Post-Election Analysis from Honduran Experts

Radio Progreso, a project of the Jesuit organization ERIC (the Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación, y Comunicación) located in El Progreso, Yoro, has a commentary on their website with insight from a number of Honduran commentators about where the post-election phase is headed. It starts:

Two weeks after the general elections, their results continue to be the object of critique for the suspicious way in which the count of votes in the local polling places developed and the filling out of the actas electorales (vote tallies).

 
Then it moves to a series of comments from Honduran perspectives. The most intriguing of these is the perspective of the new student movement, the so-called Camisas Negras or Movimiento anti JOH. This is the group whose protests in Tegucigalpa were met with immediate suppression by the military police in the days after the vote.

Radio Progreso quotes Marcos Rubí, a member of this movement, on its origins and aims:

"it grew in the heat of what pretended to be an electoral fiesta, with university students that from before the beginning of the process already had seen certain anomalies, certain signs of fraud, and then in the electoral process of Sunday the 24th, now that the fraud was confirmed, indignation grew and we decided to organize ourselves... The Movement is heterogeneous, there are ideologies involved that run from the right to the extreme left, but there is a consensus that there was fraud and we all have the same purpose".

The disillusionment of students with the electoral process has been under-reported in the international press. University students took the place formerly occupied by representatives of the church in this election, as custodians for the individual election polling places. That means they were witnesses to the most egregious irregularities: the selling of party credentials, voter intimidation and mis-information-- irregularities international observers dismissed as minor, but that these Honduran youths (in our view, rightly) saw as shocking and unacceptable.

Honduran sociologist Eugenio Sosa criticizes the Tribunal Supremo Electoral, and was blunt about the possible impact of challenges to the TSE:  "I believe that the results will stand, the Tribunal has announced them and it isn't going to reverse itself even though they will make a pretense of reviewing the actas":

"I believe that the Tribunal, despite having launched itself affirming that these were the most transparent elections and despite having all the backing of official organizations such as the OAS, EU, the US Embassy and Department of State, little by little has been showing aspects that demonstrate that in these elections there were as many problems, irregularities, and alteration of results as in the primaries."

Hermilo Soto, national coordinator in Honduras for the Lutheran World Federarion, characterizes reforming the electoral system as a "great challenge" for Honduras going forward, because "the great problem that we have today is that the people do not trust in the present institutionality directing the electoral process".

The article notes that Congress will play a key role in determining whether and how the electoral system might be revised, as well as having a key role to play in the subsequent elections of the Supreme Court and Ministerio Público.

As we have noted previously, no single party has a large enough delegation to congress to control these processes. Radio Progreso quotes the opinion of Antonio Rivera Callejas, a re-elected Partido Nacional congress member, about what may happen:

"It's too early to talk about the composition of the junta directiva (executive committee), that is going to be defined in January, I figure, you should remember that there will be many political factions making up the congress, there will not be a simple ajority for any of the political parties, this is going to require the consensus of many... What there is not yet are concrete names, of candidates for the presidency, vicepresidency, and secretariat [of the congress], so it is normal that there are conversations among all the political parties but that will take a concrete form only in the month of January".

Sociologist Armando Orellana is skeptical of the vision of harmonious consensus advanced by Rivera, and raises instead warnings of backroom deals and corruption as usual in the negotiation of a congressional majority:

"The party of the government [Partido Nacional] is buying consciences, there has been talk of payments of up to five million lempiras [about $240,000] to procrue the presidency of the Congreso Nacional. The ally that it has had during this period [the Lobo Sosa administration] has been the Partido Liberal, nevertheless they are not going to succeed in controlling the two-thirds majority necessary to manage constitutional reforms"

This is a critical point: many of the more alarming legislative initiatives under the Hernández Congress required constitutional amendments, which sailed through with unprecedented ease due to the alliance between the two dominant parties.

Radio Progreso cites Orellana's observation that LIBRE and PAC could, along with smaller parties (such as PINU and UD) form a large enough block that, with a few Partido Liberal congress members acting more independently they could push congress in a different direction.

While Antonio Rivera dismisses this, his argument for a more centralized authority in Congress-- which is that the hegemony and harmony under Juan Orlando Hernández was critical to the legislation that the current congress passed-- actually cuts both ways: for those who question the wisdom of such rapid, unreflective passage of major changes to the legal and economic framework of Honduras, slowing down the process may be the best outcome of this election.

And Radio Progreso's coverage suggests that the incoming Congress will operate not only with internal dissent, but with the scrutiny of a newly mobilized younger generation of Hondurans whose outrage about the way the election was conducted is unlikely to be settled simply because the international community declares that this election was good enough, if not really as good as it could have been.

