Exit polling for the National Party...

NotiBomba has just identified the company that did exit polling for the Partido Nacional-- polling on which Juan Orlando Hernández based his claim of re-election. It apparently is owned by Arturo Corrales, former member of Hernández government. Not a company with any track record in this kind of work.

While widely reported in the English language media, the claim by Hernández was seen by Hondurans as an affront to their system which calls for waiting for results from the Tribunal Supremo Electoral.

The early announcement by Hernández is widely viewed as a strategy to make it harder for people to accept eventual results which might show a closer race, or even a win by his opponent.

The fact that the exit poll was produced by a party apparatchik will hardly give those skeptics greater confidence.

Shake Up In Control of the Christian Democrat Party of Honduras

The Honduran Partido Democráta Cristiano (PDCH) has split into two factions with two different leadership councils. Now it's up to the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) to decide which faction legitimately represents the party.

The PDCH was founded in 1968 but not recognized by the TSE until 1981.  It historically garnered between one and five Congressional Representatives in elections.

Since the coup in 2009 it has aligned itself with the ruling party.

In the last election, however, its presidential candidate received about 5000 votes or 0.17 % of the vote, and the party received only one Congressional seat. They gained a second Congressional representative in 2014 when Eduardo Coto joined the party, defecting from LIBRE.

By law, the TSE should have ceased to recognize the PDCH for failing to obtain enough votes to be considered a viable political party (set at 5%). Viability as a party has defined legal criteria because recognized parties receive funding from the TSE.

Other parties that received more presidential votes, such as Romeo Vasquez Velasquez's Partido Alianza Patriotica were disbanded by the TSE after their poor election showing in 2013. But that has not happened to the PDCH, perhaps because one of the three senior judges on its leadership panel, Saul Escobar, is a member. 

Coming out of the 2013 Elections, the PDCH, despite its small electoral constituency, had three factions attempting to gain power. One was controlled by Arturo Cruz Asensio, one by Nieves Fernando Perez and the third by Carlos Manzanares and Felicito Avila. This resulted in three different slates being nominated to compete for the party leadership, one headed by Cruz Asensio, a second by Carlos Manzanares, and a third by Nieves Fernando Perez.

Just before the party election, Manzanares and Fernando Perez stepped aside in the name of party unity.  Cruz Asensio was elected party President, and Manzanares Vice President. They replaced Felicito Avila and Lucas Aguilera in those posts. Cruz Asensio promised to be more questioning towards the ruling National Party, although there is no indication that he has been.

But all is not well.

A rift that developed between the current leadership and a faction led by Manzanares manifested in a violent meeting where people were throwing chairs and punches at each other. Disguised by rhetoric about old guard versus new guard, the attack on the party leadership turned out to be a long-planned attempt to co-opt this minor party in Honduras for personal gain, allegedly fomented by Arturo Corrales, the current Chancellor of the country.

Gissel Villanueva, an aide to Cruz Asensio said

“People paid by Arturo Corrales and his helpers, Felicito Avila, Carlos Romero and Jorge Bogran were the ones who started this fight and this they did because they are people who have already left the party but don't want to let go of power.....

The only thing that interests Arturo Corrales is power; what he wants is to have control over the three congressmen which this party has in the National Congress and which he doesn’t control; he wants these positions.”

Corrales has played a prominent role in both the Liberal Party and National Party governments that have ruled Honduras since the coup of 2009. He has held the cabinet posts of Security Minister and Head of Foreign Relations under both of the last two National Party Administrations. But his political career was made as a member of the minority Partido Democráta Cristiano, for which he was a presidential candidate in 1997.

On September 5th, a group claiming to be PDCH party leadership delegates met in Tegucigalpa and stripped Cruz Asensio of his party leadership role and elected Carlos Manzanares to that position.  In the very same meeting the disciplinary committee suspended the party membership of Arturo Corrales because of the attack at the youth meeting.  This appears to be a resurgence of the factionalism evident in 2014, with the Manzanares faction claiming control of the party leadership.

Cruz Asensio contests his demotion.  He called the meeting illegal because he neither convened it nor was present at it. He notes that the delegates who convened it were not the delegates registered with the TSE as the party's official delegates. David Aguilera, the party executive secretary called the suspension of Arturo Corrales illegal though he didn't state why. Luis Aguilera, who is part of the Manzanares faction, said that the 200 legal delegates were convened, conveying his position that the meeting was legal.

Now, the group that seized the leadership of the party has submitted to the TSE a leadership council headed by Manzanares with a replacement disciplinary committee, and with a new political committee headed by Arturo Corrales, and staffed by Felicito Avila, Ramon Velasquez Nazar, and Lucas Aguilera.

Augusto Cruz Asensio has submitted an appeal attempting to dismiss the other group's submission, arguing that the delegates that met were not those listed with the TSE as the law demands.

The TSE said that after combing its archives, it can find no filings listing the delegates for 2013, 2015, or 2015 for the PDCH. That greatly weakens Cruz Asensio's position, and the failure happened under this leadership.

At stake is more than control of a moribund electoral party: there is also the matter of control of votes for the upcoming selection of candidates for the Supreme Court.

Ebal Diaz: "We've already contained the corruption"

Large Torchlight Marches (Marchas de las Antorchas) have been going on every night in different cities in Honduras for at least the last three weeks.

Participants have called for three things: an end to impunity, the establishment of an International Commission against Impunity, and the resignation of Juan Orlando Hernández, President of Honduras, due to corruption in his election campaign.

The Partido Nacional has admitted that the election of Hernández was funded in part by resources diverted from the IHSS. Nonetheless, both the party, and the government it controls, are against Honduras calling for an International Commission against Impunity.

That's the word from Ebal Diaz, a Honduran presidential advisor.

These commissions, organized by the UN, have been effective in other countries where they've been formed, such as Guatemala.

Honduras doesn't need one because, according to Diaz, "We've already contained the corruption." 

Diaz goes further, calling the Guatemala commission ineffective. He relates that it has cost $150 million over its seven year life, and successfully brought and prosecuted only four cases of corruption or impunity. 

Diaz said:

"Is this an alternative for the country?  There are the numbers; they're not something we invented.  So the Honduran people need justice...When?  In three years?  In 5 years? or now?  We're looking for solutions now by strengthening our [government] institutions."

Diaz suggests the government might accelerate its pace of cleaning up corruption and implementing training.

These actions, however, do nothing to capture and prosecute those who perpetrated the crimes, something Diaz fails to address.

The recent Congressional Commission which reviewed a series of corruption cases involving the IHSS, INPREMA, and the IP, and the assassinations of notable government officials like Alfredo Landaverde, was relatively useless.

It served only to confirm what everyone already knows: the Public Prosecutor's office is barely investigating these cases of corruption and impunity, some of which have stretched on for more than seven years in the investigative state. While it might eventually bring charges against those immediately responsible, it likely will not pursue those who planned and directed the crimes. From that perspective, then, even with the "numbers" Diaz cites, a commission like that in Guatemala would be an improvement.

The level of corruption and impunity in Honduras is hard to believe. In fact, even as the Congressional report was being released, the lead on the congressional committee, Mario Perez, was being identified in the Honduran press as a drug trafficker, based on Honduran government documents from 2012.

Impunity reigns in Honduras not because the Public Prosecutor's office is incapable of pursing these crimes. It has been endlessly trained under US and European foreign aid programs in investigation and prosecution of organized crime. 

To pursue these crimes is neither politically expedient, nor good for a prosecutor's longevity.  No government program will address either of these risks.

The previous Prosecutor against corruption, Roberto Ramirez Aldana, who had headed the IHSS investigation from the start, recently took an extended leave to assume a government post as Honduras's Ambassador to UNESCO.  He did so because the Honduran Military Intelligence agency informed him of credible death threats against him and suggested he leave the country.

One of the trails of corruption leads directly to the currently ruling Partido Nacional. But the current Public Prosecutor, Oscar Chinchilla, was appointed by that party, while Juan Orlando Hernandez was the President of Congress, during the presidential term of Porfirio Lobo Sosa.  Chinchilla sets the priorities for the office. He's focusing the department on corruption during José Manuel Zelaya's term as president, largely ignoring more recent corruption that can be linked to his own party.

