Slight Improvement in Homicide Statistics

The Observatorio de Violencia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH) announced over the weekend that 2013 closed out with 6,757 homicides, yielding an average of 79.7 homicides per 100,000 population or about 18.5 homicides per day. 

That's consistent with their prediction that Honduras would close out the year with a homicide rate of 80 per 100.000 population.  Its also a clear improvement over the previous year, when the homicide rate was 85 per 100,000 population.  Honduras's most violent year was 2011, when there were 92 homicides per 100,000 population.

Aruturo Corrales, the Security Minister, however, is not satisfied.

He would have you believe that Honduras improved even more.  He claims his new "official" statistics recorded a homicide rate of 75.1 per 100,000 population, or about 17 per day. 

As we have previously indicated, the problem with his "official" statistics is that he changed the definition of homicide, and the way the information is collected, so that his data cannot be compared with any previous data about the homicide rate in the country.  Corrales relies on the police to collect and evaluate the data but will not make the data publicly available for independent evaluation.  The Observatorio de Violencia, on the other hand, uses a publicly auditable set of procedures to collect and evaluate the homicide data for Honduras, and their data and procedures are available. 

It's a case of "trust me" statistics versus auditable statistics.

Corrales resents being challenged on his sleight of hand with statistics, so much so that he is threatening to create his own official Observatorio de Violencia that would be part of the Security Ministry. 

He also claims Honduras is on track to reduce the homicide rate to 30 per 100,000 population by the end of this year. That would be quite astonishing.

Like a bad statistician, Corrales keeps trying to present short-term statistics as if they represent a lasting change in homicide rates.  Accordingly, he claims the current homicide rate, over the last 37 days (!) is 14 per day.

For some reason, Corrales thinks the fact that homicides are mostly concentrated in just a few municipios (like San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, and Tegucigalpa) makes the security situation better. True enough: but then, the majority of the population is also concentrated in those few municipios.

Migdonia Ayestas, the Director of the real Observatorio, says the state should think carefully about how it invests its scarce resources, but that even if they do create their own Observatorio de Violencia, the current one at the university will continue.

Julieta Castellanos, Rector of UNAH, added:

Corrales claims all that we do is repeat the numbers that they publish; nonetheless, the data that they process is less than the number of events registered each day and UNAH cannot publish a report that doesn't certify how the data were compiled....I think that he (Corrales) wants the number to be decreasing and we as academics cannot say what isn't true.

Ultimately success will not be measured by statistics, but by how safe the Honduran people feel.  The bad news is that regardless of the source of current homicide statistics for Honduras, it still has the highest homicide rate in the world.

How to Lie With Statistics: Honduran Homicide Edition

Arturo Corrales has cut off Honduras's Observatorio de Violencia from its ability to get crime statistics from the police and coroners in Honduras. 

Julietta Castellanos, the rector of the National Autonomous University, says that Corrales has obstructed the Observatorio from getting statistics for the last 6 months of this year.  Castellanos observed that the Observatorio:

"was created in 2003 and never have we had any restriction on access to the information; the procedures and methodology for the construction of the data were a validation process done by the University, the Public Prosecutor's office, and the Secretary of Security."

The power struggle between an administration that desperately wants to make the homicide statistics look better, and the Observatorio de Violencia, that wants to transparently report on the statistics, was made clear in October, when both the government and the Observatorio released their homicide statistics for the first half of 2013.

They differed on the number of murders by about a thousand.

At that time Corrales made the argument that it was proper to change the way Honduras reports homicides to conform to the standard way the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo counts homicides. This procedure is particularly maladapted to the Honduran situation.  It calls for a determination of homicide only when both police and a coroner agree on a verdict of homicide.

In Honduras, few homicide victims are examined by a coroner.  Coroners only operate in the major cities (Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula) so for there to be a determination by a coroner, the body would have to be taken from where the individual was killed, to one of these morgues.  That simply doesn't happen, for cultural and financial reasons.  Most Hondurans reclaim the body from the police within 24 hours and bury it within 48 hours of death. The existing coroners have trouble keeping up with the volume of urban homicides. But violent death is not limited to these cities.

So requiring both a police and a coroner's report predictably would lower Honduras' reported murder rate, even though nothing has actually changed.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa claimed yesterday that

"the indices of violence have experienced a notable decline,"

and continued that he often used to hear of 20-35 deaths a day, but now it seldom breaks single digits.

That is, obviously, no justification not to make the data requested by the Observatorio de Violencia public. The reasons for obscuring it are purely political. 

The government claims homicides are down, and wants to show a big reduction.  However, the way they're now counting homicides is incompatible with the way the rate was determined in past years, so whatever they choose to announce is actually meaningless.  Numbers calculated using a new method cannot be used to establish a pattern with respect to previous homicide rates. 

As Migdonia Ayestas, head of the Observatorio de Violencia told Proceso Digital:

"we cannot play with the citizenry saying that violence has diminished when we have seen that daily there are multiple crimes."

Caritas, the Catholic charity, also issued a statement lamenting the obfuscation and calling on Corrales to cease obstructing the Observatorio's access to information.

Proceso Digital seems to agree.  It closes its article:

Ever since Arturo Corrales assumed the reins of the Secretary of Security, in one way or another they have hidden the violent death statistics from the press and the citizens in general.

Honduras Wants A New Public Prosecutor In the Worst Way Possible

Here's how:

Back on June 25, the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubi, and his deputy Public Prosecutor, Roy Urtecho, resigned from office, to avoid impeachment.  A committee appointed by Congress to investigate the Public Prosecutor's lack of progress on cases had found that prosecutors were complicit with organized crime, taking payoffs, and that a significant part of their budget was spent without accounting records.