US State Department Blinks on Honduran Security

All across the US, the news from Honduras over the last day has been the same:

"US withholds funds to Honduran police"

Or, if you read the Washington Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, or a number of other papers, you might see the story under the headline

"US cites human rights concerns, withholds funds to Honduran National Police"

What is making the rounds is an AP story by Alberto Arce in Tegucigalpa, with Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz. It says that funds are being withheld from

Honduran law enforcement units directly supervised by their new national police chief until the U.S. can investigate allegations that he ran a death squad a decade ago.

It's about time. The murky antecedents of Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, El Tigre, were well aired back when he was appointed -- in late May, more than two months ago.

We noted at the time that the appointment gave insight into what Porfirio Lobo Sosa thought made a good top cop: getting results quickly, at any cost:

Bonilla Valladares definitely has a history of getting results. But that history shows that the "results" came from his exercise of extra-judicial power.

We  cited an interview by the Salvadoran media outlet, El Faro, which included this chilling exchange with Bonilla:

—Have you killed anyone outside legal proceedings?-- I asked him, while we left behind El Paraíso.

—There are things that one carries to the grave. What I can say is that I love my country and I am disposed to defend it at any cost, and I have done things to defend it. That is all that I will say.

As we noted at the time, State Department documents from 2004 acknowledged the accusations against Bonilla Valladares. 

Now, according to the AP, the State Department has produced a new report (which we could not locate) that

says the State Department "is aware of allegations of human rights violations related to Police Chief Juan Carlos Bonilla's service" and that the U.S. government has established a working group to investigate.

This story is worth the coverage it is getting. But there are some subtleties here that are worth further comment. The AP report goes to say

Under the new guidelines, the U.S. is limiting assistance so that it only goes to special Honduran law enforcement units, staffed by Honduran personnel "who receive training, guidance, and advice directly from U.S. law enforcement and are not under Bonilla's direct supervision," according to the report.

"Direct supervision" is the operative phrase here, since Bonilla Valladares, as national police chief, is the commander of all the Honduran police. Does it really matter if there is an interposed subordinate officer between him and the units the US is still funding?

Or is the significant difference here that the US will still fund US trained, guided, and advised units which, while technically part of the Honduran police forces, would be expected not to follow orders from the national police chief?

Some Honduran drug enforcement agents already have direct connections to US FAST teams, although their training wasn't enough to stop a still-disputed massacre in the Mosquitia.

The most obvious candidate for funding under this exclusion is the new unit, named the Tigres, that Honduras has proposed to create to offer policing while in theory continuing to purge the national police of corrupt officers.

According to reports in Honduran press, by September Tigres (Tropas de Inteligencia y Grupos de Respuesta Especial de Seguridad, "Intelligence and Special Security Response Groups Unit") will be deployed independent of the National Police. 

Juan Orlando Hernández, head of Congress (and presidential primary candidate in the right-wing Nacional party) is quoted as saying the Tigres would be

“a highly trained elite force that will have hi-tech equipment for fighting common and organised crime... This is not at all a force parallel to the police or the army. What we want is a rapid response team to tackle the insecurity in our country. Regardless of whether they like it, it will strengthen the response capacity to crime, because the Tigres will attack everything”.

La Prensa offers this characterization of the expected progress of the law that would authorize the Tigres, and their recruitment and training:

The law will be approved next week, in August the first stage of training and selection will come to an end since that process is already advanced, and in September the first contingent will appear.

That does not seem to allow much time for the purported training in human rights that, it is claimed, will keep this new force from committing the kinds of violations so common in existing Honduran security forces.

We have previously noted that selection and training of officers should legally follow approval of the law, which in a real democracy would not be taken as a fait accompli, but then, this is policing in Honduras today. Initial funding for the new unit will reportedly come from the Interamerican Development Bank.  

This unit, with its novel reporting line (in times of peace, the Ministry of Security; and in times of emergency, the Ministry of Defense), is the one Honduran "police" force that could be characterized as outside the direct control of the impeached police chief, Bonilla Valladares.

Writing on the IPS news website, Thelma Mejía provides a thoughtful summary of what we know about the proposed Tigre unit, and its contribution to continuing to blur the line between policing and military actions. She cites Honduran sociologist Mirna Flores and social commentator Eugenio Sosa, reminding readers that

similar forces created in the 1980s ended in grave violations of human rights, the most recent example being the so-called "Red Car Gang", a paramilitary corps that carried out operations of "social cleansing" against young men in gangs from 2003 to 2005, and acted from within the police, according to humanitarian groups.

In other words, there is a history here of abusive action by such "elite" police groups given sweeping mandates to combat "violence". 

Bonilla Valladares is part of that history; but his selection as police chief was not an error, that the US can simply avoid reinforcing. It was deliberate, despite this known history. The reaction of the Honduran government to the US withholding aid shows that: the AP story cites a Lobo Sosa spokesman Saturday supporting Bonilla Valladares, saying

the administration has repeatedly pledged full support for the police chief and that under his leadership "there has been a real improvement in the security situation."

