Chepe Handal: "I Have Nothing To Hide" -- Literally

On April 9th, "Chepe" Handal (Juan Miguel Handal Perez) was identified in a press release from the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) of the US Treasury as head of drug running organization in Honduras.

This banned US citizens from any financial transactions with him. 

Also named as part of the drug organization were his wife, Ena Elizabeth Hernandez Amaya, and his father, Jose Miguel Handal Larach.  The US Treasury department named all three as drug kingpins under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin act.  OFAC Director Adam Tzubin said of Handal:

"Chepe Handal plays a critical role in the transportation and distribution of drug shipments between South America and the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas."

Also added to the list were businesses importing Chinese car parts, Chinese motorcycles and parts, and a Peruvian horse breeding ranch belonging to the Handals (father and/or son).  OFAC released a chart of the businesses affected here. 

A Treasury Department press release noted that on March 3, 2011, Chepe Handal was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in the Southern District of Florida and charged with one count of "conspiracy to distribute cocaine with knowledge that it will be unlawfully imported into the United States."

This is the first time the US Department of the Treasury has named a Honduran as a drug kingpin.  Chepe Handal denied the accusations and told the AFP

"They fell on me like a bucket of water. We are trying to clarify the situation, as we do not know where they originate."

He went further with the Honduran press, and called on the Honduran government to investigate his businesses.  He said to an interviewer in Proceso Digital:

"We have said from the first moment this happened that the doors of our businesses are open, we will give them all the information that is needed because we have nothing to hide."

Handal's father said:

"We're going to sue the United States, neither my family nor myself are drug runners"

Chepe Handal is the brother of Esteban Handal, a failed presidential candidate for the Liberal Party in last November's primary election.  Chepe Handal himself ran to be a candidate for Congress in the same elections as a member of his brother's faction of the Liberal Party, and he also lost. 

On Chepe Handal's website from his failed campaign for congress, under the heading of security, he said he would

"promote laws that favor the people so that we can count on quality security in all the corners of the country, and also to support the police so that they can be treated with dignity in all senses of the word and so they can count on the support of the national government.....Your well being is my obligation."

After he and his brother failed in their election bids, Chepe Handal affiliated himself with Libre, the political party that arose from resistance to the coup of 2009, but not in a position of leadership or as a candidate for office.

Last week, the Honduran government, along with the Drug Enforcement Agency,  took Chepe up on his suggestion to investigate and moved to secure all of the houses and businesses owned in Honduras by Chepe Handal, his wife, and his father. The officers raiding the houses found them literally empty, except for "exotic animals in cages" in the father's house, and 22 horses on the ranch. 

Everything that belonged to the Handals had been removed from the houses in the intervening week so that quite literally they had "nothing to hide" because they left nothing behind. 

The Honduran daily paper Tiempo reported that Chepe Handal was notified a week ago via text message that the confiscation was going to happen, but even so, to pack up and clean out three houses and 10 businesses in a week is a monumental task.  Where are all their household goods located now?  Where are the three alleged drug kingpins themselves?  Why did no one notice all this activity?

The day afer the raid, the same Honduran government officials moved against the businesses of Chepe Handal and his father, seizing their books and inventory. Under Honduran law, they had 72 hours to protest the seizures in court.  In three months, the court that authorized the seizures will issue an opinion deciding whether or not these properties are forfeited because of criminal activity and therefore belong to the government.

The very same day that the Handal properties were seized, Honduras's most successful prosecutor for the Public Minister's Office of Money Laundering, Orlán Chávez,  was assassinated in Tegucigalpa.

He literally wrote Honduras's law on money laundering and the law that set up the government agency that holds properties seized under the law-- like the ones seized from the Handals.

The Public Prosecutor's office is reportedly investigating whether the assassination was "planned in the north", meaning in San Pedro Sula, where Chepe Handal and his father lived. 

Orlán Chávez was reportedly to travel to San Pedro Sula today to help in an organized crime case "involving the Mexicans".

To date, no criminal charges have been filed against Chepe Handal in Honduras. Nor has the US requested his extradition.

The Liberal Party at 122

The Liberal party in Honduras just celebrated its 122 birthday, amid widely divergent views about the status of the party.

Founded February 5, 1891, the Liberal party grew from the Liberal league which had been formed in 1884.  Liberalism, based on ideas ideas espoused by Morazan, is described as a center-right political philosophy. 

The Honduran Liberal party is one of two founded in Central America that has persevered to the present, the other being the Colombian Liberal party.  The Honduran Liberal party itself is part of Liberal International, a federation of Liberal parties throughout the world, which promotes:

liberalism, individual freedom, human rights, the rule of law, tolerance, equality of opportunity, social justice, free trade and a market economy.