The committee reorganized the Prosecutor's office and dismissed a handful of prosecutors. That created a situation where Honduras needed a new Public Prosecutor and deputy Public Prosecutor.

There was a procedure for this, a law spelling out the composition of a nominating committee that involved members of civil society representing churches, universities, and lawyers group.

A few odd things happened on the way to composing the committee. First, Congress hastily revised the composition of the committee, to include a new group, the Alianza por la Paz y Justicia. Then, Roy Urtecho, who had been forced to resign as deputy Public Prosecutor, was appointed by the Lawyer's Association (CAH) as their representative.

Urtecho's appointment gave some committee members pause, but they continued. Rather than debate names and select candidates proposed by members of the committee, they opened the process for self-nomination.  They established a procedure to review nominees that included a lie detector test and psychological evaluation, with failure of either test explicitly supposed to disqualify a candidate. In the end, fifty-one people nominated themselves for the two positions.

Things started to fall apart as soon as the nominations closed. Try to follow the timeline here:

The nominating committee met and disqualified candidates who were not licensed lawyers in Honduras, as well as those who lacked some legal qualification (such as age) to be considered, or whose application was incomplete.

With the announcement that candidates would have to submit to lie detector and psychological tests (the same being used to evaluate police), reportedly many candidates withdrew their names.

Oscar Fernando Chinchilla (Supreme Court Justice) was named as among those failing the psychological test, along with Doris Imelda Madrid, and Lino Tomás Mendoza.  Others signaled by the press as having failed one or the other of the tests include Manuuel Enrique Alvarado, Marco Antonio Zelaya, and Guillermo Escobar Montalván

Only 13 candidates passed both tests and the review of their application:

     1-Ivis Discua Barillas.
     2-María Antonia Navarro.
     3-Gina González.
     4-José Arturo Duarte.
     5-AnÍbal Izaguirre.
     6-Eugenio Edgardo Rivera.
     7-Rolando Argueta.
     8-Jair López.
     9-Mario Salinas.
    10-Rigoberto Cuéllar.
    11-Marcelino Vargas.
    12-Lisandro Sánchez.
    13-German Enamorado.


So the final candidates must be on this list, right?

Not so fast.

Julieta Castellanos, rector of the public university, complains that when Luis Evalin, representative of the private universities, came back after a week out of the country he sought to change the rules agreed to by the other six members of the committee. Evalin missed the meetings where candidates' education was being evaluated.  He also missed all the interviews

When the nominating committee reconvened last Tuesday, after the first round of tests had been administered, to see who had passed and who had failed, Evalin demanded a change in the way candidates were evaluated. He put forward a motion that called for  polygraph evaluations of the twenty candidates who had been eliminated either during review of their resumes, or by failing the psychological tests.

Roy Urtecho seconded the motion, and the nominating committee, perhaps overwhelmed by the small number of individuals remaining in the pool, agreed. Evalin's side prevailed, on a 4-3 vote.

So by Wednesday those who had failed one of the confidence tests were allowed to take the other test, rather than be eliminated. That put Oscar Fernando Chinchilla back into the running, despite having failed the psychological test.

Evalin later told the press, "I represent the 19 private universities, respect them."  Though Evalin was not present and therefore could not know what went on in his absence, he told the press that university faculty with international reputations had been rejected just for faults in their paperwork, and that there had been no interviews.  Evelin argued for using experience rather than the results of tests to evaluate the candidates.

Also on Wednesday, Mauricio Villeda, Liberal Party candidate for president, called on Liberal Party Congressmen to abstain from voting for any candidate coming out of the nominating committee, arguing that the election would be illegal, and should be held after the new Congress is seated next January. If the Liberal Party had followed him, it would have denied the National Party sufficient votes to approve any candidate.  PINU, another minority party in Congress, agreed with his position, as did Libre, which has no congress members currently.

Thursday the Alianza por la Paz y Justicia pulled out of the nominating committee.  Its representative, Carlos Hernandez, said that

"We are not going to participate in a process where they break the rules at the last minute, I don't know what their motivations are, but the rules were established and unfortunately they changed, and if this isn't undone, we won't participate."

Everything was transparent and agreed to up until Monday, according to Hernandez.

The same day, Ramon Custodio, Human Rights Ombudsman,  also pulled out, saying that he would not sully his good name.  Julieta Castellanos also withdrew, echoing Hernandez's call for transparency.  She continued:

"Everything that happened from Tuesday onward, that's the responsibility of four members...We cannot in conditions where there isn't a transparent explanation, of what has happened, continue the participation of the University"

So Thursday, the nominating committee met with three of its members missing (Hernandez, Custodio, and Castellanos).  Present were Jorge Rivera Aviles, Roy Urtecho, Luis Evalin, and Edith Maria Lopez Rivera. They agreed to consider 27 candidates and whittle the list down to 5 names.

Candidates began withdrawing their names from consideration.  Three candidates who had passed both tests withdrew early in the day: Jair Lopez, Jose Arturo Duarte, and Rigoberto Cuellar. Rivera Aviles later told the press that the nominating committee chose to ignore the withdrawal of candidates on Thursday.

By Friday morning, Rivera Aviles, as committee chairman, made it known that the nominating committee had settled on a list of five candidates, but was not releasing the names until later in the day in case any of the committee members who had withdrawn wished to vote their positions, possibly changing the outcome.

Nonetheless the list was leaked to the press from Rivera Aviles' Supreme Court staff:

     Oscar Fernando Chinchilla
     Maria Antonia Navarro
     Rigoberto Cuellar Cruz
     Ivan Discua Barillas
     Rafael Argueta


At that point it became obvious that Chinchilla, Rivera Avile's hand-picked candidate to control the Constitutional branch of the Supreme Court, was going to get the nomination.

