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.

Does the death of a teacher count as a human rights issue?

Porfirio Lobo Sosa has taken a hard line against teachers' unions, saying he will not talk to them until they return to the classroom and stop going out on strike. The response from the unions has been nationwide protests that yesterday and again today were received violently by security forces.

Lobo Sosa has played on the frustration parents feel about the discontinuity of education of their children, and the effect that is likely to have on their future.

It is far easier to portray striking teachers as an enemy, because it is the strike that leads to suspended classes; far harder to convey the argument that it is the government that has the responsibility for these strikes, by not resolving the issues involved, which involve government defaults on funding teacher's pensions, failure or lateness of payment of salaries and benefits, and, most recently, proposals that teachers unions interpret as aimed to privatize education.

So, as is almost routine in post-coup Honduras under the security regime of Oscar Alvarez, not only the police but the military are sent in to combat protesting teachers.

This policy has now led to the predictable outcome: the death of a striking teacher, Ilse Ivania Velásquez, who Vos el Soberano reports was hit in the head by a tear gas canister, then run over by a vehicle described as a "tanqueta".

The story in El Heraldo describes the action as intended to remove striking teachers and Resistance members from the Boulevard Centroamérica in Tegucigalpa. Its description of the cause of death was, perhaps predictably, quite different than that on Vos el Soberano:

According to versions from witnesses, the educator was thrown to the ground by a stampede of teachers that caused serious wounds to her face.

Afterwards it happened that the woman was run over by a vehicle that was crossing the area. Up till now, none of the versions has been confirmed.

In a separate story, El Heraldo specifically disputes the claim that she was run over by a vehicle. Their story clarifies that the tanqueta in question was a water tanker, the kind of vehicle used to fuel the water cannons that were turned against the teachers by the police and military.

This additional coverage explains that teachers were attacked with batons and tear gas grenades when they tried to stop a commission named by Lobo Sosa from entering the building where the Instituto de Previsión Magisterial (INPREMA) has its headquarters. INPREMA is at the center of the pension dispute with the Lobo Sosa government, and the teachers have rejected this commission, whose motives they (quite reasonably) distrust.

El Heraldo does admit that the action was being carried out by the National Police and the Cobra unit of the military, but manages to blame the teachers and resistance members for the death.

International news stories echo the claim that Velásquez was run over after falling in the crowd, while fleeing from tear gas being fired into the protest.

Vos el Soberano describes her as the sister of Manfredo Velásquez, who disappeared in the repression of the 1980s. She was also the sister of Zenaida Velásquez, described as the first president of the Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH, Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras).

These are reminders that there are deep roots to the resistance in Honduras.