa called him and told him that as of Monday morning he was in charge of SCAD. Speaking by telephone from Comayagua, when contacted by the press, he said:

"My job is to return the Secretaria to normalcy and refocus on everything to do with the artistic, cultural, and sports development of the country."

But don't tell that to Bernard Martinez.

He showed up at his office in SCAD this morning to resume his job as Minister of Culture, saying:

"I don't have any official notification of the naming of Mr. Sierra as interim [head] in this job....I am awaiting some notice from the president that will make this clear, conclusive and official."

El Heraldo couldn't resist a dig at the presidential press office:

The defective press office of the Government House (Executive Branch) which is coordinated by Miguel Angel Bonilla, could not say if Bernard Martinez was fired or remained suspended indefinitely.

In addition, unofficially, El Heraldo has heard from a source in the Executive branch that Godofredo Fajardo, formerly Vice Minister of Sports, was informed of his dismissal by Lobo Sosa's private secretary, Reinaldo Sanchez.

El Heraldo also reported that the head of the SCAD workers union, Melba Bardales, assured them that Martinez and Fajardo were fired, and if they came to work today "it was only to pick up their things, because both already know they've been fired."

So: who is in charge of SCAD this morning?

Update 9:52 AM PDT: La Prensa now reports that Lobo Sosa has not, in fact, made up his mind what to do with Bernard Martinez. According to them (citing unofficial sources in the Executive Branch), Lobo Sosa appointed Sierra as interim head of SCAD while he decides who to appoint as the next head of SCAD. They go on to say it might be Sierra, or someone else. They did not say or even hint that it would be Martinez.

Military Hitmen for hire?

2012-01-16T05:48:00.000-08:00

Was the Honduran military paid to kill a Nicaraguan citizen?

That's what Nicaragua's La Prensa claims.

When Daniel Ortega announced that he would seek an unprecedented third term as Nicaragua's President, it raised all sorts of anger among the community of former Contra members who fought the Sandinistas in a civil war back in the 1980s with CIA and US military backing (look up Iran-Contra).

First to declare his opposition was Jose Gabriel Garmendia who in July 2010 announced he was organizing an armed rebellion against Ortega during a ceremony in Matagalpa to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Contra disarmament. Known as Comandante Jahob, he was known as a charismatic and brave commander among the rural anti-Sandinista population.

In late January 2011, he released a recording noting that:

It is aberrant that Daniel Ortega is doing what he wants with the constitution of Nicaragua.

In the recording he stated he had enough people, with an organized command structure. He called on ex-president Arnoldo Aleman and Fabbio Gadea, the two candidates opposing Ortega in the election, to set aside their political aspirations and unite against Ortega. Garmendia continued:

The worst thing that could happen is the re-election of Daniel Ortega and that re-election should not be possible

Ortega had managed to get the largely Sandinista Party Nicaraguan Congress to change the constitution to allow he to run for a third term. Ortega dismissed Garmendia's threats as those of a common criminal affiliated with the drug runners and coup-conspiring officers of the Honduran military.

Two weeks later, Garmendia lay dead in the mountains. He was either shot by Nicaraguan soldiers or intelligence officers (according to Nicaraguan media) or killed by a jealous farmer in the region (according to an official Police investigation).

A second group, the Fuerza Democrática Comandante 380 (FDC 380, a reference to former Contra Enrique Bermudez who was known as Comandante 3-80), is headed by Santos Guadalupe Joya Borge, known as Comandante Pablo Negro. It was organized in April, 2011. In November, 2011, the FDC announced it was an

"armed organization in defense of the democracy, liberty, and human rights which had been cut by the dictatorial regime of Daniel Ortega"

Early in January this year rumors began to circulate in the Nicaraguan press that the FDC was organizing in Honduras, probably in the El Paraiso province where the Contras had been based in the 1980s. Then they called El Paraiso "New Nicaragua" and terrorized the local Honduran population. The Honduran military announced they would check into that on January 9, and that they would be coordinating with the Nicaraguan military, who might know more about it than they did.

However, the FDC had already announced on January 7 that Comandante Pablo Negro had been captured by the Honduran military or police, two days before the Honduran military said they'd go looking for him.

They already had him when they announced they'd go looking for him.

Indeed the Nicaraguan press on the 8th of January said that the Honduran security forces were paid $2 million to pick Joya up. This is also what Roberto Petray, President of the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights, told the press.

On Thursday, Joya's lifeless body was found in Honduras, 300 meters from the border (and the border crossing of ) in El Paraiso Department. He had been shot twice. His family, who arrived in Tegucigalpa to collect the body on Friday, said that he had been captured by four Honduran soldiers in El Paraiso. A silver Toyota pickup with four different soldiers came from the direction of the Nicaraguan border to pick him up and return him to Nicaragua the same day, January 7.

He never made it.

The Honduran police spokesperson denies that the Honduran police know anything about the capture of Joya Santos. The legal coordinator for the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH), Gonzalo Carrión. said it would by international standards fall to Honduras to do the due diligence to investigate Joya's death.

The Nicaraguan Police have opened an investigation into this citizen's death in Honduras, but indicated they will wait for Honduras to say what it knows before proceeding. They report the Honduran medical examiner will perform an autopsy tonight both to securely identify the body, and to determine the official cause of death.

There's not even a hint of an investigation mentioned in the Honduran press.

Massacre in the Aguan: Two Ways to Report

2012-01-12T07:49:00.001-08:00

Earlier this week, another group of farmworkers living in the Aguan valley died. Children as young as one year old were killed in an act of great violence.

This time, the details were so horrific that they have attracted international media attention. But readers of the Washington Post would be hard pressed to connect the story reported January 11 with its specific context. The Post wrote

Officials in Honduras say men armed with AK-47 rifles and machetes killed four adults and four children in a part of the country torn by a land dispute between workers and landowners....

Regaderos is in the Aguan River valley where farmworkers have been demanding ownership of thousands of acres of oil palm plantations that they say were illegally seized by landowners.

All I have left out in the quoted section above is the grisly details of who was killed and how, details that feed the sensationalism of this kind of reporting. So what we are left with is all the context the Post sees fit to provide. I suppose I should be grateful that they acknowledge there is a land dispute at all; but notably absent is any attempt to explain who the victims are, structurally, and who the likely authors of this crime are.

Honduran media rushed to fill the gap with premature elimination of suspects. La Tribuna writes that

The massacre of some eight people that occurred yesterday in Sabá, Colón, could be the product of a conflict over land, the authorities noted today.

The chief of police of Colón, Osmín Bardales, said that the first inquiries point to an enmity resulting from conflic over the ownership of some land.

Nonetheless it is not possible yet to make official if this is the true cause, but he clarified that the topic of the Bajo Aguan has nothing to do with this situation.

Nothing to see here: move along.

The attempt by Bardales to divert suspicion away from the conflict that pits campesinos against major landowners is to be expected. The telling fact that the attackers were provided with AK-47s simply sits there begging to be addressed: who has this kind of weaponry?

But don't look to places like the Washington Post to follow through on asking that question, or others that might shed light on this incident. This is, after all, the paper that on December 26 published an article that shed considerably more heat than light on the crisis of violence in Honduras today.

The headline of that story Grim toll as cocaine trade expands in Honduras, offered a simple storyline that we might call the default narrative for violence in Central America. Derived from the sensationlistic coverage of what is in fact a very dangerous situation on the Mexican border, it skips the actual step of establishing cause and effect. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world; it is a pass-through point for moving drugs from South America to the US; so obviously, the murder rate must be caused by the drug trafficking.

The story acknowledges that "the homicide problem goes back decades", but then plunges right on to say that the rise to 2011 heights came "as if the cocaine were gasoline tossed on a fire".

So tell me, what kinds of evidence show that drug trafficking is producing the increased murders in Honduras? Perhaps the Post did an analysis of statistics about Honduran murders?

Well, no. Instead, they stitch together data on drug flights into the Mosquitia with the story of a police raid on a so-called drug processing lab in the mountains near San Pedro Sula, before getting to their only argument linking the drug trade-- which is, without doubt, corrosive to public safety and institutional legitimacy:

Honduran police commanders say smugglers are also increasingly paying their contacts in raw product rather than cash, driving up local drug-dealing and the lethal violence that accompanies it.

Well. I feel like that is a convincing argument. "Honduran police commanders" say so. Like Osmin Bardales, who, within hours of a massacre, knows that it has nothing to do with the continuing conflict that shapes tensions in the Bajo Aguan. Who is sure enough that it is a private conflict to state that, but offers no explanation of the access that the antagonists (presumably, other peasants?) have to AK-47s.

The Post continues with a by now much-needed caution (but really, what reader other than someone like me is paying attention by this point?) that acknowledges that there is no causal analysis supporting their story line:

Researchers caution that the surge in killings here cannot be attributed entirely to narcotics trafficking. As in Ciudad Juarez, drug-fueled violence appears to have fostered an overall climate of impunity, in which bullets settle the slightest dispute and anyone can literally get away with murder.

Well, San Pedro Sula is not Ciudad Juarez, and Honduras is not Mexico. That "climate of impunity" might have other causes which an alert reporter might possibly, maybe, mention. Remember that whole coup d'etat incident back a while? when the de facto dictator defied the world, and unleashed the police and armed forces against the citizenry?

And that, of course, is where the next paragraph finally arrives:

Journalists, labor activists and gays also are apparently being killed at elevated rates, and political violence has flared since the 2009 coup that deposed leftist President Manuel Zelaya. Then there are the thousands of other Hondurans who seemingly have nothing to do with the drug trade who have been slain in carjackings, muggings and hotheaded feuds.

Yes. I would give a lot to know how much thought went into the "apparently": yes, journalists are being murdered at an extraordinary rate. And the Honduran police, including those commanders in the Bajo Aguan, try to claim that each such incident is due to "enmity", personal stuff, or else wave their hands at "drug violence". Yes, LBGT activists have suffered horrendous attacks. Yes, it became worth your life to be a labor or social activist.

And oh yes: being a peasant fighting for land in the Bajo Aguan is very, very bad for your health.

Here's what's missing from the Washington Post and other mainstream media: analysis. It isn't impossible. Back on October 6, a website called Honduras Daily took the amazingly difficult step of downloading and reading a UN report on global crime statistics.

That report considers the relationship between drug trafficking and violence to be non-linear:

Organized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking do not necessarily make themselves visible through violent and lethal crime. For example, in situations when areas of influence and/or illegal activities are clearly distributed among different criminal groups they may prefer to maintain a low profile and not to attract the attention of state authorities. Violence often escalates when an existing status quo is broken, as a result, for example, of changes in the structure of the drug market, the emergence of new protagonists or the “threat” posed by police repression.

In other words, violence along the Mexico and US border-- which results from cartels fighting battles to control a lucrative market, and fighting Mexican government efforts to break their power-- is not automatically a model that fits Honduras. The report continues:

higher levels of violence and homicides are not only associated with increases in drug trafficking flows, but also with decreases in drug flows that lead to turbulence in established markets, more competition between criminal groups and more killings. It is therefore likely that changes in drug markets drive lethal violence, not overall levels of trafficking flows per se.

For me a glaring omission in reporting dominated by the comfortable narrative of drug violence is the contribution of murders of women to the death toll. In a report titled Unbearable Levels of Violence, the NGO Social Watch draws the connection between impunity and the 2009 coup that so often evades the English-language media. Citing an "alarming rise" in violence against campesinos and a marked rise in violence against "transsexuals", the report goes on to say

femicide is also increasing. In the period 2003 to 2010 some 1,464 women were killed, 44% of them aged 15 to 29. In 2010 alone 300 women died violent deaths but in only 22 of these cases (7.3%) were the perpetrators brought to justice. From 2008 to 2010 there were 944 murders of women but the legal system only managed to punish 61 of the murderers (6.4%).

Similar figures have been reported by other advocacy groups, such as the Campaña Nacional Contra Femicidios. Writing in a statement relates October 7, 2011, this group reviewed the statistics on prosecution of murders of women in Honduras:

of the total of 351 cases reported to the prosecutor in 2010, only 179 (51% of the total) were able to enter the court as cases, and only 59 cases arrived at trial in court, of which 48 verdicts were produced, which indicates to us a percentage of 13.6% effectiveness in those cases.

They conclude:

While impunity exists we women will continue in a state of defenseless and the list of victims of femicide will continue to grow.

As, in fact, has happened with the latest atrocity in the Aguan, which added two more women to the death toll.

Impunity; the availability of guns; targeting of certain groups for political and structural reasons; and the ineffectuality and corruption of the police, who no one expects to actually investigate crimes professionally: all these factors should be the start of press coverage of crime in Honduras, not the end.

But then, that is a story that requires more specific historical context. So much easier to just draw a line from San Pedro Sula to Ciudad Juarez, and ignore all that is particular to each of these zones.

Aguan Agreement Endangered

2012-01-11T08:01:00.000-08:00

The agreement between the Movimiento Unificado de Campesinos del Aguán (MUCA) and the Honduran government to buy land in the Bajo Aguan from Miguel Facussé is endangered. MUCA alleges the government is not keeping their part of the bargain.

Decree 161-2011 was signed on October 4, 2011, and gave a 90 day window for MUCA and the government to agree on financing of the purchase through private funding, with the government acting as a guarantor of the loan. MUCA would be responsible for paying off the loan.

According to Vitalino Alvarez, spokesperson for MUCA, the government only got one response to their request for proposals from private banks. That response, from BANHPROVI (the Banco Nacional Hondureña de Producción y Vivienda) agreed to finance the purchase, at 14% interest with full repayment in 7 years, and a two year grace period.

However, according to MUCA, the terms required them to assume all the costs of acquiring the loan (legal, environmental, registrations, etc.) which combined with the interest rate and repayment period, made the loan impossible for them to assume, according to Vitalino Alvarez.

Further MUCA said the government negotiated the loan terms without consulting them, whereas their interpretation of the agreement calls for a mutual discussion of the loan terms.

In any case, MUCA is right; the loan terms are too onerous for them to assume. They've earned about 150 million lempiras since they took over the land in April, 2010, or roughly 75 million lempiras a year. They put about 30 million lempiras of that back into land improvement. The balance they divided among the 3000 families of MUCA. That works out to be about 20,000 lempiras per family, or $1055 a year. Simple math shows they could never earn enough, at that rate, from the African Palms to ever come close to paying off the loan, even assuming the 3000 families that belong to MUCA needed no income for those nine years.

Did the government (or the bank for that matter) bother to even do the math? Apparently not since they presented this deal to MUCA. It turns out MUCA is smarter than the members of the Secretaria de Finanzas that negotiated this deal.

MUCA did the math, and it didn't add up. It would be insane for them to sign the proposed deal. It would have hurt the Honduran government as loan guarantor when MUCA inevitably defaulted.

Back to the drawing board.

Winds of Change in Culture Ministry?

2012-01-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

The date for a report from the investigative commission appointed by Porfirio Lobo Sosa to look into the work conditions and financial management of the Secretaria de Cultura, Arte, y Deportes (SCAD) has come and gone. But that doesn't mean we can comment on the report.

El Heraldo on Thursday said that Lobo Sosa was not happy with the report, that it simply repeated the conclusions drawn under previous investigations without concretizing anything.

Perhaps more interesting, they say that Porfirio Lobo Sosa is having trouble finding a replacement for Bernard Martinez.

Their source, El Heraldo tells us, is an anonymous person in the executive branch, who told them:

"He's been looking, but he hasn't been able to get a confirmation from those he had thought of for Culture."

As a result, Lobo Sosa has extended for another 15 days the suspension of Bernard Martinez and Godfredo Fajardo, and has asked the commission to come back at the same time with a more concrete report-- one imagines, to give him cause for making the changes he is trying to engineer.

In the meantime, the Tribunal Superior de Cuentas (TSC) has launched an audit of purchases made during the last two years under Bernard Martinez's oversight.

There were so many accusations of impropriety placed with them that they had put this auditing of SCAD into their 2012 budget. The TSC has already determined that Martinez needs to better account for 2 million lempiras he spent, and that Fajardo needs to better account for 87 million lempiras, or be held accountable for repaying that amount to the state.

The Corruption Prosecutor is awaiting the results of the TSC investigation to bring charges on any documented abuses.

One problem with finding a replacement for Bernard Martinez may be that Lobo Sosa has publicly pledged that any replacement of ministers who were part of the much-hyped "government of reconciliation" will come from the same party as the minister being replaced.

In the case of SCAD, that means the Partido de Innovación y Unidad (PINU) to which Martinez belongs, which would greatly restrict the pool of candidates.

Of course, it may also simply be the case that, having suffered now from the notorious Myrna Castro administration ("Fashion is culture too") and the Bernard Martinez interval ("Very few of us know the concept of culture") SCAD is a Ministry no sane, qualified person would take on.

In the meantime, although suspended, Bernard Martinez and Godfredo Fajardo continue to receive their salary.

More Victims of Police Violence: Catholic Clergy Edition

2012-01-09T08:38:00.000-08:00

What does "impunity" mean?

In Honduras, it means that the police and armed forces are not held accountable for the violence they unleash against the people with no reason other than that they can. The number of victims and the sectors of society they come from exceeds our ability to track or report them. As has been repeatedly noted, few of these excesses are investigated, even by the human rights officials assigned this responsibility.

Now, add another group to those subject to random violence by Honduran security forces: the Roman Catholic clergy. And this time the outrage that actually gained traction with the international media.

The Latin American Herald Tribune reports that Father Marco Aurelio Lorenzo, pastor of Macuelizo, a small town in the Department of Santa Barbara, has filed a formal complaint with the Public Prosecutor's office in San Pedro Sula denouncing a police attack he experienced.

Father Lorenzo described the attack by the police, which took place on December 26, when he and two brothers were traveling to visit family, and stopped along the highway to rest. Honduran reports specify that they were between La Esperanza and Gracias, on the way to the town of Yamaranguila, in the heart of Lenca territory.

Eight police officers set on them and beat them, badly enough that they then took them to the hospital. The Latin American Herald Tribune quotes Father Lorenzo:

“They beat us on every part of our bodies,” Lorenzo said, adding that the cops didn’t realize he was a priest until they took the three brothers to a nearby hospital.

The story has been circulating in Honduran media for about a week. On January 3, La Tribuna of Honduras provided its version. Lorenzo is quoted as saying that he feared he would be killed:

“In the beginning I thought that they would assassinate me, but they did not do it."

This is how impunity leads to power: Hondurans live with the very real, and well-founded fear that if the police attack, they will end by murdering their victims to cover up their actions. The fear intimidates people and leads them to avoid exercising the rights they have under their constitution. That makes Father Lorenzo's decision to file a complaint especially important.

The Herald Tribune story adds that Father Lorenzo "is known in western Honduras for his activism on behalf of human rights and the environment". Juan Donaghy provides more details about Father Lorenzo's work in the community where he ministers.

His work places him in the company of many others who have been victimized in this way; the only apparent difference is that he wasn't deliberately targeted, but was randomly set on.

Why? in another country we could hope that the prosecutor, who supposedly "said in a communique that he would investigate the case", would clarify that. But we won't be holding our breath.

In the absence of an investigation, what we have is a story of three men, stopped to rest along the road in the countryside, randomly set on by the police. One of Honduran stories says the police robbed their victims of 11,500 lempiras during the attack. The local police claim that they were responding to an accident.

A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the kind of violence that exercises a chilling effect on the people of Honduras.

The parish of Father Lorenzo, in a statement of support for him issued on December 31, provide an indication of the corrosive effect such incidents have on public trust in government institutions:

We alert the public in general so that they don’t trust nor allow themselves to be seduced by the security forces which are the right hand of organized crime in our society and that don’t fulfill their function to protect, serve and care for the population in general.

They add a very serious additional charge:

the principal objective was to get into the vehicle and throw it in a chasm 300 meters deep.

This apparently unbelievable claim would be consistent with a police history of covering up violence by committing even more acts of violence.

This time, the police appear to have picked the wrong victim. In reporting last week, La Tribuna of Honduras noted Father Lorenzo's history of community activism:

defender of human rights and of the El Merendón forest, the zone his parish belongs to. He also battles against the installation of mining enterprises in the area.

In the complaint he filed, Father Lorenzo said

"Both the priests as well as the nuns of the Christian base community in the Departments of Copán, Intibucá, Lempira, Santa Bárbara and Ocotepeque, belonging to the Dioces of the west of Honduras, live in a climate of terror and threats from the repressive bodies of the State."

Fighting back and providing an example for his community, Father Lorenzo can expect to have his reputation blackened and his motives questioned. But his is an example that needs to be publicized in the face of the linked impunity and despair that state violence has produced in Honduras.

Secret Contract

2012-01-08T16:25:00.000-08:00

Africo Madrid, Interior Minister, has entered into a no-bid contract with Securiport, a Washington D.C. based company, for implementation of its Total Digital Control System (TDIC), a system which uses biometrics to determine that the same person who checks in is the person who boards an aircraft.

Once implemented, it will check the Honduran national criminal database for individuals with the same biometric data (fingerprints, in this case).