The members of the committee who had withdrawn refused to legitimate the procedures used by the rest of the nominating committee. The five candidates selected by the remaining committee members were proposed to Congress on Friday night.  Interviews began the next day.

Saturday, while being presented to Congress for his inverview, Ivan Discua Barillas withdrew his candidacy, saying there was already a "fix" in for Chinchilla.  Addressing Congress, he said to their faces

"I don't have godfathers and I don't want them because I value my abilities; I want to tell you legislators that are here and don't bear the blame.  The decision over who will be Public Prosecutor was taken last night (Friday) at 9 pm by the [National] party leadership; and I tell you with conviction that to that class, Honduras isn't important."

Porfirio Lobo Sosa called Discua's reaction "logical" but dismissed it as political.

To the surprise of no one, Honduras awoke Sunday morning to the announcement that Oscar Fernando Chinchilla had been elected the new Public Prosecutor for a term of five years.

Rigoberto Cuellar was elected as deputy Public Prosecutor, despite having withdrawn his name from consideration on Thursday.

And we are sure that everyone who watched this sausage being made is reassured that the Public Prosecutor's office won't be corrupt this time around.

First Heads Have Rolled, Sort Of....

Well, heads have rolled in Honduras, but no one has actually lost a lucrative government job-- so far. 

As we previously reported, the Honduran Congress passed a law giving itself remarkably broad powers to open an investigation of any member of the government. In response to that threat, the cabinet of Porfirio Lobo Sosa has undergone some major late term shifts.

First removed was Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla.  He was replaced immediately as Security Minister by the Foreign Minister, Arturo Corrales.  It's not that Corrales has any actual ideas about how to better the security situation in the country, but rather that Pompeyo Bonilla was so bad at doing it.

Among his failings:  sitting on the dismissal orders for 223 police officers who failed one or more of the confidence tests.  Only about 7% of those were failures of the drug testing.  The rest failed combinations of the psychological, lie detector, and financial history tests meant to point at unfit or corrupt police.

Bonilla admitted delaying their dismissal in Congressional hearings last week but failed to offer any explanation.  He also admitted promoting several of them, knowing that there were outstanding requests for their dismissal, again without explanation.

Another failing:  since he assumed the position of Security Minister in September, 2011, there have been 11, 199 murders, of which fewer than 20 percent were investigated.  He was in office both for the murders of two university students (including the son of Julieta Castellanos) by the police, and the assassination of Alfredo Landaverde.  No one has been tried for either case, and there are no suspects in the Landaverde case, where there are also indications the police were involved.

Not that Corrales was all that good at his last job of Foreign Minister.  He failed to reform the consular service, which is filled with unqualified political appointees who line their pockets charging Hondurans for services that are supposed to be supplied for free.  He presided over a consul who hired prostitutes for an official party.

So Corrales is in as Security Minister, and actually reportedly has expanded powers over other ministries, including Defense.

But Pompeyo Bonilla isn't exactly out on the street.  He will have a new title on May 1,  Private Secretary to the President, replacing Reynaldo Sanchez, who will depart to run full time for the Congress.

Corrales will be replaced as Foreign Minister by Mireya Aguero, the current Vice Chancellor in the Foreign Ministry.

Thee Honduras Congress also decided to intervene in the Public Prosecutor's office, effectively taking over control, removing the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubí, and his deputy Roy Utrecho from any decision making.  Luis Rubí admitted in his Congressional testimony that only about 20% of murders get any investigation.

These two are sidelined for the next 60 days while an appointed committee will make decisions about what the organization does, and how to reorganize the office to (it is hoped) be more effective.   In addition to making the office more effective, the committee was also charged with applying confidence tests to all prosecutors, similar to those used for the police.  To accomplish this, they will assume all the powers delegated to the Public Prosecutor and his deputy.  The US Embassy has previously offered to provide expert support in re-organizing the Public Prosecutor's office.

But Luis Rubí hasn't lost his job, and Marvin Ponce says that Rubí won't. Ponce says Rubí secured his job going forward by agreeing to throw many of his top prosecutors under the bus. For the duration of the commission's term, he'll have to sit on his hands and get paid to do nothing, watching what changes the commission implements and awaiting any recommendations the commission makes back to Congress for its action. 

The Association of Prosecutors of Honduras had a meeting scheduled for yesterday afternoon to discuss whether Congress acted within the law, and whether the Public Prosecutor's office (constitutionally supposed to be political independent) has to obey this order or not.

The legal secretary of the Public Prosecutor's office, Rigoberto Espinal, called Congress's action unconstitutional, pointing out that the Prosecutor's office is neither a part of the Executive, nor Legislative branch of the government, and therefore neither is allowed to mess with it.  Espinal asserted that Congress wants to remove Rubí for his involvement in the 2009 coup.

Edmundo Orellana of the Liberal Party and himself a former Public Prosecutor, said he was considering bringing a legal challenge to Congress's action before the Supreme Court.

Honduran Police Failing Evaluation

Forty seven percent of the 70 police officers processed fully by the Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP) over the last three months failed their confidence test.

That's 33 police officers that the DIECP will seek to have fired.

Seventy is an admittedly small sample, but if this rate of failure held up for the entire police force, we would be looking at the dismissal of more than 3700 police over the next two years.

The DIECP is moving slowly, though.  In the last 3 months they have conducted their confidence tests on 145 police officers, and only made evaluations of these 70. In addition they collected urine and blood samples from the 90 officers that form the COBRA Special Operations team.

The slowness of their evaluations prompted Julieta Castellanos to ask the Cabinet for an investigation of the DIECP to find out why it is proceeding so slowly.

War of Words Between Police Chiefs

Late yesterday Juan Carlos Bonilla, the police chief, revealed on Honduran TV that the police were linked both to the 2009 murder of General Julian Aristides Gonzalez and the 2011 murder of Alfredo Landaverde.