Since that definition starts with "liberalism" it is somewhat recursive, so lets unpack what liberalism is.  According to the 1947 liberal manifesto, liberalism believes

that liberty and individual responsibility are the foundations of civilized society; that the state is only the instrument of the citizens it serves; that any action of the state must respect the principles of democratic accountability; that constitutional liberty is based upon the principles of separation of powers; that justice requires that in all criminal prosecution the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, and to a fair verdict free from any political influence; that state control of the economy and private monopolies both threaten political liberty; that rights and duties go together, and that every citizen has a moral responsibility to others in society; and that a peaceful world can only be built upon respect for these principles and upon cooperation among democratic societies. We reaffirm that these principles are valid throughout the world.

The Liberal Party of Honduras seems to have lost its web presence, which used to be at www.partidoliberaldehonduras.hn, which now redirects to the Facebook page of Esteban Handal, a failed Liberal Party candidate in the primary elections for President this year.

A historic rift formed between the Catholic church and the Liberal party during the nineteenth century. During the rule of Francisco Morazan over the United States of Central America in the 1830s  Morazan, who advocated the true separation of church and state, made the state government stop enforcing the tithing of the population for the benefit of the church.

In recent times, Liberal parties have tended to split up fractioning into more social democrat factions, and more conservative ones.  Until the coup of 2009 the Honduran Liberal party had avoided this split, but as a result of the coup, about 55 percent of the Liberal party left to form Libre, the new political party headed by Manuel Zelaya Rosales.  That rift has left a small social democrat faction within the remainder of the Honduran Liberal party, along with a strong right wing faction, responsible for the coup, which controls it.

Liberal party members assert the party has come together since the exodus of 2009 and will win the 2013 elections. Analysts disagree. 

Yani Rosenthal, himself a presidential candidate in the party primary this year, told a reporter for Proceso Digital that he didn't see the party as factionalized, but that it must unify now that the primary elections are over around its presidential candidate, Mauricio Villeda, who represents the far right in the party.  Rosenthal said:

Everything will depend on the capacity of the leaders of the party to unify the distinct factions which participated in the internal [elections].  If the leaders are capable of uniting it, the party can be first and win the next general election.

So far, though, the party has not rallied in support of Villeda, who of course was intimately involved in the de facto regime installed in the coup of 2009.

Edmundo Orellana, who belongs with some of the remaining few social democrats inside the Liberal party, doesn't see the party leadership consolidating authority; just the opposite:

There is no acceptance of the leadership of the Central Party Executive because there has been an exodus of Liberals to the Libre party and those that are still within the Liberal party feel marginalized in the organization....There is a distancing between the Liberal party organization and the candidate of the party.

Julio Navarro, a political analyst and Liberal party member sees no way the party can win in the 2013 elections.  For Navarro, there's a crisis of credibility in the party itself.  He further indicated:

The party leadership that arose out of the primary elections has not been seen; the presidential candidate does not appear interested in uniting the factions which participated in the primary election.

Navarro suggested that

to win, they have to regain credibility and confess, because those who ran the party made a mistake in June 2009.  They need to say a "mea culpa" for liberalism and blame the errors on whose who led at that time; they must recover the ability to organize and construct messages that convince the electorate to accept their political proposal.

But Navarro doesn't hold out much hope of this happening.  He noted that their party presidential candidate, Mauricio Villeda has the same problem that Elvin Santos had in the last election, held while the de facto regime controlled the country:

They believe because they are the most conservative that is sufficient to win elections.  Villeda assumes that because he is the most conservative candidate, against the menace of Juan Orlando Hernandez and Libre, that he'll be elected....this belief that he'll be elected could lead him to defeat.

The first political poll of the year showed that the Liberal party candidate would come in fourth if the election were held now, behind Xiomara Castro of Libre, Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National party, and Salvador Nasralla of the Anti Corruption party. 

That tends to support Orellana and Navarro's analyses. 

Proceso Digital assures us that most experts agree that the Liberal Party would come in third, though they fail to cite any specific experts.

The Liberal party remains stuck in the factionalism that resulted in the coup of 2009 where the ultra conservative faction of the Liberal party took out their party's more centrist president. 

Mauricio Villeda has not made any overtures to other existing factions within the Liberal party to try and unify it post primary elections.  Instead he's left it up to the factions to come bargain with him for a power-sharing role in the party, as Yani Rosenthal did.

The faction controlling the Liberal party thinks they will win simply because they are running the most conservative candidate from a major political party. Meanwhile, the Honduran people seems to have moved on.

How many more years of continuity will this long-established party have, if it cannot accept the evidence of lost elections and lost support?

Refounding the Liberal Party

On July 14, Vos el Soberano published a brief note under the headline "When they expel the dictator then we can talk".

It reported the content of a message sent by ex-president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales to the Consejo Central Ejecutivo (Central Executive Committee) of the Liberal Party.