So, new technology, purchased on a no-bid contract. What's it going to cost?

Hondurans don't know. Madrid said the contract terms are secret, to prevent letting organized crime know the details of the technology.

Some secret. Anyone can use google to find information on what Securiport does.

Madrid told the press he's doing this because it's too easy for people to enter and leave Honduras without the police being able to accurately identify them. He told El Heraldo:

"we are trying to avoid the immigration of members of organized crime, terrorists, drug traffickers, kidnappers, arms traffickers and money launderers that use our country as a center of operations because of the lack of scientific mechanisms of immigration control."

Madrid said that the equipment is to be located at the 23 border crossing points where travelers can legally enter Honduras. Madrid said that the system will, through a satellite connection, bring back real time images of a person's face, and run vehicle identification information based on the license plate.

Such systems of identification are only as good as the databases to which they connect.

The best security would come from connecting to Interpol's SLTD database, a collection of lost and stolen identifications and travel documents as reported to Interpol by national governments. Former Security Minister Oscar Alvarez promised back in July 2011 that Honduras would do this. It's a good database and identified 23,000 people worldwide in 2011 traveling on one of the lost or stolen documents.

But that isn't part of the workflow outlined for customer's on Securiport's website.

Their website explains what their technology does. Fingerprint scanning is done using "ultrasonic imaging". This is both a strength and a weakness of the system. Ultrasonic fingerprint scanning is great. It avoids the distortions introduced by putting your finger on a glass plate, or taking a photograph of your finder tip. It is also said to have the ability to detect "live" versus "dead" skin, avoiding the problems caused by chemical burns and occupational calluses.

Ultrasonically obtained fingerprints are not entirely comparable to those obtained by other methods. Thus, as this manufacturer of ultrasonic fingerprinting chips shows, appropriate applications are for places where you can scan 100% of the population for comparison using the same technology.

What makes it possible for this system to interact with others is a US government project, by way of the National Institute for Science and Technology. This has over the years defined a finger print identification and storage system that constructs a vector based on the ridges, working around the incompatibility of directly comparing images collected by different systems.

This system codes 3 levels of detail. The first level data contains what NIST calls the "flow" of the ridges. The second level encodes the pattern of ridges, recording the paths of ridges, and their sequence. Level three encodes features along individual ridge paths. Recognition is usually performed (in the computer) by reference to just the first, or the first and second levels of data. From these recommendations, a series of International Standards Organization specifications for fingerprint data storage, interchange, and identification were issued.

So, not-so-secret technology.

And even if it were, that wouldn't explain why the contract cost needs to be secret.

So how much will Securiport actually get? That's Madrid's big secret.

Some travelers will now have to pay an additional $34, $17 on entry and another $17 to leave, in a "security tax". Madrid told the press

"Someone has to pay for it."

He continued:

"This security tax will be applied uniquely and exclusively to international travelers who enter and leave the national territory via the four international airports; they will subsidize the people who enter and leave by land and sea."

And that's how we can estimate the actual payoff to Securiport that Madrid doesn't want to reveal.

According to El Heraldo, all of the money collected will be placed in a special account and go to Securiport, about $27 million a year. The contract has a duration of 10 years. $270 million: not bad.

This special security tax was approved by Congress on December 14. They approved the increase in airport exit fees to $60.30, later rolled back by order of Pepe Lobo, around the same time.

All of this secrecy.

The added expense for air travellers-- including all those tourists on whom the country is depending-- leaving Honduras with the highest airport entry and exit fees in Central America.

How many criminals would it take to justify the cost of this contract?

Papel Sellado By Another Name

2012-01-03T12:24:00.000-08:00

New Year's brought a change to another legacy of Spain in Honduras. In 2012, papel sellado, or legal size sheets of paper with tax stamps affixed to them, is no longer valid for legal documents. Instead, Hondurans must get used to two different colors of Papel Especial Notarial, or special notarial paper. Same concept, different implementation.

In a Royal decree of 15 December 1636, the Spanish King, Phillip IV established papel sellado as a royal right and a way of conferring "trustworthiness" on legal documents. While the decree talks of improving the reliability of legal documents and this being a royal right, the income generated from it was equally welcome. Papel sellado sold for 4 or 8 reales. The decree went into effect in Spain in 1637, and papel sellado came to Central America in 1638 and replaced a tradition of writing legal documents on plain paper.

In the Honduran colony, papel sellado was initially scarce, such that many legal documents continued to be written on plain paper. It was not until the 18th century that papel sellado really became widely used in Honduras, and even then, one frequently encounters documents written on plain paper that bear the notation "written on plain paper because we have no papel sellado" in the Archivo General de Centroamerica.

Thus papel sellado formed part of the Spanish colonial legal and bureaucratic system brought forward to the present day.

This year Honduras turned its back on another part of its colonial history.

In 2002, Decree 194-2002 conferred on the Supreme Court the power to provide, administer, and distribute papel sellado of a single type for all legal uses. The court also acquired the right to determine the price of the paper. On November 12, 2011, La Gaceta published the Reglamento para la emisión, adminstración, distribución y uso del papel expecial notarial, issued by the Supreme Court to do away with papel sellado.

The new paper for legal documents is called "special notarial paper" and comes in two colors, green and orange. As I understand it, the green is for wills and contracts, the orange for legal documents with the government. Only approved notaries can buy the green paper, on sale at banks. Approval consists of authorization in writing from either the Comptroller of Notaries or the judiciary. Notaries do not require authorization to buy the orange paper from a bank. Each sheet will sell for a court established price of 20 lempiras.

There is no argument in the rule that special notarial paper is more secure than papel sellado. While the rule calls for the special notarial paper to be printed on "security paper", it does not specify any security requirements. Generally such papers are watermarked, and may incorporate metal or plastic threads, some of which might fluoresce under ultraviolet light. However, paper alone is not enough to provide security. It's far too easy to steal paper. Usually one specifies security features in the printing as well, as is done for currency.

The description of what's printed on the special notary paper provides no security. It is printed without lines. On one side is the seal of the Judiciary, on the other is a drawing of Themis, the Greek representation of divine justice, law, and custom. Below Themis is printed the phrase "Special Notarial Paper", the value, and the four year interval for which it is valid.

Both papel sellado and special notarial paper must be capable of holding 25 double spaced lines of text printed on them while maintaining strict margins.

So the special notarial paper seems to be "because I can", not because it has any benefit for Honduras or Hondurans.

Papel sellado by another name.

Whither Free Speech

2011-12-31T11:51:00.000-08:00

It is customary at the end of each year for some Hondurans to construct paper maché, wood, and fabric figures of the bad things that happened that year and burn them, to symbolically kill all the bad of the current year and usher in the good of the next year. Normally these would be filled with fireworks: rockets, mortars, and firecrackers, but this year there's a complete ban on fireworks, so they'll reportedly be stuffed with paper, grass, and other combustible materials.

It's New Years Eve and a weekend, so the reporters stayed close to home this year (coverage: El Heraldo, El Tiempo, La Tribuna, and La Prensa, and international press coverage in EFE and Univision.). Here's what Hondurans in Tegucigalpa want to leave behind.

One figure is a Transit Police vehicle with the bodies of Rafael Alejandro Vargas Castellanos and Carlos David Pineda Rodriguez thrown carelessly in the back.

Another is a tank driven by Porfirio Lobo Sosa and ENEE boss Roberto Martin Lozano with text that calls into question the final thermo-electric generation deal. To quote one of the creators,

"They have been cruel to the people of Honduras with the increases in the cost of electricity....It's a government that has the people on their knees, and they cannot do anything to get out of poverty."

Still another is a figure of a police officer, in a uniform and orange colored official vest donated by a police officer disgruntled by the corruption, holding up a sign that says "A Bribe or Your License".

Another figure is an assassin standing before a tree labeled, the "Tree of the Poor". "This is the assassin, we have to kill him so that he won't kill more people," said the creator.

The owners of an upholstery shop constructed a figure of a man and a woman riding a red motorcycle. They want to protest the new law that restricts who can be a passenger on a motorcycle.

The creators of the Transit Police Car report receiving death threats:

The figures were almost done; we had them outside the house but mysteriously the (figure of) the driver of the patrol car disappeared. Another day, around 6 pm as we were finishing up the final touches, someone shot at us from a moving car."

This morning, Police officers came by and confiscated all the figures related to police corruption. The commander of the National Police, José Ricardo Ramirez del Cid, ordered that the Police "not retain the figures", noting that:

The people have a right to protest. I call on all the police, and we are talking here about an order, that they let people protest; we do not have a reason to be offended; we are subject to criticism. If we have committed errors we'll try to fix them.

So far, not sign of anyone returning the confiscated figures.

Thunder and Lightning

2011-12-30T21:25:00.000-08:00

So, what's with this name, Operation Lightning (Operación Relampago) anyhow?

Is Porfirio Lobo Sosa just copying Manuel Zelaya Rosales?

In August 2006 Zelaya initiated Operation Thunder (Operación Trueno) as his solution to the growing organized crime problem. It proposed to employ the 30,000 - 60, 000 private security guards as a paramilitary force deployed to put a stop to crime, along with the military deployment of 10,000 soldiers to the streets.

Operation Lightning, by comparison, has only deployed 3000 soldiers, in an operation intended to help stop crime.

Zelaya's deployment was marred by military shootings of innocent civilians. Lobo Sosa's deployment has been incident free-- so far.

Operation Lightning has only been deployed in the cities of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, and the department of Olancho. The plan is to extend it to the departments of Copan and Atlantida in January 2012.

While Lobo Sosa claimed early success, with alleged reductions of 30 percent in the murder rate in Tegucigalpa, both the most recent journalist killed, and the assassination of Alfredo Landaverde, the former head of the Anti-drug taskforce, came after the Operation had been active for weeks.

And the question will still remain, even if demonstrated decreases in crime come from militarization, how much damage is done to civil society when the constitutional separation of civilian police and armed forces is so thoroughly compromised?

Rumors of a Coup

2011-12-30T08:40:00.000-08:00

Here we go again.

Marvin Ponce, Vice President of the Honduran Congress, says that he's been present at various discussions of political scenarios with politicians and businessmen in which they were discussing that Porfirio Lobo Sosa could be a victim of a coup.

According to Ponce, there are groups within Honduras that want to take advantage of the political destabilization and the internal chaos caused by the "discovery" of police corruption to get rid of Lobo Sosa:

These groups would like to take advantage of the Police crisis and can count on a sector of the Armed Forces with which they could go as far as to stage a coup,

Ponce told El Tiempo. He added:

there's a geopolitical game between Honduran politicians and businessmen.

Ponce was even more forthcoming in what he told El Heraldo's reporters:

In the last few days they have been talking about coups in political circles, that they no longer want Pepe Lobo as president. There is a geopolitical game between the US Embassy and powerful economic and political groups that want a government that serves them.

Ponce went on to allege that the US Embassy is behind an intentional destabilization of the democratic order in Honduras, pointing to the failure of Honduras to qualify for a Millennium Challenge grant and the withdrawal of the Peace Corp.

He also included a recent Washington Post article describing conditions in Honduras as out of control due to drug trafficking in his list of US Embassy efforts to destabilize Honduras.

So two and a half years on from the first coup in Honduras in over 30 years, and there's talk of a coup again.

Why?

Well for one thing, those who carried out the first coup, who did the unthinkable, got away with it, unpunished in any fashion.

Why wouldn't they think about doing it again if they're unhappy with Lobo Sosa?

More, More, I'm Still Not Satisfied

2011-12-30T08:31:00.000-08:00

General Rene Osorio was hoping that the 2012 budget would include an increase in the size of the military, by 1000 to 2000 soldiers.

He said he'd be happy if they even had to do it in increments, say 1000 this year, and 1000 next year. He also made it clear he wants 40 million lempiras more (slightly more than $2 million) just to support Operation Lightning, the military deployment with the police which Porfirio Lobo Sosa ordered back in October.

Why you ask, does the military need to increase in size?

Osorio cites an increase in the size of the Salvadoran military as justification. We are hoping that doesn't mean he is planning for another Central American war.

Closer to home, he argues that he needs more troops to support Operation Lightning.

Then there's forest protection, part of the mission creep in the military we wrote about here and here. Osorio already got funded in the 2012 budget to add the 2000 new soldiers destined for a special "forest protection" brigade. Congress member Rigoberto Chang Castillo noted that the 100 million lempiras dedicated for the forestry protection brigade are part of the 2012 budget.

Apparently Osorio wants the 2000 soldiers already funded for the "forest protection brigade", and 2000 more soldiers on top of those.

Mainly what he got handed in the 2012 budget was a 25% across the board budget cut.

So he's going to talk to his boss, Porfirio Lobo Sosa:

We are thinking of talking with president Porfirio Lobo to explain to him that the Secretariat of Defense should not have its budget cut, and logically also the Secretariat of Security.

So far, Osorio says, the deployment of troops in Operation Lightning has cost $17 million lempiras (about $900,000):

We cannot stay in the streets with the ordinary budget we have... If the president makes the decision that we need to increase (the soldiers in the streets), he better have more budget.

Osorio clarified to El Heraldo that the extra funds to support Operation Lightning are needed for food and fuel.

Public reaction (in the form of comments on newspaper articles) suggests that Osorio's arguments aren't persuasive to most El Heraldo and La Prensa readers, who oppose any additional funds for the military.

One commenter noted that both the police and the military have the same excuse, "they don't have sufficient budget to do anything" so they just get paid and sit on their ass for the last two years.

Another pointedly noted, "didn't we pass a Security Tax to cover these costs?"

Osorio's boss, Defense Minister Marlon Pascua said he's not that worried about the cuts to the military in the 2012 budget. He noted that there will be funding available shortly from the seized assets program (the proceeds of selling allegedly drug related assets), funding which is split between the Defense Ministry and the Security Ministry.

Rigoberto Chang Castilllo noted that the Finance Minister has set aside a special fund to help pay for Operation Lightning. He argued that the cuts to the military could be easily absorbed by reducing their office equipment and supply budget by 20%, without endangering their military readiness.

Now to wait for Osorio to explain why photocopiers are indispensable to the mission of the armed forces.

(title with apologies to Tom Lehrer)

As The US Withdraws, Hugo Chavez Moves In

2011-12-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

The United States has cut back its aid to Honduras.

The Peace Corp has withdrawn, perhaps for only a month, perhaps for a longer period.

Honduras did not qualify for the new Millennium Challenge grant competition this year, and so has been offered lesser aid.

BID and the World Bank are funding at lower levels than in the past.

Yet the government must go on.

Like Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Porfirio Lobo Sosa is turning to ready sources of investment in Honduras to replace the US and European reductions. China and Taiwan figure large in Lobo Sosa's plans, as do Brazil and Colombia.

But also among the choices being discussed is soliciting funding from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Suddenly the right wing in Honduras is quiet. Porfirio Lobo Sosa has announced that a return of Honduras to its Petrocaribe contract is assured; which has garnered nothing but praise from business organizations. US Ambassador Charles Ford, when Zelaya did the same, said charges could be brought against Honduras for violating the rights of existing transnational corporations and their importers in Honduras to sell their products at a higher price, noting it would reduce the profitability of Texaco, Shell, and Esso.

In June of 2008, ANDI and Transportation Council asked the government to supply them with lower priced Venezuelan oil. COHEP, the other main business council, also saw the Petrocaribe deal as good in 2008. PVDSA allowed the government of Honduras to buy 50% of the oil on a 25 year loan at 1% interest. The balance was sold at market rates. Honduras made its payments to PDVSA, even under Micheletti's de facto government, while using the income from investing the deferred payments for social projects in Honduras.

Now Hugo Chavez has offered to end the conflict over land in the Aguan by having the Venezuelan state oil company, Alba-Petróleo, pay the 546 million lempiras on the loan the Honduran government will set up to buy 5700 hectares of land in the Aguan at market rate. This would make it possible for the government to get better terms with the bank.

Title to the land would pass to Alba-Petróleo, which intends to mortgage it back to the campesinos of MUCA and MARCA.

Chavez also offered to have Alba-Petróleo build an African palm fruit processing plant with agreements to give MUCA and MARCA access to markets for their palm oil. This, by the way, would be in direct competition with Miguel Facussé whose DINANT Corporation has already built a palm oil processing plant in the Aguan, who expected to get much of the palm fruit from MUCA and MARCA to process.

The amount of land being discussed, 5700 hectares, is larger than that mentioned in a purchase agreed to between the government and Facussé of 4045.7 hectares. Its not clear where the additional land is coming from, but it may be that Facussé has agreed to be bought completely out of the Aguan.

This deal raises some potential legal issues, since under the agreement, Alba-Petróleo would presumably, temporarily hold title to the land before mortgaging it to the campesino organizations, and this appears to contrevene article 14 of the Honduran constitution, which allows foreign governments title only to the land occupied by their embassy. This could easily be overcome by having title pass to the Honduran government as guarantor of the campesino organization's mortgage.

El Heraldo reports that the rough details for such an accord have already been worked out with INA and it awaits Porfirio Lobo Sosa's permission to go ahead and negotiate the final details.

Facussé expects to be paid on January 4 for 4045. hectares of land.

Overbuild It And They Don't Come

2011-12-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

I think the Copan hotel owners misheard the quote from the movie "Field of Dreams".

In the movie, Ray Liotta, playing Shoeless Joe Jackson said "If you build it, he will come", which has often been misquoted as "If you build it, they will come."

The hotel owners in Copan Ruinas seem to have taken this to heart, building hotels to offer today some 1500 beds. If one bed is equal to 1 visitor for one night, then that's the equivalent of a built environment for 547,500 visitors per year (365 * 1500)!

Now the reality is that they are experiencing something like a 35-40% occupancy rate (it varies depending on the month) in Copan Ruinas, according to CANATURH data. Using the 40% occupancy rate, that means at best about 219,000 visitor nights actually are being passed in Copan Ruinas.

But that doesn't mean 219,000 visitors.

Individual visitors usually stay more than one night. The average stay reported in 2010 was 2.7 days, stays that would require two nights in a hotel.

That yields an estimate of around 109,500 visitors per year. That's a pretty good match to the actual reported visitor numbers for the last few years.

Not anywhere near the capacity of hotel rooms in the town, which would support 273,750 visitors spending the average 2 nights.

And nowhere near the 300,000 projected visitors wistfully contemplated in tourism stories promoting the celebration of the Maya calendar cycle ending in 2012. Who, if they actually materialized, would presumably have to double up in some of those currently under-utilized hotel rooms.

Peace Corp Withdrawal

2011-12-23T05:07:00.000-08:00

The Peace Corp is temporarily pulling out all its volunteers in Honduras while it evaluates their security. This comes after a peace corp volunteer was wounded in the leg on a public bus, when a passenger undertook to thwart a robbery attempt. A Peace Corp volunteer blog from Honduras indicates that that office's Safety and Security Office resigned, then shortly thereafter, the staff of that office were all let go as part of budget cutting.

The New York Times reported today that in addition to temporarily closing down operations in Honduras, the Peace Corp will not send any new volunteers to El Salvador or Guatemala, but for now, will keep the volunteers who are already deployed there in place.

Welcome to the End of the World (Or Not): Honduras Maya Edition

2011-12-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

2012.

Other than the title of one of the world's worst films ever, what does it mean to you?

If you are an archaeologist working in Mexico or Central America, it is likely to bring a sigh of resignation about a conversation no one wants to have. Yes, the prehispanic Maya inscriptions include mention of a date in 2012. Yes, that date "ends" one cycle of the "Long Count" calendar, the 13th cycle of approximately 400 years.

What comes next? Well, not the end of the world. Sorry, but there is nothing to suggest any Maya inscription predicts an apocalypse. In fact, if there were still Maya using the Long Count, we do not really know what they would do on December 22, 2012. There are two main possibilities.

One is that, since most Maya time cycles run in groups of 20, baktuns also should be counted in sets of 20-- which would mean December 22, 2012 would be 13.0.0.0.1, and some day 400 years or so from now, the dial would turn over to 14.0.0.0.0. Like the odometer on your car.

Another possibility is that a new cycle would begin: December 21 would be 13.0.0.0.0, and December 22 would be 0.0.0.0.1. This would be consistent with mythological texts from Palenque that tell of world-beginning events long in the past, which happened the day after a cycle 13 ended, and initiated a new Long Count starting at 1.

Based on confusing mythology about the beginning of time with a prediction of the end of time, a very large group of people have developed popular proposals that the ancient Maya predicted the end of the world, and it will come a year from now. For those who believe it, December 21, 2012 is not just an end of time, it is the end time.

Which brings us to Copan on Wednesday. As El Heraldo writes,

Some fear that it will be the beginning of the end. Others assert that it deals with a new era. What is certain is that together we all began this Wednesday to walk the path that will take us to see the truth face-to-face. The date is 21/12/12.

The clock began ticking. Within exactly one year the world will discover the truth about the enigma that will close the Maya calendar and for that, since yesterday the eyes of humanity turned toward Copán Ruinas, the Maya heart of Honduras.