Arturo Corrales, Honduras' Foreign Minister, has said Honduras will not ask for an International Commission against Corruption from the UN.

Rigoberto Chang Castillo, currently Minister of Justice, the Interior, and Decentralization, went further: he made up a criterion for when such a commission is necessary: "Only when there's a high degree of ingovernability". Chang Castillo claims that "Honduras isn't worthy" of such a designation.  These kinds of commissions, he continued,

"uniquely can be asked for by the government of the Republic when the country is in a state of ingovernability and there is no confidence in the institutions of the State....This is requested when the Judicial system has collapsed."

The irony is, Chang Castillo precisely describes the Honduras that the Torchlight Marchers see.

Dueling Murder Rates

Good News.  Honduras's murder rate has fallen significantly, though the magnitude of the drop depends on who you believe.  The Security Minister reports a homicide rate of 65.55 per 100,000 population, or 15.67 murders per day.  The Observatorio de Violencia, indicates that Honduras is on track to have a murder rate of 71.82 per 100,000, or 17.17 per day.  Still, either of these rates lets Honduras remain the murder capital of the world for nations not a war.


The difference again comes down to what you count as a murder.  Arturo Corrales, the Security Minister, changed the definition of murder back in 2013 to require both a police report and a coroner's report indicating the case is a homicide.  Corrales claims he was just following the recommendations of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB0 on how to construct a comparable murder statistic between countries.  See our previous posting on this topic for a link to that IADB "standard".  We point out in that post some of the shortcomings of the standard.

The Observatorio de Violencia, on the other hand, gathers both the police reports and the coroner's reports and reconcile the two.  There are bodies that lack a police report but have a coroner's report.  There are bodies that have a police report but no coroners report.  The Observatorio, using internationally recognized techniques attempts to determine based on the information available, if those bodies represent a homicide, and if so, include it in their statistics.

The difference so far this year is 623 bodies in the first half of the year that the Security Ministry does not recognize as homicides because they lack a coroner's report.  The Director of the National Police, Ramon Sabillon,  told El Heraldo that until there's a coroner's report the body cannot be incorporated into his database.  His database is the Sistema Estadistico Policial en linia (SEPOL), the official public face of crime statistics in Honduras.

Then too, there's confusion among the official government sources about how many homicides there have been in the first half of 2014.  FUSINA, the inter-institutional police force (combined military and police) says 2442 murders in the first half of the year, while the Police report 2720 homicides.  The coroner's office reports 2442 homicides.

Still, despite the innumeracy of the Honduran government, this is good news.  Murders are decreasing, though slowly. 

Whose Observatory of Violence?

Who controls the crime statistics?  Honduras has an Observatorio de Violencia, long a part of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH).  The Security Ministry has outsourced its collecting and reporting of crime statistics to a private company,  Ingenieria Gerencial, owned by the Security Minister, Arturo Corrales.  Just about no one believes the crime statistics Corrales has been peddling.

So in February, Corrales announced the formation of 30 separate municipal Observatorios de Violencia, modeled after the successful program in Colombia, the  Observatorio para la Prevencion de Violencia y Lesiones de Colombia.  This program, and the existing Observatorio at UNAH, both owe their existence to pilot projects done by the CISALVA institute of the Universidad del Valle de Cali, in Colommbia 2002-2004, financed by Georgetown University and USAID.

In 1996 the Organization of American States Pan American Health Organization recognized that violence was a health problem, and in 2008 published a manual of best practices derived from what was learned in the Colombia pilot program.  The manual was written as part of a project to roll this program out in several Central American countries.  Ultimately Panama and Nicaragua were part of the initial pilot program.

Honduras was considered for that pilot program, but because of internal political considerations, was dropped.  The OAS wrote in the methodology manual for these municipal observatories in 2008:

It should be noted that Honduras was selected for the first phase [of the roll out by the UN], and later postponed for political reasons, in actuality the methodology has been successfully implemented developing a national observatory and a local observatory in the capital city of the country, founded in the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras, UNAH, with the technical aid of the UN Development Program (PNUD in Spanish) and financed by the Swiss Agency for International Development.

So basically, the OAS/Pan American Health Organization is saying in 2008 that Honduras already has a national program that follows the best practices methodology they're promulgating, and doing it successfully.

So why is Arturo Corrales rejecting the Observatorio de Violencia at UNAH and proposing to supplant it with 30 municipal Observatorios doing the same work?  Corrales falsely claims you cannot do this at the national level:

The objective for establishing these municipal observatories of violencis is to characterize the causes of death and this can only be done at the local level, not the national level.

But the OAS, who after all, wrote the best practices manual, just said that the methodology was successfully being implemented at the national level in Honduras by the UNAH Observatorio de Violencia, so either Corrales is unfamiliar with the actual program and methodology, or he's being disingenous.

The irony here is that the UNAH Observatory already has proposed to do exactly this, almost a month ago.  For the last several years it has been establishing local observatories of violence in selected municipalities.  On March 27,   they announced the creation of a local observatory in Tela and said they sought to extend this to the whole country.  In fact, there already are local observatories in Comayagua, Choluteca, San Pedro Sula, Choloma, La Ceiba, and Juticalpa.  At least some of these are places Corrales intends to install his own observatories.  Maybe instead of developing a competing program, Corrales should embrace the existing one?

Why should Honduras spend money on setting up municipal violence observatories when everyone including Corrales agrees the UNAH program is exemplary? Migdona Ayestes, head of the UNAH Observatorio de Violencia, thinks it may be that Corrales doesn't understand the mission and function of an Observatorio de Violencia.  She arranged to meet with him  to explain it to him.

However, there seems to be two other  answers here.  On the one hand, these would be the "Official" observatories that would collect and disseminate statistics through the Security Ministry.  That should give everyone pause.

Corrales, though, went on to say that they would be more inclusive, involving more of civil society, and let them be able to take local preventative action and measure the results of such actions through their local statistics.  So its also about decentralization, taking the responsibility for crime fighting decision making from the Security Ministry and making responsibility for devising strategies to fight crime the responsibility of Mayors and their local observatory.

This kind of local decision making is a part of what is envisioned in the OAS best practices manual.  How that will translate in Honduras, where the police force is nationally controlled by the Security Ministry remains to be seen.
It has the benefit of taking responsibility for crime statistics away from the national government and puts it on municipalities, which Corrales must like.  Currently his job performance is evaluated by the national crime statistics, hence his investment (and profiting) from producing and reducing them.

There's no explanation for where the funding for these local observatories is coming from.  The OAS manual calls for an IT professional and a computer to host the database and map server/gis system that registers and displays crimes, and these cost money.  There is not necessarily such a person already in every municipality who can be freed up to support such a program.  The computers need to allocated, and the specified software packages installed and configured on them.  Presumably Corrales is freeing up money from some other part of his budget to cover the expenses of such a program roll out and operation.  It certainly wasn't in his 2014 budget.

So right now it looks like Honduras will have competing Observatorios de Violencia for the forseeable future.

Slight Improvement in Homicide Statistics

The Observatorio de Violencia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH) announced over the weekend that 2013 closed out with 6,757 homicides, yielding an average of 79.7 homicides per 100,000 population or about 18.5 homicides per day. 

That's consistent with their prediction that Honduras would close out the year with a homicide rate of 80 per 100.000 population.  Its also a clear improvement over the previous year, when the homicide rate was 85 per 100,000 population.  Honduras's most violent year was 2011, when there were 92 homicides per 100,000 population.

Aruturo Corrales, the Security Minister, however, is not satisfied.

He would have you believe that Honduras improved even more.  He claims his new "official" statistics recorded a homicide rate of 75.1 per 100,000 population, or about 17 per day. 

