US Embassy: Police Cleanup Failure

Monday, the United States suspended all aid it was giving the Honduran Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP). 

The DIECP is responsible for carrying out the confidence testing of Honduran police, part of a process to weed out those who should not be police.  

A US embassy employee who did not want to be named told El Tiempo:

Hondurans have expressed their frustration with the slow progress of the confidence testing of the police....it's a frustration that we share and as a result, we have suspended the aid from the United States to the DIECP.

The funds, among other things used to pay for foreign lie detector contractors, to assist the DIECP, come from the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI).

It's been apparent for a while that the DIECP wasn't working well. 

Earlier this year Porfirio Lobo Sosa "accepted" (after requesting) the resignations of Eduardo Villanueva, the DIECP director, and his deputy.  However, both continue to serve because Porfirio Lobo Sosa has made no effort to appoint replacements.

As of Tuesday, Villanueva told El Tiempo that he had received no notice from the US Embassy of the funding cuts.

Drug Testing of Police Command

Much has been made of Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP) not performing the confidence tests on the police high command in Honduras.

It is in part why Eduardo Villanueva has lost his job as director of DIECP. 

Much is now being made of the confidence tests for the police high command having finally been scheduled. 

But before everyone goes patting Porfirio Lobo Sosa on the back, consider these facts.

The drug test portion of the confidence tests is a standard test of urine for the metabolites of common drugs.  This is the same drug test that some US companies apply to potential employees and that the US military applies to recruits.  It does not directly test for the presence of the drug, but rather tests for metabolites, compounds produced by the body when it breaks down the drug, in the urine.  There are standards for how much metabolite must be present in order to constitute a positive test, and this number is set by the Honduran government.   The reason there's a threshold set is that some of the metabolites can occur in urine due to normal biological processes, but always at less than the threshold value.

There is a wide body of literature on the Internet about how long the metabolites can be detected in a urine test.  Answers abound to questions posed by anxious potential employees and military recruits. Marijuana metabolites last a long time in the body because they are stored in lipids (fats). If one is a regular user, a urine test can be positive for up to 100 days, though lab tests show that an individual regular user may test drug free in as few as 7 days.  PCP, like marijuana, is stored in fats in the body, and therefore can take 7 to 28 days to clear the body of a regular user.  Most drugs, however, fall below the testing threshold in 1-7 days.  This means drug tests are best done with no forewarning, unannounced, not scheduled.

Not for the police high command in Honduras, apparently, who have been given more than a week's notice.

The tests of the police high command are scheduled for May 6 -10.  That's 9 to 12 days after the schedule for the tests was publicly announced.  In the testing done so far on lower ranking police, 7% of those tested have been positive for drug use. The police high command has been given enough time to clear the traces of all but chronic drug use.

The only police high command likely to be caught by the pre-announced drug test are those who cannot quit for a few days. Which might help identify some obvious candidates for dismissal, but falls far short of any claim of purifying the police force.

Heads May Roll....

Juan Orlando Hernandez aspires to be president, and things he controls are changing in Honduras.

With Porfirio Lobo Sosa's help, he has re-instated the "voluntary" contribution every government employee makes to the ruling political party.  Both parties have been accustomed to collecting "voluntary" payments from government employees, with people who decline being marginalized in their positions. What is new here is that a specific level of "contributions" has been set up, to be deducted directly from the workers' salaries and deposited directly into bank accounts controlled by the National Party. In theory an employee could not agree, but what government employee is going to risk that?

Hernandez isn't limiting himself to political jostling for the benefit of his party. Under his leadership, the Congress has been asserting more power over the other branches of government. He now says he will put the judicial branch, the public prosecutor's office, and the police in order by "supporting the good judge, the good prosecutor, the good policeman."

We've written about Congress and the not-so-Supreme Court before. Analyst Raul Pineda Alvarado told the press this morning "now they have a Supreme Court in tune with their plans, and intimidated."  Pineda Alvarado went on to remark on the amount of power now centralized in Hernandez and Lobo Sosa, noting that they will remove anyone who gets in their way.