In case the prose isn't purple enough, take a look at one of the images that accompanied their story:What you are looking at here is spectacle, the outright exoticization of the history of an indigenous group. Read carefully through the coverage and you will not find the names of any representatives of the Chorti, descendants of the authors of the inscriptions on Copan's monuments.

El Heraldo assures us that

Never before in the history of humanity has a generation been present at the beginning or the end of a cycle of baktuns, and therefore 2012 will be a unique moment, in which for the first time humanity will be witness to a change of epoch according to the Maya measurement of time.

That would be news to the ancestors of the Maya who lived lives as hunter-gatherers in 3114 BC, when Palenque's inscription record the beginning of our current era. But of course, what the passage means, other than asserting a universalizing claim to Mayaness as a unique Honduran heritage divorced from any actual Maya people, is that never before has any human being seen the kind of shows and spectacles that are being trumped up for this manufactured event.

On hand to start the festivities off was Porfirio Lobo Sosa, quoted by El Heraldo as saying:

"This is the countdown of this era that we all are waiting for and during these 365 days that today begin we have proposed to celebrate many events of an academic nature. We hope that the world will come to know the marvels of the Mayas and the impressive studies that have been done."

"We hope that the world will come to know": that of course is what this is all about: the desperate need to revive the tourism industry and get it to yield more money for the Honduran economy.

El Heraldo, again, is clear about making the connections:

In Copán Ruinas they are conscious that this opportunity cannot be let past and they want to take advantage to the maximum to revive national and foreign tourism...

Juan Ángel Wélchez, president of the [organizing committee, Comité Copán 2012], affirmed that they would do everything in their power so that Copan would be the center of attention of the world. "It is of greatest importance, this year coming, it is an excellent opportunity to relaunch Copan as a tourist product of high quality for the world. These last years have been difficult, but we believe that now it can change..."

The secretary of tourism, Nelly Jerez, also underlined the importance of promoting this tourist destination in the world and boosting enthusiasm for the Maya civilization that inhabited the zone. "This is the best opportunity and the best window that our country could have, our Maya culture. This is the moment of Honduras".

News reports say that the hope is for 300,000 tourists to visit Copan this year.

Of course, Copan is not alone in trying to exploit 2012. International news coverage gave Honduras shared billing with Guatemala, undercutting the repeated claim in Honduran media that Copan had a special role in astronomy and calendars, based on a now-discredited interpretation of the figures and dates on Copan's Altar Q as a reunion of astronomers.

Starting the festivities, Copan witnessed an enactment of a so-called "fire ceremony" and ballgame, as El Heraldo said, "following the traditions of the Maya". In other coverage, they describe the "new fire ceremony" presented during the recent festivities more accurately, as a hodge-podge of Mexican indigenous ritual and Euro-American New Year's ideologies:

This ceremony comes from the moment in which the calendar of Anahuac was invented, around 4,000 years ago, and has been maintained to the present, being celebrated by many indigenous peoples, although adapted to Catholic festivities.

So where are the Chortis as Honduras inaugurates this celebration of a badly misunderstood, garishly exploited version of their historical legacies?

On December 15, eighty Chorti families were evicted from land in the municipality of Copan Ruinas by police and members of the armed forces:

The Chortis, located in the community, asserted that they had lived for twenty years on the properties where they built their houses. Nonetheless, the sale of the property to another owner initiated the conflict that ended with their eviction.

Men, women and children remained in the street, with their petates, bundles of clothing and other belongings they left the property and set up in the middle of the street. The eviction was peaceful, but tears were visible among the women and children who remained without a roof.

Since five months ago the new owners of the property had appealed for the Chorti to move out of the lands; in the face of the conflict, directors of the National Council of Indigenous Chorti Maya (Consejo Nacional Indígena Maya Chortí) asked the government to assist in purchasing other lands. The government committed on the 12th of October of this year to give 8 million lempiras (about $445,000), but the money did not arrive and the campesinos were evicted.

The government promise made on October 12 came, of course, in response to Chorti occupying the Copan archaeological site. This is a tactic, as we noted at the time, that has been used by Chorti for some time to enlist the visibility of the site to make their own contemporary lives, poverty, and dispossession, visible.

Don't expect to see that authentic reality of Honduran Maya culture covered with the tourism festivities. After all, we don't want the international tourists to feel guilty, now do we?

Two Men On A Motorcycle: Bad

2011-12-21T02:06:00.000-08:00

Has the Honduran Congress just accidentally created a market for female assassins?

Recently, they approved a new law that would restrict ridership of motorcycles to a man and a woman, or a woman and child, or a man and a child, but not two men.

Oh, and the man must be the driver. No male passengers over the age of 12. The new law went into effect December 14 and is in effect for 6 months, until 13 June, 2012.

Why did they write such an arcane rule?

Assassinations frequently involve gunmen on motorcycles, with one driving, and one shooting. The Honduran Congress, being sexist, knows that only men are assassins, and so promoted this rule as a way of cutting back on assassinations.

Then there are the fashion notes in the law: those protective face masks the helmet has to keep the bugs out of your eyes when driving a motorcycle? the law prefers you not use them. They want to see your face.

Within three months, the Security Ministry is supposed to supply numbered vests to all 231,965 registered motorcycle owners, who are then required to wear them while riding the motorcycle. (No word in the bill about penalties for wearing someone else's numbered vest.)

No one on the motorcycle can be armed, even with a permit for the weapon.

The law can be extended indefinitely without further action of Congress by a declaration from the Minister of Security.

There's one exception to the two men on a motorcycle rule: police officers can ride with a male passenger.

Ironic since the police are corrupt, and thought to have been behind the assassination of Alfredo Landaverde.

The law went into effect on the 14th, with little effect. El Heraldo reported that many men still rode double on motorcycles in their roadway survey.

Anyone think this is going to work?

Elvin Santos Has A Secret

2011-12-20T09:31:00.000-08:00

On December 19, Elvin Santos Ordóñez told the press in Tegucigalpa that at any moment he might reveal some well protected secrets about the November 2009 election held by the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti, in which Porfirio Lobo Sosa was pronounced the winner.

El Tiempo quotes Santos:

"some day we will tell the reality of how those elections were."

Santos was non-specific about what secrets he was guarding, but left clear, El Tiempo reports, that he was talking about the results of the election, especially how many votes each candidate won. Until now he's kept silent, he says, because he wanted the wounds from the coup d'etat to heal, and Hondurans to reconcile.

On November 30, 2009, Arturo Valenzuela, commenting officially for the State Department said that he

"would like to commend the Honduran people for an election that met international standards of fairness and transparency..."

At the time we wrote several posts in our other blog (for example here, and here) about how untransparent the elections were, and how the official numbers literally didn't add up.

Enrique Ortez Sequeira, head of the Election Court (Tribunal Supremo Electoral), when asked about Santos's claim to know secrets, said

"That secret only he knows, but I also have other secrets, and if we discuss secrets, let's tell all of them."

Sequeira was approved to his post on the TSE while a political candidate for the Central Executive Council of the Liberal Party, and an operative for Santos's election campaign, according to El Tiempo.

What comes next depends on the relative strength of the different political actors, and the strength of the threat the secrets each holds constitutes for other actors on the Honduran political scene.

Airport Concessions and Taxes

2011-12-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

Interairports, owned by Grupo Terra's President, Freddy Nasser, and operated by Edgardo Maradiaga, has had the concession on airports in Honduras since 2000 and the current concession was set to run untiil 2020.

Now, Interairports has announced it will invest $129 million to build a passenger and cargo terminal at Soto Cano Air Base, also known as Palmerola, about 82 kilometers north of Tegucigalpa.

This would become Honduras's fifth international airport, joining those at San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, Roatan, and Tegucigalpa.

Interairports, or Aeropuertos de Honduras as it now wishes to be known, announced a $300 million investment in Honduras's airports, including $52 million for San Pedro, $42 million for Roatan, $45 million for La Ceiba, and $7 million for Tegucigalpa.

The proposed investment in a modern terminal and separate cargo area at Palmerola that will be able to accommodate up to 1 million passengers and aircraft up to the size of 747s and Airbus 330s has a projected $129 million price tag.

Curiously, that leaves $25 million of the proposed $300 million investment unaccounted for.

Back in 2008, Interairports told the Honduran government that it would take rather more to build the facilities contemplated in Comayagua: $166 million, to be exact.

Now, with the new proposal and new numbers, Interairport's concession has been extended by the Honduran Congress to 2040, without discussion or bidding by other companies.

The concession extension was a quid-pro-quo for Interairport's announced $300 million investment.

Perhaps needless to say, this deal does not follow government regulations for large contracts.

We can't help wondering how much of the construction work will be outsourced to Grupo Terra's construction division, thus moving the "investment" in airport improvements back into Freddy Nasser's pockets.

But there is a much more immediate return on the investment that was part of the deal.

After extending the concession for twenty years, Congress passed a bill nearly doubling of the airport exit tax paid to Interairports for operating the airports, from $37 to $60.30. This tax is separate from the security tax, collected to pay the cost of required airport security, and the immigration tax, paid to the government.

This would generate about $36 million/year for Interairports at current passenger levels, or, assuming passenger levels stay the same, $1.044 million over the life of the concession.

This move makes Honduras's exit tax the highest in Central America, where comparable charges range from Panama at $40 to El Salvador at $20. An executive of Interairports, who did not wish to be named, was curiously inaccurate when he told La Prensa that:

"the airport taxes in Central America revolve, with the exception of Panama, around 60 dollars and by this measure we are standardizing Honduras with the rest of the region."

This is really new math: $20-$40 is "around $60".

An Interairports executive told La Tribuna that this increase was appropriate because Honduras's 600,000 annual passengers was "very low." That's supposedly the total number of passengers at all four airports. But there's also something wrong with this number, since publicly available sources cite over 600,000 annual passengers at Ramon Villeda Morales airport in San Pedro Sula alone (here, here, and here, for example)

By way of comparison, Juan Santamaria Airport in Costa Rica serves about 4.1 million passengers annually. Tocumen airport in Panama serves 3.1 million passengers annually. El Salvador International Airport in El Salvador gets about 2 million passengers annually. Augusto Sandino International airport in Nicaragua serves about 1.1 million passengers annually.

Congress extended the concession to 2040 as part of a deal between the Executive Branch and Interairports, approved in the November 29 Council of Ministers meeting.

The question of why Honduras needs an airport in Comayagua alone that can handle 1 million passengers annually when that's more passengers than all four airports combined supposedly see now is left unanswered; as is the question of why Congress approved the exit tax increase without debate.

How this will affect tourism in 2012 is also unknown, but at least here, there's a clear indication of what the answer likely will be. In Europe, where high airport taxes are all the rage now, airlines expect a 5% reduction in passengers next year.

Juan Bendeck , president of the Camara de Turismo de Honduras (CANATURH), calls the new tax "robbery". But in this case, the robbery is taking place in plain sight.

Business Organizations At Odds Over Security, Minimum Wage

2011-12-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

The Asociación Nacional de Industriales (ANDI) decided last week to stop participating for a while in the main business association of Honduras, the Consejo Hondureño de la Empresa Privada (COHEP).

Why?

Because ANDI's president, Adolfo Facussé, was kicked out of the Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Interior (CONASIN) for proposing a candidate for president of that body, intended to deal with cleaning up corruption in the police. CONASIN has existed for a while, but scholars have noted that even in the first half of the 2000s, it "rarely convened". In 2010, Julia Schünemann reported in a study for the EU-funded think tank FRIDE that

in recent years the functions of CONASIN have been severely cut, turning it into a toothless, “ornamental” body, and ultimately reducing civilian oversight and participation.

CONASIN was essentially moribund. Now, with police corruption the story of the hour, it is being reactivated.

COHEP chose to remove Facussé as its representative to CONASIN because they did not approve of his suggesting a candidate of his own. Facussé was replaced by the president of COHEP, Santiago Ruiz.

Adolfo Facussé reacted to this as a personal affront:

How can I go to a place where they expelled me and ignored my representations.... I don't want a bigger mess. If I bothered them, I won't attend, I don't need them....I won't attend, but ANDI will continue to be a member.

It's the first time I've been expelled from an organization, and that's why I resent it. If it was the second or third time, I'd be used to it.

ANDI also has decided not to participate in minimum wage negotiations, while COHEP will be participating. According to Facussé, that is a change from a position the business associations had agreed on, to not participate with Lobo Sosa in this exercise (which, readers will remember, was one of the presidential functions that polarized the business community against Manuel Zelaya Rosales during his term as president). Facussé said

In the last meeting of presidents of business organizations carried out by COHEP it was decided that we were not going to participate, I don't know if that organization changed its opinion, I am not attending the meetings now since they expelled me as a member of the Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Interior.

Regardless of whether they participate or not, ANDI member businesses will be bound by any agreements that come out of wage negotiations.

The ANDI-COHEP conflict, which Facussé makes seem very personal, represents a fragmentation in what until now was a united front in the business community.

Never Mind

2011-12-15T09:37:00.000-08:00

Porfirio Lobo Sosa announced Wednesday morning that if Honduras didn't qualify for the Millennium Challenge grants competition this year, next year he would consider withdrawing from the competition for chance at $200 million in program funds and projects.

They told me that I should defer (another year). What's going on? I have been thinking of telling the Vice President (Maria Antonieta Guillen) that she should say that in the following year we will waive it, because they show that they don't behave well, what it is, it isn't fair. When they want to help, they help. There are countries that don't go around with so many things.

He added:

My mother had a saying. She told me: "My son, do good and don't look at anyone else". When you want to help, you help; this gives me, I don't know, I feel at times as if someone said I have money but if you want me to give it to you, do this and that. I'll tell you something: I received this country not at zero, but at minus 10....

Talking about what he felt were too-demanding requirements, he said:

We haven't hidden the weaknesses that we have, all the will, the affection and gratitude, but I feel that it shouldn't have to do with passing an exam. If the brother who is there is not able to investigate, because I recognize, I have the will to clear things up, but not the capacity.

He also criticized the United States for its lack of support for developing the investigative service of the police in Honduras:

I have never hidden my concern with what has happened with the journalists. Never, either, have I hidden that we don't have the ability to investigate... if a country wants to help us and knows that we have a problem with investigations, then what they should do is say "Look sir, I will send you a contingent of 50 investigators to clear up the crimes."

That left the Presidential Minister, Maria Antonieta Guillén to clean up the mess. Late Wednesday she read a statement to the press that said (in full):

The government of the Republic recognizes the good relations with the government and people of the United States and thanks them for the support and resources they've given which support the different program and projects that benefit our people.

At the same time, we would like to emphasize the positive impact that the first Millennium Challenge grant compact left for our compatriots.

The government of Honduras is making a great effort to reach the agreed levels in security, human rights, and the struggle against corruption.

It is in the permanent interest of the people and government of Honduras to agree to new or existing programs that will contribute to the well being of the Honduran people.

She went on to say:

"There's no contradiction between what I said, and what he (Lobo Sosa) said. They have helped us a lot."

Honduras's previous evaluation, in 2010, disqualified it in part based on measures of corruption, freedom of information, and economic activity.

On Thursday, it was confirmed that they would not be included in the current Millennium Challenge Corporation funding either.

Delayed Gratification, Military Edition

2011-12-13T05:05:00.000-08:00

In 2008, under the government of Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Honduras asked the United States for military aid to include 4 Maule MXT-7-180 aircraft with Lycoming O-360-C1F engines. They also asked for replacements for the current AT-27 flight training aircraft.

Somewhere along the line, that request, which was granted, got delayed, and the aircraft were never received.....until now.

The US Southern command has now delivered two batches of two Maule aircraft, painted a fetching yellow, to the Honduran Air Force.

These are relatively slow aircraft (top speed 164 MPH or 256 KMH) that can carry up to six passengers, or equivalent weight in cargo, for up to 1000 miles (1600 km.).

La Tribuna said the Maule Air 7-180s will be used in pilot training, search and rescue, and aerial spying, as well as disaster relief.

This echoes a story from June of 2008, in the Moultrie, Georgia, Observer that quoted Honduran Air Force Colonel Jorge Cabrera saying that while the primary use would be for air force pilot training, they could also serve in search and rescue, surveillance, and reconnaissance. (Moultrie is the location of the Maule Air, Inc., manufacturer of these planes.)

Some Honduran press reports suggest that these small planes will now be used as part of the drug interdiction program in Honduras, though how has not been made clear.

The US Embassy in Honduras made note of the delivery of the Maule aircraft in a press release marking the visit of SOUTHCOM Commander Douglas Fraser.

So what's the explanation for the long delay in turning over the last of the Maule aircraft first requested in 2008?

Some Honduran media mentioned the suspension of military aid that followed the coup of June 2009 as contributing to the delay. Announced September 3, 2009, the suspension of aid came so late that it had no real effect on the political emergency. But that doesn't mean it didn't have substantial effects on specific programs. So we decided to try to follow the money here.

International media attributed the financing for the Maule aircraft just delivered to the Foreign Military Financing Program of the Department of Defense.

According to an October 2011 GAO review, over $6.5 million in Foreign Military Financing Program funds (administered by the Department of State) were suspended in September 2009. Suspended categories of aid were restored after the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa. A Congressional Budget justification of the USAID budget for Honduras, undated but after the inauguration of Lobo Sosa, projected $1.075 million in 2010 and $1.3 million in 2011 for the Foreign Military Financing Program. (The funding from this program for Honduras is not singled out in the "highlights" sections of the full budget reports, that give the only specificity to the proposed and completed uses of the funds in this program.)

This level of funding is a sharp increase from the total recorded for 2008 under the same program, when $496,000 was expended.

The sometimes unreliable Honduran media, however, gave the source of the funds for the Maule aircraft as a different program, Foreign Military Sales. Honduras received rather less from that program over the period of interest: $292,000 in 2008; $845,000 in 2009; and $117,000 in 2010, the last year for which we found data.

For those of you curious about how many Maule MXT-7-180 planes Honduras could have purchased with funds from either of those programs, we found 2007 models going for just under $160,000. A bargain.

Bernard Martinez, 2 Others At Culture Suspended

2011-12-12T13:59:00.000-08:00

Maria Antonieta Guillén announced today that Minister of Culture Bernard Martinez and his two Vice Ministers, Godfredo Fajardo and Tony Sierra have been ordered to absent themselves from the premises of the Secretaria de Cultura, Arte, y Deportes (SCAD) for the next two weeks.

They are to be absent while a verification commission is appointed and investigates the accusations brought by employees of SCAD as part of a human rights investigation of their management. When that investigation has been completed, Porfirio Lobo Sosa will make a decision as to their fate. The SCAD employee union took over the facilities last week and has asked that Martinez and Fajardo be fired.

Lobo Sosa has made it clear that if Martinez is fired, he will be replaced by another PINU party member, not a National Party member as Ricardo Alvarez has demanded.

And So It Begins

2011-12-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

Late December 5, the Honduran Cabinet, in a session without the participation of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, approved a decree declaring an emergency of public security for 90 days, enabling the Honduran military to officially assume police powers as soon as La Gaceta publishes the decree.

The initial 90 day period can be extended.

Ana Pineda, the Minister of Justice and Human Rights, argued against the 90 day period, urging that the public security emergency last no more than 30 days. Pineda stated that the measure might have repercussions for Honduras in the international community. She expressed concern that the military still have no actual training on policing or human rights.

In response to Pineda, the Security Minister, Pompeyo Bonilla, said:

"We live in reality; we need the presence of the armed forces in the streets if we think about the human rights of the most poor of Honduras....the first thing we give a soldier who is going onto the streets is a brochure (cartilla) on human rights."

And what if the soldier cannot read the booklet, as many are functionally illiterate?

Lobo Sosa did not participated in the Cabinet meeting, because he was in Mexico, but he approved of the outcome.

He also approved of the new wiretapping law, stating December 6 that

"We want to explain that the law is totally constitutional."

and that the new law

"will be a powerful instrument against organized crime."

He also pointed out that there were already people in the country with wiretapping capabilities (not legal ones) and argued that the new law will strengthen sanctions against them.

In a meeting the same morning called by Juan Orlando Hernandez, president of Congress, that most notably did not include the Minister of Justice and Human Rights Ana Pineda, he reported that participants unanimously thought the wiretapping law was a good idea. Pineda, of course, came out against the specific revisions to the law as potential human rights violations, but she was ignored yet again.

International news coverage, in a predictable repetition of their failure to understand the context for everything happening in Honduras, publicized the militarization of policing as an essentially positive move. The BBC wrote that "opinion polls suggest people feel safer with soldiers on patrol", ignoring the human rights issues raised.

The only voice mentioned against the move was UD member of Congress Sergio Castellanos, not identified by role or title, who said

We have serious doubts about the implications of sending the army to do police work... They are not prepared to deal with civilians and this will only strengthen their position in society after the coup.

As the Eurasia Review explains in an analysis published December 11, the coup is the context not just for this surge in involvement by the military in domestic affairs: it also has led to a drop in Hondurans' support for democracy as a political system. They note that the population in places like Honduras seems "willing to overlook an administration’s democratic lapses to achieve domestic security."

