The Death of Culture

Honduras no longer has a Secretary of State in Culture, Art, and Sports. The carcass that the last two mismanaging Ministers of Culture left will be picked over for the bits that the Hernández government feels are effective and can be used to further its goals and missions, and the rest will be dumped.

It's not that this comes as a complete surprise.

We've been vocal about the rampant neglect of the last two Culture ministers under the Lobo Sosa administration. There was the one with the strange notion of what culture is, and the one for whom culture is to sponsor street fairs at which folk dancing and his beloved chess are taught.  Both let the ministry stagnate, and become irrelevant.

So when Jorge Ramon Hernandez Alcerro announced today that it would disappear, along with the Secretariates of Justice and Human Rights, Tourism, and Planning, few should have been surprised. 

The Hernández administration chose to model their government re-organization after the reorganization carried out by Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

But Ecuador still has a Ministry of Culture.  Honduras will not.

In not having a cabinet-level Minister of Culture, Honduras will become unique in Latin America.

In some countries this role is combined with the Ministry of Education; in others it is a stand alone Ministry; in still others it's paired with Tourism; but everyone else has one.

Not Honduras; not any more.

Hernandez Alcerro tells us not to worry about the abolished ministries, because this does not mean that their missions and functions necessarily will be going away.

Each will be picked apart, broken up, and the parts deemed effective will continue.  But they will be assigned to a lower level, headed by non-cabinet functionaries within the new super ministries.

The breakup of Culture will be the responsibility of Alden Rivera, Minister of Competitiveness and Employment, the place that the functions of this former ministry have been assigned in the new cabinet structure.

This decision will be even more consequential than the demotion in level of administration in changing the role of the remaining entities forming part of the former ministry of culture-- including the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Rivera has said he has 21 institutions assigned to his ministry, and he will be reducing them to twelve over the next several weeks. Some, like Tourism, will become Institutes.

The mission of all twelve of the surviving institutions, according to Rivera, will be to

serve the Nation in terms of economic services and to stimulate the labor of the businesses and entrepreneurs to have a transforming effect for the country.

This mission is a far cry from the role of the now dissolved ministry, which during its earlier history worked to increase the appreciation of the Honduran people for their own history and culture, and supported non-governmental institutions and efforts to preserve, develop, and share knowledge about those topics nationally and internationally.

It is that role that has made cabinet-level offices of culture universal in Latin America.

But not in Honduras, now.

The Shape of the New Honduran Government

The Honduran government under Juan Orlando Hernández is on a slimming diet that hopes to save 4000 million lempiras (about $190 million). 

It will accomplish this slimming by radically restructuring the government and its bureaucracy.  As a first step, Honduras has already gone from having 38 cabinet level Ministers, to having only seven.  There will be a total of twelve Subsecretaries, all of them reporting to one of the seven ministers.

Here's the seven ministries, and what existing government institutions will be preserved under them:

0.  Executive Branch Administration (no official name announced)
          Minister - Reinaldo Sanchez
          Advisor - Ebal Diaz
          Communications and Strategy - Hilda Hernandez
          Coordinator - Jorge Ramon Hernandez Alcerro

*1.  Gabinete de Competitividad y Empleo  (Competiveness and Employment)
          Minister - Alden Rivera
          S. de Trabajo - Carlos Alberto Madero Erazo
          S. de Desarrollo Economico - Jorge Lobo
          SERNA (Secretaria de Recursos Naturales) - José Antonio Galdámez

*2. Gabinete de Economia y Finanzas (Economy and Finances)
          Minister - Wilfredo Cerrato
          BCH (Banco Central de Honduras) - Marlon Tabora
          DEI (equivalent of the IRS) - Miriam Guzman

*3.  Gabinete de Energia e Infraestructura (Energy and Infrastructure)
          Minister - Roberto Ordoñez
          SOPTRAVI (Secretaria de Obras Publicas) - Roberto Ordoñez

*4.  Gabinete de Gobernabilidad y Modernización (Government and Modernization)
          Minister - Ricardo Alvarez
          S. de Interior y Poblacion - Rigoberto Chang Castillo

*5.  Gabinete de Inclusion y Desarrollo Social (Participation and Social Development)
          Minister - Lisandro Rosales
          S. de Salud - Yolany Batres
          S. de Educación - Marlon Escoto

*6.  Gabinete de Seguridad (Security)
          Minister - Arturo Corrales
          Vice Minister - Alejandra Hernandez
          S. de Seguridad - Arturo Corrales
          S. de Defensa - Samuel Reyes

7.  Gabinete de Relaciones Exteriores
          Minister - Mireya Aguero de Corrales


While a lot of decisions remain to be made, the following Secretaries of State are abolished:

1. Secretaria de Cultura, Artes y Deportes
2. Secretaria de Planificacion y Cooperacion Externa
3. Secretaria de Turismo
4. Secretaria de Justicia y Derechos Humanos
5. Secretaria de Pueblos Indigenas y Afrodescendientes
6. Secretaria de la Juventud

"Abolished" here means that these are no longer Secretarias de Estado, cabinet-level offices. It is not that their functions will necessarily go away.