As we have previously indicated, the problem with his "official" statistics is that he changed the definition of homicide, and the way the information is collected, so that his data cannot be compared with any previous data about the homicide rate in the country.  Corrales relies on the police to collect and evaluate the data but will not make the data publicly available for independent evaluation.  The Observatorio de Violencia, on the other hand, uses a publicly auditable set of procedures to collect and evaluate the homicide data for Honduras, and their data and procedures are available. 

It's a case of "trust me" statistics versus auditable statistics.

Corrales resents being challenged on his sleight of hand with statistics, so much so that he is threatening to create his own official Observatorio de Violencia that would be part of the Security Ministry. 

He also claims Honduras is on track to reduce the homicide rate to 30 per 100,000 population by the end of this year. That would be quite astonishing.

Like a bad statistician, Corrales keeps trying to present short-term statistics as if they represent a lasting change in homicide rates.  Accordingly, he claims the current homicide rate, over the last 37 days (!) is 14 per day.

For some reason, Corrales thinks the fact that homicides are mostly concentrated in just a few municipios (like San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, and Tegucigalpa) makes the security situation better. True enough: but then, the majority of the population is also concentrated in those few municipios.

Migdonia Ayestas, the Director of the real Observatorio, says the state should think carefully about how it invests its scarce resources, but that even if they do create their own Observatorio de Violencia, the current one at the university will continue.

Julieta Castellanos, Rector of UNAH, added:

Corrales claims all that we do is repeat the numbers that they publish; nonetheless, the data that they process is less than the number of events registered each day and UNAH cannot publish a report that doesn't certify how the data were compiled....I think that he (Corrales) wants the number to be decreasing and we as academics cannot say what isn't true.

Ultimately success will not be measured by statistics, but by how safe the Honduran people feel.  The bad news is that regardless of the source of current homicide statistics for Honduras, it still has the highest homicide rate in the world.

Cell Phone Blocking versus Cell Phone Interception

Honduras has embarked on a very stupid program of forcing its cell phone providers to block calls from within the 23 prisons in Honduras. 

It's not that the idea is necessarily bad.  But the implementation they chose is exceptionally stupid.

The Honduran Congress under Porfirio Lobo Sosa passed a bill that requires cell phone providers to block any calls from prisons. This is not something that is done easily in a standard cell phone base station and requires special programming (and probably required the purchase of that capability from the base station provider). 

The idiocy comes from the fact that the law specifies that for each prison location, no cell phone be able to complete a call, text message, or Internet connection within a one kilometer circle around the prison.

The Honduran Congress definitely shouldn't have specified a technical solution to what recognizably is a problem for their desired management of the prison population. But they did, and they chose the worst possible solution for the Honduran populace that lives near the prisons.

It probably bears emphasis that in Honduras, prisons are often located in densely populated areas surrounded by housing.

The residents of these cities and towns living within one kilometer of the prisons targeted are suffering because their cell phones don't work, either.  That means no emergency service calls for medical help, no fire protection, no calling the police to report a crime in progress. 

In some cases the congressionally mandated solution wipes out the telecommunications capabilities of businesses.  And the affected zone is not actually limited to the mandated one kilometer: people living 2-3 km away from the prison in Gracias a Dios cannot use their phones.

Why? Because the system works by geolocating each phone and determining its distance from the prison. This is not always an accurate process.

Arturo Corrales, the Security Minister held over from the Lobo Sosa administration, strongly supports the law, and today said

the common good is above the good of individuals.

But who defines the "common good" being served here? 

There's an awful lot of people who can no longer use their cell phones despite a legitimate right to do so.

Cell phone jamming has been proposed as a possible alternative technology, but in trials around the world, it has a mixed record of success.  If there's a cell tower near the prison, it can easily swamp the jamming signal, and managing the tuning of the jammers is time consuming and requires ongoing attention. 

The Honduran military already has this capability and deployed it in 2009 during the coup if Corrales wants to try it.

The technological solution that's most appropriate for what Honduras wants to achieve is called "managed access". 

In this system, the prison would establish a small cell phone base station to provide a radio umbrella over the prison. That umbrella can be tuned fairly accurately to only affect the prison population. 

When a cell phone connects to the system, the system determines if it is an authorized cell number.  Authorized cell phones are then connected to the commercial services.  Unauthorized cell phones simply stop working.

Such systems are available from multiple vendors and have successfully been used in US prisons.

Corrales alludes to efforts to study possible technological solutions that might limit blocking to just the prison, but in the meantime, Honduran citizens with legitimate rights to use a cell phone will continue to suffer because Congress inappropriately specified a technological solution it did not understand.

The Shape of the New Honduran Government

The Honduran government under Juan Orlando Hernández is on a slimming diet that hopes to save 4000 million lempiras (about $190 million). 

It will accomplish this slimming by radically restructuring the government and its bureaucracy.  As a first step, Honduras has already gone from having 38 cabinet level Ministers, to having only seven.  There will be a total of twelve Subsecretaries, all of them reporting to one of the seven ministers.

Here's the seven ministries, and what existing government institutions will be preserved under them:

0.  Executive Branch Administration (no official name announced)
          Minister - Reinaldo Sanchez
          Advisor - Ebal Diaz
          Communications and Strategy - Hilda Hernandez
          Coordinator - Jorge Ramon Hernandez Alcerro

*1.  Gabinete de Competitividad y Empleo  (Competiveness and Employment)
          Minister - Alden Rivera
          S. de Trabajo - Carlos Alberto Madero Erazo
          S. de Desarrollo Economico - Jorge Lobo
          SERNA (Secretaria de Recursos Naturales) - José Antonio Galdámez

*2. Gabinete de Economia y Finanzas (Economy and Finances)
          Minister - Wilfredo Cerrato
          BCH (Banco Central de Honduras) - Marlon Tabora
          DEI (equivalent of the IRS) - Miriam Guzman

*3.  Gabinete de Energia e Infraestructura (Energy and Infrastructure)
          Minister - Roberto Ordoñez
          SOPTRAVI (Secretaria de Obras Publicas) - Roberto Ordoñez

*4.  Gabinete de Gobernabilidad y Modernización (Government and Modernization)
          Minister - Ricardo Alvarez
          S. de Interior y Poblacion - Rigoberto Chang Castillo

*5.  Gabinete de Inclusion y Desarrollo Social (Participation and Social Development)
          Minister - Lisandro Rosales
          S. de Salud - Yolany Batres
          S. de Educación - Marlon Escoto

*6.  Gabinete de Seguridad (Security)
          Minister - Arturo Corrales
          Vice Minister - Alejandra Hernandez
          S. de Seguridad - Arturo Corrales
          S. de Defensa - Samuel Reyes

7.  Gabinete de Relaciones Exteriores
          Minister - Mireya Aguero de Corrales


While a lot of decisions remain to be made, the following Secretaries of State are abolished:

1. Secretaria de Cultura, Artes y Deportes
2. Secretaria de Planificacion y Cooperacion Externa
3. Secretaria de Turismo
4. Secretaria de Justicia y Derechos Humanos
5. Secretaria de Pueblos Indigenas y Afrodescendientes
6. Secretaria de la Juventud

"Abolished" here means that these are no longer Secretarias de Estado, cabinet-level offices. It is not that their functions will necessarily go away.

Those functions will be evaluated. Jorge Ramon Hernandez Alcerro, the Coordinator in the Presidential Ministry, has the responsibility for keeping each Ministry to its assigned goals, and for determining by Tuesday, February 4, how the functions of each secretaria that is not being continued get integrated into the existing structure.

As a hint at what may happen: Alden Rivera has explained that in his Ministry,  Competitividad y Empleo,  there are currently twenty-one institutions and those will be reduced to twelve.

 So stay tuned.  There will be more changes.

Government Reorganization: Massive Centralization Proposed

We're beginning to see the pieces of how Juan Orlando Hernández's transition team wants to re-organize the Honduran government.  We've accumulated our description through press reports (notably this, and this) and sources in Honduras with knowledge of the planning.

The names of proposed units vary, but the shape is clear: massive centralization and an emphasis on economic development, subordinating many of the functions of the executive branch to new structures of authority.