The former police chief, Ricardo Ramirez del Cid, seems to have taken that as a personal attack.   Ramirez del Cid told a local radio program:

If anyone has evidence against me they should present it but not send me subliminal messages in the media trying to blemish the image of retired officials, attacking from the inside will not resolve anything.

Del Cid also said:

He left us guessing; he didn't mention anyone's name but he left us guessing.  That's not good because the same thing could happen to him (Bonilla) tomorrow.

He went on to complain that Bonilla knows that there are many police stations in such precarious conditions that they could not possibly be used to commit crimes!

Ramirez del Cid seems to have been referring to finances when he said "precarious conditions".  The only way I can make sense of this statement is as a reference to the motorcycle used to kill General Gonzalez, which Bonilla said left from, and returned to, a Tegucigalpa police station. The implication seems to be, hey, our motorcycles wouldn't be in good enough condition for a drive-by shooting.

Ramirez del Cid also denied that any acts of police corruption occurred during his six months as police chief.

We will simply point to the killing of Julieta Castellanos's son, which happened during Del Cid's time as police chief. It was his handling of the event for which he was ultimately fired. Thw implicated police officers were allowed to escape. This was the case that led to police corruption becoming a focus in Honduras.

There is nothing in Bonilla's comments that we can see to lead Ramirez del Cid to take then as a personal attack.

It may be a guilty conscience.

Ramirez del Cid is one of 11 high ranking police who failed to show up for their appointment for the process being employed to identify sources of corruption in the Honduran police. The group not complying with the law includes pretty much everyone in the police command before Bonilla was appointed. Ramirez del Cid was the man in charge.

Del Cid is still an active duty police officer despite having no duties.  He still receives a salary, and therefore must submit to the tests under the law passed by Congress. The process he is ducking involves drug tests, psychological tests, financial investigation, and answering standardized questions while connected to a lie detector. 

Instead, he says he's asked to retire. But that isn't stopping him from launching a war of words with his successor.

Luis Rubi: Police Cleanup Law Unconstitutional

We have often found ourselves critical of Luis Rubí and the Public Prosecutor's office. But we do agree with his latest finding: the law under which the Honduran police are being purged appears to violate the due process guaranteed by the Honduran constitution.

Here's the story: In late June of this year, 375 police officers filed an appeal of the May, 2012 law which Congress passed to clean up the National Police.

The law, decreto 89-2012 [note correction], created the Comisión de Reforma de la Seguridad Pública (Commission for the Reform of Public Security) with broad powers.

It also eliminated Articles 114, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 y 132 of the Ley Organica, the police charter.  These were the articles that spelled out  due process procedures for firing a police officer of any rank. 

The Sala Constitucional, the five justices of the Honduran Supreme Court that hear constitutional cases, solicits an opinion from the Public Prosecutor about any law subject to challenge.  Luis Rubí filed his opinion, finding the new law unconstitutional. He argued that it denies due process rights to the accused police officers; implicitly presumes officers under investigation guilty; and demands that they prove their innocence.

Rubí said:

There is no doubt that the decreto 89-2012 weakens the rule of law by openly contravening the constitutional disposition and the international order to protect human rights.

The presumption of innocence and the right to due process are guaranteed by the Honduran constitution.

This opinion really should come as no surprise to anyone in Honduras.  Back in February, the Association of Magistrates and Justices of Honduras issued a press release reporting their opinion that the law was unconstitutional, because it suspended basic, constitutionally guaranteed, rights.

The day the law was approved the Public Prosecutor's office said they would begin a review of the law to determine if it violated the constitutional rights of police officers.  Previous attempts to clean up the police had failed for precisely this reason.

Nonetheless, Julieta Castellanos, the Rector of the National Autonomous University, criticized Rubí:

The Public Prosecutor will do harm by opposing a cleanup of the police and I think that there will be sufficient power in society to be able to succeed in the fight that we are all interested to put in order.

Castellanos suggested that Rubí is opposed to cleaning up the police because the same law covers his office as well.

What she doesn't do is provide a counter-argument to his finding, echoing that of the Association of Magistrates and Justices, that the new law violates guarantees of due process.

The Sala Constitucional has not ruled on the case, and the opinion submitted by the Public Prosecutor is not binding on the court, so for now, the process of purifying the police will continue.

Lack of Will to Fix Police

There is international agreement that Honduras needs to clean up the corruption in its national Police.

Chile sent its Carabineros to make recommendations. A result of their visit was the immediate dismissal, without hearings, of 24 police officers, though the reasons for their dismissal were never made public or their names communicated to the prosecutor's office.

As recently as five days ago, representatives of the US State Department reiterated their support of the process of addressing police corruption in Honduras. Even Ramon Custodio, Human Rights Ombudsman, said that "cleaning up corruption is an urgent necessity because of the emergency situation that the country is living with." The Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church in Honduras called for the immediate and effective cleanup of the Police.

All of this urgency arose from the assassination of two university students by the Police last October. Eight Police officers have been indicted in the murders.

But there's a problem.

Nothing's actually happening.

On the first of December, Congress created the Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP), and selected Óscar Manuel Arita to direct it. But it seems Congress "forgot" to include his new agency in their 2012 budget passed later that month. Unofficially he saw that he could accomplish nothing, and has quit citing the lack of budgetary support as the reason. Officially, however, he quit strictly for personal reasons.

The lack of funding might be deliberate. It is Lobo Sosa's government that proposes the budget. On November 5, 2011, Lobo Sosa reactivated the Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Interior (CONASIN) to, among other things, oversee the cleanup of the police.

Lobo Sosa's group, under his control.