Hernandez' current target is the executive branch.  He has been holding hearings in Congress where each cabinet-level official has come to give a report on their progress towards providing a secure life for Hondurans.  According to Hernandez, only General Julian Pacheco has performed well.  Pacheco is head of the intelligence service, and is widely rumored to be using the position to listen in on the phone calls of politicians. Not the person you want lined up against you if you are an ambitious Honduran politician.

Hernandez is reportedly going to demand replacement of Eduardo Villanueva, head of the Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP). The DIECP was created to manage the police cleanup process. Villanueva volunteered for the post after the original director quit in disgust from waiting for Congress to allocate a budget for the unit.  Instead of managing the police cleanup, Villanueva gave control of the process to the Police command, the very group that should have been the first to undergo the confidence tests.  Of the over 200 police who have failed the confidence exams, several have since been promoted, and only seven have been dismissed by Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla.

Hernandez has also put in motion mechanisms to remove the Public Prosecutor Luis Rubí and several other top prosecutors.  After Rubí's Congressional testimony last week it was privately suggested Rubí resign. He chose not to, so now Congress is getting ready to formulate a "political trial" using the recently adopted law that gives Congress the power to review, and fire, without the right of appeal, any top government official, including the president, for anything Congress decides is negligent or incompetent or if there is an accusation of a serious crime or the person has worked against the constitution or national interest (Article 5 of the Ley de Juicio Politico).

Lobo Sosa has recently taken pot shots at Ramon Custodio, the Honduran Human Rights Ombudsman, calling him dishonored and unable to serve in international bodies.  Jimmy Dacaret of the right-wing UCD fears that Custodio is one of the people targeted by Lobo Sosa.  Dacaret supports Custodio because of Custodio's unwavering support of the pro-coup forces in Honduras.

German Leitzelar, a PINU party Congressman, is of the opinion that "no heads should roll because all of them would have to roll".  The failure he says, is one of not having a state security policy, and replacing a director here and there will not solve this.

Edmundo Orellana, a Liberal Party member, has said that what Hernandez desires is to place people loyal to him into positions of power. This is an opinion shared by Raul Pineda Alvarado, who said that Hernandez and Lobo Sosa are playing a political game.  Jimmy Dacaret, of the right wing UCD agrees that Lobo Sosa and Hernandez are playing political games in concentrating power in themselves.

This is the new face of the National Party, the candidate for next president of Honduras. Not a pretty picture.

Police Clean Up Law Appears Unconstitutional

The Constitutional Branch of the Honduran Supreme Court ruled 4 to 1 that the law defining procedures for cleaning up corruption in the police is unconstitutional; this on the same day that the Lobo Sosa government seeks to extend the bill enabling the cleanup for another six months.  Only justice Oscar Chinchilla voted to uphold the law.

The law which regulates the police cleanup calls for an examination of each and every police officer, requiring them to pass a confidence check that involves a psychological exam, a lie detector test, an examination of their finances, and a drug test.  The law modified the police code so that there was no due process right of appeal of any findings under this confidence check.  It stipulated that any failure to pass any of the steps of the confidence exam was automatically grounds for immediate dismissal.

Questions have been raised about the validity of the tests, and especially the evaluation of the results of the lie detector tests.  A fairly high level officer who had passed the lie detector test was recently arrested during an organized crime operation with over $200,000 in cash on him.  While his evaluation had not been finalized, he had, according to the Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial, passed all but the financial checks.  This case is being seen by Hondurans as evidence that the confidence tests are not sufficiently rigorous to remove all police corruption, casting doubt on the entire process.

Of the 233 officers that failed the tests, so far, only 33 have been dismissed.  The rest remain part of the active police force, though some without any assigned duties, all collecting their salaries.