But there's a hitch: on Friday, the emerging plans got slapped down when Congress refused to authorize changes to the Ley de Administración Pública that would be necessary to implement what one Honduran source described to us as massive centralization.

Here's what the transition team proposed:

Eight super Ministries whose heads would form Hernandez's cabinet:

• Strategic Planning (Conducción Estrategica)
• Interior and Decentralization (Gobernabilidad y Descentralización)
• Economic Development (Desarrollo Economico)
• Social Development and Inclusion (Desarrollo e Inclusión Social)
• Defense and Security (Defensa y Seguridad)
• Productive Infrastructure (Infraestructura Productiva)
• Foreign Relations and International Cooperation (Relaciones Exteriores y Cooperación Internacional)
• Economic Planning and Regulation (Conducción y Regulación Economica)

The new structure demotes many of the existing Secretariats (such as Gobernacion, Justicia y Derechos Humanos, Agricultura y Ganaderia) to a director level below a super Minister.  It folds all the existing Secretariats into the eight super Ministries, if not at the director level, then as part of merged portfolios.
 Each of the eight cabinet ministers will have a series of direct reports, many of them running institutions that under Lobo Sosa were represented at the cabinet level.

Thus, Economic Planning and Regulation would include the Banco Central de Honduras (BCH), the Comision de Bancos y Seguros (CNBS), and the former cabinet-level Secretaria de Finanzas (SEFIN), among others.

Interior and Decentralization encompasses the former Interior Ministry, immigration services, and the National Registry of People (RNP)

Economic Development incorporates the Secretaria de Recursos Naturales y Ambiente (SERNA), and the Secretaria de Agricultura y Ganaderia, each previously cabinet level on its own.

Productive Infrastructure takes over the former Secretaria de Obras Publicas, Transporte, y Vivienda (SOPTRAVI).

Defense and Security essentially remains as it did under Arturo Corrales, folding together the former Secretaria de Defensa and the Secretaria de Seguridad, combining cabinet-level responsibility for the military and police.

Foreign Relations and International Cooperation replaces and continues the existing Ministry of Foreign Relations.

Takeaway? 

Power would be concentrated in a very few individuals. 

The proposed shape of the government shows the neoliberal economic agenda that is the focus of this government.  For example, the affairs of the former cabinet-level Ministry of Culture would be rolled into the new ministry of economic development.

The goal was allegedly to reduce the size of the Honduran government, and reduce its budget by some 700 million lempiras (about $35 million). But it's not clear where the savings would come from. Each super Ministry must do what all the previous Secretariats incorporated in it did.

This led Congress to reject the entire thing this Friday.

At the same time Congress was given the proposed structure, and changes to the Ley de Administración Pública to implement it, it was also given the Hernández budget for 2014 based on doing that reorganization. The rough outline of spending reportedly is:

Strategic Planning - 2000 million lempiras ($100 million)
Interior and Decentralization - 7000 million lempiras ($350 million)
Economic Development - 5000 million lempiras ($250 million)
Social Development and Inclusion - 70,000 million lempiras ($3.5 billion)
Defense and Security - 8000 million lempiras ($400 million)
Productive Infrastructure - 40,000 million lempiras ($2 billion)
Foreign Relations and International Cooperation - 855 million lempiras ($42.7 million)
Economic Planning and Regulation- 45,000 million lempiras ($2.25 billion)

Congress members said that the plan they received, along with the budget above, doesn't appear to eliminate any part of the existing government and just tacks a bureaucracy for a super Ministry on top of it, bloating the budget by 18 to 20 million per super Ministry. 

An unnamed Congressman is quoted as saying "they think they invented hot water....they sent us a bunch of foolishness and clumsy structures".

Now Congress, not Hernandez's transition team, will have the final say on if and how the government will be re-organized when they take the question up again in the next few days.

Tigre Bonilla and Rene Osorio Canales Out

Porfirio Lobo Sosa  is letting Juan Orlando Hernández start making changes in the Honduran government before he is sworn in this coming January, underlining the collaboration that exists between these two Partido Nacional administrations, while highlighting their differences in key changes in the police and military leadership.

On December 17, Lobo Sosa gave his Ministers until the end of the day to hand in their resignations so that Hernandez could install his choices once he made them.  The first act was to shuffle the command in the police and military.  The new holders of these positions have already been sworn in by Lobo Sosa today, with Hernández speaking at the ceremony.

Juan Carlos "Tigre" Bonilla is out.  Ramon Antonio Sabillon Pineda is the new police commander.  Sabillon previously was the commander of the special investigations division of the police. 

Bonilla is rumored to have had differences with Arturo Corrales, the Security Minister, who Hernández is considering keeping in that office. 

Felix Villanueva Mejia will be the assistant director of the police.  The preventative police will be headed by Javier Leopoldo Flores Milla, while Hernández will keep the current director of the transit police, Abencio Atilio Flores Morazán, in that position.  The director of the investigative police (Dirección Nacional de Investigación Criminal) will be Jose Leandro Osorio.  The special investigative police will be headed by Ruben Martel Garcia,while Hector Ivan Mejia will serve as director of the police academy.  Abraham Flores Marcelino will be head of the police special unit, and José Leonel Enamorado will be the police commander of the joint military and police task force.

The high command of the Honduran Armed Forces was also changed significantly. 

In the place of the current military commander, Rene Osorio Canales, will be Fredy Santiago Diaz Zelaya.  In December Zelaya received his fifth star, along with Julian Pacheco Tinoco, who will remain as commander of the Military Intelligence service.  Rigoberto Espinosa Posadas, who was promoted in December, will be second in command of the Honduran Joint Chiefs.  Miguel Palacios Romero will be the military Inspector General.  Jorge Alberto Fernández López will command the Air Force, and Héctor Orlando Caballero Espinoza will command the Navy.

Lobo Sosa also let Juan Orlando Hernández name and install his head of the Dirección Ejecutivo de Ingresos (DEI), the Honduran equivalent of the IRS. 

This important government unit, which failed to meet its quotas all through the Lobo Sosa government, will be Miriam Guzman.  She also has taken the reins of her government unit already.

How to Lie With Statistics: Honduran Homicide Edition

Arturo Corrales has cut off Honduras's Observatorio de Violencia from its ability to get crime statistics from the police and coroners in Honduras. 

Julietta Castellanos, the rector of the National Autonomous University, says that Corrales has obstructed the Observatorio from getting statistics for the last 6 months of this year.  Castellanos observed that the Observatorio:

"was created in 2003 and never have we had any restriction on access to the information; the procedures and methodology for the construction of the data were a validation process done by the University, the Public Prosecutor's office, and the Secretary of Security."

The power struggle between an administration that desperately wants to make the homicide statistics look better, and the Observatorio de Violencia, that wants to transparently report on the statistics, was made clear in October, when both the government and the Observatorio released their homicide statistics for the first half of 2013.

They differed on the number of murders by about a thousand.

At that time Corrales made the argument that it was proper to change the way Honduras reports homicides to conform to the standard way the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo counts homicides. This procedure is particularly maladapted to the Honduran situation.  It calls for a determination of homicide only when both police and a coroner agree on a verdict of homicide.

In Honduras, few homicide victims are examined by a coroner.  Coroners only operate in the major cities (Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula) so for there to be a determination by a coroner, the body would have to be taken from where the individual was killed, to one of these morgues.  That simply doesn't happen, for cultural and financial reasons.  Most Hondurans reclaim the body from the police within 24 hours and bury it within 48 hours of death. The existing coroners have trouble keeping up with the volume of urban homicides. But violent death is not limited to these cities.

So requiring both a police and a coroner's report predictably would lower Honduras' reported murder rate, even though nothing has actually changed.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa claimed yesterday that

"the indices of violence have experienced a notable decline,"

and continued that he often used to hear of 20-35 deaths a day, but now it seldom breaks single digits.

That is, obviously, no justification not to make the data requested by the Observatorio de Violencia public. The reasons for obscuring it are purely political. 