In January of this year, Julieta Castellanos, whose son was one of the university students murdered by the police, called what's going on a fictive cleanup. She said the police actions to date are merely marking time so that they can make the claim they don't need a commission to clean them up. There was talk at that time of an international commission to oversee the Police cleanup, with 3 national and 2 foreign members, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.

While more than 100 police have been dismissed for alleged corruption (which includes failing a drug test), none of the information on their alleged acts of corruption, or their names, has been given to the prosecutor's office so that they can be investigated. Blame the Security Minister, Pompeyo Bonilla for this.

Lot's of heat; not very much light.

Tim Johnson sheds light on Honduran crime

Since I recently complained in frustration about the way mainstream media (using as my example the Washington Post) rely on an overly generic storyline to account for crime in Honduras, I need to applaud McClatchy reporter Tim Johnson for writing a story that sounds, for practically the first time, as if it was written by someone who has actually talked to people in Honduras.

As a result, the story he tells is one of police corruption and impunity, and the rule of law broken down; a lack of security and a lack of trust in government to provide security. Johnson writes:

Unlike other parts of Central America, where organized crime has relied on enforcers recruited from street gangs and unemployed youth, in Honduras entire units of the national police appear to work for drug and crime groups, preying on the public and gunning down foes.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/20/136474/crime-booms-as-central-americans.html#storylink=cpy

This is a far cry from the easy storyline about youth gangs which has been used in Honduras to justify fatal violence against the young, whether they are engaged in criminal activity or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My own perspective on this comes from a prior episode of repression in Honduras, when a hard working young man I knew, from a dirt poor barrio (literally dirt poor-- the kind of place where houses had dirt floors), who was as talented as any of the much better educated and privileged North Americans on our project, was shot and killed, victim of being out for a drink when someone decided to take out young men thought to be (and perhaps actually) involved in drug dealing.

My friend was collateral damage. But the crime was portrayed as a regrettable but necessary response to the danger posed by young men generically-- not young men involved in crimes, who-- again, sadly, worth underlining-- should be subject to arrest, trial, and conviction before being punished, but were seen as disposable.

We can disagree about all of the causes of the current Honduran situation. We will disagree about what steps might put Honduras on a route out of this mess. But we should all agree that Johnson proved that a reporter who approaches the story with open ears might actually find something new, and maybe even illuminating, to say.

I was astonished to read a quote from the head of the Chamber of Commerce and Industries of Cortes (where San Pedro Sula is located), Luis Larach saying that

drug lords "have bought tremendous tracts, ranches, farms (and) coastlands" in Honduras, and the drug profits have filtered into sectors such as banking, construction, sports teams, restaurants, auto sales and private security.

In a sign of money laundering, he said, unknown companies are winning bids "on huge infrastructure projects, like highways and bridges, and no one knows where the money is coming from."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/20/136474/crime-booms-as-central-americans.html#storylink=cpy

We have been covering many of these government contracts given to shell companies. Our suspicion has been that these are evidence of behind-the-scenes corruption, payoffs to decision makers, or promises of favors, but like Larach, our ultimate question has been, how do companies with no assets get these contracts?

I am glad to see a story that doesn't just say Hondurans are inherently violent. Now, the question is whether other media will start paying attention to the specifically local character of the tragedy in Honduras. Johnson quotes the rector of UNAM, Julieta Castellanos, whose perspective as a sociologist informs her comments, saying

many Hondurans [view] police corruption as a litmus test of whether the state could stave off an onslaught of gangsters.

"People are really indignant, worried, but above all frightened. If nothing happens, if the police are not purged, where is the country headed?" she asked. "Who will be governing in a few years?"

This isn't a threat entirely from outside; it isn't a cancer that can be removed with ever more security measures. This is what happens when impunity reigns, trust in institutions disappears, and the social fabric itself threatens to come apart.

Honduras has a Police Problem

And, contrary to English-language media-- including the usually more critical BBC-- it is not taking effective steps to solve it.

If you read the Washington Post, you will be told that 176 cops were arrested "for alleged connections to kidnappings, extortion plots and drug trafficking". Quoting the highest level Honduran source, President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the Post said

the mass arrest is part of a nationwide crackdown on corrupt police.

A spokesman for the National police, Silvio Inestroza, went further, claiming these officers had "links with drug gangs".

Drug violence is the one narrative about Honduras that US media seem to understand, so it is no surprise that Honduran authorities repeat it, and while disappointing, not even surprising that the US media parrot it back.

But in this instance, that is not in fact what is going on. To understand what is really happening, you need to ask, "Why 176 officers, and not others? Why those 176 police officers?"

As CNN International correctly notes, the 176 are the complement assigned to one police outpost in Tegucigalpa. So, not quite so sweeping a "nationwide crackdown" of the Honduran police force-- which totals around 11,000 members.

CNN's lead paragraph falls into the trap, describing the action as part of a "a campaign to cleanse its national police."

Buried far down in their story is the fact that this station is where four police officers worked who are suspected in the murder of two university students, including the son of university rector Julieta Castellanos.

The Washington Post managed to blur that one-to-one correspondence entirely, writing only that

The detentions late Wednesday came three days after the president fired six high-ranking officers following the release by police of four policemen who allegedly killed the son of a university chancellor.

The "detentions" not only came three days after-- the detained were the colleagues who worked with the suspected killers, and who let them walk out.

Castellanos, of course, was a member of the official "Truth Commission" on which the US State Department placed much of its hopes for national reconciliation, despite Honduran skepticism. So the murder of her son is international news.

Castellanos herself used the opportunity to point out that her son's murder is part of a pattern of police complicity in violence that extends beyond the children of the socially- and politically- prominent.

This is a pattern that English-language media have not covered particularly well. And the present stories are simply additional examples of what goes wrong in the reporting process.