In it, Zelaya reportedly said he would talk with that group when it fulfills three requirements:

• when “the Central Committee announces against the Coup”

• when "They expel the dictator [Roberto Micheletti]”

• when “They demand justice for the intellectual and material authors of the 166 assassinations [by repressive organs of State on account of the Coup]. ”

Zelaya's communique was one response to a proposal by Elvin Santos Lozano, president of the Central Executive Committee (and father of the failed 2009 presidential candidate of the party), that Zelaya return to Honduras and rejoin the Liberal Party in order to unify it (and thus save it). Seems like a rough judgment on his own kid.

As an editorial by Radio Progreso, also available on Vos el Soberano, notes, Hondurans find themselves

with a situation unequalled in the political history of Honduras: a president who was overthrown by a coup d'Etat and sent into exile, and, after one year, is reclaimed by two antagonistic projects and political forces. The president that was proscribed, sent into exile and considered as the cause of the major division and polarization in the life of the country, now his return appears to be fundamental to the exit from the institutional stagnation in which we find ourselves and to make possible national reconciliation.

We have previously explained the outcome of the Tocoa Assembly of the Frente, in which Liberals in resistance were unable to seat additional delegates and withdrew from the provisional governance, explicitly without withdrawing from the Frente itself. This led to a curious sequence of actions by the Liberal Party itself.

Leadership of the Liberal Party came out shortly after the end of the Tocoa assembly of the Frente with an open invitation to the Liberals in resistance to reintegrate in the party. This explicitly included an invitation to Zelaya to return and organize a political "movement" within the party.

First, Marlon Lara, ex-campaign director for the party, currently second vice president of Congress, said the Tocoa meeting showed that the Liberals in Resistance should return to the party and contribute to its unification. Lara

exhorted them to collaborate with the initiative of the Consejo Central Ejecutivo to procure granitic unity of the party for which a commission will travel to the Dominican Republic to negotiate with the overthrown president Manuel Zelaya.

At about the same time, members of the Liberal Party held what was reported variously as a unity forum or a gathering of Zelaya supporters, the latter the way El Heraldo headlined their article. It was said to bring together "a part of the directorship of the Liberal resistance, ex-officials of the deposed president Zelaya, and presidential aspirants", implying that these are all categories of Liberal Party members with reasons to oppose the current governance of the party.

At this forum, Eduardo Maldonado, ex presidential contender, said that "the unity of his party passes by the return without conditions of ex president Manuel Zelaya." Esteban Handal Pérez, another "pre-candidate" for president, called for a special party convention to vote in new leadership.

Edmundo Orellana, who reportedly also participated,

insisted on the need for the authorities of his party to convene, as quickly as possible, internal elections (not primaries) to change all the authorities: central, departmental, and municipal.

As the article notes, the majority of those who would be removed from office belong to one of three major movements within the Liberal Party: those headed by Elvin Santos, Roberto Micheletti and Eduardo Maldonado. Maldonado volunteered to have the occupants of the two seats his movement controls on the Central Executive resign. No one from the Santos or Micheletti camp attended.

Also present and speaking at the forum: Jaime Rosenthal, perennial presidential aspirant and owner of El Tiempo.

According to La Tribuna, all the speakers called for the immediate and unconditional return of Zelaya, hoping he will take a place as a "standard-bearer" in the party, and most of the speakers at the forum endorsed a national constitutional assembly as a the only way to institute social and economic changes. The exceptions to the latter call: Jaime Rosenthal and Esteban Handal

As we write, the Central Executive Committee is reportedly writing a letter to ask whether Zelaya would receive a delegation to talk things over in the Dominican Republic. As reported by El Heraldo, "some political sectors" speculate that Zelaya will receive a delegation if the Central Executive Committee calls the "events of June 28" a coup:

The Central Executive [Committee] has not said if what occurred the 28th of June was or was not a coup d'Etat nor has it condemned nor applauded the situation of which Zelaya, member of the Liberal Party, was victim.

Elvin Santos Lozano ducked the question, saying that the Truth Commission will decide what happened. Not too promising in terms of meeting Zelaya's stated condition. And of course, no reference to the requirement that Roberto Micheletti, honored senior Liberal Party member, be expelled.

Tiempo, in its reporting on the forum by dissident Liberal Party members, underlined that members of the present Central Executive Committee "do not enjoy the sympathy and backing of the majority of the Liberals".

That was inadvertently underlined when presidential hopeful Handal helpfully predicted that the proposed commission to Zelaya would be a fiasco.

Victor Sierra, a director of the Liberal Party movement M-Lider (Movimiento Liberal Democrático Revolucionario), probably had the single most evocative comment.

As reported in Tiempo, he proposed to "refundar el Partido Liberal": refound the Liberal Party.

Now, where have we heard something like that before?