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.

Jobs

To be precise: 672 jobs. That's the total of hourly positions approved under controversial legislation passed in 2010.

Juan Orlando Hernandez, the head of the Honduran Congress, told us that a new part-time work law would create 600,000 jobs in the next three years. He then pushed such a law through Congress. It was published in La Gaceta in November, 2010. How's it doing?

It took the Labor Ministry under Labor Minister Felicito Avila until February to publish the regulations under which companies could register and be certified to have hourly workers. So, in the six months it's been in effect, the new law officially has generated 672 jobs.

Juan Orlando Hernandez says Avila is holding up implementation of the law. Avila points out that the law requires regulations, and that each company that wants to employ part time workers must register and be approved for hiring part time workers.

The workers' unions say the regulations are not working. Employers are going ahead and hiring hourly workers but failing to register their contracts. The unions estimate that more than 22,000 workers are already working hourly, just not legally.

And as predicted, there are complaints of abuses being filed with the Labor Ministry. One high-profile complaint was made by Lennys Fajardo, a Radio Globo reporter who claims he was fired, then offered to be rehired on an hourly contract.

Felicito Avilla says the law wasn't designed to create thousands of jobs, merely to support supplementing existing jobs with part time ones. Think part-time seasonal help and you'll have what he says the Labor Ministry had in mind when it crafted the regulations.

So: we have a law that is doing precisely what critics thought it would do-- encouraging employers to transform existing full time jobs with benefits into part time contracts without benefits. Meanwhile, the Labor Ministry gets criticized for keeping the number of officially approved hourly jobs low.

What no one seems to be addressing is the disconnect between the rhetoric about the hourly law that suggested it would create more jobs, when logically, all it ever promised to do was split existing full time jobs into more part time positions. Not precisely a success to celebrate.

Labor Code for Dummies

The Lobo Sosa administration can't quite figure out Honduran labor law. They haven't figured out all the steps they need to actually suspend or fire the teachers who are on strike. They've tried several times to suspend or fire the striking teachers, and appear to still not have done everything required under Honduran law to make it legal.

First on March 18, Lobo Sosa declared an education state of emergency, abusing the emergency declaration laws, and threatened to replace the striking teachers. Five days ago, on March 22, the Lobo Sosa administration tried to suspend 1200 teachers who are participating in the strike. The declaration came from the Secretary of Education. Only one problem; that declaration violated the Codigo de Trabajo, Honduran labor law. Oops. The teachers then filed a legal challenge with the Supreme Court.

Today the Lobo Sosa government tried again, issuing a declaration that they were suspending them under Article 571 of the Codigo de Trabajo, the labor code. Article 571 states that once a strike is declared illegal (and article 570 covers who declares it illegal and how) the government has the right to dismiss the strikers and suspend for two to six months labor leaders who lead the strike.

To be valid, an act using Article 571 as the justification requires, under the rules of Article 570, that the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare have issued a prior finding of illegality using the criteria spelled out in Article 569. Once such a declaration is made, and communicated, the workers must cease their strike immediately or they may be dismissed or suspended. Without the Article 570 finding by the proper government official, Lobo Sosa's emergency decree replacing them, and today's firing of them does not comply with Honduran labor law.

So, has such a finding been made and communicated as Article 570 requires? I would have to say "no" based on the wording of today's declaration, which starts:

The Government of the Republic of Honduras to the National and International opinion, ..... declares the illegality of this collective suspension of work, the same that by virtue of law and by Administrative resolution, has already been declared, since the seventh of March of 2011...

So that would imply there has been no finding of illegality by the required party. It appears that Lobo Sosa has declared it illegal, not the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, as required by law.

It is Felícito Ávila Ordóñez, Minister of Labor, who has been busy trying to negotiate the new minimum wage and being part of the government commission that took over running the Instituto de Prevision Magesterial (INPREMA) earlier this month who needs to issue the Article 570 declaration that the strike is illegal. He's made no pronouncements about the teacher's strikes, let alone issued a declaration that they are illegal. He's not been involved in mediating the strike, as required by law. He's not been involved at all. Sigh

Once again it would appear the Honduran government has failed to comply with, or even read and understand, its own labor code. Lobo Sosa cannot invoke Article 571 when the proper Article 570 declaration has not yet occurred.

Do over?

Hunger strike at National University becomes serious

Today in El Tiempo there is a report on an ongoing hunger strike by employees and one student at the national university in Tegucigalpa (UNAH). Four of the eleven employees on hunger strike were reportedly treated for medical problems on Thursday including cramps, faintness, strong headaches, and loss of vision.

Tiempo reports that students who are members of the Movimiento de Resistencia Patriótica (MRP) started a drive to collect food for the dismissed employees this past Thursday.

The hunger strike began on April 27 to demand the rehiring of 186 employees who were fired, the article says, "supposedly for taking over the UNAH." La Tribuna gives a more detailed report that describes the situation as beginning on February 23, when members of the UNAH union took over a building to put pressure on the university administration to negotiate a new contract, and then

extended to all the University City [campus] by taking in progressive form the remaining buildings, which impeded classes being able to be held during almost two weeks.

This led directly to the arrest of University union leaders on charges of, among other things, charges of sedition, as we previously described. On May 3, the judge hearing the case issued a dismissal for the remaining union members whose charges were still pending.

The Tiempo article notes that

uncertainty is growing for the university workers, since their calls still have not been heard by the university rector, Julieta Castellanos

According to coverage in La Tribuna, the initial hunger strikers, David Montoya Velásquez, Víctor Rodríguez, María Juvencia Alvarez, Katy Marlen Pereira, Josué David Reyes and Dilier Herrera, were joined on April 30 by a philosophy student Marvin Amílcar Pérez, and workers Nora Valladares, Jorge Rafael Durón Flores, Gustavo Adolfo Salinas, María Lucila Miranda and Anderson Flores. Finally, a few days later, Samuel Elías Sánchez Flores and Abelardo Antonio Alvarado joined the protest.

Four are in critical condition. Anderson Flores was hospitalized on May 6. No progress appears to be happening on negotiating an end to their hunger strike. Julieta Castellanos met with the Secretary of Trabajo y Seguridad Social, Felicito Ávila a week ago to try to agree on a solution, without success.

Castellanos, of course, is busy in her recently adopted role of Honduran member of the highly contested "Truth Commission".