CNN International presents the story exactly as the Honduran authorities would like. It takes the specific, and quite limited, investigations of 176 officers at one post as evidence of a commitment to cleaning up the police force, calling it "the latest of a series of steps" taken for that purpose.

CNN described the removal of police command officers as if the impetus for this originated from within, saying "Days after the incident, the national police shook up its top ranks". But the removal of officers came from outside the police force, as a product of political calculation in the Lobo Sosa government.

CNN writes approvingly that the Honduran Congress

rewrote the country's policing laws, stripping the national police of its internal affairs department, and handing over such investigations to a new, independent force.

This claim advances the argument that there are just a few "rotten apples" in the Honduran police, and adding more, separate, police units will somehow solve what in fact is a problem rooted of abuse of power, in impunity.

If you read these stories, you would think the police killing of the two university students was an anomaly, a product of police involvement in drug trafficking.

But Honduran reports suggest the killing was an arbitrary and unconstrained abuse of power: having wounded one of the students, the officers decided not to bring them in for medical attention, which would have triggered an investigation of the circumstances of the original shooting.

It is up to Fox News Latino to give a more credible account, in a story covering the protest following the police bungling of the case. It opens with quotes from Julieta Castellanos:

"There has been a process of tampering with evidence, there has been a process of obstructing the investigation. The police have engaged in double-talk."

"they intimidate the prosecutors, the investigators and the medical examiners."

Unlike the other English media, this story goes on to report fully on the skepticism about government actions. On the changes in officers, they note

critics said the move amounted to no more than "rotations" of officers between posts.

Most astonishing are the final few paragraphs of this story, unparalleled in other US media:

Lobo, who was elected in November 2009 in a process marred by violence, media censorship and low turnout, has so far failed on his promise to improve public safety.

Few murders are ever solved and Honduran authorities routinely ascribe violent acts to "score-settling" within and among the country's youth gangs and criminal outfits.

At the same time, many of the killings since Zelaya's ouster appear to be politically motivated, as victims are often associated with the resistance movement that sprang up in the wake of the coup.

The deposed head of state returned to Honduras five months ago under a pact brokered by regional leaders, but violence against his supporters and other activists continues.

So what actually happened in the recent events? Should we see any of it as even a tiny ray of light, set against this sobering-- and entirely accurate-- account by Fox News Latino?

The Honduran National Police released the four officers under investigation for the murder of the two university students, who promptly failed to turn up for further investigation. The Lobo Sosa government shuffled appointments of officials with oversight authority for the police, and used the opportunity-- again-- to use the Armed Forces in civilian policing, in violation of Honduran constitutional separation of the missions of these forces.

When outrage continued, the remaining police officers from the post where those responsible for this one crime were assigned were ordered to report to a different post, to be individually investigated. Detained for investigation, not arrested, as was reported in the English-language media. But arrested sounds so much more effective, doesn't it?

La Prensa Latina reports comments by the pro-coup Human Rights commissioner Ramón Custodio, and by Andrés Pavón of the Comité Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, who has often been opposed to Custodio since the 2009 coup, that demonstrate how widespread Honduran distrust of the police forces actually is.

Custodio said that

"the agents of the police have license to rob, kill, extort, and we cannot do anything, because the high command practices impunity, cover-ups and other crimes."

Pavón, in turn, said that

"there are so many extra-judicial deaths and by their characteristics it is known that the Police participate everyday in those horrendous crimes".

From both sides of the spectrum, it is clear to Hondurans that the problem of the police is a problem of impunity, and that it is not limited to one bad apple.

Or even 176 bad apples in a single barrel.

Military Mission Creep 2: Give Us Police Powers

General Rene Osorio, head of the Honduran Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, suggested today that he would like constitutional changes that would give the military some police powers, like the ability to stop and search anyone, the general ability to search property, the ability to legally carry out raids, and other unnamed police powers.

The granting of police powers to the military would require constitutional changes, to make these part of the mission of the Armed Forces. Osorio said:

"We're not putting ourselves in the place of police; we want to help and support them with our own troops and our intelligence work."

But that's exactly what Osorio is proposing, that the military mission be changed, added to, and that training be supplied to his troops so that they do things in a legal fashion, like arrest and hold people.

As Osorio said, all of this will require changes to the constitution, the laws, changes to the military charter, changes to international treaties, all because Porfirio Lobo Sosa wants a single point of contact to coordinate the actions of the Police and Military, "to make them more effective and successful against delinquency."

Lobo Sosa grew up in an era where the Police and Military were the same thing in Honduras. This proposal to return to those days does not appear to bother him in the slightest; but it bothers those concerned with human rights and democracy in Honduras from all sides of politics.

Thus we have statements from the Rector of the National University, Julietta Castellanos opposing any unification of police and military, and the Judges' association saying its illegal.

German Leitzelar, who presided over the original separation of the Police from the Military, thinks a single Ministry with authority over both is OK so long as there's no unification of their actual operations. In contrast, General Jorge Estrada, ex-judicial auditor for the military, said that

"We have to be clear that from the point of view of the functions and strategies, to join the police with the Armed Forces would be a step backwards, to resort to the past, and we all know how that turned out."

The problem is that the Armed Forces aren't Police; what police do is not part of the mission or training of the armed forces. Osorio asking for police powers for the Armed Forces is troubling given the military's history of human rights abuses, such as extrajudicial killings and the illegal detention of Honduran citizens.

To merge them in the midst of international condemnation of violence against Honduran citizens by security forces is, at the least tone-deaf, and just possibly, one of the more obvious signs of rejection of opinion in the international community.

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".

Alternative truth, official truth, or honest disagreement?

An article published by IPS today, written by Thelma Mejía, attests to the widespread skepticism about the newly formed Honduran Truth Commission.