Eurasia Review cited a Latinobarómetro poll discussed in The Economist in late October that found that the number of Hondurans who agree that democracy is the preferable form of government fell from 57% in 2001 to 43% today, falling a full 10 points just from last year's proportion of 53%. Explicit support for authoritarian government rose from just 8% in 2001 to 16% in 2010, and is now at 27%.

None of this context seems to make it into the mainstream English-language media. Public opinion in Honduras should be treated as a sign of the erosion of a free society-- not an acceptable mandate for militarization.

Alfredo Landaverde Assassinated

2011-12-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

Continuing with the litany of death today Alfredo Landaverde, frequent critic of the Security Ministry, former Congressman, and former head of the Anti-Narcotics Commission in Honduras was murdered as he drove from his residence in Valle de Angeles to Tegucigalpa. He was stopped at a traffic light when he was shot to death by gunmen on motorcycles. Two other occupants of the car were rushed to a hospital.

I guess Porfirio Lobo Sosa's Operation Lightning, where the military are deployed in Tegucigalpa along with the police to cut back on crime, isn't working after all.

Journalists Assassinated

2011-12-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

Two more journalists were assassinated in Honduras this week. Radio journalist Luz Marina Paz Villalobos was being driven through Comayaguela when her vehicle was intercepted by assassins on motorcycles who shot into the moving vehicle and killed her and her cameraman/driver, Delmer Omar Canales. There were 16 bullet holes in the car, and 47 shell casings from various caliber weapons were found at the scene.

The car they was riding in was owned by Coronel Marco Tulio Leiva Puerto of the Honduran Army. Leiva is in charge of the forest protection detail of the Army. He told the press that Luz Paz was taking a test-drive to decide about purchasing it. These were the 17th and 18th journalists to be assassinated since Porfirio Lobo Sosa took office.

The Police are floating the theory that Luz Paz was killed for not paying a "war tax" to the gangs. She owned a small store in a neighborhood in Comayaguela. Such theories are usually the prelude to not investigating the crime, but Pompeyo Bonilla says that Ambassador Lisa Kubiske promised US aid in the investigation of the assassination of journalists, transsexuals, and lawyers.

In a surreal juxtaposition of headlines, El Tiempo ran stories headlined "Journalism under Terror" and "Still Vacancies in the Journalism Career" in today's edition. Do you think the two might be related?

Wiretapping

2011-12-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

Despite rampant police corruption in Honduras, for which Porfirio Lobo Sosa just approved a law to give the Armed Forces policing powers, now Juan Orlando Hernandez wants to give the police permission to wiretap.

Not only does he want a law to let them wiretap, but he wants it now.

Hernandez says they're wiretapping anyway, so the government might as well give them a legal way of doing it.

In other words, solve the illegality by making it nice and legal.

Some in Congress think this is a bad idea. PINU party member German Leitzelar said:

"It would be a delicate thing to put into the hands of agents in the judicial branch infiltrated by organized crime a weapon so powerful as wiretapping."

Analysts pointed out that such laws have failed in other Central American countries, where they've been used for political blackmail more than they've been used against organized crime.

The Minister of Justice and Human Rights, Ana Pineda, has come out against this law as unconstitutional because it violates the right to privacy.

Even the Commissioner of Human Rights, Ramon Custodio, who sees crime as the most serious human rights issue in Honduras, has come out against the proposed new law.

Still, Hernandez intends to fast-track it.

There already is a law in Honduras that governs wiretapping. Article 223 of the Codigo Procesal Penal spells out the conditions that must be fulfilled to authorize the interception of communications. It reads, in full:

A Judge, at the petition of the Public Prosecutor or other lawyer in his office, may order via a well founded resolution, the recording of the telephone, computer, or other kinds of analogous signals made by the accused or any other person directly or indirectly related to the crime being investigated.

The Judge should weigh in his resolution the gravity of the crime being investigated, the utility and proportionality of the measure.

The intervention in communications treated in this Article might be the identification and recording of the origin, the destination, or both or in the knowing and recording of the content.

In the act which authorizes the intervention, the Judge shall determine who carries out the intervention.

The intervention may not last more than 15 days, but may be extended by the Judge, at the request of the Public Prosecutor or lawyer in his office, for additional 15 day periods, by founded acts, as long as the conditions which initially justified the adoption of the measure remain true.

The recordings, once made, will be given only to the Judge who ordered them, within five days of the termination of the intervention, and every one of the successive extensions. In the case of extensions, the recordings will be turned over to the Judge within sufficient time for the Judge to consider them before reaching a conclusion about extension. Only the Judge may know the contents of the recordings. If they are related to the crime under investigation, the Judge may order transcripts prepared so they can be used in the legal process.

The people charged with making the recordings or the transcriptions must keep secret the contents of the recordings and if they leak the information, will incur legal responsibility.

The recording of a communication by one of the parties without fulfilling the requirements outlined in this Article will lack all probative value.

Juan Orlando Hernandez argues that, because this Article lacks specific procedures for how the recording will be made, his new law is necessary.

In fact, the current law contains what Hernandez's law lacks: judicial protection of the Honduran populace's right to privacy under the constitution. Currently, no wiretapping intercepts can legally occur without a judge's review and approval. Hernandez's law would eliminate judicial review.

Mario Perez, the Congress member Hernandez commissioned to write the new law, says that it will create a Unit for Communications Interception which will both determine when intercepts are necessary and authorize them.

Let me emphasize that this leaves judges out of the loop. The new wiretapping Unit will both determine an intercept is necessary and carry it out, all without the review of a judge, according to Perez.

Mario Perez is getting into a pattern here. He was also part of the committee that wrote the unconstitutional interpretation of Article 274 of the constitution, twisting it to grant full policing powers to the military. Constitutional guarantees seems to mean little to him, other than being obstacles.

Meanwhile, the legislators are ignoring the objections of both the Minister of Justice and Human Rights, Ana Pineda, and the Commissioner of Human Rights, Ramon Custodio. As with the departed Sandra Ponce, events like these make it clear that human rights positions are simply there to satisfy international organizations: the Honduran legislature sees no need to pay attention when these individuals tell them they are acting unconstitutionally.

So what is "Culture" in Honduras these days?

2011-12-03T20:30:00.000-08:00

In what could be a metaphor for its current state, on November 17, the Ministry of Culture, Art, and Sports left a semi-trailer containing its mobile stage blocking a lane of a major thoroughfare in downtown Tegucigalpa. The Ministry has consistently declined to loan the stage for programming when requested. It is a former asset that simply has become an abandoned truck load.

Last year the Ministry discontinued the BiblioBus, a mobile Library that visited remote communities, only allowing it to travel if the community paid for the fuel consumed and provided lodging and meals for the staff.

So what is SCAD doing with its funds this year?

The press coverage we have found covers only a few events, but those tell an interesting story: continuing a trend begun by Myrna Castro, appointed to run the ministry during the de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti, the events SCAD promoted this year seem to have less to do with awareness of Honduras' own culture, and more to do with implementing a weak reflection of a global kind of "culture".

Not that there is all that much to judge by. Press reports show that the ministry has done some of what we might think of as its normal honorific activities, awarding certificates to some athletes, awarded the medals of art and literature (but not science). It has also published some books.

All of this took place in Tegucigalpa. What has SCAD done for the rest of the country?

At least one press critic answers that question: nothing.

In an editorial in La Tribuna, Miguel Osmundo Mejia Erazo says

The reality is that little or nothing has been done by Culture, Art, and Honduran Sports...

That's not entirely accurate. The ministry funded a concert performance of Carmina Burana, the cantata by German composer Carl Orff. The ministry also partially funded an international food festival.

We cannot help hearing echoes of the Euro-centric "fashion is culture, also" of the lamented Castro in these decisions about where to invest the ministry's resources. We happen to love Carmina Burana, but there is a lot of Honduran music that doesn't appear to be on the radar screen of the new ministry.

This move to a vision of high "culture" located somewhere outside Honduras also calls for renewed reflection on the famous interview in which Bernard Martinez provided his own definition of culture as a quality of the individual person.

At the time, we confessed to being uncertain if we understood the minister. It now seems clear that we did.

What he thinks his ministry should promote is not the distinctive practices of a people that mark their historical presence.

It is culture in the sense of "someone with culture", someone who has cultivated a set of values and behaviors, historically usually those of a restricted class set as the standard for others. Culture as fashion; culture as European symphonic music; but where is the culture that only the Honduran ministry could possibly encourage?

Culture Wars

2011-12-01T21:36:00.000-08:00

Parts of the National Party hate Porfirio Lobo Sosa's government of "unity"; it has a small number of cabinet Ministers from the other political parties.

The reason they hate it, and continue to call for the removal of all Ministers who are not National Party members, is that Ministers hire employees to positions within the Ministry.

In Honduras, those jobs are treated as the spoils of the party in power. Thus, the logic is that all employees at all Ministries (who are not protected under civil service laws) should be active supporters of the party in power.

So it galls National Party loyalists like Ricardo Alvarez that non-party members control a few of Lobo Sosa's Ministries. On November 23 he again called for the removal of Jacobo Regalado (Agriculture and Cattle), Rigoberto Cuellar (Natural Resources), Bernard Martinez (Culture, Art, and Sports), Cesar Ham (National Agrarian Institute), and Felicito Avila (Labor).

Porfirio Lobo Sosa told the press to "pay no attention to Alvarez," but of course, the Honduran media, like their colleagues elsewhere, like a good dispute.

The most recently aggrieved Nationalists are 80 or so who were let go by the Minister of Culture, Art, and Sports (SCAD), Bernard Martinez.

These were all from the division overseen by the Vice Minister of Sports, Godfredo Fajardo. Martinez attempted to fire Fajardo (who recently admitted to working only 2 days a week) in July. At the time, Martinez took back all responsibility for the Sports division, including hiring and firing. He let these 80 National Party members go in July, then reportedly hired back 10 National Party members, filling the remaining positions with 70 or so members of his own PINU party.

Lobo Sosa forced Martinez and Fajardo to make up after the July blow up, but the rift is still there.

On November 28, the Nationalist Party members fired from SCAD went to complain to the party Central Committee, saying that the party was not doing enough to control the "spoils" of governing and not rewarding enough party members with jobs.

On November 29, Godfredo Fajardo started a hunger strike in support of the fired SCAD workers. Fajardo is demanding the firing of Minister Bernard Martinez and, in an unusual, perhaps unprecedented move, also called for his own firing.

Tony Sierra, the Vice Minister for Culture, told a prosecutor for human rights that he was frustrated because the Minister had not let him carry out a single one of the projects for which they have plans and a budget.

"No projects have been carried out because the Minister has not approved them. I have told him I don't agree with some of his actions; I don't understand."

Nothing is happening in the Sports division under Fajardo either, because the Minister appropriated his budget. Fajardo, who is a bit vulgar, said of his connection with SCAD, "I only come to pee."

Complaints to the Human Rights Prosecutor's office from other SCAD employees include not being paid for four months at a time, death threats, intimidation, and abuse of funds.

El Heraldo reported Wednesday that the Tribunal Supremo de Cuentas will cite both Bernardo Martinez and Godfredo Fajardo for what appear to be improperly supported expenditures of their budget.

In Martinez's case, it's 2 million lempiras ($105,000.00) for which there is no paperwork supporting the expenditure. For Fajardo, the problem is 87,000 lempiras (about $4,600) he received in expense reimbursements without supporting paperwork or reports on the business purpose of the expenditure. Fajardo specifically is billing the government for travel to the matches of a boxer he manages.

Both will have 60 days from being cited to clarify the legality of the expenditures.

Lobo Sosa has reiterated over and over again that his government will close out in 2014 with the same political parties represented in it as he started with. He told the press:

"As my government began, that's how it will terminate with members of different parties, if some leave to campaign we will substitute for them someone from the same party."

What does that mean if Martinez is found to have mismanaged the Ministry of Culture? Either he will continue-- presumably with the same undistinguished record seen to date-- or Porfirio Lobo Sosa will have to identify a second PINU member for whom there is some rationale as a new candidate. Considering the murkiness of the qualifications Martinez had for the position, that should be a really interesting second act, politically.

Unfortunately, though, in the meantime the people of Honduras are no longer getting any of the benefits they should be able to expect from this government agency.

Military Policing Again

2011-11-30T08:01:00.000-08:00

Porfirio Lobo Sosa is standing firm; he wants the Honduran armed forces to have police powers; never mind that it takes us back to Honduras before 1986. That was the year the Honduran Congress voted to separate the Police and military.

After a several hour meeting with the top brass of the National Police, Lobo Sosa told the press:

"I convened a meeting with the heads of the police to explain that my determination [to proceed] with the participation of the institution of the armed forces is firm and that there is no reason for there to be trouble between either institution."

Lobo Sosa also called on civil society to support his security actions, and in particular mentioned the debate begun in Congress Monday. Congress proposes to interpret Article 274 of the Honduran constitution as giving the military some policing powers, including the ability to stop, search, and detain individuals.

Lobo Sosa stated that the military supported his actions, and that they had asked for a legal basis to act as police. He said:

"They have told me that it is not possible that the Armed Forces, being able to aid our people, cannot do so; we ask that we be given the legal right [to help]."

Lobo Sosa acknowledged that the military does not have the right kinds of training to carry out the role he envisages for them, and so has requested that the UN provide accelerated police training for the soldiers.

While El Heraldo wrote that the new law would enable up to 180 days of military policing via presidential decree, Alfredo Saavedra, a Liberal Party Congress person, said they were looking at a year and a half (545 days) life for the decree.

Lobo Sosa told La Tribuna that the militarization of policing would last as long as necessary to clean up the National Police.

Under Honduran law, emergency decrees that do not restrict constitutional guarantees can be assigned any desired duration, so these extended time frames would actually be legal.

In fact, the current draft of the law is not the limited grant of policing powers described in the government's statements to the press.

The current draft of the new law, in full, reads as follows:

Article 1: To interpret the second and last paragraphs of Article 274 of the Constitution of the Republic, in the sense that the Armed Forces may carry out specific police functions when there is declared a state of emergency in public security, through a decree from the executive branch by the President of the Republic and the Cabinet, as an exceptional case and in conformity with the corresponding legal regulations

To interpret the second and last paragraphs of article 274 of the Constitution of the Republic in the sense that, with the proposition of restoring public order and achieving social peace and respecting the Constitution: In exceptional circumstances the armed forces may carry out police functions for a limited period, in situations of emergency that affect people and property; may participate permanently in the fight against drug trafficking; also cooperate in the fighting of terrorism, arms trafficking, and organized crime; at the request of the Secretary of State for Security they may carry out limited policing functions if the Executive Branch issues the corresponding decree of emergency, establishing in it the duration of the decree and any other scope.

Article 2: The Executive Branch decree which declares a Public Security State of Emergency should guarantee:
1) the unrestricted respect of human rights
2) the constitutional guarantees
3) the dignity of the person; and
4) due process.

In acts of internal security which the Armed Forces carries out, they should be accompanied by a Prosecutor from the Public Prosecutor's office, or make known to one immediately the knowledge of these actions, as established by the Ley Procesal Penal; preferably the different police operations should be carried out in different geographic areas of the national territory, jointly or separately with the National Police, such that both institutions can achieve better results in their activities. While carrying out police functions, the armed forces must frame their actions within the terms and scope of the emergency decree, guaranteeing to their members the same rights (Article 125 of the Ley Organica de la Policia Nacional de Hondurs) as held by members of the National Police, and imposing the same responsibilities and obligations (Article 106 of the Ley Organica de la Policia Nacional); the coordination of operations in emergency situations is the job of the Constitutional president of the Republic and the Secretaries of State for Security and Defense, along with their respective commands.

Article 3: This present decree will enter into effect on the day of its publication in the Official Newspaper La Gaceta.

This draft of the law, still subject to modification by Congress, does not specify a limited set of policing powers for the military. By not specifying a subset of powers, it grants all policing powers to the military. They may carry out any function a National Police officer may under existing police regulations.

Yesterday the law, promulgated by Head of Congress Juan Orlando Hernandez, passed in its first debate session. So Congress will skip the second debate and go right to final approval, perhaps as early as today. La Tribuna reported today that the emergency decree has a duration of 18 months written in now, but Congressional Vice President Marvin Ponce said that may change depending on what the Executive branch wants.

Quite a sweeping change, for such a short legal text.

UPDATE Nov. 30, 2011 10:15 AM: The law was passed late yesterday on its final vote in Congress and will become law once its published.

New US Bases in Honduras

2011-11-28T05:16:00.000-08:00

The United States military continues to build bases in Honduras, with the public mission of supporting US drug interdiction missions and oversight of the Caribbean, especially the area from Honduras to the Dominican Republic.

The first of these bases, at Catarasca, in the Mosquitia, opened in April 2010. The US built this base from scratch, providing all the materials, logistics, and construction forces through DOD contracts. One of the DOD contracts that only partially built the base was for $1.9 million:

"Caratasca FOL [Forward Operating Location] Facilities", $1.9 million contract W91278-07-D0098 0001, with Eterna S.A., initially to be completed in May 2009, extended to August 2009.

Now comes word that the visit of the HSV 2 Swift earlier this year brought the materials to build a base on Guanaja, an international tourist destination previously known as a diving mecca for its pristine waters, and a celebrity vacation spot.

Honduras has never had a navy base in the Bay Islands. The Guanaja base, at a cost of $2 million, again built from scratch, contains buildings and a pier built by US Navy personnel, and technology supplied by and installed by the US forces. It will eventually house a Honduran patrol boat, the L. P. Honduras, that was recently retrofitted by the Honduran Navy at a cost of $790,000 after being abandoned for the last 22 years!

The base will also reportedly house both US and Honduran aircraft used for drug interdiction missions. Quotha listed part of the public contract for the base on Guanaja as follows:

"Design Build CN [Counternarcotics] Facility", contract signed June 2010 for $1.2 million, funded by SouthCom, for completion by Empresa de Construcción y Transporte Eterna, by September 2011.

So the running total for these two bases is upwards of $3.1 million.

But wait, there's still more.

The USS Oak Hill (LSD-51) is currently docked at Puerto Castillo, nominally so its Marines can hold joint exercises with the Honduran forces. Among the exercises: refurbishing the existing facilities here.

La Tribuna quotes a US Embassy release as saying:

The marines will disembark to work jointly with the Navy of Honduras in infrastructure projects to improve their living quarters, training, and security on the base.

They will also share information on maintaining weapons and military procedures, according to news reports.

This military aid, the Embassy explains, is coordinated by the US Southern Command. This project is partially built on the following contract:

Listed as "Puerto Castillas", "Team Room and Range," $350,000 funded by Special Operations Command South, scheduled for July-September 2011.

This contract allows a US presence at the only deep water port in Central America, one the Seabees improved in the 1980s to support the US bases in the Trujillo area (CREM, for example).

La Prensa said that the US Navy had not yet identified a place along the Pacific coast to build a base to support US anti-drug efforts, but this La Tribuna story says that the Swift carried out a similar "training" mission in the Honduran part of the gulf of Fonseca last March. As it happens, there is an abandoned base in the southern Honduran department of Choluteca, the only department in Honduras with coastline on the Pacific, previously upgraded by the US in the 1980s. But it is not clear whether La Tribuna is talking about this former base, or something else.

The 2010-2011 contracts include pier and barrack upgrades at Corinto, Nicaragua, along the Pacific coast, which may be better equipped to support the US Navy.

Add to the bases listed above a multi-million dollar contract to build permanent base housing at Soto Cano airfield in Comayagua, and you have an increasingly permanent US military presence in Honduras, now extending across all of the territory.

Xiomara Castro for President?

2011-11-23T06:15:00.000-08:00

On November 17th El Heraldo ran a news story claiming that Xiomara Castro, Manuel Zelaya Rosales's wife, is the candidate, by consensus, of the new LIBRE party, without ever having to stand for election in a primary. This in turn, was based on a La Tribuna story from the day before.

Trouble is, it wasn't true.

LIBRE includes five political currents, each of which has the right to name a primary candidate for president. These include the Movimiento 28 de Junio (composed of former Liberal Party members) whose candidate will be, if the Pope agrees, Monsignor Luis Alfonso Santos, outgoing bishop of Santa Rosa de Copan. The other currents are the Movimeinto Resistencia Progresista (MRP), the Pueblo Organizado en Resistencia (POR), the Movimiento 5 de Julio, and Fuerza de Refundación Popular (FRP).

According to La Tribuna, the FRP floated the idea of Xiomara Castro being a consensus candidate for the party. This was supposedly announced on the Facebook page of Los Necios.

La Tribuna attributed the posting to Manuel Zelaya, acting as coordinator of the FNRP, who they said wrote that

militants of the FNRP mostly lack a place in (eg, do not identify with) the movements described above that will go to the internal elections of 2012 for reasons that are irrelevant to treat here; therefore we have decided to create the FRP, which is directed by assistant coordinator Juan Barahona.

I am unable to verify this alleged Zelaya statement on the Los Necios Facebook page, since they decided to unfriend me over my questioning of their support for Col. Ghadaffi of Libya. But I tend to doubt its authenticity, since Zelaya's communications are usually published on the website voselsoberano.com, which remained silent on the issue.