There is one final subtlety worth underlining: the AP story gives credit for this modest reversal of the US support for militarization of civilian policing in Honduras to "a series of letters from Honduran and U.S. academics, activists and members of Congress". It quotes a June 7 letter "signed by hundreds of academics" that read, in part

Combatting drug trafficking is not a legitimate justification for the U.S. to fund and train security forces that usurp democratic governments and violently repress our people. 

This letter was the culmination of the frustrated cry from the heart of scholars in Honduras, the US, and 28 other countries asking the US government to stop ignoring the on the ground reality in Honduras. Cautiously, we might conclude that finally this outcry is getting heard.

New CESPAD Study

The Centro de Estudios para la Democracia (CESPAD), a group founded in 2009 to study Honduran democracy, has issued a paper that examines three possible scenarios for an end to the unresolved political crisis in Honduras. Gustavo Irias, director of CESPAD held a press conference yesterday. The report is the result of the work of Eugenio Sosa and Francisco Saravia and appears to be based in part on the results of the September 2010 public opinion survey that CESPAD carried out. We wrote about this poll in late November contrasting its results with the much earlier LAPOP poll from January which hit the press about the same time.

Since we've been critical of Proceso Digital, I want to give them credit for providing the only Honduran press coverage. This post is based on their summary of the report, which has not yet been posted anywhere.

The September poll found that only two to six percent of the population had confidence in any one of the organized political parties in Honduras. Only 14 percent of the survey respondents reported being satisfied with the state of Honduran democracy; a large majority, 86 percent, were unsatisfied. Finally, in September 2010 only 15 percent of those polled thought the political crisis of 2009 had been resolved.

As described by Proceso Digital, the report soundly condemns the Honduran political parties for their jingoistic focus on elections and a lack of any real plan for dealing with the economic and political crises facing the country. Politicians in power, both Liberal and Nationalist, live off international funding. This, of course, makes them extremely vulnerable to outside pressure.

Irias noted in the press conference that the country is experiencing a growing dissatisfaction with democracy and its institutions. Irias said,

"This is a kind of public challenge of electoral democracy, as well as holders of political power, so we dared to ask what the prospective scenarios might be going forward, without being wizards, how could the country go in 2011"

The first scenario assumes that Honduras fails to overcome the political crisis, fails to meet the conditions for OAS readmission, and fails to find conditions to allow Manuel Zelaya Rosales to return to the country. Under these conditions the international community will maintain pressure on the Honduran government, especially on the issue of human rights, which in turn, may tarnish or discredit the international image of the country.

CESPAD suggests that under these conditions, the Honduran political system will fail to stabilize or regain credibility with the public. The Nationalist party will not increase its electoral power. The Liberal party will remain divided, and the Frente will fail to reach a political consensus.

If the political forces disintegrate, this can lead to a governance crisis in which the next election would be marked by an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and probably result in a weak minority government reaching power.

CESPAD researchers concluded that the probability of something like this actually happening is high, that with the political recognition of the Lobo Sosa government and the recovery of international funds, the perception is that the hardest part of the solution to the crisis is over, when it is not. The underlying structural problems will persist in the scenario, and may worsen, leading to a new governance crisis.

CESPAD posited a second scenario that involves some minimal level of agreements towards a democratic transition from the current political and structural crisis. In this scenario agreement is reached for Zelaya's return and he becomes a force for either reuniting the Liberal party or focusing the political ambitions of the Frente possibly forming a larger front with the UD (Unificación Democatica) party. In this scenario the UCD would have to raise its profile to neutralize Zelaya's influence. The real question in this scenario is to what extent Zelaya and the Frente are able to move forward beyond discourse to political action which restores the political parties.

CESPAD believes that there's an even chance of arriving at this point, and they point to the short term international pressures around Zelaya's return and human rights as drivers towards arriving here.

In a third scenario, the crisis deepens and there is a further deterioration of democracy making the country even less governable. In this scenario, Zelaya becomes a point of contention both for supporters and detractors, and increases pressure on the government by mobilization for a constituent assembly. CESPAD says this puts the 2012 internal elections and the 2013 general election at risk and may bring Honduras back to be the center of OAS debate. CESPAD says it would test Lobo Sosa's management skills, and likely lead to increased human rights violations, which in turn might lead to a suspension of international aid. CESPAD sees this scenario as less likely, but still possible.

However, Director Irias concluded

"In practice, the actual dynamics of Honduran politics will yield results combined from all three scenarios, arising from factors that change the context and the political will to make changes. The scenarios we provide can serve as a basis for policy making by both civic organizations and those who wield power."