The government claims homicides are down, and wants to show a big reduction.  However, the way they're now counting homicides is incompatible with the way the rate was determined in past years, so whatever they choose to announce is actually meaningless.  Numbers calculated using a new method cannot be used to establish a pattern with respect to previous homicide rates. 

As Migdonia Ayestas, head of the Observatorio de Violencia told Proceso Digital:

"we cannot play with the citizenry saying that violence has diminished when we have seen that daily there are multiple crimes."

Caritas, the Catholic charity, also issued a statement lamenting the obfuscation and calling on Corrales to cease obstructing the Observatorio's access to information.

Proceso Digital seems to agree.  It closes its article:

Ever since Arturo Corrales assumed the reins of the Secretary of Security, in one way or another they have hidden the violent death statistics from the press and the citizens in general.

Murder By The Numbers

The Lobo Sosa government and the independent Observatorio de Violencia disagree on the number of murders in Honduras in the first six months of 2013.

The difference is substantial.

The government says there have been 2,629 murders.  The Observatorio de Violencia recorded 3,547 homicides during the same period.

The difference?

The government says there isn't paperwork or bodies to substantiate 918 homicides counted by the Observatorio. The Observatorio says it has paperwork and bodies for all of them, and that it got that information from the same government sources the Minister of Security and Defense, Arturo Corrales, says don't have them.

There is an explanation.

Corrales admits that when he was appointed, he ordered a change in the methodology of the way homicides were counted, applying a new Sistema Regional de Indicadores Estandardizados de Convivencia y Seguridad Ciudadana (Standard Indicators of Living Together and Citizen Security), promulgated by the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID).  This is a way of standardizing social statistics, including the measure of homicides, between countries to allow comparison.  This new protocol to standardize how countries report crime statistics is described in an article (linked above) published in the 2012 edition of the Revista Panamericana de Salud Publica.

So Corrales asserts that the difference in count is because the Observatorio de Violencia is not following the proper methodology.  For Corrales to count a death as murder, he requires both that there be an autopsy, and a coroner's report calling the death homicide.  Corrales says that those 918 cases are only "possible homicides" because either they lack the body, or the coroner's report declaring it a homicide.

Reality check: coroners work in, and autopsies are only performed, in Tegucigalpa, La Ceiba, and San Pedro Sula. Many families do not allow autopsies to be performed, reclaiming the body for burial almost immediately.  Thus any statistic that requires both an autopsy and coroner's report will significantly undercount homicides in Honduras.

The Observatorio de Violencia has been following internationally recognized procedures since 2004, using the same approach to accumulate data from the national police and the investigative police, as well as the coroners.

Migdonia Ayestas, the Observatorio de Violencia coordinator, said of Corrales:

If the Secretary of Security does not incorporate all the homicides attested to in his files, there is a problem with his analysis.  The police report says "dead", says by firearm, and gives a name and surname.

Of the 918 disputed cases, all have a police report; 786 of them have a cause of death indicated in the report; and only 135 lack the name of the individual.  Ayestas says there are about 400 cases where the police have not declared the death a homicide, and that the Observatorio does not count those cases.

Why is this a problem? Changing methods impedes assessing trends over time.

Corrales wants to assert that the current homicide rate in Honduras has fallen dramatically, to 70 per 100,000 population from the reported 85-91 per 100,000 in 2012.  The Observatorio de Violencia agrees that the homicide rate has fallen slightly, to about 80 per 100,000. The difference is that the Observatorio de Violencia is comparing two numbers calculated the same way; Corrales has changed the rules, so really we cannot compare the 2012 and 2013 numbers. One way the murder rate fell about 18-23%; the way the Observatorio has always used, by 6-12%.

The takeaway here is that the government is no longer following the same procedures it was following for counting murders, and therefore the numbers it gives out from now on will be incommensurate with the homicide rates it reported before. The Observatorio de Violencia is following the same procedures, so its current and past numbers will be comparable.

Or, put another way, Corrales is prepared to change the way he counts homicides so that it looks like the Lobo Sosa government is being much more effective against crime than it really is.  To do so he invented a methodology that because of how things work in Honduras, will significantly undercount the homicide rate.

Fiscal Irresponsibility and the Security Tax

Who would think it was OK to spend 1,800 million lempiras ($90 million dollars) from a fund whose balance is only 500 million lempiras ($25 million dollars)?

That's spending more than 3 times your current balance!

Juan Ferrera, head of the government commission that decides how to spend the income from the security tax, thinks it's OK.  Not only that, but he plans to borrow perhaps 600 million lempiras ($30 million dollars) to cover the shortfall from his commission's irresponsible spending, as short term loans from domestic Honduran banks which will be at high interest rates. He proposes to pay the loans back with the projected income from the security tax in 2014.

The security tax, new in 2012, is a tax on bank transactions intended to pay for additional security efforts in the country in general. After the tax was approved, it was modified by Congress so that in addition to reinforcing security, it could be used to "fortify the finances" of the government. It has been used as a candy jar for everyone's pet idea of how to spend government funds, and ultimately, they spent more than they will take in this year, by a lot.

Ferrera made the astounding admission that his commission, which was set up to make decisions about administering funds from the security tax, has made no decisions.  Instead, he says the decisions were made by the Secretary of Defense and Security (Arturo Corrales), the Supreme Court (Jorge Rivera Aviles), the Public Prosecutor's office (formerly Luis Rubi, now Oscar Fernando Chinchilla), and municipalities. 

Basically, if anyone proposed using funds from the security tax for any old project, it simply was done.  The commission headed by Ferrera totally abdicated its responsibility.

Naturally they overspent. There was no one accountable. 

The biggest winner by far has been the Secretary of Defense and Security, who assigned himself a whopping 716.7 million lempiras ($35.8 million dollars).  This includes paying for both the new Military Police (24.5 million lempiras), and a Police Special Operations Unit (los Tigres), both championed by Juan Orlando Hernandez and approved by the Honduran Congress.  While the Military police unit has started operations, with between 600 and 1000 troops chosen from existing soldiers, the Tigres unit has not even begun organizing itself, despite having been authorized last spring.

The latest proposed charge to the security tax:  800,000 lempiras to electrify the island of Isla Conejo, subject of a dispute with El Salvador.  Ferrera said

"There's no doubt that it's part of our territory and we need to exercise sovereignty in this place and because of that the petition [to electrify the island] was immediately approved....the money is already in the hands of the company that will carry out the project."

Has any of this spending spree made a significant change in the security of the Honduran people?

Not significantly by any of the measures that matter.  The government predicts that the murder rate will be around 80 per 100,000 population, while the National University's Observatory of Violence sees the rate continuing at 85 per 100,000 for the rest of the year, off slightly from its observed rate of 91 per 100,000 in 2012.

More militarization of policing, and intensifying a border dispute with a neighbor over an uninhabited island hardly seems like enough to justify the over-spending and lack of accountability demonstrated.

Meet the New Police, Same as the Old Police

Honduras has a new law establishing a military police force meant to police the civilian population.

Apparently Juan Orlando Hernandez, who championed this bill only after leaving the Congress to run for president, is pining for his teens and 20s because he's set Honduras to return to military control of part of the civilian police force that used to be the norm.

The military likes it because they get to appoint 5000 more troops, called up from the military reserves, and they get a bigger budget as a result as well.

General Rene Osorio Canales says the new force needs training and vetting, but will be ready in October.  (How much training can they get in a month?)

This proposal stirs up memories, and not good ones. Honduras used to have a militarized police force, called the Fuerza de Seguridad Publica. It had an awful reputation for human rights violations and corruption.  Its National Investigation Directorate [DNI in Spanish], responsible for "investigating" crimes, was useless.  They merely sat in the office and took crime reports (and solicited bribes) from victims.

It was actually worse than that.  Ineffectual in dealing with crime, the DNI was good at something: violence against the Honduran population.

Edmundo Orellano wrote in a report in 2004 that during the 1980s, the FUSEP:

Through its dependency known as the National Investigation Directorate, once the constitution [1982] was in effect, persecuted, tortured, and murdered hundreds of Honduras because they thought their ideas were dangerous for the stability of the regime.