It was on voselsoberano.com that Zelaya Rosales wrote his reply to the rumor on the 18th of November. His statement noted that the newspaper had written such an article making claims, but reaffirmed that LIBRE is a political party founded under the election laws of Honduras and as such, those laws and its own charter indicated how it would proceed to select its candidate.

Furthermore Zelaya wrote:

Remember that the Movimiento de Resistencia Progresista (MRP), one of the internal currents of the LIBRE Party, coordinated by Rasel Tomé, has taken the initiative to propose that citizen Xiomara Castro be the presidential candidate, by partial or total consensus of all the internal currents, which means that this decision will be submitted to the groups of the Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE) party, and they will be consulted by the election urns of the internal election.

So not only did La Tribuna get it wrong as to who was proposing Xiomara Castro as consensus candidate (the FRP led by Juan Barahona versus the MRP led by Rasel Tomé), but they got it wrong in reporting it as a decision already made.

So, yes, Xiomara Castro will be the internal candidate of the MRP movement, and her candidacy will be voted on in the internal party elections, supervised by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral in 2012. Only if she wins the internal elections will she become the party candidate for president.

And that should suggest just how unreliable the sources for some of the Honduran media really are.

Patriotic Alliance of Honduras

2011-11-21T05:43:00.000-08:00

There's a new political party in town. It will take the baby steps needed to found a new party this coming Tuesday. The Patriotic Alliance of Honduras (Alianza Patriotica de Honduras), a party founded by ex-military officers to support the presidential candidacy of their candidate, retired general Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, submits their 55,000 signatures (La Prensa says 90,000 but everyone else says 55,000) to the Supreme Election Court (Tribunal Supremo Electoral). Vásquez Velásquez will be familiar to readers of this blog as a significant force behind the 2009 coup.

Participating in the handing over of the party charter and electoral materials will be the retired generals José René Oliva and José Barahona Pérez, and the retired coronels Jordi Montañola, Allan Castillo, Gilberto Rivera y Lima Bueso. Montañola told La Tribuna that one of the goals of the party is to "rescue Honduras from ruins, to put it on a road to progress for all Hondurans without exception." The new party claims the support of all reservists and like minded Hondurans. It did not publish its charter or goals.

Inside Honduras the headlines were informative. La Tribuna said "The party of Romeo Vasquez Velasquez will present 55,000 signatures to the TSE," and El Heraldo said "The Political Alliance of Honduras initiates its road to power;" but Proceso Digital was more tentative, titling it "General who participated in the exit of Zelaya will seek to be president." Outside of Honduras, coverage was more blunt, generally adopting the wording of sources like Univision and Estrategia y Negocios: "Golpista military officer will seek the presidency of Honduras in 2013."

This brings to 3 the number of new political parties registered this year for the 2013 elections.

New Police Voice

2011-11-18T06:24:00.000-08:00

After only two months in the position, Silvio Inestroza has been removed from the position as Police spokesperson. Replacing him is Héctor Iván Mejia, former police chief of San Pedro Sula. Inestroza was appointed to head the public relations department of the Police when Pompeyo Bonilla took over as Security Minister.

So who is the new head of public relations, the voice of the National Police in Honduras?

Hector Ivan Mejia last held this job as head of public relations of the National Police during the 2009 coup. When a video surfaced at CNN showing troops shooting out the tires of buses filled with protesters on their way to Tegucigalpa to protest the coup and forcible exile of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Mejia told CNN

"Protesters will be arrested for vandalistic acts but they will not simply be stopped on their way to protests"

as if the video didn't exist showing exactly that happening.

In an August 2008 essay on the media and the Police posted to a website, Mejia had described his vision of how the media should depict violence in Honduras. He asserted that the Honduran media have for too long reveled in the sensationalism of it, and used it to sell newspapers. In a section on how the media should act, he wrote:

- In these circumstances (the media depiction of violence in Honduras) it is necessary to establish the undeniable necessity to establish a social control that establishes what we should communicate, and how we should communicate.

- Coverage of criminal activities should be the object of rigorous, contextualized reporting.

- Citizens have the right to be informed, but the police and judicial procedures should be respected.

- You cannot be neutral to those who threaten the safety of the population.

- The media should play an active role in the defense of democracy, avoiding giving extreme significance to those aspects of violence that put the system of liberties in danger or at risk. They should establish different treatments between those who violate the legal and social norms, and those that respect them.

Mejia concluded that the press must properly contextualize all criminal acts, making clear in their reporting the socially important context, so that people are not led to the wrong conclusions. The press, for Mejia, should be a force for forming public opinion, in this case, against violence.

The decision to bring Héctor Iván Mejia back is curious. Just two months ago he was head of the San Pedro police department. When Pompeyo Bonilla assumed the Security Minister's job, Mejia was removed from that post, as were several other prominent police commanders.

While commander in San Pedro, Mejia was in charge of the botched investigation into the shooting of 18 workers in a shoe factory in September, 2010, where his police failed to collect the shell casings as evidence from the factory.

At the time, Mejia told CNN that the factory was in a neighborhood where drug trafficking proliferated, and that soon became the official "explanation" for the killings. He told the BBC at the same time:

"Apparently the murder was carried out as part of a turf battle between small-scale drug gangs, given that the neighbourhood has conflicts because of the presence of gang members."

After that, the crime was never investigated.

A few days later he ordered the San Pedro police to put down a peaceful demonstration by the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular in the center of San Pedro.

He dismissed Sandra Ponce's investigation of the Police shooting of alleged gang members in 2010 in Colonia Planeta, an outer barrio of San Pedro, as "unfair" and declined to present the firearms used by the police officers involved for forensic analysis, according to a UNHCR report.

Also in 2010, when a sixth reporter, television anchor Jorge Alberto Orellana, was killed in San Pedro, it was Hector Ivan Mejia, as chief of the San Pedro police, who floated the idea that he was killed for personal reasons, not as part of a systematic intimidation of journalists in Honduras. Again this became the official explanation without further investigation.

This year, when Congressmember Marvin Ponce said that a significant portion of the National Police were linked to organized crime, Hector Ivan Mejia dismissed the comments.

Quite a choice as official voice of the national police.

Military Policing

2011-11-17T05:56:00.000-08:00

The Honduran constitution spells out the role of the military: what they can and cannot do.

Juan Orlando Hernandez, head of the Honduran Congress with presidential aspirations, wants to change that. He assigned a committee of legislators (Mario Pérez, Oswaldo Ramos Soto, German Leitzelar, José Alfredo Saavedra, Augusto Cruz Asensio y Marvin Ponce) to formulate an "interpretation" of the constitution that will use Article 274 of the constitution to grant policing power to the military.

There's a real problem with this.

Its unconstitutional.

When Congress wrote a constitutional modification that granted it the sole power to interpret the constitution, which is what is proposed here, the Honduran Supreme Court ruled that change unconstitutional. The decision said that the Supreme Court itself is the final authority on the interpretation of the constitution. In retaliation, for years Congress has delayed publication of that decision, but it nonetheless is law. Three Justices of the Supreme Court chose to speak out and remind Congress of the law on Tuesday.

Articles 272 and 274 of the Honduran constitution define the role of the military. Article 272 reads:

The Armed Forces of Honduras is a National Institution of permanent character, essentially professional, apolitical, obedient and non deliberative. It is constituted to defend the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of the Republic, to maintain the peace, the public order, and the dominion of the Constitution, the principles of free suffrage and the alternation in the exercise of the Presidency of the Republic.

To cooperate with the National Police in the conservation of public order to the effect of guaranteeing the free exercise of suffrage, the custody, transport, and vigilance of the electoral materials and all the other aspects of the security of that process, the President of the Republic shall place the Armed Forces at the disposition of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, from one month before the elections, until the decision of the same.

Article 274 expands on other missions that the Armed Forces can have. These include education, agriculture, environmental protection, road building, health, and agricultural reform. Under this article, the military may cooperate with the institutions of public security (aka, the police).

All of these additional missions require a request from the appropriate Minister of state for the military to assume the role. In the case of cooperating with the police, they must be asked to do so by the Security Minister. They cannot act as police, only in conjunction with police.

In the United States we have a strong tradition, indeed a legal mandate, that says the military may not be used for civilian law enforcement except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or an act of Congress. In the debate over the ratification of the US Constitution, the Federalists argued that the military should not be used against the civilian population, ever. The legal foundations are embodied in the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

In 1985, in Bissonette v. Haig, the US 8th Circuit Court wrote:

Civilian rule is basic to our system of government. The use of military forces to seize civilians can expose civilian government to the threat of military rule and the suspension of constitutional liberties. On a lesser scale, military enforcement of the civil law leaves the protection of vital Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights in the hands of persons who are not trained to uphold these rights.

Honduras has no such tradition. Civilian rule of the military is an aspiration in Honduras, one that was emergent over the two decades before the 2009 coup. Certainly the changes introduced with the 1982 constitution were an attempt to subject a strong military to a weak civilian rule, but the 2009 coup has brought this power struggle back to the limelight.

A change like the law proposed by the Honduran Congress would be step backwards, reinforcing the erosion of civilian control over the military that was set in motion by the Honduran coup. It is one among many continuing impacts of a coup that has not really ended.

FNRP New Political Party: Libre

2011-11-15T07:59:00.000-08:00

"The revolution is inevitable in Honduras"
- motto of Libre.

Libre is the short form of Libertad y Refundación, the official name of the new political party in Honduras representing the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP). The party will be known by its initials, PLR.

Manuel Zelaya Rosales submitted 80,000 signatures from Honduran citizens supporting the founding of this political party. Earlier this week, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) verified 63,000 of these signatures. This puts the party far over the required number of signatures to establish a new party (42,920, according to the announcement by the TSE). The TSE also approved the emblem of the party. The emblem appears on the ballot, helping illiterate voters to recognize the party's candidates.

As part of the process, Zelaya presented the charter of the new party, its electoral plans for the upcoming election, and evidence of organizational structures present in at least half of the 298 municipios of Honduras.

Libre's declaration of principles has been published on (and can be downloaded from) the FNRP website. The document is well worth a close and careful reading; we have posted our own English translation to enable readers to do that.

Among the core principles the party declares is the primacy of popular sovereignty. In the wake of the 2009 coup, the existence in the Honduran Constitution of articles that could not be changed was challenged by constitutional scholars as violating the principle that the authority of a constitution stems from the people. The Frente has, in its own processes, employed direct, participatory deliberation in the Assembly of Popular Power, which is specifically characterized as basic to the project of the new party.

While many aspects of the program proposed are entirely contemporary-- including the firm rejection of neoliberalism, imperialism, and neocolonialism-- the party also calls on specifically Central American roots. As a Morazanic party, it espouses the "dream" of Central American unity and projects that farther, as a basic call for solidarity of all the Latin American and Caribbean peoples of the Americas. Libre specifically calls for respect for religious diversity, secularism, respect for the rights of women, and calls for the eradication of discrimination on the basis of "race, sex, sexual diversity, cultural difference".

Libre is the second new political party registered with the TSE this year. The first belonged to Salvador Nasralla, whose Anti-Corruption Party registered in early October. The Honduran press has taken up the question of whether the founding of new parties will actually change the de facto domination by the Liberal and National parties, and, unsurprisingly, concludes that it will not.

El Heraldo quotes Rafael Pineda Ponce, who was part of the regime of Roberto Micheletti, saying the new parties won't change things: better the old and familiar than the new and unknown, he says the Honduran people will conclude. Of course, Pineda Ponce is busy promoting his own preferred candidate for the Liberal party, who he claims can unite its fractured factions: Mauricio Villeda. He reserves particularly pungent words for members of the Liberal party who also maintain (he thinks) an allegiance to Zelaya:

"O se quedan con Jesucristo o se quedan con Satanás" (They either stay with Jesus or with Satan).

Indeed. Never has the opinion of the Micheletti wing of the Liberal party been clearer. For them, all the principles expressed by Libre are whitewash for a Zelaya movement. And sticking with Zelaya-- well, we'll let you figure out who is Satan in this metaphor.

Honduras has a Police Problem

2011-11-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

And, contrary to English-language media-- including the usually more critical BBC-- it is not taking effective steps to solve it.

If you read the Washington Post, you will be told that 176 cops were arrested "for alleged connections to kidnappings, extortion plots and drug trafficking". Quoting the highest level Honduran source, President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the Post said

the mass arrest is part of a nationwide crackdown on corrupt police.

A spokesman for the National police, Silvio Inestroza, went further, claiming these officers had "links with drug gangs".

Drug violence is the one narrative about Honduras that US media seem to understand, so it is no surprise that Honduran authorities repeat it, and while disappointing, not even surprising that the US media parrot it back.

But in this instance, that is not in fact what is going on. To understand what is really happening, you need to ask, "Why 176 officers, and not others? Why those 176 police officers?"

As CNN International correctly notes, the 176 are the complement assigned to one police outpost in Tegucigalpa. So, not quite so sweeping a "nationwide crackdown" of the Honduran police force-- which totals around 11,000 members.

CNN's lead paragraph falls into the trap, describing the action as part of a "a campaign to cleanse its national police."

Buried far down in their story is the fact that this station is where four police officers worked who are suspected in the murder of two university students, including the son of university rector Julieta Castellanos.

The Washington Post managed to blur that one-to-one correspondence entirely, writing only that

The detentions late Wednesday came three days after the president fired six high-ranking officers following the release by police of four policemen who allegedly killed the son of a university chancellor.

The "detentions" not only came three days after-- the detained were the colleagues who worked with the suspected killers, and who let them walk out.

Castellanos, of course, was a member of the official "Truth Commission" on which the US State Department placed much of its hopes for national reconciliation, despite Honduran skepticism. So the murder of her son is international news.

Castellanos herself used the opportunity to point out that her son's murder is part of a pattern of police complicity in violence that extends beyond the children of the socially- and politically- prominent.

This is a pattern that English-language media have not covered particularly well. And the present stories are simply additional examples of what goes wrong in the reporting process.

CNN International presents the story exactly as the Honduran authorities would like. It takes the specific, and quite limited, investigations of 176 officers at one post as evidence of a commitment to cleaning up the police force, calling it "the latest of a series of steps" taken for that purpose.

CNN described the removal of police command officers as if the impetus for this originated from within, saying "Days after the incident, the national police shook up its top ranks". But the removal of officers came from outside the police force, as a product of political calculation in the Lobo Sosa government.

CNN writes approvingly that the Honduran Congress

rewrote the country's policing laws, stripping the national police of its internal affairs department, and handing over such investigations to a new, independent force.

This claim advances the argument that there are just a few "rotten apples" in the Honduran police, and adding more, separate, police units will somehow solve what in fact is a problem rooted of abuse of power, in impunity.

If you read these stories, you would think the police killing of the two university students was an anomaly, a product of police involvement in drug trafficking.

But Honduran reports suggest the killing was an arbitrary and unconstrained abuse of power: having wounded one of the students, the officers decided not to bring them in for medical attention, which would have triggered an investigation of the circumstances of the original shooting.

It is up to Fox News Latino to give a more credible account, in a story covering the protest following the police bungling of the case. It opens with quotes from Julieta Castellanos:

"There has been a process of tampering with evidence, there has been a process of obstructing the investigation. The police have engaged in double-talk."

"they intimidate the prosecutors, the investigators and the medical examiners."

Unlike the other English media, this story goes on to report fully on the skepticism about government actions. On the changes in officers, they note

critics said the move amounted to no more than "rotations" of officers between posts.

Most astonishing are the final few paragraphs of this story, unparalleled in other US media:

Lobo, who was elected in November 2009 in a process marred by violence, media censorship and low turnout, has so far failed on his promise to improve public safety.
Few murders are ever solved and Honduran authorities routinely ascribe violent acts to "score-settling" within and among the country's youth gangs and criminal outfits.
At the same time, many of the killings since Zelaya's ouster appear to be politically motivated, as victims are often associated with the resistance movement that sprang up in the wake of the coup.
The deposed head of state returned to Honduras five months ago under a pact brokered by regional leaders, but violence against his supporters and other activists continues.

So what actually happened in the recent events? Should we see any of it as even a tiny ray of light, set against this sobering-- and entirely accurate-- account by Fox News Latino?

The Honduran National Police released the four officers under investigation for the murder of the two university students, who promptly failed to turn up for further investigation. The Lobo Sosa government shuffled appointments of officials with oversight authority for the police, and used the opportunity-- again-- to use the Armed Forces in civilian policing, in violation of Honduran constitutional separation of the missions of these forces.

When outrage continued, the remaining police officers from the post where those responsible for this one crime were assigned were ordered to report to a different post, to be individually investigated. Detained for investigation, not arrested, as was reported in the English-language media. But arrested sounds so much more effective, doesn't it?

La Prensa Latina reports comments by the pro-coup Human Rights commissioner Ramón Custodio, and by Andrés Pavón of the Comité Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, who has often been opposed to Custodio since the 2009 coup, that demonstrate how widespread Honduran distrust of the police forces actually is.

Custodio said that

"the agents of the police have license to rob, kill, extort, and we cannot do anything, because the high command practices impunity, cover-ups and other crimes."

Pavón, in turn, said that

"there are so many extra-judicial deaths and by their characteristics it is known that the Police participate everyday in those horrendous crimes".

From both sides of the spectrum, it is clear to Hondurans that the problem of the police is a problem of impunity, and that it is not limited to one bad apple.

Or even 176 bad apples in a single barrel.

Fly by Night Contracts for Electricity

2011-11-01T02:26:00.000-07:00

Generally, if you're a Honduran government agency you await authorization before you sign a contract for a major purchase, and you follow government guidelines for how to negotiate such a contract; but not the Empresa Nacional de Energia Electrica (ENEE). They're special, apparently.

In the latest in what appears to be a series of contracts with US companies with no apparent expertise or established track record in the energy sector, Roberto Martinez Lozano, Director of ENEE, signed a contract on September 14 (contract 057-2011) with Ira L. Ginsburg of Westport Financial LLC for up to 100 megawatts of electricity from diesel or bunker oil fired generators, with a contract duration of 15 years.

Ira Ginsburg has extensive experience in putting together the financing for projects both in Latin America and other parts of the world. Some of these have been energy projects, including a 305 megawatt deal under the administration of Mel Zelaya. But all he does is line up financing. That's his expertise.

From his Linked-In profile we know he is a member of the Wartsila group on Linked-In. Wartsila, you might remember, is the Finnish energy company ENEE suggested it would be buying this generating capacity from. So one question is, why is the contract with Ira Ginsburg?

But while this is curious, it's not the most serious problem with this contract.

The contract was signed on September 14. Lozano wasn't approved to seek a contract for this power until September 28. He committed the government of Honduras to a contract for which he had no authority, with a financial company that has 3 employees and $96,000 in assets, not a company that has generation equipment or expertise.

There are several other problems with the contract, which should have conformed to the emergency decree passed on September 28.

First, the emergency decree only authorized the purchase of this power for 12 months. The contract Lozano signed obligates Honduras to buy it for 15 years!

The contract calls for installing an additional 24.7 megawatts capacity in Puerto Cortes, a region not covered by the emergency decree, in a plant which has been sold to another company for conversion to coal generation!

Still another problem is that the emergency decree calls for the government to pay 9.99 cents per kilowatt of installed capacity, while the contract calls for a payment to Westport Financial of 15 cents per kilowatt. Over its 15 year life, this no bid contract will cost the Honduran government $340 million.

There is an emerging pattern of questionable contracts here. ENEE also recently contract for an 18.5 megawatt solar power farm on Roatan with Onyx Service and Solutions, Inc., a company that until this August listed its chief business as running a network of banking ATM machines, and has never installed a solar power farm anywhere in the world.

All of this has come to light in the last few days because the contract was finally submitted to Congress for their authorization. In order for the contract to be in effect in Honduras, Congress must vote to authorize it. La Prensa reports there is fierce opposition to it in both the Liberal Party and National Party congressional delegations

It stinks of corruption or incompetence at the highest levels in ENEE.

Police Shakeup

2011-10-31T20:11:00.001-07:00

The head of the National Police, José Luis Muñoz Licona is out. Today the Secretary of Security, Pompeyo Bonilla, replaced him with José Ricardo Ramírez del Cid. There's no surprise here. Over the weekend, the four officers who are suspected of killing the two university students disappeared.

It came out over the weekend that the head of the Tegucigalpa Police, Jorge Alberto Barralaga Hernández, told them to take a few days off and report Sunday, releasing them from custody. Naturally, they disappeared. El Heraldo says they know that setting the police free was a "strategy" because they were innocent and the investigation had no physical evidence to tie them to the crime. When the four policemen failed to report Sunday, Barralaga Hernandez lost his job. Today the head of the National Police lost his job over the same issue.

In the meantime, four more policemen suspected of involvement in the killing were captured, and 300 FAL rifles and 300,000 cartridges for them disappeared from the Police Special forces (a.k.a. the Cobras) arms locker.