Composed of former Guatemalan vice president Eduardo Stein; Michael Kergin, a Canadian diplomat; María Amadilia, former Peruvian minister of justice; and Honduran members Julieta Castellanos and Jorge Omar Casco, assisted by Sergio Membreño as technical secretary, the Commission will begin its work on May 4.

As Mejía points out, conservative forces in Honduras-- notably the Unión Cívica Democrática (UCD)-- are opposed to including Julieta Castellanos. In addition, Mejía points out, "human rights groups criticised the inclusion of Casco, whom they link with the most radical fringe of the political right". Meanwhile, the Human Rights Platform notes that the Truth Commission has been established without following international norms.

The selection of the international members of the commission appears to have been constrained by the need to avoid participants from countries that have been critical of the coup. Since few governments in the world refrained from expressing outrage about the de facto regime, and many governments have not yet recognized the Lobo Sosa administration, the range of candidates was restricted from the outset. While Mejía cites Minister of Foreign Relations Mario Canahuati as saying the selection was made from a group of 15 competitive candidates, she quotes Reina Rivera of the Human Rights Platform as saying that

We believe that the selection of the international members was made more on the basis of their nationalities than their competence and abilities. The representatives from Canada and Peru are not well looked upon in some sectors, which is why some reject the Commission, while others view it with reservations.

Among those skeptical others: pro-coup businessman and ANDI president Adolfo Facussé, who reportedly said

this Truth Commission is a demand of the international community and we already know what its findings will be.... [These] will be geared to what the world wants to hear, and not to what really happened in Honduras. I don't have very high expectations regarding this question. It won't contribution to reconciliation; on the contrary, it will create greater division.

Finally, something on which both sides can agree! But surely even if it doesn't heal the wounds, finding out the truth will help? well, not so fast:

As we previously pointed out, the fact that the commission will seal records for ten years suggests the search for truth in Honduras is premature, if the committee thinks the country cannot handle hearing what it expects to discover. The report that Stein suggests will be complete in eight months is hard to imagine, if it has to avoid sensitive topics.

On the positive side, Mejía reports plans for an "Alternative Truth Commission", reportedly with the backing of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, to "monitor the process and the conduct of those who make up the Truth Commission".

So, while we may share the skepticism of the left, right, and pro-business sectors in Honduras about the official Truth Commission, there is a chance that opposition to the proposed whitewash will keep a focus on the actual events of the coup and its aftermath and give human rights groups a chance to call attention to ongoing repression.

Retaliation Against Honduras' National University

Student correspondents at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH) write, alarmed at proposals to close the university "temporarily", which they believe are a pretext to dismiss existing faculty and hire new professors, who our correspondents suspect will be selected on ideological grounds.

The threat to close the university has been widely reported in the Honduran press. While today's coverage in La Tribuna says the proposal has been discarded, it also reports the head of Congress saying that

“there has been talk of distinct options to approach this problem, we're not going to hide it, there are congress members that have advised that if this continues it might be more profitable to give a grant to a student so that he could study in a private university, the amount that a student at the autonoma [UNAH] costs the State so much that it has been said, but no decision has been taken."

Rigoberto Chang Castillo, secretary of the National Congress, reportedly proposed closing UNAH as "ungovernable". News coverage notes that Chang Castillo is a faculty member of the school of law, and cites a precedent (although unsuccessful) when in 2008, then-president of the Junta de Dirección Universitaria, Olvin Rodríguez, called for a two year closure of the university which quite obviously was not implemented.

The most recent news reports say that the heads of the three branches of government, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, Juan Orlando Hernández (on behalf of Congress), and Jorge Rivera Avilés (from the Supreme Court) met with Julieta Castellanos, rector of UNAH, and decided against closing the university.

Yet today, the university has reportedly been closed for a period of ten days, although not apparently by the National Congress: the Ministry of Health says it is closing the campus due to unhealthy conditions created by garbage accumulated when workers went on strike. The Health Ministry claims in particular that dengue (a mosquito born illness) and H1N1 (spread by contact with someone already affected) will be promoted by the trash that has built up on campus and the uncleaned bathrooms. This suggests the ministry of health has a novel view of disease processes, one that we might have hoped was not the understanding of the officials charged with improving health conditions in the country.

The current irritation to the government that is behind the proposal floated this week is the continuing strike by SITRAUNAH, the union that represents labor at UNAH. SITRAUNAH has been on strike since February 23 in a power struggle over reforms at the university. One of the keys to the controversy is the University's unwillingness to continue with the requirement to make payments of over two years of salary upon the death of an employee. As a result, SITRAUNAH has gone on strike and taken over buildings.

The union appears to have some faculty and student support, with recent reports of strikes by some faculty and students, although these also concern proposed financial policies that directly affect students. But SITRAUNAH does not have support from the administration of the university: according to today's report in La Tribuna, Julieta Castellanos requested the congress declare this strike illegal.

The Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubi, would go further: he wants to charge union members with sedition, usurpation, and coercion and has asked a judge in Tegucigalpa to issue arrest orders for the entire leadership of the union.

Sedition? Really? Sedition is an illegal action against lawful authority, directed at a government, tending towards insurrection, but which does not itself amount to treasonous conduct.

What makes the university such a target? Among other things, UNAH is full of intellectuals who have written critical analyses of the conditions that led to the coup d'etat, and of the overall system of government in the country. As we noted in a previous post, UNAH has been criticized for hiring former members of the Zelaya administration, people well-qualified for the jobs they took on.

During the months of open aggression by the Micheletti regime, UNAH students and faculty, even the rector, were subjects of violence. UNAH, and the national teaching university, the Pedagógica, were accused of being sites where bombs/Molotov cocktails were constructed and stored, despite the documented fact that the chemistry lab where the police claimed this was going on had burned years earlier, and not been repaired or replaced.