Orellana continues:

A consequence of this conduct by the [millitary] police and the submissive attitude of the judiciary [towards that behavior] was that Honduras was condemned in the Corte Interamericana de los Derechos Humanos.

In 1993, the Honduran government took away investigative powers from its military police force and gave investigation over to the Public Prosecutor's office. Instead of hiring people who hadn't completed high school (the FUSEP model), the Public Prosecutor's office only hired those with at least a high school or college degree, to try and avoid the abuses of the past.

Orellana notes that they quickly found that it was in fact, a corrupt [millitary] police that was behind much of the crime.

This led to a political war between the military and the public prosecutor's office. 

Congress, in its political wisdom, then tried to reincorporate the investigative services back under military control, but public sentiment and some political will resulted in the investigative force being switched to reporting to the Minister of Security instead, under the direction of the Public Prosecutor.

In 1997 the national police force was formally separated from the military and put under civilian control for the first time since the 1940s. In 1998 the Honduran Congress passed a law creating and regulating the civilian national police force Honduras has today.

The new 5000 member strong police force proposed would be a military police force, not under civilian control, staffed by military reservists who are called up to serve.  They would be better paid and have better benefits than the national police according to analysts, who indicated that this will exacerbate the financial crisis in Honduras.

Jose Simon Azcona, a Liberal party congressman, says the idea for a new militarized police force came from the US Embassy, and that

the government of the United States had offered assistance, and were converting four batallions into military police under the previous administration. 

So that's 5000 new military police.

But that's not the only new police.

There also is a newly created community police force, brainchild of uber Secretary of Defense and Security Arturo Corrales.  This project, done by decree instead of by law, is to hire 4500 new civilian police starting in September of this year.

Corrales announced earlier this month that he had discovered in his first 100 days as uberMinister that there were 2,150 phantom police officers, people on the payroll collecting salaries, but who could not be located in two successive attempts at roll call.  He says they're fired, and he'll replace them in September.

The lawyers in the Public Prosecutor's office say he's wrong, and that it's more like 9000 phantom police officers.

Corrales says he's budgeted for 15, 655 positions, but there aren't that many police on the payroll.  In May there were 14,472 on the payroll, and in July there were only 12,800.  Only 9,350 police could actually be located at work in July and they weren't necessarily the same individuals as the 12,800 on the payroll. 

Adding it all up, over the next several months the Honduran government proposes to hire 9,500 new police. Paying for those police is another thing.

Corrales claims that he can hire the 4,500 new officers for the new community police from his existing budget, but that's only so if 9,350 number is the true number of police actually hired and working. 

He still has to identify and get rid of the phantom payroll.  To date he's only identified and fired some 2,000 phantom officers.

The only proposal for how to pay, equip, and house military reservists called up to take over civilian policing put forward so far is to take the cost from the security tax fund, which was put in place to provide equipment, not pay people.

But neither the bad history nor the bad economics is standing in the way of these increases. Honduran politicians want more officers on the streets. What do the Honduran people want? Why would that matter?

DNIC Back To Work

More than 1400 employees of the Dirección Nacional de Investigación Criminal (DNIC) returned to work on Monday after super-Minister Arturo Corrales reversed himself (he had said their jobs were suspended) and ordered them to return to work.

An unnamed agent told La Tribuna that probably Minister Corrales was being badly advised because you can't suspend the investigative work in a country where there are an average of 20 murders daily, over 7000 a year.  Each of the investigators manages an average of 300 open cases at a time.

Its also likely that Corrales did the math. 

The first 100 DNIC agents will take the confidence tests this week, and they hope that 200 can take the tests next week.  If they can continue on that pace (and they never have) it would take a full 7 weeks to test all the DNIC agents, and if you think about it, you really can't allow all crimes to go uninvestigated for 7 weeks.  That would create more impunity, causing more crime.

Once a sufficient body of DNIC agents have passed the confidence tests, they will be assigned to the new Fuerza de Tarea Policial de Investigaciones (FTPI) along with agents of the Dirección Nacional de Servicios Especiales de Investigación (DNSEI).

Agents of the DNSEI have not undergone the confidence tests and Corrales has not ordered them to be tested before they join the new FTPI.

Anyone else see a problem here?

Civilian Policing "Reform" Consolidates Power

Investigation of crimes came to a screeching halt Tuesday in Honduras as Security and Defense Minister Arturo Corrales ordered the suspension of all 2,200 members (approximately 1400 police and 800 employees)  of the Dirección Nacional de Investigación Criminal (DNIC).

Corrales further ordered that organizationally the DNIC should be merged with the Dirección Nacional de Servicios Especiales de Investigación (DNSEI).  Corrales is calling the merged group, the Fuerza de Tarea Policial de Investigacion (FTPI) which loosely translates as "Police Investigation Working Group".

This is basically a take-over of the resources, personnel, and equipment of the DNIC by the DNSEI whose head is now in charge of the merged organization.  It is a further step toward militarization of civilian policing, which began with the centralization of military and police under Corrales.

Yesterday DNSEI personnel examined the offices and equipment of the closed DNIC offices and made plans for their use.

Members of the ordinary police arrived at DNIC facilities across the country and escorted all employees from the building and padlocked them.

Citizens are now supposed to report crimes to this new working group, but Corrales forgot to order the dissemination of that information to the public, or tell them the new locations to do so.

Corrales explained his action as derived from the fact that the DNIC was leaking information to organized crime.  All 2200 employees, country wide, are suspended until they have submitted to, and passed, the police confidence tests.

Not that those tests have been ordered or scheduled. 

The result was that DNIC police and employees staged public rallies Wednesday and Thursday asking to return to work while they wait for their confidence tests to be scheduled.  They issued a public statement applauding the decision to ask them to submit to the confidence tests but asked that their rights be preserved, including the right to an assumption of innocence.  They called the current plan "improvised" and said that criminals currently held will go free because of the lack of investigation.  They further suggested that Corrales should have created a schedule for their testing and allowed them to continue working until the tests can be done rather than suspending all of them, "denying justice to Hondurans."

On Thursday several hundred of the protesters took over the former DNIC offices by force, throwing out the DNSEI officers who were there including the man who nominally is their new boss, Alex Villanueva Meza, the head of the FTPI.

A lawyer for the officers arbitrarily dismissed began legal action to get them reinstated because their suspension violated their rights to due process and presumption of innocence.

A sargent with 26 years of experience in the DNIC said:

Our families feel bad; they [the government] consider us a bunch of criminals; they should give us the confidence tests and those that they have to fire, they should fire....The objective [here] is to mark us as criminals without paying us a lempira of the funds they legally have to and go back to the 1980s, fire the police to put the military in our place.

In Honduras, the reference to the 1980s would resonate: this was the last time that civilian policing was linked to the military.

First Heads Have Rolled, Sort Of....

Well, heads have rolled in Honduras, but no one has actually lost a lucrative government job-- so far. 

As we previously reported, the Honduran Congress passed a law giving itself remarkably broad powers to open an investigation of any member of the government. In response to that threat, the cabinet of Porfirio Lobo Sosa has undergone some major late term shifts.

First removed was Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla.  He was replaced immediately as Security Minister by the Foreign Minister, Arturo Corrales.  It's not that Corrales has any actual ideas about how to better the security situation in the country, but rather that Pompeyo Bonilla was so bad at doing it.

Among his failings:  sitting on the dismissal orders for 223 police officers who failed one or more of the confidence tests.  Only about 7% of those were failures of the drug testing.  The rest failed combinations of the psychological, lie detector, and financial history tests meant to point at unfit or corrupt police.

Bonilla admitted delaying their dismissal in Congressional hearings last week but failed to offer any explanation.  He also admitted promoting several of them, knowing that there were outstanding requests for their dismissal, again without explanation.

Another failing:  since he assumed the position of Security Minister in September, 2011, there have been 11, 199 murders, of which fewer than 20 percent were investigated.  He was in office both for the murders of two university students (including the son of Julieta Castellanos) by the police, and the assassination of Alfredo Landaverde.  No one has been tried for either case, and there are no suspects in the Landaverde case, where there are also indications the police were involved.

