Meet the New Police, Same as the Old Police

Honduras has a new law establishing a military police force meant to police the civilian population.

Apparently Juan Orlando Hernandez, who championed this bill only after leaving the Congress to run for president, is pining for his teens and 20s because he's set Honduras to return to military control of part of the civilian police force that used to be the norm.

The military likes it because they get to appoint 5000 more troops, called up from the military reserves, and they get a bigger budget as a result as well.

General Rene Osorio Canales says the new force needs training and vetting, but will be ready in October.  (How much training can they get in a month?)

This proposal stirs up memories, and not good ones. Honduras used to have a militarized police force, called the Fuerza de Seguridad Publica. It had an awful reputation for human rights violations and corruption.  Its National Investigation Directorate [DNI in Spanish], responsible for "investigating" crimes, was useless.  They merely sat in the office and took crime reports (and solicited bribes) from victims.

It was actually worse than that.  Ineffectual in dealing with crime, the DNI was good at something: violence against the Honduran population.

Edmundo Orellano wrote in a report in 2004 that during the 1980s, the FUSEP:

Through its dependency known as the National Investigation Directorate, once the constitution [1982] was in effect, persecuted, tortured, and murdered hundreds of Honduras because they thought their ideas were dangerous for the stability of the regime.

Orellana continues:

A consequence of this conduct by the [millitary] police and the submissive attitude of the judiciary [towards that behavior] was that Honduras was condemned in the Corte Interamericana de los Derechos Humanos.

In 1993, the Honduran government took away investigative powers from its military police force and gave investigation over to the Public Prosecutor's office. Instead of hiring people who hadn't completed high school (the FUSEP model), the Public Prosecutor's office only hired those with at least a high school or college degree, to try and avoid the abuses of the past.

Orellana notes that they quickly found that it was in fact, a corrupt [millitary] police that was behind much of the crime.

This led to a political war between the military and the public prosecutor's office. 

Congress, in its political wisdom, then tried to reincorporate the investigative services back under military control, but public sentiment and some political will resulted in the investigative force being switched to reporting to the Minister of Security instead, under the direction of the Public Prosecutor.

In 1997 the national police force was formally separated from the military and put under civilian control for the first time since the 1940s. In 1998 the Honduran Congress passed a law creating and regulating the civilian national police force Honduras has today.

The new 5000 member strong police force proposed would be a military police force, not under civilian control, staffed by military reservists who are called up to serve.  They would be better paid and have better benefits than the national police according to analysts, who indicated that this will exacerbate the financial crisis in Honduras.

Jose Simon Azcona, a Liberal party congressman, says the idea for a new militarized police force came from the US Embassy, and that

the government of the United States had offered assistance, and were converting four batallions into military police under the previous administration. 

So that's 5000 new military police.

But that's not the only new police.

There also is a newly created community police force, brainchild of uber Secretary of Defense and Security Arturo Corrales.  This project, done by decree instead of by law, is to hire 4500 new civilian police starting in September of this year.

Corrales announced earlier this month that he had discovered in his first 100 days as uberMinister that there were 2,150 phantom police officers, people on the payroll collecting salaries, but who could not be located in two successive attempts at roll call.  He says they're fired, and he'll replace them in September.

The lawyers in the Public Prosecutor's office say he's wrong, and that it's more like 9000 phantom police officers.

Corrales says he's budgeted for 15, 655 positions, but there aren't that many police on the payroll.  In May there were 14,472 on the payroll, and in July there were only 12,800.  Only 9,350 police could actually be located at work in July and they weren't necessarily the same individuals as the 12,800 on the payroll. 

Adding it all up, over the next several months the Honduran government proposes to hire 9,500 new police. Paying for those police is another thing.

Corrales claims that he can hire the 4,500 new officers for the new community police from his existing budget, but that's only so if 9,350 number is the true number of police actually hired and working. 

He still has to identify and get rid of the phantom payroll.  To date he's only identified and fired some 2,000 phantom officers.

The only proposal for how to pay, equip, and house military reservists called up to take over civilian policing put forward so far is to take the cost from the security tax fund, which was put in place to provide equipment, not pay people.

But neither the bad history nor the bad economics is standing in the way of these increases. Honduran politicians want more officers on the streets. What do the Honduran people want? Why would that matter?

How Rumors Get Started-- and Why they Spread

Little did we know a week ago when we posted about Leonardo Villeda Bermudez crying wolf about Honduran teachers, that we would be writing again so soon about child organ trafficking in Honduras, the topic that first made him notorious.

To refresh your memory: in January 1987, Villeda Bermudez told a reporter in Honduras that there was a child organ trafficking problem in Honduras; specifically he said:

"Many families came forward to adopt children with physical defects. At first we thought they were decent people who loved children, but in time it was discovered that they wanted to sell them for body parts..."

(quoted in Tim Tate, "Trafficking in Children", in C. Moorhead, Ed. Betrayal: Child Exploitation in Today's World. Barrie and Jenkins, 1989, pp. 115)

It wasn't true; Villeda later retracted the statement, albeit too late to avoid getting fired by President Jose Azcona.

Imagine my surprise, then, to read the headline in Friday's La Tribuna: "Supposed christians linked to organ trafficking in Honduras", over a story reviving the fear that children are being abducted to harvest their organs.

Attributed to documents leaked from the Supreme Court of Honduras, as broadcast on radio station HRN, La Tribuna reported that Mexico is investigating the trafficking of organs of Mexican children transported to Honduras.