UNAH is a continuing irritation to government because it is in the nature of a university to encourage free expression of opinions and the development of critical perspectives. The fact that the national congress and public prosecutor are using a labor dispute as a pretext to discuss shutting the whole place down, and even re-directing public funding to private universities, is another indication that Honduras remains far from the ideal of reconciliation and far from conditions that would allow a real pursuit of the truth about the political events of 2009.

Honduran Members of Truth Commission Previewed

Radio America reported this afternoon, as did El Heraldo and La Prensa, that the Lobo Sosa government confirmed today the names of Hondurans who would be members of the truth commission.

Two of the announced members are the current and former rectors of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH in Spanish), Julietta Castellanos and Jorge Omar Casco. Casco has been working with Stein on setting forth the ground rules for the commission.

The third Honduran member of the commission will be Sergio Membreño, also an academic, who will be the technical secretary of the commission. Membreño was Deputy Chief of the Honduran diplomatic mission in Washington starting in 2003, having previously served the Honduran UN Development Program as an economist. Perhaps more intriguing, in 2007 he was the Executive Director of the Honduran National Anticorruption Council (CNA), and was quoted then as saying

Corruption [in Honduras] is closely related to a system of political favoritism, bi-partisan favoritism, and the way in which the operators of justice are named...There is a shortage of values in Honduras and it makes me sad to admit it, especially in front of the international community, but if we don't acknowledge this, it will be very difficult to find a solution [to corruption in politics]

Porfirio Lobo Sosa has already announced that Eduardo Stein will stay on as one of the three international representatives on the commission, but as yet, has not confirmed who the other two international members will be, only that the commission will be fully formed by the 25th of February. Stein said the process of organizing the commission is taking longer than he anticipated, and that it is no longer sure that the commission will be fully formed by February 25.

In reaction to the announcement of the Honduran members, the Unión Cívica Democrática (UCD), or at least one of its organizers, businessman Jimmy Dacarett, continues to call for a public consensus on who should be truth commission members. Dacarett said Porfirio Lobo

is placing his people how he wants, with people who are not qualified to be part of the truth commission.

Dacarett told La Tribuna that Julietta Castellanos, the rector of the University, has been singled out by businessmen as supporting the resistance. Stein, they allege, published articles in which he referred to events in Honduras as a military coup. In his view, this disqualifies both:

These are people who have deep beliefs about a position in this sense. As people, they are not qualified to be part of the commission. The commission has already failed because no one will accept their report as either true or false because they are not complying with the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord under a national consensus. Just like Manuel Zelaya did in his time, what Pepe Lobo is doing is going against the interests of the majority of Hondurans.

Meanwhile, the rabidly pro-coup El Heraldo spun it that Julieta Castellanos was pro-resistance because she has hired some of Zelaya's former cabinet members to be faculty and administrators at the University, and some of them had even supported the cuarta urna! They stopped short of actually saying that this disqualified her to serve on the commission, but that certainly would have been their position if they were voicing one.

La Prensa adds that Lobo responded to a question from a student later in the day, commenting on more than 3000 reports of human rights abuses in the country since June 28, saying

yes we are going to pay attention to those 3000 cases that you point out because....we want to respect those rights.

So perhaps human rights abuses might actually be on the agenda after all. Stay tuned.

Finally, Proceso Digital noted today that Lobo and Eduardo Stein would meet with the members of the committees that negotiated the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord for Micheletti and Zelaya on Thursday. The meeting is to understand what both parties intended a truth commission to do in including it as part of the Accord.

UNAH Under Pressure for Hiring Ex-Zelaya Officials

A story in El Heraldo yesterday reports that two former members of the Zelaya administration are, or are likely to be, hired by the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH).

Speaking to reporters, the rector of the university, Julieta Castellanos-- who became inadvertently famous as the woman who was attacked by anti-riot police in August, 2009, when she and other university officials came out to calm a confrontation between police and students-- is quoted as saying hiring Armando Sarmiento and Marlon Brevé "is not against the Law".

Armando Sarmiento was director of the Honduran equivalent of the IRS (the DEI). He will occupy the position of secretary of Institutional Development of UNAH. Marlon Brevé was Minister of Education in the Zelaya administration. According to an article on the Radio America website, the UNAH is awaiting a response from Brevé to an offer of a position in the directorship of post-graduate studies.

The Radio America article leads with a claim that the rumor circulating is that

UNAH has been converted into the refuge of Zelaya ex-officials.

"Refuge" in this and other press coverage is an interesting choice of words, suggesting that ex-Zelaya administration officials are being viewed as illegitimate. This is made extremely clear in the way that Castellanos is forced to reply to questioning: not only was she compelled to state that these hires were not against the law; she also is quoted as saying

We have interviewed many people for these jobs and we consider that they are people that have the expertise.

Castellanos is, once again, showing personal integrity. But she is also acting like an academic, as if the real world around her will accept the idea of going ahead without dragging history into things. Meanwhile, the press is clearly ready to conduct a witch hunt, and the university is being painted as of questionable loyalty.

The scrutiny being leveled at these appointments strongly suggests that at least some Hondurans-- notably, those who control these media outlets-- are far from putting the coup behind them. Are former members of the government not to be hired in positions they are qualified to hold? Or, as other comments in these articles suggest, does the Honduran media-- whose biased reporting was a major factor in inciting the coup d'etat-- really want to see show trials over the cuarta urna campaign?

It will be in reactions to things like the attempt by former Zelaya government members to reintegrate in civil society that the thinness of "reconciliation" will be most obvious. Naming a few token outsiders to your cabinet doesn't create reconciliation-- and neither will conducting a pretense of a truth commission.