Not that Corrales was all that good at his last job of Foreign Minister.  He failed to reform the consular service, which is filled with unqualified political appointees who line their pockets charging Hondurans for services that are supposed to be supplied for free.  He presided over a consul who hired prostitutes for an official party.

So Corrales is in as Security Minister, and actually reportedly has expanded powers over other ministries, including Defense.

But Pompeyo Bonilla isn't exactly out on the street.  He will have a new title on May 1,  Private Secretary to the President, replacing Reynaldo Sanchez, who will depart to run full time for the Congress.

Corrales will be replaced as Foreign Minister by Mireya Aguero, the current Vice Chancellor in the Foreign Ministry.

Thee Honduras Congress also decided to intervene in the Public Prosecutor's office, effectively taking over control, removing the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubí, and his deputy Roy Utrecho from any decision making.  Luis Rubí admitted in his Congressional testimony that only about 20% of murders get any investigation.

These two are sidelined for the next 60 days while an appointed committee will make decisions about what the organization does, and how to reorganize the office to (it is hoped) be more effective.   In addition to making the office more effective, the committee was also charged with applying confidence tests to all prosecutors, similar to those used for the police.  To accomplish this, they will assume all the powers delegated to the Public Prosecutor and his deputy.  The US Embassy has previously offered to provide expert support in re-organizing the Public Prosecutor's office.

But Luis Rubí hasn't lost his job, and Marvin Ponce says that Rubí won't. Ponce says Rubí secured his job going forward by agreeing to throw many of his top prosecutors under the bus. For the duration of the commission's term, he'll have to sit on his hands and get paid to do nothing, watching what changes the commission implements and awaiting any recommendations the commission makes back to Congress for its action. 

The Association of Prosecutors of Honduras had a meeting scheduled for yesterday afternoon to discuss whether Congress acted within the law, and whether the Public Prosecutor's office (constitutionally supposed to be political independent) has to obey this order or not.

The legal secretary of the Public Prosecutor's office, Rigoberto Espinal, called Congress's action unconstitutional, pointing out that the Prosecutor's office is neither a part of the Executive, nor Legislative branch of the government, and therefore neither is allowed to mess with it.  Espinal asserted that Congress wants to remove Rubí for his involvement in the 2009 coup.

Edmundo Orellana of the Liberal Party and himself a former Public Prosecutor, said he was considering bringing a legal challenge to Congress's action before the Supreme Court.

Lobo Sosa "Baffles" Taiwan Government

So says the headline in a story in the Taipei Times, posted date Dec. 26.

We sympathize: he often baffles us, as well.

The Foreign Minister of the Taiwanese government is quoted as saying

The bilateral relationship with Honduras remains “normal” and “solid” and “will not be affected” even if the country moves to develop economic and trade relations with China.

What sparked the comment? A statement published last week on the website of the Honduran Presidential Office. The website Centralamericandata.com published this translation:

President Lobo Sosa confirms intention to open diplomatic relations with China

President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, confirmed on Wednesday that there are clear intentions to open diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, a situation that should not affect relations with Taiwan.

The Honduran president said that in the XXI century, we can not continue to think that expanding relations with one nation means being an enemy to another.

The leader believes that China is a super attractive market because it has established itself as a world power in the economic and commercial sphere.

In this regard, he said that Beijing already has investments in Honduras through the Patuca III hydropower project, capital that could be extended to other projects.

That last sentence is all you really need to know. Honduras needs capital investors. China has capital.

The recent announcement really shouldn't come as a surprise. In September, the Honduran government hosted a visit by the China Development Bank.  At the time they received presentations from government ministers about potential projects to invest in Model Cities (now declared illegal), tourism, mining, and energy.

Taiwan has been a major investment partner of Honduras. They were among the few governments represented at Lobo Sosa's inauguration. They contributed Lobo Sosa fulfilling one of his campaign promises. The Taiwan government has publicly stated that it has no objection to the development of trade relations between Honduras and China.

But they thought they had assurances that was all Honduras was contemplating. The Lobo Sosa statement, however, calls for establishing diplomatic ties, and that would mean recognizing the government of mainland China, which is more of a sticking point. As the Taipei Times article puts it

Lin said that Taipei does not consider it acceptable for it’s diplomatic allies to recognize China while maintaining diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

“We don’t think double recognition is acceptable and we don’t think that will happen,” Lin said.

The principle guiding President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) “flexible diplomacy” has been that Taiwan and China do not attempt to poach each other’s diplomatic allies, Lin said.

According to the timeline offered by the Taipei Times, last week, after hearing that Honduras was thinking of establishing trade ties with China, Taiwan's Foreign Minister "said that while the ministry was not happy to see an ally establish a trade office in China, it did not oppose allies developing economic ties with Beijing".

Two days after that, the website of the Honduran Presidency posted the statement that starts with a call to establish diplomatic relations.

The next day, the ambassador from Taiwan to Honduras, Joseph Kuo, met with Honduras' foreign minister, Arturo Corrales, who said that

the country had yet to finalize a plan to set up a trade office in China and that its ties to Taiwan remain solid and will not be affected by Tegucigalpa forging an economic and trade relationship with Beijing....However, the ministry was unable to explain the discrepancy between Lobo’s statement and the information Kuo received from Corrales and the Honduran presidential office.

All very diplomatic. The article says Kuo expects to meet with Lobo Sosa himself soon to resolve the discrepancies.

But it isn't really just the statement posted on Lobo Sosa's website that is at issue: it is what he said to the press about the topic. On December 20, La Tribuna quoted his responses to reporters at a press conference:

“We are free, we can have have relations with any country in the world”

“it is the right that we Hondurans have to have relations with all the countries of the world, it is a sovereign right, who's going to place conditions on us saying with this one yes, with that one no”.

“I appreciate very much the fondness that Taiwan has for Honduras, but the fact that we are friends, that they give us affection doesn't mean that we cannot take a step for Honduras, to have relations with a country that is the second most developed country in the world today."

"China is the second economy in the world, it is a super attractive market, they have many resources for investment, in fact they have invested here in the Patuca III dam."

“To be a friend with one and for that reason to be an enemy of another, that makes no sense."

Not quite so diplomatic. Lobo Sosa's comments sound like a man in a long-term marriage trying to rationalize starting to date before getting divorced. The use of the term "cariño" and the "super atractivo" characterization of China is simply not the tone a diplomat would want his president to use.

Pity poor Arturo Corrales, stuck with making up to Taiwan for these public statements. Lobo Sosa seems simply not to have exercised any critical judgment before speaking; his "who's going to place conditions on us" and "that makes no sense" statements can be read-- and probably are being read-- as broader criticism of the policy position of the Taiwan government.

Of course, nothing in these statements to the press actually concerns diplomatic relations, specifically. It is only in the official statement on the presidential web site that this term is introduced. Every intemperate statement to the press could have been taken as about setting up trade relations. It is as if the presidential office doesn't know the difference, and added fuel to a fire that could easily have been kept low.

But that would imply that Lobo Sosa doesn't understand what he is doing. And surely that cannot be true. Can it? No wonder the Taiwan government finds him "baffling".
 

Corrales: Blame the Civilian Aircraft

According to Arturo Corrales, Foreign Minister of Honduras, the civil aviation planes that were shot down by Honduran Air Force pilots in August were to blame for their own deaths. 

At least that's the conclusion to be drawn from his statements that no one in Honduras is responsible.

Corrales makes some extraordinary claims in an article in El Heraldo, claims that should give the United States pause in negotiating a new four year agreement with Honduras about cooperation in drug interdiction.

The article is primarily about the obligation of Honduras' Public Prosecutor to investigate who gave the order to shoot down at least two civilian aircraft, in contravention of a 1942 treaty on civil aviation.

But it also includes a statement by Corrales, whose position in the Honduran government is equivalent to that of Hilary Clinton in the US administration.

Corrales said no civilian or military official ordered the shooting down of the civilian aircraft:

"I understand that there was no order; I understand that no one gave the order."