Bonilla also named a new Vice Minister of Security, Coralia Rivera, who previously was the Inspector General of the National Police.

Corruption: The Verdict on the Lobo Sosa Government

2011-10-31T05:12:00.000-07:00

Honduras is going the wrong way, or so say 80 percent of respondents to a CID-Gallup poll conducted October 14-18, 2011. The poll reports the results of 1238 interviews, with a margin of error of 2.8 percent.

Terra, an Argentinian news source, reports that 52 percent of Hondurans think that the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa is the most corrupt in Honduran history. Only former President Carlos Roberto Reina had a more negative public opinion during his time in office.

The people surveyed identified violence and crime as the most serious problem (79%), with the same number reporting that crime had increased in the last four months. A majority believe that the current situation is worse than it was last year. One in three reported that they, or someone in their home, had been a victim of assault or robbery in the last four months.

The cost of living and unemployment was the next most serious problem, cited by 63% of those polled.

The poll shows that Porfirio Lobo Sosa has become terrifically unpopular in Honduras, with 63% saying he never, or almost never does what is best for the people of Honduras.

Quite a record to have built up in less than two years.

Gold and Heritage

2011-10-28T05:59:00.000-07:00

The El Puente archaeological site, one of Honduras' few archaeological parks open to the public, now has a foreign owned mine site located within a half kilometer.

Not that there's any press coverage. We learned about the new mine from the public statements of residents of small towns around the archaeological park who feel their environment is threatened by the development.

They write:

Considering: That in the areas around our communities there have been discovered deposits of iron and other metals that they wish to exploit without the consent of nearby towns.....

Worldwide supplies of iron ore are tight, with the biggest demand for ore coming from China. Over the last five years, iron ore prices have increased from around $31/metric ton to $177/metric ton. So iron ore might motivate international exploitation.

However, the logistics of the supply chain would argue that it is going to be uneconomical to develop iron ore deposits in Honduras for the foreseeable future.

Gold is another possibility. Gold prices have increased from $550/troy ounce to $1770/troy ounce over the last five years, making exploitation of mines potentially more profitable.

Most mines in this part of Honduras tend to be open pit gold mines, with open cyanide leach fields. They use explosives to blast the rock, then crush that rock, mound it in the leach fields, and cover it with cyanide to extract the gold.

Gold mines in Honduras don't have a good record of containing the cyanide. The San Andres mine, just beyond Santa Rosa in the Department of Copan, suffered a massive cyanide spill into the Lara river, a tributary of the Higuito river which forms the main water supply for Santa Rosa de Copan. 18,000 fish and everything in that stretch of the river was killed when the cyanide spilled.

El Puente opened to the public on January 20, 1994 and has a visitor's center and administrative offices in addition to nine restored buildings built between the 6th through 9th centuries A.D.

Open pit mines with their regular use of explosives and vast amounts of dust that they produce, are not something you would want near to a restored archaeological site like El Puente; at least, not if you want it to remain standing and attractive to tourists, which, after all, is why the park was developed.

Currusté Archaeological Park Abandoned?

2011-10-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month La Prensa published a story indicating that the Archaeological Park of Currusté, officially opened to the public in December, 2008, is reportedly abandoned by both the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), and the city government of San Pedro Sula.

Currusté, an archaeological site within the city limits of San Pedro Sula, became the country's fifth archaeological park when it opened on December 12, 2008. Prior to that it had been protected by IHAH, but closed to the public. Archaeologists first investigated the site in 1972 when archaeologist George Hasemann mapped the site and excavated in and around some of the largest structures at Currusté.

Under Dario Euraque's leadership, the IHAH formed a partnership with the city of San Pedro and the US Embassy to develop the park. Under IHAH guidance, the park was cleared, archaeological testing of the area destined to be a visitor's center, and of several of the structures was carried out, interpretive trails were built, signs were installed, and it was opened to the public. The city was supposed to pave the road leading to the site entrance, and build a visitor's center/museum on site.

Currusté was a popular location for field trips for school groups from the neighboring cities.

The coup in 2009 disrupted the plans for Currusté.

First, in July of that year, the de facto government removed the Mayor of San Pedro, Rodolfo Padilla Sunseri, who had been a party to the overall agreement for developing the park and replaced him with Micheletti's nephew, William Franklin Micheletti. Padilla Sunseri later fled to the US.

Then the de facto government removed Dario Euraque as head of IHAH that September. After the November, 2009 elections, when a new Mayor took office, he found the city badly underfunded and in debt. The funds for the visitor's center at Currusté were silently diverted to other projects.

La Prensa reports that today the park is closed to the public, and overgrown. The guard, they report, quit because he wasn't being paid.

Only the sign out on the main road remains; that and the mosquitoes.

Police Suspected of Murdering University Students

2011-10-26T12:27:00.000-07:00

The Police in Barrio Granja are now the chief suspects in the death of two students at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras early Saturday morning. The students were Alexander Vargas Castellanos and Carlos Pineda Rodriguez. Vargas Castellanos was the son of the rector of the University, Julieta Castellanos.

Crime scene technicians descended on the Police post in the Barrio Granja of Comayaguela and impounded three of the post's patrol vehicles and began collecting the records of who was patrolling Saturday morning when the two students were killed execution style.

The two students were killed in the early hours of Saturday morning after having been intercepted coming home after a birthday party for a friend. They were taken from their car and driven in another vehicle south of Tegucigalpa, where they were both killed.

Their vehicle was found later that day with four bullet holes from a 5.7 mm "mata policia (cop killer)" pistol. One shot, fired from behind the student's car, passed through both the back seat and driver's seat of the car, probably forcing them to stop. Such guns are illegal in Honduras, but were part of the ATF's Fast and Furious project which gave guns to criminals in Mexico, and were also part of the Operation Castaway where the ATF is alleged to have provided weapons to Honduran gangs.

Operation Castaway, run out of the Tampa Bay ATF office, was shut down in 2010, with the arrest of Hugh Crumpler III, Ramon Lopez, and others, but had been allowed to ship more than 1000 weapons (AK-47, AR-15, Fabrique Nacional Herstal 5.7mm "mata policia" pistols, and glock semi-automatic pistols) to the gangs in Honduras, among other destinations. Many of the weapons were later used in crimes in Central and South America and Puerto Rico.

Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla confirmed to the press that the the material evidence points to renegade police as the suspects in the death of the two students. Police Commander Jose Luis Muñoz Licona, however said he would prefer to confirm the police were involved once they've arrested someone.

Supreme Blessing on the Coup

2011-10-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

The coup of 2009, in which Manuel Zelaya was forcibly removed both from office and from the country, was officially blessed in an unappealable decision today by the Honduran Supreme Court.

In a case initially heard by Chief Justice Jorge Rivera Aviles, the Public Prosecutor had sought to charge the former heads of the military Joint Chiefs (Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, Venancio Cervantes, Carlos Antonio Cuéllar, Miguel Ángel García, Luis Javier Prince, and Juan Pablo Rodríguez) with forcibly removing Zelaya from the country, a violation of the Honduran constitution, and with abuse of authority. In their defense, they did not reject that it had happened, but claimed it was out of necessity. Rivera Aviles then dismissed the charges.

The Public Prosecutor then appealed to the Constitutional group of the Supreme Court, which voted 4 to 1 to uphold Rivera Aviles's decision, but because it was not a unanimous decision, the Public Prosecutor could and did appeal it again, this time to the full Supreme Court.

El Heraldo reports that HRN radio reported that the vote was 12 to uphold the original decision, three against.

Too Many Generals

2011-10-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Honduran armed forces are restless because for the last two years, the Honduran Congress has sat on the promotion of officers.

This is unprecedented in Honduran history.

Like in the United States, in Honduras, once you get above a certain grade, the military proposes career advancement, and the legislative branch (in Honduras, the Congress; in the US, the Senate) ratifies the promotion.

The US Senate routinely fails to promote officers proposed by the armed forces, for a variety of reasons. Now the Honduran Congress is using its authority to do the same in Honduras.

Among proposed advancements now under consideration are the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Brigadier General René Osorio Canales (to Major General) and Coronel Wilfredo Oliva Lopez (to Brigadier General). Left over from last year are Coronel Marco Vitelio Castillo (Air Force), General Jose Gerardo Funtes Gonzalez, and General Javier Prince Suazo.

Congress has said that some of these promotions don't make sense because the individuals will shortly retire (Fuentes Gonzalez, for example).

The advancement of Vitelio is rumored to have been withheld as a punishment for the theft of an airplane in San Pedro Sula while it was under the control of the Air Force there.

General Prince is clearly not in good regard; he was removed from the Joint Chiefs council and installed instead as Auditor of the Armed Forces last year.

Whatever the truth is about the motivations for not advancing these officers, the large number of pending promotions draws attention to a peculiarity of the Honduran military: it is top heavy.

In 1993 it had as many senior officers as the Salvadoran Army (about 250), yet the Salvadoran army was, at that time, double the size of the Honduran one.

The Honduran military is still top heavy today. Honduras has 12 flag officers (Generals and Admirals) for around 11,000 troops (2009 data), or about 1 General for every 916 soldiers. In contrast, the United States has 1.4 million troops, and 919 Generals (and Admirals), or one General for every 1536 troops (2009 data).

What that means in day to day practice is worth further consideration. Meanwhile, the excess generals-- and other high officers-- are getting restless as the Honduran congress appears less motivated to grant what once were automatic advancements.

Military Mission Creep 2: Give Us Police Powers

2011-10-13T15:41:00.000-07:00

General Rene Osorio, head of the Honduran Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, suggested today that he would like constitutional changes that would give the military some police powers, like the ability to stop and search anyone, the general ability to search property, the ability to legally carry out raids, and other unnamed police powers.

The granting of police powers to the military would require constitutional changes, to make these part of the mission of the Armed Forces. Osorio said:

"We're not putting ourselves in the place of police; we want to help and support them with our own troops and our intelligence work."

But that's exactly what Osorio is proposing, that the military mission be changed, added to, and that training be supplied to his troops so that they do things in a legal fashion, like arrest and hold people.

As Osorio said, all of this will require changes to the constitution, the laws, changes to the military charter, changes to international treaties, all because Porfirio Lobo Sosa wants a single point of contact to coordinate the actions of the Police and Military, "to make them more effective and successful against delinquency."

Lobo Sosa grew up in an era where the Police and Military were the same thing in Honduras. This proposal to return to those days does not appear to bother him in the slightest; but it bothers those concerned with human rights and democracy in Honduras from all sides of politics.

Thus we have statements from the Rector of the National University, Julietta Castellanos opposing any unification of police and military, and the Judges' association saying its illegal.

German Leitzelar, who presided over the original separation of the Police from the Military, thinks a single Ministry with authority over both is OK so long as there's no unification of their actual operations. In contrast, General Jorge Estrada, ex-judicial auditor for the military, said that

"We have to be clear that from the point of view of the functions and strategies, to join the police with the Armed Forces would be a step backwards, to resort to the past, and we all know how that turned out."

The problem is that the Armed Forces aren't Police; what police do is not part of the mission or training of the armed forces. Osorio asking for police powers for the Armed Forces is troubling given the military's history of human rights abuses, such as extrajudicial killings and the illegal detention of Honduran citizens.

To merge them in the midst of international condemnation of violence against Honduran citizens by security forces is, at the least tone-deaf, and just possibly, one of the more obvious signs of rejection of opinion in the international community.

Chorti seize Copan (Again)

2011-10-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

Members of the Consejo Nacional Indigena Maya Chorti (CONIMCH), a Maya speaking indigenous group, have seized the archaeological park of Copan to protest a planned police action to remove them from lands they claim in the small town of Nueva Estanzuela.

Their claim is to 350 manzanas (about 245 hectares, or 604 acres) where, in May of this year, they asked the government yet again to give them title. INA has done nothing, according to them, and today they understood there was a police operation planned to remove them from the land; a court order obtained by the land owners.

CONIMCH leaders blame César Ham, INA's boss, for being totally focussed on the problems in the Bajo Aguan and ignoring the rest of the country.

The Chorti have used the strategy of taking over the park repeatedly since 2005 in order to get the Honduran government's attention.

A US Embassy cable from 2008 notes that the Chorti in Nueva Estanzuela (then about 10 families with 52 individuals) were invited by the government to take over a property of about 3.75 hectares there in 1991, and then the owner declined to sell it to them. The land was then sold to a new owner who wanted the Chorti evicted. And so it continues leading to the takeover yesterday of the archaeological park.

Ambassador Ford concluded in 2008:

As the descendants of the Maya who built Copan, the Chortis have been smart to play on this link and lend legitimacy to their takeovers of the archaeological site. Each time the site is taken over, the area suffers financial hardship, and the reputation of Honduras is tarnished, so the Government of Honduras knows it has to work with this group to keep them happy.....We can expect to see more Chorti protests in the future.

CONIMCH expected more supporters from Ocotepeque to arrive later today to reinforce their indefinite takeover of the archaeological park.

Taking Marbles, Going Home

2011-10-12T09:57:00.001-07:00

Oswaldo Canales has made good on his threat to remove the evangelical church confraternity from the Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción. Yesterday he sent a note to the new head of the council, Dulce Maria Zavala, announcing their withdrawal.

"[Oswaldo Canales] was not at the meeting, but he sent a note of the withdrawal. What it reveals to us is that this is an infantile attitude, that which our partner has, and this is what we demonstrated and this is what they want to discuss now. He is a member of this group and it is important that he be present in the CNA, but through a note he made official his withdrawal,"

Zavala told La Tribuna. She noted that the CNA replied to the note, asking them to reconsider.

Zavala also revealed that the Catholic church would be returning to the CNA after a one and a half year absence.

Bishop Santos's Presidential Bid

2011-10-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

Bishop Luis Santos Villeda of Santa Rosa de Copan will turn 75 in November and must submit his resignation as bishop to the Pope. At that time, he will ask the Pope to allow him to run as a presidential candidate of the Authentic June 28th movement of the Liberal Party.

Its not that he wants to be president:

"I don't aspire to be president of Honduras. This isn't my idea,"

he told the Catholic News Service.

"Why do I get involved in politics? Because it is politics that has screwed the poor.... But it's politics that makes people poor, that leaves the clinics and hospitals without medicine, that robs money from the villages. It's politics that supports the rampant corruption in Honduras,"

he is quoted as saying. The press report adds:

"I can't be disinterested in the health and education of the children, the least of my sisters and brothers...I'll do it for the common good, the good of Honduras."

Santos made his original announcement of his candidacy on September 16.

That announcement brought a mixed reaction from within the Liberal Party, where some, such as Lino Tomas Mendoza, were excited by its potential to reunite the Liberal Party.

If the Pope grants his request, Bishop Santos will have to compete with a large group of candidates for the Liberal Party nomination. These include Edmundo Orellana, Mauricio Villeda, Yani Rosenthal, Wenceslao Lara, and Esteban Handal, to name but a few of the announced candidates.

One Minister to Rule Them

2011-10-10T05:04:00.000-07:00

Porfirio Lobo Sosa came back from his trip to the United States and ordered that a new law be written to abolish both the Ministry of Security, which oversees the civilian police, and the Defense Ministry, which oversees the military.

Instead he wants a single civilian ministry to coordinate both functions, with three vice ministries, one each overseeing the police, the military, and the new investigative police that he hopes to create at the same time.

The UN Human Rights Relator, Frank Larue, said of this idea:

"absurd, it should not happen in any country on earth."

But Lobo Sosa will go ahead with it because, as he explained, he finds it difficult to coordinate the two services.

Maybe that's because he has the military doing something it should not be doing, policing the civilian population.

Lobo Sosa tried to argue that the move would also save the government money, but since he proposes to increase the budgets of both, and form a new police investigative unit, there's no real savings here. The bureaucracy actually gets bigger, not smaller.

Not Too Sexy After All

2011-10-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, the censorship commission of the Ministry of the Interior ruled that the Ricky Martin concert on October 16th would potentially damage the mental health of Honduras's youth and they therefore set age restrictions on who could attend.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa returned to Honduras Saturday and overruled them. Anyone may attend the concert without respect to age.

This has, all along, been a battle between the conservative religious movements of Honduras, of which Interior Minister Áfrico Madrid is a member, and human rights, as recognized by Honduran law and international treaties signed by Honduras.

Lobo Sosa first intervened when Madrid made noises like he was considering not giving Ricky Martin a visa to enter Honduras to perform the concert. At that point Lobo Sosa ordered that Martin be admitted saying that anything less would be a violation of Martin's human rights.

Now he's made it clear that the age restrictions were wrong as well.

So Ricky Martin is just sexy enough for all of Honduras to enjoy the show.

Ricky Martin: Just Too Sexy?

2011-10-06T12:02:00.001-07:00

Today Porfirio Lobo Sosa, in Washington, D.C., ordered his government to make sure Ricky Martin was allowed to enter the country to perform his concert in Honduras.

The message was conveyed by his Human Rights Minister, Anna Pineda. On the morning television program Frente a Frente, she said:

"The official position of the government has been to respect human rights and trying to keep in line with that policy, it has has been arranged, through the Secretary of Justice and Human Rights, that the singer Ricky Martin can enter and perform his show."

She pointed out that Martin was coming as a UN good will ambassador for UNICEF, with a message against sexual abuse, and that as that representative, he would not have an act that caused harm to anyone, and even less to children.

Nonetheless, the official government censorship committee has put age restrictions on attendance. No children under 15 admitted because of "erotic content". Alberto Espinal, director of the the group that made the decision to restrict attendance, said:

"We take this measure to protect the mental health of the youth of Honduras....Martin is offering eroticism."

Martin's show is called Music, Soul, Sex.

Maybe they should look to what's on Honduran television before saying this show was too erotic for Honduran youth.

Losing Democracy, or Military Mission Creep

2011-10-06T05:34:00.000-07:00

Militarization in Honduras is expanding, muddling the constitutional mission of the armed forces of Honduras.

The recent suggestion by Porfirio Lobo Sosa and Minister of Defense, Marlon Pascua, to abolish the Minister of Security position and make it a Vice Ministry under Defense, is further retrograde motion. Surprisingly, the current Security Minister, Pompeyo Bonilla, is in favor of abolishing his job.

In 1997 Honduras made the leap to separate the Police from the Military. This involved several changes to the constitution and created the separate Minister of Defense and Minister of Security positions. This was also when, for the first time, the President was designated as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

The next phase in the separation of the Police and Military was to be the removal of elections from the list of responsibilities of the armed forces, who currently are charged with guarding the ballots, a circumstance that means any Honduran citizen voting is under the scrutiny of the armed forces.

In 1998, the military lost control of HONDUTEL, the Merchant Marine, and Immigration. Then-president Carlos Flores said

"The changes we are making are necessary and inevitable if effective democracy is to become a reality."

Yet all these changes are being rolled back under Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

Only under the military dictatorships have there been more ex-military men in charge of the state institutions than in the present administration.

Currently, retired military offices direct the Merchant Marine, Immigration, Hondutel, several branches of Foreign Relations, Health, Education, and the Honduran equivalent of FEMA.

The military also receive 70% of the congressionally budgeted money to protect forests from illegal logging, rather than the civilian branch of Forestry which has that as its responsibility.

All of this, dare I say it, points to a resurgence of military involvement in the democratic institutions of government not seen since before 1994. It's a regression to the way things were, when Honduras was a protected democracy.

Unifying the Defense and Security Ministries, the police and armed forces, under one leadership would be another step backwards in time, and another step away from democracy in Honduras.

Definitive Verdict: Final Answer?

2011-10-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

Remember when Romeo Vásquez Velásquez and the other generals were "tried" for kidnapping President Zelaya and forcibly sending him to Costa Rica back in 2009? The Public Prosecutor eventually lodged a case against them, and that case was heard by the Chief Justice, Jorge Rivera Áviles, who found them not guilty.

Well, that case is back.

The case was brought after Porfirio Lobo Sosa assumed the presidency in January 2010, and heard last January. Rivera Aviles handed down a definitive verdict of "not guilty".

The Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubí appealed, lost, and appealed again and got a split decision. The Supreme Court appeals panel that heard the case, the 5 judges of the Constitutional branch of the court, could not agree on a verdict. Four voted to uphold the verdict, and 1 voted to reject it. They had to be unanimous in their decision to reach a verdict.

So the case moves to the entire Supreme Court for them to try and reach a verdict. Today the entire Supreme Court will meet and vote on this case. Tomas Arita Valle, the judge who issued the arrest order for Zelaya, will preside over this hearing. The court can issue a definitive and final verdict, or remand the case to a panel to study the options and make recommendations.

The Supreme Court split, 10 to 5, on the issue of punishing the judges later fired for supporting Zelaya. I can't imagine the decision today will be all that different.

Solar Powered Wedge against Chavez?

2011-10-03T16:43:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of renewable energy projects being authorized, or coming on line, in Honduras in the last month. But I've never seen one described as a wedge against the political power of Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela, before today.

Onyx Services and Solutions, Inc., a solar power contractor that "focuses on energy solutions that empower our democracy and its allies’ strategic national and international energy policies", will expand into Honduras, building an 18.5 megawatt solar generation station on the island of Roatan. The project consists of installing approximately 65,958 280 watt panels and connecting them to the island's power grid at a total cost of $84 million.

