Questioning the State Department: Human Rights "Progress" in Honduras?

UC Santa Cruz historian Dana Frank, in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, strongly criticizes the US State Department for its recent affirmation that Honduras is making sufficient progress in correcting human rights abuses to allow disbursal of foreign aid funds sequestered by congressional mandate.


This finding recently received publicity, ironically, because of one small exception: the admission by the State Department that Porfirio Lobo Sosa's hand-picked police chief, Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, has a suspect history. As Frank writes:

the State Department did announce that it was withholding all U.S. funds to Juan Carlos (El Tigre) Bonilla, the national chief of police, or anyone under his direct supervision, until an investigation of his alleged death squad activity has concluded.

You would think that the fact that the president of Honduras appointed, and continues to support, someone with such a tainted history during a period when in theory the government is committed to clearing up corruption in the police would have raised questions about the Lobo Sosa administration, not just Bonilla. But apparently not: the vast majority of US funding that was subject to withholding has now been approved for release.

Why? Frank, in her final paragraph, reaches the same conclusion as most other observers of the situation; the US administration

is obsessed with an unwinnable, militarized drug war in Latin America, and as result appears to be willing to back almost any government that will allow it to expand its military presence in the region.

Frank cites the almost unbelievable numbers that have been tallied since 2009, when Honduran rule of law was disrupted by a coup, boundaries between military and policing began to be blurred, and the security forces were unleashed by the government to silence dissent:

• 10,000 human rights complaints against security forces
• 23 journalists killed
• multiple reports by international human rights groups about repeated abuses of due process, denial of constitutional rights, and violation of human rights.

Want to read more details? Start with the links provided by the UNHCR. Or those maintained by Reporters Without Borders.

Too internationalist for you? Then visit the website of Freedom House, generally considered a centrist organization. In a report dated July 4, 2012, Freedom House writes that in the past year,

Honduras continued to suffer from human rights violations, impunity, and corruption.

But none of this convinced the State Department to use the leverage provided by Congressional direction to withhold a small percentage of funding--"20% of a portion of U.S. police and military aid", to quote Frank-- to try to move the Honduran government away from its current posture.

What is that posture?

In June, Maria Antonieta Guillen represented the Honduran government in testimony to the UN.  She argued that the government had to walk a "fine line" to "avoid delinquency by minors" while "preserving the integrity of the diverse centers of rehabilitation". Deadly prison fires over the past year have exposed the reality: overcrowding, large numbers detained without charges, and the criminalization of practices of the young. As sociologist Leticia Salomon wrote, these fires are "evidence of the collapse of the system".

Guillen argued that, since human life is the fundamental human right, policing cannot be said to violate human rights, because it is the prevention of violent crime. Whenever accusations of human rights violations are raised, the Honduran government's response is either that the crimes were private (explaining away the systematic and unprecedented increases in crimes against activists and journalists); or that the security forces were acting to combat crime. These justifications betray a fundamental difference in how the Honduran government understands the role of security forces and the status of human rights.

It would be one thing for the State Department to admit that Honduras has not improved its record, and make a case-- however it might want-- that US national security interests outweigh this failure. That at least would not involve giving a blessing to a regime uninterested in improving actual human rights, and incompetent to do so in any event.

What is tragic is that, by certifying progress that no one else sees, the US State Department is lending support to assertions about what is needed for social order in Honduras that are directly at odds with values the US espouses.

Honduran Scholars on Militarizing Policing

Was a letter from Honduran and international scholars the inspiration for the US to place tighter controls (or suspend) some funding for Honduran police agencies?

No one can really say.

What we can demonstrate is that Honduran scholars have been unstinting in their critical analyses of what is happening in their country. Unfortunately, those voices do not get a hearing in the English language press. They should.

Consider an interview with Leticia Salomón, noted Honduran sociologist and scholar of policing. 

Headlined "Soldiers in the streets are a grave menace for citizenship", the interview includes Salomón's pointed comments on the proposed "elite" Tigres unit that, we have noted, is immune to the limitations on US funding sparked by the admission that the Chief of Police has a suspected history of extra-judicial killing.

Salomón expresses grave reservations about the participation of the military in civilian policing:

Notice that each time we are seeing with more frequency the military undertaking tasks of civilian security, which means that the soldiers in the streets, like the police, prosecutors and judges are converted into a grave menace to citizenship, and more serious yet because they carry arms and are prepared to shoot those who they consider their enemies.

It is this, fundamentally, that the US State Department needs to face: with US aid, the Honduran government has undermined the constitutional separation of civilian and military security, creating a situation in which the military can classify the people as the enemy.

The proposal to create an elite unit that deliberately blurs those lines even more preoccupies Salomón. In response to the question, "What do you think about the possible creation of the Tigres?", she responded

It is a dangerous return to the past, it signifies reaffirmation by the State of the linking of the military with public security. It is forming intelligence troops with operational units. Intelligence is thinking about, analyzing, and sensing tendencies, data, possible threats and what capacity of response we have, whereas the operational is going out into the street for which the information from intelligence serves to get results, in this proposal they want to do these two things at the same time, this is very dangerous.