At first, this seems like throwing the pilots to the wolves, since they would then presumably be responsible for their own actions.  

But Corrales absolves them:

The responsibility for the downing cannot be attributed to the pilots of the military planes who shot at the illegal planes, since they risk their lives to go in search of irregular flights and an accident can happen in a fraction of a second.

This is, at best, a non sequitur: because they risk their lives and an accident can happen in a matter of moments, they are not responsible for shooting down two civil aircraft in one month?

The last time Honduras shot down a civilian aircraft was in 2004. Corrales' conclusion strains credibility.

There is a simpler explanation: the Honduran Armed Forces has been advocating for exactly this policy, while presumably knowing it violated Honduran treaty obligations, ever since the spring of this year. These pilots were enacting that desired approach, whether there was an official policy or not.

Paraphrasing an anonymous person identifying himself as a former Honduran Air Force pilot, who wrote a comment on the article in El Heraldo: that's how we've been trained at least since General Osorio Canales was a cadet.

The comment is no longer available; but it is consistent with statements in April of this year by Osorio Canales, still the commander of the Honduran Armed Forces, saying

"The National Congress should reform the law [implementing the 1942 treaty] and consider leaving the treaty because we cannot take down civilian planes that illegally enter our airspace".

At the time he said that there was discussion in the Honduran Congress about the proposal.

We might want to remember why the international presumption is against shooting down civilian aircraft that wander into national airspace without responding to requests for identity. It is simply this: you may think they are engaged in illegal activity: but you cannot know that.

Both Peru and Columbia, at US urging, have adopted a policy of shooting down civilian aircraft suspected of drug trafficking. In both countries that policy has resulted in the shooting down of civilian flights carrying missionaries, not drugs.

Corrales made it clear how poorly justified these incidents actually are, in his comments implying the pilots of these planes were to blame:

The downing was the product of a extreme situations:  such as the flight of the planes was in the early morning hours and the planes were flying at low speed; therefore they were shot at.

A neutral party reading these comments would presumably continue to be troubled that the Honduran government is neither taking responsibility, nor (apparently) is clear on what constitutes a suspicious way of acting (early morning flights at low speed are surely not automatically drug traffickers, even if some drug traffickers fly at those times).

So it is more than troubling that an article early this morning in La Prensa quotes US Ambassador Lisa Kubiske suggesting US radar assistance will be returned to Honduras "soon", specifically because

President Porfirio Lobo and minister Arturo Corrales spoken clearly about the topic of the civilian aircraft and the treaties that Honduras has signed with the international community.

We agree that Corrales has spoken clearly. But we wonder what Ambassador Kubiske finds reassuring in what he has said.

Command Change in Honduras: US Role?

Did the United States force the removal of the Honduran Air Force Commander?

On September 1, 2012, the then-current head of the Honduran Air Force, Colonel Luis (or Ruiz) Pastor Landa  stepped down as head of the Air Force, turning over his command to Colonel Miguel Palacios.  

At the ceremony, Armed Forces Chief General Rene Osorio Canales lavishly praised Pastor Landa, and later told Radio Globo:

We're not happy; we're uncomfortable with these situations because we must be Hondurans with love of country..."

What did Osorio Canales mean by this?

On June 13, 2012, the Honduran Air Force shot down an alleged civilian drug plane, killing the two crew members.  One of the crew members, the Honduran press says, was a DEA agent who had infiltrated the drug cartel. This was not revealed to the press at the time. 

Shooting down suspected drug planes is controversial, on its face, an illegal act in violation of paragraph 3bis of International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO)  Convention on International Civil Aviation.

This is not to say there is universal agreement as to the meaning of paragraph 3bis.  As we wrote last April, the Convention says:

the contracting states recognize that every state must refrain from resorting to the use of military weapons against civil aircraft in flight, and that in case of interception, the lives of persons on board and the safety of aircraft must not be endangered.

It establishes that civil aviation aircraft are supposed to obey orders from military aircraft.  The Convention, however, recognizes a nation's sovereignty over its airspace, a loophole that in the past has been used by some nations to justify the downing of civilian aircraft.

The Honduran military, since last spring, has been vocally in favor of shooting down drug planes, though at the same time they claim not to be capable of doing so without the purchase of new aircraft.

General Rene Osorio Canales, back in April, called shooting down civilian airplanes suspect of drug trafficking, "more effective than legalizing drugs" for combating the drug cartels.  In fact, the Honduran military itself advocated for shooting down civilian aircraft suspected of engaging in drug trafficking back in March, 2012 when they supported Juan Orlando Hernandez, president of Congress, in his call for such a procedure.

So why is General Osorio Canales unhappy?

It seems, based on the evidence at hand, that the head of the US Southern Command, General Douglas Fraser, met with Porfirio Lobo Sosa on August 24, 2012 in Honduras.  Ambassador Lisa Kubiske also was at the meeting.  Based on a letter from the Defense Minister, Marlon Pascua, translated below, General Fraser expressed his unhappiness with the current Honduran policy (unacknowledged) of shooting down civilian aircraft suspected of drug running; and objected to Honduras compromising an ongoing investigation of the DEA.  As Porfirio Lobo Sosa stated at the time, Fraser

"expressed his concern over some incidents that in some manner violated the agreements on aerial navigation."

Air Force Colonel José San Martin F. wrote an editorial in La Tribuna published on September 2 calling for a rewrite of paragraph 3 bis of the OACI Convention.  Colonel San Martin F. was frustrated by the Honduran Air Force's inability to respond in 2009 when a plane carrying deposed President Manuel Zelaya was trying to land in Tegucigalpa.  Paragraph 3bis, Colonel San Martin F. writes,

"unfortunately permitted that that violation [of Honduran airspace] went unpunished."

La Tribuna published a letter from Secretary of Defense, Marlon Pascua to his Foreign Minister, Arturo Corrales the same day stating:

With respect to what was discussed in our recent visit to the Southern Command of the United States in a meeting held this day with General Fraser and Ambassador Kubiske, and following the instructions of the President we have sent the following instructions:

1.  In the command structure we make the following changes

a) The Commander of the Air Force starting September 1 will be Colonel Miguel Palacios Romero.

b)  The head of the Air Force command starting September 1 will be Colonel Jimmy Rommel Ayala Cerrato.

2. [We will] restructure the Operations Center of the Air Force.

3.  [We will change] the general process of certification of the pilots in the finding, identification, surveillance and interception of civilian aircraft

4. Honduran Air Force pilots who have participated in interception missions in this year will be sent back for a process of reinduction and retraining.

The letter is signed Marlon Pascua Cerrato and dated August 24, 2012.

The letter from Pascua seems pretty clear.  The US Southern Command "requested" a change in the command structure of the Honduran Air Force in General Fraser's meeting with Porfirio Lobo Sosa, and Corrales is being told of the results of the meeting, what Lobo Sosa will order as civilian commander of the Honduran Armed Forces.  Its also clear that General Osorio Canales doesn't like it.

Nor do high ranking members of the Honduran Air Force.

The editorial by Colonel José San Martin F. on September 2 challenges the decision expressed in Marlon Pascua's letter to rescind the policy the Air Force had been using to train pilots.  He wants clearer guidelines about when he can shoot, and he wants shooting down civilian aircraft suspected of drug running to be the policy in Honduras. He best expressed this position in writing of his frustration at not being able to do anything in 2009 against the plane that was carrying President Manuel Zelaya trying to land in Tegucigalpa after the coup.  Unstated was his clear desire to shoot it down.

In March, General Osorio Canales seemed to be both for it, and against it on the same day, in articles in the same newspaper.  On the same day, in another newspaper, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, Osorio Canales's commander in chief, said that such a policy would be a violation of international law.  Even Osorio Canales, in one of the two articles, acknowledged that there needed to be legal changes before drug planes could be shot down.

It therefore seems likely this the adoption of a shoot-down policy was instituted by the military without civilian government approval.

Pascua's letter confirms that the United States forced the removal of Colonel Pastor Landa as head of the Honduran Air Force.