Now this company is a strange bird. As recently as its November 2010 SEC 10K filing, its principal business was the ownership of a small network of ATM machines in Onondaga County in upstate New York. It obtained its capital by selling shares of stock, which expanded from 309,000 shares in November 2010, to over 4 million by April of 2011. As late as July, 2011, its business was the Automatic Teller Machines network in upstate New York.

It has no cash, no employees other than officers, according to its audit reports.

But then, in August of this year, it replaced its CEO and CFO with Malcom Burleson who previously ran a company called Solar-nomics, which he founded in 2009. Now Solar-nomics is a Centennial Colorado company founded in the category "Repair shop and related services" with 3 employees. Their mailing address is a PO Box in Aurora, Colorado. They don't list a phone contact anywhere on their website, which is filled with stock photography and generic solar information.

The first thing he did at Onyx was acquire Southern Geopower for a stock swap, with the help of Blackstone Equity Partners, who end up owning 78.5 % of the issued stock. Southern Geopower was developing a "unique wireless power transmission technology," but had no customers and was no longer a going concern. On September 13 they filed a stock registration statement with the SEC, proposing to compensate directors, officers, and consultants, with a pool of 5 million more shares of Onyx stock.

In September 2011, they wrote a proposal to be the lead contractor for an ENEE photovoltaic installation on Roatan. You can read the proposal (with the pricing data redacted) on their website here. Other than the price, there are no specifics in this proposal, only generalities about what they might do. No guarantee about whose panels, which inverters, what substation components, only suggestions about what they might use. They say they source their panels and inverters from Optimum Solar, a Chinese solar manufacturer. Yet on September 28, ENEE selected them to install the project.

Onyx writes in their description of the Roatan project:

"Many nations of Central America, South America and the Caribbean find themselves being squeezed by the need for power coupled with the temptation to use Venezuelan diesel for electrical generation. While this solution has provided a quick supply of power - it comes with a very high cost to the sovereignty and free will of these nations. .... Without power projects that reduce reliance on Venezuelan diesel, prices can be raised and lowered at will to force leaders of these nations to bend to the will of Hugo Chavez."

Someone better tell the poor of the US northeast not to use CITGO home heating oil, or CITGO gas, as CITGO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state owned oil company. CITGO has been working with states in the northeastern US to provide free or reduce cost home heating oil to poor families through groups like Citizen's Energy.

Perhaps Onyx needs to wage a campaign for solar contracts closer to home, in the northeast United States.

Too Gay For Honduras

2011-09-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

I was frankly amazed to read in Thursday's El Heraldo that Ricky Martin, the Puerto Rican pop singer who is openly gay, might be denied a visa to enter Honduras and give a concert, solely because he's gay.

None the less, that's more or less what Áfrico Madrid, Interior Minister, (the man who banned Halloween in Honduras) told El Heraldo. In an interview he said that he had received pressure, though no written requests, from the church organizations of Honduras to deny him a visa because he was a bad example for families in Honduras. Madrid told El Heraldo:

"It is through the departmental rules that we will analyze the request they presented to hold the event and in all cases it is the management, based on the convenience and to safeguard the moral and ethical principles of our society, that will authorize or not the event."

"Representatives of the Christian churches, Evangelical and Catholic of Honduras, have asked that we not authorize the permission because he is not a good family example,....this is not the type of family that the laws of Honduras and Honduran society want to construct and promote in the young and the rest of the population."

Ricky Martin, openly gay since 2010, lives with his two children and his partner.

Just to be clear, Honduras cannot legally deny a person admission just because they are gay. As Sandra Ponce was forced to point out today in response to Áfrico Madrid's insanity, to deny him entrance would be a violation of the Honduran constitution, human rights, and international treaties to which Honduras is signatory.

But the fine points of law, like the Honduran constitution and human rights, often seem to be beyond the grasp of Áfrico Madrid.

National Party Split

2011-09-29T11:28:00.001-07:00

The fissure in the National Party has become an open split.

Ricardo Alvarez, the Mayor of Tegucigalpa with presidential aspirations, and Miguel Pastor, current head of SOPTRAVI, have formed a caucus of 25 Congress persons from the National party, splitting with Juan Orlando Hernandez, and promising a legislative agenda of their own. Three of the four fired Ministers have pledged to join the group as well (Oscar Alvarez, Armando Caledonio, and Nasry Asfura).

This split has the effect of denying the National Party a straight line ability to pass legislation without consultation. While still large, with 46 members, the National Party caucus loyal to Juan Orlando Hernandez no longer forms a majority.

Congressman Antonio Rivera Callejas, a member of the newly formed caucus, loudly denies that it has anything to do with presidential politics.

According to Callejas it has everything to do with the lack of support given to the Ministers who Lobo Sosa recently fired. "They were the people who were lending credibility to the Lobo Sosa government," Callejas told El Heraldo.

On the other hand, La Tribuna reported that Callejas completely undercut his denial when he told them

"This is the beginning of a legislative alliance between the Congress people supporting Ricardo Alvarez and Miguel Pastor, and for now it is only for legislative affairs, but I hope that later on it will become an electoral alliance."

Mario Barahona, another member of the caucus, said

"Miguel Pastor and Ricardo Alvarez are a guarantee of triumph and we understand this..."

Barahona went on to explain that it was, in fact, an alliance of those who support the political aspirations of Miguel Pastor and Ricardo Alvarez and to complain of being marginalized and mistreated by Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Juan Orlando Hernandez thought the cause was presidential politics:

"I'm very sorry that we haven't finished even the second year of governing and we are already in this debate, but such are politics,"

he said, when consulted about the split. Celine Discua, head of the National Party caucus in Congress said that this was "treason, and in the past, we've seen what happens to traitors."

This is a break. We would argue that their words are confirmation that Presidential politics was indeed the cause, more than two years before the election. What it will mean legislatively remains an open question.

Plotting

2011-09-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

No one was more surprised than Oswaldo Canales when he was not re-elected head of the Consejo Nacional Anti-Corrupción. In the election, Dulce María Zavala, representative on the council of the Asociación Nacional de los Empleados Públicos (ANDEPH), won the backing of 7 of the 10 representatives present.

Canales attributes his loss to his having told the truth:

"Telling the truth in this country is a sin,"

Canales told the press.

Now Juan Ferrera, council member representing Foro Nacional de Convergencia (FONAC) says it was a "plot", hatched six months ago, to wrest control of the CNA from the religious organizations.

"In the organizations, they discussed the idea that neither of the two church organizations (catholic and evangelical) should assume the coordination of the CNA, in light of their having left many problems, especially when they did that of June 28 and they have to be in some form the moral force that should remain and accompany the CNA assembly, but they should not coordinate the council."

The "plot" was said to originate in the Executive Branch, with Zavala's candidature having the support of Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

The CNA was founded in 2001 and "reinstalled" in 2005 with the ambitious goals of promoting transparency in government, developing public morality, to prevent, control, and combat corruption in government. The religious organizations have predominated in leadership roles since it was founded.

Citing a potential loss of autonomy in the CNA, the three groups that didn't vote for Zavala are thinking about pulling out of the CNA for the time being. They fear that Zavala, representing the government employees union, will politicize the jobs within the CNA, appointing party activists. Others within the CNA see this as a secularization of the organization.

What the election has done is highlight a pre-existing split between the religious organizations and the secular ones who were members of the CNA. The CNA has been largely ineffective under church leadership since 2005.

It will be interesting to see if the secularization of the CNA can make it more effective at dealing with corruption in government.

Putting the "General" in General Election

2011-09-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

It is (semi) official.

Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, infamous as the general who commanded the armed forces during the coup d'etat in June 2009 and throughout the de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti when the military brutalized the Honduran people, wants to be the next president of Honduras.

Prensa Latina reports that Vasquez will run at the head of the Alianza Patriótica Hondureña party. To be able to run, his advisers are reportedly telling him to resign this October from his post-military position as manager of Hondutel, a plum post given to him after he stepped down from the military.

The same advisers suggest that if he does run, he risks the re-activation of legal actions against him for the forcible (and illegal) removal from Honduras of José Manuel Zelaya Rosales. They are quoted as saying

"The politicians created the crisis, so it would not be strange if they exculpated themselves and for their political relaunching they would implicate the military".

Despite this danger, Prensa Latina reports that Vasquez will register as the candidate of the Alianza Patriótica Hondureña and start his run for president in October, the month of the Armed Forces. The article describes APH as "a military-civic organization that intends to 'rescue the country from underdevelopment'".

The new report comes shortly on the heels of stories in the Honduran press saying that the Christian Democrat Party was thinking of drafting Vasquez Velasquez as its candidate. These rumors were sparked by a birthday visit with Ramón Velásquez Názar, vice-president of the Christian Democrat Party.

A background in the armed forces has not, until now, been a recommendation for candidates for president under the constitution adopted in Honduras in the 1980s. But then, the coup and its aftermath clearly changed the role of the military in modern Honduras. Ex-army officers running for president probably goes along with the rest of the package.

Not-so-Special Justice

2011-09-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Jorge Rivera Áviles, rescinded his order of August 8 prohibiting the naming of police officers as court officers in relation to cases that involve raids and the dislodging of campesinos from land.

His reversal followed his participation Tuesday in a meeting between representatives of the Supreme Court, Military Command, the Police, and the Ministers of Defense and Security.

Previously the appointment of police officers to oversee the proper legal actions in police operations of these types was seen as a bad thing. Now its not seen by the Chief Justice as a problem.

At the meeting on Tuesday it was decided that the judiciary and security forces would no longer rely on local judges for court orders in their operations in the Bajo Aguan. Instead they will use special court officers, jueces ejecutores ("distrainor" in English, defined as the legal officer who seizes goods for debts, apparently used with a slightly wider meaning in this instance).

With no local connection, these jueces ejecutores will be flown in to the area, then escorted back to where they came from.

Why do they need special justices?

The military believes there is a problem getting court orders to dislodge campesinos who have invaded the plantations of the large land owners in the Bajo Aguan. They claim that local judges are reluctant to issue the orders because they fear for their lives.

The judges issuing the orders must physically be present during the operations by the military. According to at least one story in La Tribuna, they have been not showing up, causing operations to be canceled. By bringing in legal officers from other areas, this presumably will be avoided.

But these will not be just any legal officers: they will be police officers, overseeing the actions of other police officers.

This is a bad idea.

Its a bad idea because it makes the Police both Judge and Executioner. The legal system is designed as a series of checks and balances; this removes one of the checks.

Ana Pineda, the Minister of Human Rights, was not included in the Tuesday meeting that led Rivera Aviles to reverse his original decision. Pineda was supposedly consulted by phone about the appointments and gave her approval. We can only assume she didn't know that Rivera Áviles was going to rescind his order against having police officers appointed to these positions.

Buy High, Sell Low

2011-09-22T15:13:00.001-07:00

ENEE, the Empresa Nacional de Energia Electrica, the state owned electric company of Honduras, knows how to drive a business into bankruptcy: buy electricity at horrendously high rates, and sell it for less to the consumers in Honduras.

Seriously, this is the ENEE business plan: to lose money.

Prices were set with the goal of subsidizing the cost of electricity for the poor, here defined by how much electricity they consume in a month.

Prices were reset higher in 2008 during the Zelaya administration, and at that time ENEE was authorized to charge an energy cost surcharge on top of the usage charges. The subsidy for the poor was expanded into higher usage tiers.

At this point, no one in Honduras is paying the actual cost of electricity, not businesses, not the wealthy, not the poor. Somehow what started out as subsidy for the poor got expanded to everyone. Is it any wonder ENEE runs at a loss?

Blackouts are once again common in Honduras, especially in the area around San Pedro Sula, in the western part of the country, in the central part around Yoro, and in Olancho. This is because domestic production of electricity is insufficient to meet demand, and the distribution system in the country is incapable of distributing the excess production in other parts of the country to the parts that lack electricity.

This was entirely expected and preventable.

The electricity shortage was the subject of a 2007 US Embassy study, as well as a 2010 World Bank one. Both predicted Honduras would need more power than is generated in the country by 2011, and accurately predicted how much more power was needed.

Many of the neighboring Central American countries produce excess electricity. ENEE cannot buy this excess production because the interconnects linking its distribution system to those of its neighbors are inadequate and outdated.

ENEE is under government orders not to buy any additional electricity produced by bunker oil or diesel generating plants.

Yet, earlier this year it placed a request for bids for 50 megawatts of so called "thermal" power. At the time it received bids costing $0.34/KWh to $0.54/KWh. Roberto Martinez Lozano, manager of ENEE, rejected all the offers then as being too expensive.

Now Martinez Lozano wants to buy electricity at $0.50/KWh, and wants to sign a contract at that rate for the next two years.

Who gains?

The Finnish firm Wartsila, which offered the electricity at $0.16/KWh, as long as the government of Honduras buys and transports the fuel. At current market prices that raises the cost to ENEE to around $0.48-50 KWh.

ENEE sells this electricity back to businesses and consumers for less than it pays for it.

According to the US Embassy, in 2007 ENEE paid about $0.14 KWh and sold electricity for an average of $0.08 KWh.

Nearly 25% of electricity is not paid for, compared with a Central American average of 15%. Only about 10% of that total is transmission line loss. The remainder is due to billing errors, illegal connections, and fraud.

Freedom for Suspected Drug Figure

2011-09-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

Today a Honduran judge let suspected drug operator Eduardo Elias Handal Saybe go free, for what he called lack of "compelling proof" linking him to a private home with a storage building that yielded coca leaf paste, chemicals used in the processing of cocaine, strips of lights used to light runways, and weapons.

According to the Public Prosecutor, Handal Saybe, along with the Guatemalan Juan Carlos Garcia Urbina, are heads of the Zeta's operation in Honduras. The Zetas appear to have armed the Mara Salvatrucha MS-18 in Honduras. Weapons found in the warehouse last March correspond to the same lot as weapons captured in Mexico in the hands of the Zetas, and weapons found in the hands of MS 18 prisoners in the main San Pedro Sula prison.

On the basis of what was found in the warehouse, registered in Elias Handal Saybe's name, an Interpol arrest warrant was issued for Handal. He was captured in Nicaragua on September 12 and extradited back to Honduras.

Yesterday his defense lawyer, Walter Ramirez, successfully argued that someone else had used Handal's name to register the property, and that his signature had been forged.

Handal Saybe is a partner is several limited partnerships. They include PRODUCTOS PLASTICOS INTERNACIONALES, S.A., registered in Panama, with Carlos Alberto Yacaman Meza, the assassin of Roland Valenzuela, who before his death had broadcast serious charges of US complicity in the 2009 coup.

Yacaman Meza is in prison in Florida appealing a deportation order to Honduras.

Handal Saybe remains at liberty.

Cover Up in the Bajo Aguan?

2011-09-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

Competing stories have developed about what happened in the Bajo Aguan last Friday, when a combined military-police patrol alleges it was ambushed by foreign guerrillas at La Consentida plantation, near Sonaguera.

The official story today, as told by Secretary of Defense Marlon Pascua, is that foreigners ambushed the patrol in the La Consentida orange plantation. Found at the scene were rifle bullet casings (other reports specify AK-47 casings) and fragments of an exploded grenade. Pascua is quoted as saying

"The intent of these bands is that we not patrol this sector, that the patrols not do their job..."

Well, that's one theory... Its not clear how Pascua knows the intent of the attackers with such certainty, nor why he knows with the same certainty that the attackers were foreigners. Surely by now his troops have had enough time to identify all the foreigners in the zone. Yet as of yesterday, none of the identified foreigners were doing anything suspicious, according to the military.

Pascua went on the radio to tell everyone he's given the patrols permission to return fire if fired upon.

Meanwhile, the campesinos of MUCA tell a much different story about what happened on Friday.

The MUCA spokesperson, Vitalino Alvarez, told La Tribuna that the site of the supposed ambush is not one where ambush is possible. The road is straight, and there is no forest nor bushes to hide in.

According to him, a drunken soldier detonated a grenade inside his patrol vehicle. There are no guerrillas in the Bajo Aguan, he told La Tribuna, only people dedicated to their work.

Vitalino Alvarez was quoted El Heraldo as saying:

"It was a grenade that exploded in the cabin of the car. Also I was at the hospital when they arrived; there was a boy wounded only in the lower legs below the knee; ....how could they shoot him only below the knee.... Another had a wound only on his nose produced by a grenade fragment. If it had been a rife shot, he'd be dead."

El Heraldo's coverage today makes it clear that both the Police and Military agree with the MUCA spokesperson that grenade fragments were in the passenger compartment of the truck, and that it was the driver and passenger in the truck that died, from the explosion of a grenade on the floor of the truck.

Yet the spokesperson for the Xatruch II batallion, Roger Martinez, claims to have bullet casings from Falk rifles, AK-47s, and .22 calibre rifles. He also claims the area where the ambush occurred is forested. He denied there were grenade fragments in the cabin of the car. A grenade would have dismembered the occupants, according to Martinez.

The only Falke rifles I can find are all air rifles; probably the patrol was not ambushed by pellet guns! Perhaps he meant FN-FAL rifles, which are in abundant use by the Army in Honduras according to Janes, and take the very same caliber ammunition as the AK-47, 7.62 mm. NATO standard ammo.

A .22 rifle would be an insane thing to use to attack an armed military patrol. It is 1850s military technology.

It is good for rabbit and squirrel hunting, though.

Guerrillas in the Mist

2011-09-20T01:24:00.000-07:00

So Friday someone shot up a combined military and police patrol, part of the Xatruch II operation, in the Bajo Aguan, just as it was about to turn into the La Consentida orange plantation of Rene Morales. One police officer and one soldier were killed, and three others wounded.

The initial description was that the attack was made with shotguns, but later it was characterized as employing large caliber weapons, e.g., military rifles.

Interestingly, there's no indication from press accounts that those "ambushed" either returned fire, or came under fire beyond the initial salvo that killed two and wounded three others. The encounter is not described as a firefight. No suspects were either found or detained in the region.

The military has concluded the attack was not the work of campesinos, because of the strategy used. Police reached the same conclusion, according to spokesperson Juan Martinez. They point to the use of surprise and violence as un-campesino-like behavior. Like the media, the security forces characterize the event as an ambush.

The reaction by security forces was to stop and question all foreigners coming through the district, although to no avail:

"None of them could be tied to anything illicit,"

said Martinez.

But that, of course, did not stop the military from reaching conclusions.

"It's a dedicated band of guerrillas,"

said Joint Chiefs Chair General Rene Osorio on Sunday.

There is another, unexamined, group in the Bajo Aguan that has both licensed and unlicensed weapons of the type used in the attack, and military training.

During the 2009 coup, landowners there hired paramilitary mercenaries from Colombia and Paraguay to be the "guards" on African palm plantations.

According to the UN Working group on Mercenaries in 2010, more than 120 paramilitaries from various Latin American countries are present in the Bajo Aguan.

The military, as part of Xatruch II, has not apparently thought to inspect, regulate or interdict the arms used by these paramilitary guards, only those campesinos were suspected of using.

Until the paramilitary guards employed by land owners in the Bajo Aguan are subject to the same scrutiny as the campesinos, the military surely cannot conclude that there is a band of foreign or foreign-trained guerrillas operating in the Bajo Aguan.

Fissures in the Nationalist Party

2011-09-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

Ex-president Rafael Leonardo Callejas acknowledged the necessity of working on the unity of the Nationalist party in light of the latest decisions of the president, Porfirio Lobo...

With these words, La Tribuna highlighted what we've been observing for a while: there is a division in the Nationalist Party, in its own way perhaps as bad as the divisions within the Liberal party in Honduras.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the deep rift that has developed between Ricardo Alvarez, head of the Nationalist party and Mayor of Tegucigalpa, and Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

It is normal in Honduran politics for the president to appoint only members of his party to ministerial positions, and to then pack their employment rolls with party loyalists as well. Under pressure to manufacture a "government of unity and reconciliation", Lobo Sosa didn't do that. He not only appointed opposition party members to Ministerial posts, but also allowed them to hire whomever they pleased. And some of those appointments have brought him criticism from party loyalists.

Most visibly, for weeks, Ricardo Alvarez has been calling for Cesar Ham's head, demanding Lobo Sosa replace him and all the other "reconciliation" government members from other parties with National party loyalists. This concern also seeped into his response to Lobo Sosa's recent removal of Oscar Alvarez, Mario Canahuati, and other government officials.

In reaction, Ricardo Alvarez is reported to have said

"With respect to the changes I can say that I respect the decisions (but) I cannot say in this moment whether I share them or not because I do not understand them, because we are talking about five ex-officials of the first order, good Hondurans, excellent employees, and extraordinary Nationalist party members."

Two of those dismissed (Oswaldo Guillén and Nasry Asfura) are followers of Ricardo Alvarez's movement within the National party, and Oscar Alvarez was widely rumored to be a protege.

Lobo Sosa and Ricardo Alvarez were supposed to meet this morning to discuss the firings, but at the last minute, Lobo Sosa canceled out.