Those functions will be evaluated. Jorge Ramon Hernandez Alcerro, the Coordinator in the Presidential Ministry, has the responsibility for keeping each Ministry to its assigned goals, and for determining by Tuesday, February 4, how the functions of each secretaria that is not being continued get integrated into the existing structure.

As a hint at what may happen: Alden Rivera has explained that in his Ministry,  Competitividad y Empleo,  there are currently twenty-one institutions and those will be reduced to twelve.

 So stay tuned.  There will be more changes.

How you know you hit a nerve: Honduras edition

Answer: when the Honduran Ambassador to the US, Jorge Hernandez Alcerro, writes to the New York Times to object.

I am talking, of course, about Dana Frank's powerful New York Times op ed, laying out bluntly the argument that, since the coup in 2009, Honduras has been in a state of disarray.

The response from the Ambassador was published February 5. It makes two main arguments:

(1) questioning the 2009 election is

"offensive to the 56.6 percent of Hondurans who voted for President Porfirio Lobo in the last election. More than 4,600 international and domestic observers closely supervised the electoral process. The other four Honduran political parties recognized President Lobo’s election, have been integrated into the sitting national reconciliation and unity government, and are represented in Congress."

While this is a comforting claim for the US backed government that took power in early 2010, the facts say otherwise. The "observers" mentioned were not the independent, neutral, guarantors of free elections that are normally required. The UN withdrew its technical support. The OAS refused to send observers, and no other respected international body did either. Reporting at the time noted bias on the part of these supposed observers, who, among other things, denied the violence that took place on election day itself.

The cited vote total of 56.6%, obscures the fact that voter turnout was under 50%, a steep decline from the previous presidential election, despite early inflated participation claims promoted egregiously by the US in early congratulatory messages. Even CNN managed to publish a correction with some analysis of what this meant for the legitimacy of the new government (although they rounded voter turnout up to 50%).

Then there is that thing about all the political parties recognizing the election-- and getting their share of the spoils. So career politicians are happy. What happens when a large proportion of the people do not feel represented by any political party, when they witness this kind of spoils system? You get loss of faith in any political party, and in governance generally.

(2) Calling for an end of US aid being used to militarize policing in Honduras would undercut the supposed successes Honduras is achieving in addressing crime, here reduced to drug trafficking.

What is perhaps most astonishing about the response-- apart from the strength of the attack, which reveals the way a real critique bites-- is this sentence:

The independent Office of the National Prosecutor for Human Rights has been investigating and prosecuting the alleged human rights violations.

That "alleged" is worth a million dollars on its own. Anyone paying attention knows that human rights complaints made in Honduras are routinely not investigated, and that the occupants of government offices created to theoretically promote Human Rights are over-ruled in security decisions and ignored when they caution against the erosion of civil rights. They complain about lack of resources. The ambassador follows this sentence with a nonsequitur about passing laws against child labor and human trafficking, and establishing a "committee against torture". But the human rights problem is much simpler and less exotic than that: it is a priest being beaten up on the side of the road; a peasant leader being assassinated; a LGBT activist being killed.

Then there's the letter by former US ambassador to Honduras (1996-1999), James Creagan. Again, he counter factually blesses the 2009 election process as "free and fair". I think most observers would say suspension of the rights of free speech and assembly, assault on a presidential candidate, and the lack of unbiased observers mean even if you want to accept the results of this election, the process was hardly "free", and arguably not "fair".

But this is not about truth. Creagan also writes that:

Honduras faced political and institutional stalemate after the removal of President José Manuel Zelaya in June 2009. Far from making a “mess,” the skilled diplomats under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton deftly worked for the only way out of a descent into armed clashes — democratic elections.

How wonderfully revisionist. The "removal" of President Zelaya was of course not a neutral surgical procedure: it was a coup. The "stalemate" could have been broken if the US diplomats had not kept propping up the confidence of the deluded Micheletti regime. "Skilled" and "deft" are the opposite of the words that would honestly characterize the State Department role: clumsy and clueless are rather more to the point.

And finally, finally, we have an admission: the US wasn't trying to reinstate the legally elected president of the country, and restore the rule of law. It was trying to avoid "a descent into armed clashes".

Too bad no one in the State Department noticed that the armed clashes had already happened. Only the victims were not politicians and the wealthy: they were school teachers and students.

Whitewashing things in 2009 is one thing. Continuing to assert, in the face of all evidence, that the breach opened in June 2009 was healed by the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa is insane.

And while watching a clear-eyed scholar be put to the rack is not enjoyable, it shows that the critique hurt. And, as a wise Honduran colleague notes, the more they react to the original op ed piece, the more exposure it gets, including within Honduras, where El Heraldo's story on the "diplomatic offensive" helpfully links to the original piece, in case any reader had not seen it already.