Similar stories appeared in Friday's El Heraldo and La Prensa but with one critical difference: there are two separate investigations alleged, one of organ trafficking, and the second of the trade in the children of migrants. La Tribuna apparently merged the two and revived the old rumor about trafficking of organs of children.

The story in from Mexico is very different.

The Mexican government is investigating child trafficking by members of the Christian Restoration Church in Mexico. A judge in Mexico City has issued arrest warrants for Alonso Emmanuel Cuevas Castañeda, a pastor, Elvira Casco Majalca, ex-director of a children's shelter run by the church, and Leticia Arrieta Estrada, an English teacher for the children's shelter. All are accused of trafficking in children and organized crime.

What the members of this church are not accused of in Mexico is any kind of organ trafficking, let alone traffic in the organs of children. And the Mexican news coverage doesn't make any connection to Honduras.

But that hasn't stopped the story from gaining official traction in Honduras.

La Tribuna lavishly illustrates its story with pictures of human torsos with surgical scars, letting us assume they are scars on involuntary organ donors. It quotes the Director of the Honduran Institute of Children and the Family (IHNFA), Suyapa Nuñez, as being very preoccupied by the story:

"We will investigate the sources which generated [this story], to then take the necessary actions to stop the traffic in children's organs."

Nuñez promised to take strong measures to stop the organ traffickers who the media claims are operating in the country, even though there is no basis to the story.

Organ trafficking is a real, world-wide problem, especially in poorer countries, where adults are induced by relatively small amounts of money to "donate" organs used in sophisticated international transplant facilities.

Nonetheless, the claim that children's organs are being harvested is a persistent yet unsupported rumor, one that is far from harmless, leading to attacks on innocent people.

And it is a rumor that is especially associated, according to research by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, with particular political circumstances:

“You could map the rumour and see that it was tied especially to states going through civil war or genocide.” So, looking at this wider pattern, she developed a new theory: “maybe it can be seen as a sort of inchoate testifying by illiterate people on the margins, who don’t have other discourses to fall back upon, but who recognise that their bodies are not safe under these regimes, where there’s torture, disappearances and so forth”.

As, for example, a country in the aftermath of a coup, still facing unrestrained police repression in response to legal protests. Like Honduras today.

Taxes-gate

A new omnibus tax law (decreto 17-2020) was published Monday in La Gaceta, the official organ whose publication makes laws legal. La Tribuna reports that on reading the published law, which they passed just before their Easter break, Congress was astonished to see changes in no fewer than nine articles. La Tribuna tells us that those most amazed were the committee that assembled the final version of the bill after all the changes and amendments were collated. The revision committee ("comisión de estilo") , consisting of German Leitzelar, Oswaldo Ramos Soto, and Rigoberto Chang Castillo, denies it made these changes in the version of the bill it sent to the President.

Earlier today, Secretary of Congress, Rigoberto Chang Castillo, said the only difference is in Article 15, where they left off the exoneration of payment for raw materials imported for the manufacture of medicines. Chang said of the publication of the new law in the Gaceta:

"Any doubts, any error, or omission there is in the publication of this law, the only person responsible is Rigoberto Chang Castillo, and we are willing to clarify the doubts, errors or omissions....There was no ill will nor manipulation, nothing like that, what happened was that a paragraph was left out of Article 15 and that will be rectified."

However, in later stories, La Tribuna quotes Congressman Marco Antonio Andino as finding errors in Articles 15, 16, and 19. Marvin Ponce, fourth Vice President of Congress and a UD party member, said,

"It's deplorable that at least three articles were disrupted...one of them is the revision presented by Congressman Marlon Lara so that supplies to produce medicines by Honduran companies would be exonerated, including, we said here (in chambers), that medicines for animals would be exonerated, but in the publication it's different and the exoneration isn't included."

Also missing was a motion that exonerated those owing back taxes of the fines and surcharges on them, and the tax on rental units was supposed to be five percent, starting with luxury rentals of 15,000 lempiras, but was printed as a 10 percent tax. Ponce indicated that the printed version also left out exoneration of fines and surcharges for those with a debt to the agricultural development bank, BANADESA.

Ponce continued,

"There is no confidence of that approved by the members in open session, the true law has been disrupted by the revision committee or by the people who sent this document to the Executive or in those instances."

German Leitzelar, a member of the revisions committee said

"we are reviewing La Gaceta and saw that the document of ours does not agree, there are errors in copying and changes in the working, and the members of the revision committee need to present a decree to amend by addition and correction things based on what we submitted."

His list of changes needed includes Articles 1, 7, 15, 16, 19, 20, and 21. As the Liberal Party Congressman Jose Simon Azcona said,

"laws should be published as they were approved in the National Congress, if there is a group that is not in agreement with this, they can submit a law to amend the existing law, but no one should change things outside of Congress."

Oswaldo Ramos Soto, another member of the revisions committee, urged people to wait until the committee has fully compared the document they sent to the Executive branch for signature with that published in La Gaceta.

Despite these objections, the new tax law goes into effect as published in 20 days from its April 22, 2009 date of publication. It will be up to Congress to approve revisions and amendments to the version published, to correct any errors in the published version. Supposedly the committee on revisions is working on such a set of amendments now.

These changes to the law aren't minor, if we go by the comments on the scope of changes in the various La Tribuna articles. The revision committee members seem to be trying to calm the waters, portraying the changes as minor copying errors, rather than deliberately introduced changes. Interestingly, only Marvin Ponce of the UD party called for an investigation into how and more importantly, where, the changes were introduced. I doubt he'll get his investigation.