(He opted instead to attend a ceremony at which he was awarded an honorary doctorate for his "support of non-discrimination" for hosting the Summit of Afrodescendent Peoples in August. The honorary degree was conferred by the Centro de Estudios para la Democracia Popular of Chile, la Universidad Internacional Euroamericana de España y la Universidad de la República de Chile. You can see why that would be more important than meeting with the leader of a major movement in the party of which he is the sitting president.)

He attributed the criticism from his fellow party members to "ambitions and economic interests."

Oscar Alvarez and Mario Canahuati, like Ricardo Alvarez, have presidential aspirations. This is a complication in relationships within the Nationalist party, including those to Porfirio Lobo Sosa. While a Honduran president cannot run for re-election, he certainly can extend his influence through relationships with candidates vying within his party for nomination.

Exhibit A: ex-president Callejas, stepping in to try to promote party unity, he says. No fan of Lobo Sosa's "government of reconciliation", he called on Lobo to rethink it before the end of the year and undo it.

So are Ricardo Alvarez and Rafael Callejas being unfair to Lobo Sosa? Maybe not.

While Lobo Sosa states that those dismissed were fired because they failed to meet his goals for them, Eduardo Facussé noted that the dismissals favor the presidential candidacy of the head of the Congress, Juan Orlando Hernandez, to the detriment of Ricardo Alvarez.

Although his critics within the Nationalist party are not his rivals for office, because he cannot be re-elected, they are potential rivals for leadership within the party. Lobo Sosa has promoted positioning of the Nationalist party as a force of "Christian humanism" since before he was inaugurated, a position also endorsed by Ricardo Alvarez.

More distinctive has been his allegiance to the idea of what originally was called a "government of unity and reconciliation" when the US promoted it as evidence of unification after the coup. Long after there is anything to gain from this concept, long after it has become a problem for him with his own party, and despite a lack of effectiveness on the part of some of his "unity" appointees, Lobo Sosa seems to think this distinction is worth defending.

Hence his reply to the harangues from his own party:

"It's not important to me, the price I have to pay for the intolerance of a few leaders of my party who question constantly my government of integration...they will not vanquish me."

Oscar Alvarez Fired Over Proposed Law

2011-09-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

Porfirio Lobo Sosa got around to admitting late yesterday that the proposed law that Oscar Alvarez sent to Congress is what got Alvarez fired. It seems that Alvarez usurped Lobo Sosa's perogative by not clearing it with Lobo Sosa first:

"The Secretaries of State do not have the power to initiate legislation, its the President that has that through his Secretaries of State, that is clear, that no Secretary of State can introduce a law unless instructed by the President."

The Secretaries here are part of Lobo's cabinet. Alvarez was for example, "Secretaria de Estado en despacho de Seguridad (Secretary of State for Security)". Lobo Sosa makes it clear that Alvarez did not consult with him on the proposed law, and that there is an existing law for cleaning up the Police which observes their due process and human rights.

Clearfield Rice Production System In Honduras

2011-09-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Honduras is about to embark on a rice cultivation program that will likely increase short term yields, but holds the potential to devastate the rice industry in Honduras if strict protocols are not observed.

The key to the potential increased yields, and the danger, is a variety called Clearfield rice.

Beneficio de Arroz Progreso, S.A. de C.V. has signed an agreement with BASF, a German company licensed to sell Clearfield rice varieties along with two herbicides necessary for its successful cultivation, Newpath and Clearpath, to begin using Clearfield rice in Honduras.

Clearfield rice has a natural mutation that causes it to be resistant to the herbicide Imidazolinone, known by trade names including Clearpath and Newpath. This rice was developed at the LSU Agriculture Center and developed commercially by Horizon Ag, a rice seed company.

What Clearfield rice is supposed to address is an energetic weed, red rice, that out-competes rice in fields, and lowers the quality (and hence the price) for harvested rice. Red rice (Oryza punctata) is a separate species in the rice family, close enough to domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) that any of the herbicides that kill red rice also kill domesticated rice. Clearfield rice is selected for resistance to specific herbicides that currently can kill red rice.

The rice farmer can use two applications of Imidazolinone-based herbicides to control red rice in the field without harming the Clearfield rice, while eliminating the red rice in the field.

The presence of red rice growing in domestic rice fields degrades the quality of the harvested rice crop. Rice from fields with red rice intermixed must be milled twice, first to remove the husks, then a second time to remove the red rice. This additional milling leads to more broken kernels, and hence a lower grade designation, for the finished product.

But because red rice is a member of the rice family (the genus Oryza), there is a danger of hybridization. When red rice grows in proximity to Clearfield rice, the gene the conveys resistance to the herbicide, which is dominant, passes to up to 0.46% of the offspring.

That's not good, because then the weed has the same resistance as the rice itself.

To avoid this problem a specific, complicated, and expensive protocol was developed by Horizon Ag and BASF. This Clearfield rice production system requires that the grower make two applications of Clearpath and Newpath herbicides during the growing season.

After harvest the farmer must rotate crops to a glycophosphate (think RoundUp) resistant crop, and treat the field with that for another year. Red rice in surrounding irrigation ditches must be treated with Beyond herbicide. The goal is to nearly eradicate red rice in the rice field itself, then let any red rice that survives and goes to seed sprout and be eradicated in the subsequent year, before returning to Clearfield rice again in the field.

The herbicides are toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates according to the Materials Safety Data Sheet, and don't biodegrade. So water in the field must be contained and not dumped into the local drainages. Likewise, workers must be protected from inhaling, eating, or getting these herbicides on their skin.

No saving seed from this rice, either.

The benefit is that Clearfield varieties yield a higher quality of rice, promising a higher price per pound. But this benefit will only be realized if the full protocol is observed. Hybrid varieties of domestic rice crossed with Clearfield rice also offer increased yields, which would increase income per unit of area planted. However, if resistant red rice develops, there is no herbicide that will kill it without also killing the commercializable rice.

If a resistant red rice escapes from a farm under the Clearfield protocal, rice quality, and hence price, will decline; there will be no treatment to reduce red rice in growing fields that does not also harm the growing rice. Such an event could put an end to the commercial viability of rice production in Honduras.

Rolling back the Security Tax

2011-09-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Media inside and outside Honduras are reporting on actions Wednesday by the Honduran Congress removing the security tax originally promoted by former security minister Oscar Alvarez, supported by Juan Orlando Hernandez, head of Congress, and Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

This tax was what Alvarez was counting on to buy Super Tucanos and other new equipment for the military.

The English-language coverage by Reuters foregrounded complaints that the new tax was "crimping" mining. A Mexican version of Reuters' article led with the fact that the reform would cut taxes charged mining companies by more than half, from 5% to 2% taxes on raw minerals.

A 3% tax on bank withdrawals was removed entirely. Allowed to continue without alteration were a 1% tax on mobile phone companies, and a 0.5% tax on fast food companies.

The reform also introduced new taxation on credit card issuers.

In arguing against the security tax, the business community claimed that, rather than producing the projected $79 million the government originally estimated, the tax would produce more that $230 million.

In Honduran coverage, the actions taken were described as "reforms".

Included in this coverage was a proposal (defeated) to rename the act the "Law for Strengthening State Finances". This, reports said, would help address such criticisms by the business community, which Honduran media said suggested that funds raised might be used to finance political campaigns.

If the Honduran coverage is to be believed, the passage of the reforms illustrates the depth of suspicion of the honesty of politicians -- and an echo of this is seen in the Reuters coverage citing suspicion by businesses that the law would bring in more than estimated, although the international media don't report the charge that these funds could end up being used in political campaigns.

After the reforms, the head of the financial commission of Congress estimated the tax will produce more than $116 million. This seems to be an acceptable level of funding for the business community; the English-language Reuters article quoted an approving voice from COHEP, Gabino Carbajal, saying

"The current changes made to the reform now put the taxes at levels where private enterprise can survive."

It is hard to imagine that the timing of these changes is unrelated to the removal of Oscar Alvarez, the patron of the original legislation, from the Lobo Sosa cabinet. And it makes absolutely clear the power wielded by the mining sector in Honduras.

Pompeyo Bonilla

2011-09-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

So who is Honduras's new Minister of Security, Pompeyo Bonilla? What's his recent resumé like?

Pompeyo Bonilla Reyes was a National Party Congressman from La Paz in June 2009 when he voted to remove President Manuel Zelaya Rosales from office.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa appointed him to head the Instituto de Propiedad (IP), the government department that issues land titles in March, 2010. In December 2010 he served on the intervention committee that investigated INA's actions in the Bajo Aguan for improprieties.

Lobo Sosa then appointed him to head the Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (CONATEL) in 2011.

Shortly after he assumed control of CONATEL, it issued a resolution suspending the issuing of low power FM broadcasting licenses for community radio stations. CONATEL argued that the frequencies were saturated in almost all departments in Honduras, and that it wanted to return these frequencies for use by the big broadcasters (so called high power FM broadcasters) to use as repeater frequencies. Low power FM broadcast licenses had first been authorized in 2005 as a way to democratize telecommunications in Honduras. Another of Bonilla's acts at CONATEL was to foster legislation authorizing wiretapping.

Pompeyo Bonilla Reyes is clearly someone Porfirio Lobo Sosa trusts. His government service is sure to be emphasized in coverage of the new office he is assuming.

Honduran sources, however, are reminding people of another episode in his long public career.

Bonilla started out in the military, and was an aide to General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano, who became head of state twice through military interventions (1963-71, and 1972-1975). During Lopez Arellano's second term as president, Honduras was given a moon rock by US president Richard Nixon. When that moon rock turned up for sale in Florida in the late 1990s, Bonilla was one of a group of individuals identified by La Prensa as possible suspects in the theft of the moon rock, which was government property. The moon rock had been kept in the Honduran presidential palace. It disappeared around 1994, and was tracked down in 1998 by federal investigators.

The US court convicted a different person, retired colonel Roberto Agurcia Ugarte, as responsible for selling the moon rock to a US collector, a retired member of the US military named Allen Rosen, who testified that he bought it from a member of the Honduran Armed Forces. But it is telling that in Honduras, Pompeyo Bonilla was considered capable of taking national property and selling it for personal gain.

Debts of the Coup

2011-09-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

Roberto Micheletti Bain contracted more debt with Honduran banks in his seven month takeover of the Honduran government than the previous three administrations did in twelve years.

At least, that's what Julio Raudales, the Vice Minister of Planning, told El Tiempo last Thursday, although the figures he cites are not quite as bad as that. Not quite-- but bad enough.

From the beginning of Carlos Flores Facussé's presidency to the date of the coup, the indebtedness of the Honduran government to Honduran banks went from 5000 million lempiras to 14,000 million lempiras.

But between June 28, 2009 and January 27, 2010, under the de facto regime headed by Micheletti, Honduran government debt rose from 14,000 million lempiras to 21,000 million lempiras.

Raudales added that the actual number may in fact be higher. Bills are still coming in from that period, and must be paid out of the current budget allocations, reducing services now.

This is another cost of the 2009 coup. As we reported at the time, the intransigence of the Micheletti regime in the face of universal international condemnation led him to draw down Honduran financial reserves dramatically.

And that is a debt that the Honduran people will pay.

Journalist Murdered: 16 and Counting Since the Coup

2011-09-12T17:49:00.000-07:00

Since June 28, 2009 16 journalists have been murdered in Honduras.

Thursday, a reporter for Radio Uno in San Pedro was murdered in an ambush as he drove from his farm to his home in Puerto Cortes.

The reporter, Medardo Flores, was part of the finance section of the Frente Amplio de Resistencia Popular (FARP), the political wing of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP).

He was the second Frente member to be murdered that week. On Monday Mahadeo Roopchand Sadloo, an Indian immigrant known as "Emo" with more than 30 years of residence in Honduras, was murdered in Tegucigalpa.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa has ordered an investigation of these killings, but denies any government involvement.

Oscar Alvarez, until Saturday the Minister of Security, consistently said that all of the previous murders of journalists were because of common crimes or personal circumstances, which was convenient since that told the police what to conclude when they conduct their inadequate investigation.

There are some things to note about the reporting of the latest murder.

First, the Tiempo and El Heraldo newspaper stories are based on an AFP report.

The AFP stated that many people suspect that these recent murders are political crimes. El Heraldo cut that from their version of the article, preferring to give Oscar Alvarez the last word. Proceso Digital argues that the victim was not really a reporter, only a graduate of Radio Uno's popular journalism school. In this, they follow EFE's coverage, which also leaves out any mention of the other 15 journalists killed since the June 2009 coup d'etat, many of whom also had ties to the resistance movement.

Those who carried out the 2009 coup learned that they can get what they want by force, and that they can act with impunity. By cultivating the idea that Honduras is just a violent country, they and the successor government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa have argued that these deaths are not due to the specific activities of the journalists who died, but acts by common criminals-- although the lack of evidence and ineffective investigation doesn't give the security forces any real basis to say that.

The people who murdered Medardo Flores waited in ambush. Until proven otherwise by a believable, professional investigation, the assumption that this was a political act by someone opposed to the FNRP seems like a theory of the crime that any effective police force would investigate, not just reject out of hand.

Judge, Jury, and Executioner

2011-09-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

Oscar Alvarez, the now ex-Minister of Security, sent a law to Congress September 6 for the cleansing of the police of corrupt officials. In it, he proposed that he serve as judge and jury, and be allowed to fire anyone from officers, inspectors, cadets, and the police auxiliary, without them having recourse to due process, or any process at all.

Here's the complete text of the law he sent to Congress:

Article 1: Authorize the Secretary of State for Security to the effect that he proceed with free discretion to terminate the career of classified staff in the Superior Executive, Basic Inspector, Cadets and Auxiliaries of the National Police.

Article 2: You are entitled to compensation consisting of one month's salary for each year of service you've provided, if you accept the retirement offered by the Head of the Secretariat of State.

Article 3: The organic law of the National police (e.g., the police charter) shall not apply to any of the provisions of this law.

Article 4: Authorizes the Secretary of State for Finances to make budget adjustments in support of the implementation of this law.

Article 5: This law takes effect on publication in La Gaceta and is in effect until 27 January 2014.

That's how Alvarez was going to clean up corruption in the Police.

Article 1 would have given him unchecked power over everyone in the police. He could have forcibly retired anyone, by simply ordering it. Article 3 would have removed all due process and appeal rights. Article 2 sets the severance pay to compensate those dismissed under the proposed law.

This level of unchecked power is unprecedented and likely would have been a violation of the due process and presumed innocence clauses of the Honduran Constitution.

Even assuming Oscar Alvarez is an angel with good intentions who would not abuse it (an untenable assumption!), this proposed statute doesn't really solve the problem. It merely pushes aside presumed corrupt police officers without punishment, allowing others to move forward to replace them. The presumed corrupt officials would not be punished; instead, they would be rewarded with severance pay and their accrued retirement benefits intact.

But then, this kind of absolute power is nothing new to Alvarez, who was a special forces officer in the Battalion 3-16 during the 1980s.

"The Argentines came in first, and they taught how to disappear people,"

Alvarez told the Baltimore Sun in 1995.

Isn't disappearing someone making a decision about their future without them having recourse to due process?

Alvarez told the Sun that Battalion 3-16 was supposed to have allowed for due process, but took the easy way out. The Sun wrote, quoting Alvarez:

"What was supposed to happen was that the intelligence unit would gather information and take it to a judge and say, 'Here, this person is a guerrilla, and here's the evidence," he said. "But the Hondurans did not do that." Slashing his finger across his neck, he said, "They took the easy way." And, he said, "U.S. officials did not protest."

Instead of becoming all powerful with the passage of the law he proposed, instead Oscar Alvarez was dismissed by Porfirio Lobo Sosa this weekend.

Alvarez has left Honduras for the United States to join his family, which lives in the US, and "reflect".

Especially if he intends to run for president, the traces of his history of authoritarianism are worth keeping in mind. And there is no indication yet that the law he proposed has been withdrawn.

Resigning Himself: Oscar Alvarez, Presidential Candidate

2011-09-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

As we reported Saturday, Porfirio Lobo Sosa is in the process of making changes in his cabinet and has gone beyond that to make a series of changes in top level security positions nationally and in the northwest region.

The article in El Heraldo on Saturday was headlined "Remezón en Secretaria de Seguridad de Honduras": "Aftershocks in Security Secretariat of Honduras". It referred to the "separación" of former minister Oscar Alvarez. It noted that a press conference later in the afternoon was expected to clarify the matter, "la que en algunos medios se ha manejado como una destitución y en otros como una renuncia" ("which in some media has been treated as a firing, and in others as a resignation").

There were plenty of advance indications that might have pointed towards this outcome. On September 1, as he was headed on his way to Kosovo, Lobo Sosa told Honduran media that on his return he would make changes in his cabinet. El Heraldo quoted him saying that he would retain Cesar Ham as head of the Instituto Nacional Agraria, but otherwise not promising security to any cabinet member.

On Friday, September 8, back in Honduras, La Tribuna reported that Lobo Sosa said that he "already had in his possession the resignations of all of his cabinet ministers, so that 'in the coming hours' he would determine 'which ministers will go'" ("ya tiene en su poder la renuncia de todos sus secretarios de Estado, por lo que 'en las próximas horas' determinará 'qué ministros se van'").

So comes the day after, and what do we hear?

Oscar Alvarez is out in public with statements to the press, making sure that everyone understands that he resigned, he was not fired. The Associated Press story, reported from Tegucigalpa by Freddy Cuevas and translated in typically uncritical way by the AP, runs with Oscar Alvarez' preferred narrative:

A top leader of Honduras' battle against rampant drug violence has resigned, saying he lacked economic support for his efforts and had been stepping on the toes of powerful interests.

But this is nonsense. Yes, he tendered his resignation. That is how top government officials are replaced, in the US as much as in Honduras. As Lobo Sosa said on Friday, he had in his possession resignation letters from all his cabinet ministers. It was then his decision who to let go, and who to keep. The original reporting was all correct-- every fired cabinet minister had first assented by resigning. But that doesn't make them any less fired-- removed by Lobo Sosa, for reasons he is unlikely to ever share with the press or public.

A President is not put in the position of publicly firing a cabinet member unless things have really broken down. Diplomacy would call for a cabinet minister removed from office to say something equivalent to "I serve at the pleasure of the President": to note the successes achieved and point to the future.

But not Oscar Alvarez, bless him. He is not going quietly.

El Heraldo's report on his statements to the press sums it up in the headline "I didn't succeed in cleaning up the police nor work as I had expected". It quotes Alvarez extensively from the press conference he gave to present his side of the story:

First, I would like to say to the Honduran people that our post has always been at the disposition of the President and today he has made use of the faculties that the law confers on him....

(Primeramente quiero decirle al pueblo hondureño que nuestro cargo ha estado siempre a disposición del señor Presidente y el día de hoy él ha hecho uso de las facultades que la ley le confiere)

I have not accepted another post. I am not about to accept any job, but rather a commitment that I have with my beloved homeland, Honduras....

(“no he aceptado otro cargo. No se trata de aceptar un trabajo cualquiera, sino un compromiso que tengo con mi querida patria Honduras”)

I did not achieve my objective of cleaning up the National Police of Honduras. I was not able to work as I had expected for lack of economic support; despite the numerous limitations there were attained some noteworthy successes because we were affecting interests related with kidnapping, organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering and other crimes"...

(“No logré mi objetivo de depurar la Policía Nacional de Honduras. No he podido trabajar como tenía previsto por la falta de apoyo económico, a pesar de las numerosas limitaciones sí se alcanzaron logros destacables porque estábamos afectando intereses relacionados con secuestro, crimen organizado, narcotráfico, lavado de activos y otros delitos”)

In relation to my immediate future, I want to inform the Honduran public that this is a moment to plan, redefine, and reorient my efforts and my actions. We three leave with our heads held high and our conscience clear having made every undertaking, effort, and labor to turn back the insecurity that we inherited.

(“En relación a mi futuro inmediato, quiero informar al pueblo hondureño que este es un momento para plantear, redefinir y reorientar mis esfuerzos y mis acciones. Salimos los tres con la frente en alto y la conciencia tranquila de haber puesto todo empeño, esfuerzo y trabajo para revertir la inseguridad que heredamos”)

If that sounds like a political speech, well, that's because it is.

Oscar Alvarez has been widely rumored to be a candidate for president in the National Party in the next election.

That, as much as his failure to contain violence targeting journalists and activists that has kept Lobo Sosa's government in the spotlight for international human rights violations, may have contributed to his ouster, which, however much he might like us to think this was entirely his decision, this clearly was.

As the Honduran press reports on the cabinet changes noted, Lobo Sosa has said previously that he would remove any government official planning to run in the next elections (which will take place in fall 2013, but for which party primaries take place next year).

What we saw at the press conference given by Oscar Alvarez was not (just) an offended cabinet minister surprised by his removal.

We saw the first public statement of a campaign platform for a real law-and-order candidate whose theme will clearly be, given more funding I could have done more and look how much I accomplished...