Back in August the Public Prosecutor's office submitted, at the court's request, an opinion that the law, decreto 89-2012, was unconstitutional because it removed the police officer's right to due process and their presumption of innocence.  The Constitutional Branch agreed with the Public Prosecutor's office by its 4-1 vote, but this decision carries no legal force because it was not unanimous.  It is now up the the entire Supreme Court to convene and consider the law and issue an opinion.

Honduran Police Failing Evaluation

Forty seven percent of the 70 police officers processed fully by the Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP) over the last three months failed their confidence test.

That's 33 police officers that the DIECP will seek to have fired.

Seventy is an admittedly small sample, but if this rate of failure held up for the entire police force, we would be looking at the dismissal of more than 3700 police over the next two years.

The DIECP is moving slowly, though.  In the last 3 months they have conducted their confidence tests on 145 police officers, and only made evaluations of these 70. In addition they collected urine and blood samples from the 90 officers that form the COBRA Special Operations team.

The slowness of their evaluations prompted Julieta Castellanos to ask the Cabinet for an investigation of the DIECP to find out why it is proceeding so slowly.

Progress Report on Police Anti-Corruption Reviews

The Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP) has reportedly issued a press release stating that the 24  police officers of all ranks who have not submitted to the proof of confidence testing required by the DIECP will probably be fired.

The DIECP reported that none of the 24 had provided a reason for not showing up for their scheduled appointment. The DIECP press release points out that this is disobedience of a superior's order, punishable with dismissal according to the police charter.

The files on these 24 police officers will be turned over to the police chief, Juan Carlos Bonilla, for disposition.

Proceso Digital reports that the DIECP has attempted to review 169 police officials, most of them members of the highest levels of command.  Of these, 145 have submitted to the exam, and 24 refused.  That is a rate of resistance to the campaign to excise corruption of about 14%.

The DIECP has not released the results of the confidence test on any of the 145 who have taken it so far, so the actual proportion of police officers who do not meet the requirements is not (yet) known.

The DIECP hopes to have conducted over 400 confidence tests by the end of 2012, and over 5000 in the next three years. 

Lack of Will to Fix Police

There is international agreement that Honduras needs to clean up the corruption in its national Police.

Chile sent its Carabineros to make recommendations. A result of their visit was the immediate dismissal, without hearings, of 24 police officers, though the reasons for their dismissal were never made public or their names communicated to the prosecutor's office.

As recently as five days ago, representatives of the US State Department reiterated their support of the process of addressing police corruption in Honduras. Even Ramon Custodio, Human Rights Ombudsman, said that "cleaning up corruption is an urgent necessity because of the emergency situation that the country is living with." The Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church in Honduras called for the immediate and effective cleanup of the Police.

All of this urgency arose from the assassination of two university students by the Police last October. Eight Police officers have been indicted in the murders.

But there's a problem.

Nothing's actually happening.

On the first of December, Congress created the Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP), and selected Óscar Manuel Arita to direct it. But it seems Congress "forgot" to include his new agency in their 2012 budget passed later that month. Unofficially he saw that he could accomplish nothing, and has quit citing the lack of budgetary support as the reason. Officially, however, he quit strictly for personal reasons.

The lack of funding might be deliberate. It is Lobo Sosa's government that proposes the budget. On November 5, 2011, Lobo Sosa reactivated the Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Interior (CONASIN) to, among other things, oversee the cleanup of the police.

Lobo Sosa's group, under his control.

In January of this year, Julieta Castellanos, whose son was one of the university students murdered by the police, called what's going on a fictive cleanup. She said the police actions to date are merely marking time so that they can make the claim they don't need a commission to clean them up. There was talk at that time of an international commission to oversee the Police cleanup, with 3 national and 2 foreign members, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.

While more than 100 police have been dismissed for alleged corruption (which includes failing a drug test), none of the information on their alleged acts of corruption, or their names, has been given to the prosecutor's office so that they can be investigated. Blame the Security Minister, Pompeyo Bonilla for this.

Lot's of heat; not very much light.