Salomón is calling for a separation of intelligence gathering and analysis from operations-- a division she argues lowers the risk of intelligence being distorted by operational aims. She goes on to talk about the Honduran government's interests in creating this new ambiguous unit:

They are thinking of confronting society that dares to dissent, to question and to demand that the State satisfy its basic needs more immediately. This is evidence of a political decision totally removed from the major challenges that are presumed now to face security forces.

Salomón, like other Honduran intellectuals, sees the State turning against the people since the 2009 coup. She is most pessimistic about the institutions responsible for justice in Honduras:

We are talking in the first place of the police, but also the prosecutors and the judges whose instances are not at the level of the dimension of the insecurity that the country is living through, presenting serious signals of institutional deterioration, of involvement in criminal acts and of high levels of corruption...that is, now the delinquents are not just in the streets, they are also in the police, they are in the Public Prosecutor's office, and in the Judicial Branch, it is terrible for a society that still trusts in the order inherent in the State of Law.

It would be easy, from the US, to reduce what is happening with security in Honduras to US interests.

Salomón, in this interview, says she doesn't begrudge the US the pursuit of its own interests; but she does fault the Honduran government for its willingness to make concessions for US interests. What she and other Honduran scholars are calling for, here and in the letter they signed to appeal to the US government, is help in ensuring that the Honduran government puts Honduran interests-- in security in the exercise of civil rights, above all-- first.

The interview with Leticia Salomón, dated August 3, 2012, was published in A Mecate Corto, a product of the Jesuit Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación y Comunicación, ERIC-SJ, who also broadcast on Radio Progeso, one of Honduras' most remarkable independent broadcasters.

Leticia Salomon: "The fire in Comayagua is evidence of the collapse of the system"

Leticia Salomon, a sociologist at UNAH, provided some of the most rapid and most insightful analyses of the 2009 coup; we linked to these and discussed them (here, here, and here) in the early months of the de facto regime.

Now Diego Jimenez, writing in Costa Rica's La Nación, gives us Salomon's response to the prison fire in Comayagua.

That fire exposed the shameful facts of Honduran policing: prisons overcrowded with populations not yet tried, let alone convicted, many there as a result of laws targeting expressive behaviors by young people, primarily men, said to be indicators of gang membership and thus bases for incarceration (as well as making these individuals targets of extra-judicial death squads); and rising numbers of murders, most uninvestigated or questionably attributed to convenient targets.

The interview is worth reading in full (although it seems to end so abruptly that we thought it might be part of a longer piece).

Salomon touches on the failure of the entire judicial system; the reason why guns are so pervasive in Honduras today (which we continue to think is an under-appreciated part of the reason that the murder rate is rising); and the fact that youth gangs-- maras-- became a focus of security policy for political reasons, and are not the main reason for the situation on the ground today.

She characterizes the situation as one in which the police "don't just cover for those that commit crimes, rather they are part of the organized bands" who commit the crimes; a system biased toward the rich, where the entire justice system is "deficient", something far exceeding even the excesses of past political struggle or repression: a total breakdown, in particular, without accountability for increasing funding justified for "security".

Not, one would say, where the US should invest more security funding.

What is the present profile of violence in Honduras?

There has been a change in the origins of violence. The old rivalries among political parties no longer translate into battles with wounded and dead, nor does the violence that the State exercises on the citizenry through violation of rights and the persecution of dissidents proliferate.

”Now, instead, society itself is what generates a host of problems, that run from social conflicts that are completely valid, to the organization of bands, gangs (maras and pandillas), drug trafficking organizations, and so on”.

What is the state of the Honduran justice system to confront the problem?

The Honduran system of justice presents characteristics that are very deficient to guarantee due process. I refer to all the offices of justice: preventive police, investigation police, solicitors, judges, defenders, the penitentiary system and including norms in problems of security.

"Criminality rises despite the legislative and executive branches approving budgetary increases. Since there is no horizontal rendering of accounts, it is not asked of the authorities that they should say what they are doing with those funds and they continue in the same circle without producing positive results.

”There is also involvement of the authorities with common and organized crime. The denunciations of recent days, including about the fire in the Comayagua jail, as well as the assassination of two university students, show the breakdown of the system of justice. The police don't just cover for those that commit crimes, rather they are part of the organized bands [of criminals]".

How much have policies of mano dura of recent years influenced the deterioration of the Honduran judicial system?

It has influenced it a lot. The fire in the Comayagua jail places in evidence the collapse of the system of justice to confront a real problem to which the authorities have never paid the necessary attention. The topic of penitentiaries has not been incorporated in the agenda of any government.

”They have simply dedicated themselves to sending to the jail everyone that they seize, many of whom never are definitively sentenced. There are many in jail for very minor things, such as having a tattoo, and they serve more than the time stipulated by the law while the judge is still deliberating."

What happens with those that commit crimes of great gravity?

There are persons that have the greatest resources, great political influence in the country, and that when they are detected in some problem of great crime, enjoy almost total impunity. In general, these persons neither are cited, nor investigated, and if they take a decision to imprison them while they are investigated, there are privileged systems within the jail, that they can pay for as if it were a hotel.

”So they can live with a TV, sound system, with a larder...., with everything, as if it were a hotel. And what is worse: they can go out however many times they want with the complicity of the custodians. They can observe the weekends in the discotecs, in their houses, or even taking classes".

The statistics say that the average number of guns in Honduras is five per person. Why is it so easy to get guns in Honduras?

This is an question that we have had since the National Congress approved the topic (in 2010). When it was supposed that what was recommended was to have a gun, and that with the greatest restrictions, the legislative decision did not put limits on carrying [guns]. I feel that this was a great concession to the businesses and people that have private security. The result is the existence of a potential use of violence to be able to solve any minor conflict.

How much do maras affect the level of violence of the country?

The maras are delimited in marginal neighborhoods of the city and they have the defense of their territory as a raison d'etre. That's to say, they are easily located, they do not proliferate in all the city.

”In the period of [the presidency of] Ricardo Maduro (2002-2006), this topic was placed as the focus of attention in the area of security. This responded to an actual problem, but it was made larger to distract attention of the citizenry and to disregard other topics.

”That persecution translated into the capture of the small-time leaders, who were put away in the penal centers, and many of them, on encountering other maras, entered into conflict and the violence that they had carried on outside was reproduced. There were many deaths of mara members within the prisons because the prisons were not prepared to guarantee security.

”Today, the maras continue to exist but that is not such a relevant problem as it was some years ago. However, they have gone on to other stages, such as drug trafficking on a local level".

Note: the use of quotation marks is precisely as in La Nación; it is unclear to us if the sections outside quotation marks are paraphrases, but the use of first person pronouns suggests they are also precisely what Salomon said.

Money, money money...

There, got your attention?

We have been arguing for more than a year now that the coup d'etat of June 28 and its continuing aftermath were not ideological-- unless the ideology involved is capitalism.

The forces behind the coup were shown to be a cadre of business-owners in early analyses by Leticia Salomon and other Honduran scholars. Resistance to a living wage and to union contracts was only the most visible evidence of this direction of the de facto regime, continuing in the Lobo Sosa administration. Government agencies charged with protecting the environment were converted after the coup into rubber stamps for developments damaging to sensitive ecological zones, and even to the health of the Honduran people.

The fingerprints of this shift back to favoring business interests of a small elite are also found all over concessions of rights for power generation, even if it is hard to connect the dots due to an almost total absence of real reporting in mainstream Honduran and foreign news media.

Yesterday, El Libertador published a formal statement by the Frente de Resistencia about the "harmful contracts for renewable energy" granted to "the golpista oligarchy". The contracts in question are for thermal generation of electricity. The Honduran National Congress has, according to this report, approved the concession of more than 50 watersheds for this purpose to private companies.

One of the main arguments against these contracts, advanced by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Empresa Nacional de Energía Eléctrica (STENEE), the union of the national electrical workers, is that the contracts for ENEE to buy the energy produced guarantee an overly high price: reportedly 12 US cents per kilowatt hour, far above the previously negotiated price of 5 US cents per kilowatt hour.

Unlikely to be a coincidence, on August 25, El Heraldo published an interview with Honduran businessman Fredy Násser of the energy development enterprise Grupo Terra. The theme of the article: there is a reason why they haven't invested in "clean energy" in Honduras, they would love to, and they have lots of investment funding from the Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE), the German Development Bank, and the Dutch Development Bank. Násser was among the businessmen singled out by Leticia Salomon in her analyses of the business interests behind the coup of June 28, 2009.

El Libertador claims that the concessions for energy generation rely on forged signatures of mayors of affected towns, and thus that they were "negotiated" without consultation of the citizenry. One of the hallmarks of the Zelaya administration was a push for citizen participation, and one of the counter forces against that administration was a desire to return to a system in which representatives without accountability speak for the people.

So, the Frente calls for mobilization to

defend in a permanent way our natural resources, that should be developed under public policies with participation and direct benefit for the communities. Only under this procedure can we support clean energy projects.

Rigoberto Cuellar, the Secretary of Natural Resources in the Lobo Sosa government, defended the new contracts, saying his ministry will ensure that the contracts will be the least expensive possible and environmentally sensitive. He stated firmly that the entire process of letting contracts adhered completely to the requirements of the law. The one thing absent from his public statements: any comment on how, or whether, the proposed new energy facilities have been discussed with the local communities.

But, as Fredy Násser would argue,

it is necessary to generate wealth and the spaces necessary to develop opportunities for our people. The governments have to realize that this is the only way out of poverty.

The only way out of poverty? or the only way to "generate wealth"?