Legal Challenges to Model Cities Law Proliferate

The law in Honduras that enables the Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo (RED), better known in English as model cities, is facing increasing opposition from Honduran citizens. 

The constitutionality of the law was first challenged in October, 2011 by the Asociación de Juristas para la Defensa del Estado de Derecho (Association of Jurists for the Defense of the Rule of Law).

Fourteen challenges against the model cities enabling law were filed on September 18, 2012. These fourteen challenges were filed on behalf of 14 separate individuals, including Miriam Miranda Chamorro, head of Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña  (OFRANEH), a Garifuna organization.

On September 18, the Public Defender of the Constitution, a prosecutor with the Public Prosecutor's office, filed a brief with the Supreme Court on an October 2011 case challenging the constitutionality of the law. The Honduran Supreme Court solicits the opinion of the Defender of the Constitution whenever there is a constitutional challenge present in a case before the Supreme Court.  A legal countdown clock has now started, that by law gives the Supreme Court's Constitutional group of five judges just 20 days to render an opinion in that first legal challenge from October, 2011.

Nine more challenges to the constitutionality of the law were filed with the Honduran Supreme Court on September 21, 2012.  Eight of these were filed by the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations) and the nineth by Father Fausto Milla, a Catholic priest in the Lenca region of Honduras.

On September 25, the LGBT community filed 30 more challenges to the constitutionality of the Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo law.

On September 26, a further 22 challenges against the law were filed.  One of these was by the Colectivo de Mujeres Hondureñas (Collective of Honduran Women), and the rest by individuals challenging the legislation.

For those of you keeping score, that's 76 separate challenges to the constitutionality of the RED legislation.

And that's not the only bad news. The Honduran Congress apparently agrees that the law, as written, is unconstitutional.

Oswaldo Ramos Soto, who drafted the existing RED law and is  Juan Orlando Hernandez's go-to guy for writing legislation, is preparing to introduce an amendment which will "fix" the unconstitutional parts of the law.

Ramos Soto wants to change Article 1 of the RED law to make it clear that the judicial system in the RED is still answerable to the Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort in Honduras.

Ramos Soto also wants to strip away the treaty-making power granted the model city in the existing law.  He proposes changing Article 18 to remove any mention of treaties, and to give to Congress the power to appoint judges in the model city. 

Ramos Soto also proposes changing Article 19 to make the legal system in a RED part of the Honduran judicial system, under the authority of the Supreme Court.

The net effect of Ramos Soto's proposed changes would be to gut one of the key features of Paul Romer's model cities: their judicial independence from the host country.

Both Romer and Michael Strong have argued that it is the legal systems in the host countries that are in part responsible for the poverty in them and the lack of economic development.

The experiment seems to be on the way to being over before it even began.

Bumps in the Road Toward "Model Cities"

Xiomara Castro de Zelaya is the presidential candidate for LIBRE, the progressive party founded in the wake of post-coup activism in Honduras. She is also, as most readers of this blog certainly know, the wife of former President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, the target of the 2009 coup.

Xiomara became the consensus candidate for LIBRE in advance of party primaries, named as the presidential candidate by all the different movements within LIBRE-- a circumstance that actually required the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal to make adjustments in procedures designed to insist that each current have its very own candidate.

No other party has such a consensus presidential candidate, so until the primary elections are held in November, only LIBRE has a clearly designated leader. That puts Xiomara in the unusual position of being able to issue statements on urgent national issues on behalf of the entire party, something other parties are not able to do.

This week, she spoke out against the model cities agreement announced by Juan Orlando Hernández, challenging the constitutionality of the law and describing it as contrary to sovereignty:

On this occasion we would like to alert those who, without having all the elements to judge might plan now to subscribe to contracts in Honduras under the protection of the Ley de Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo, better known as the Law of the "Model Cities". This law has already been judged unconstitutional by the Special Counsel for the Defense of the Constitution and diverse qualified segments of Honduran society have judged it an affront to the sovereignty of our country, that extends illegal privileges to the subscribers while it converts us, the rest of the Hondurans, into strangers in our own territory.

Legal challenges to the law were also filed today by what Honduran media report are fourteen groups or individuals representing affected social sectors, including campesino groups and the Garifuna organization, OFRANEH (the Organización Fraternal Negra de Honduras).

Press accounts of these legal challenges echo Xiomara's statement, citing a motion filed in October 2011 by Oscar Cruz, the former attorney for the Defense of the Constitution in the office of the Public Prosecutor. Presented to the Supreme Court, the news reports note that this motion awaits action.

Cruz is quoted in news reports as saying the law is "a mockery of the state" and "a catastrophe for Honduras":

it proposes the creation of a state within the state, a mercantile entity with state-like attributes outside the jurisdiction of the state, to which will be handed over all the traditional attributes of sovereignty.

Add to this the statement by the godfather of Model Cities, Paul Romer, who is reported to be having second thoughts about the role he supposedly was going to play in Honduras.

The British newspaper The Guardian says Romer may quit because he "not been given the powers and information necessary to fulfil his role as chairman of the transparency commission, which is meant to ensure governance of the new development zones". The report says he and others supposed to form the "transparency" commission

will issue a statement distancing themselves from this week's announcement [of the first agreements to found model cities] and calling into question the legality of their appointment, which they say has not been published in the official gazette as required by Honduran law, ostensibly because of a challenge in the constitutional court.

Meanwhile, on behalf of LIBRE, Xiomara not only challenges the constitutionality of the law: she warned

those who might initiate projects under this unconstitutional approach of model cities, will be exposed to the loss of their investment.

Xiomara ended her statement with a proposition grounded in the unique position of LIBRE as the continuation of participatory citizenship that was central to her husband's administration:

we invite the president of the National Congress and his National Party, based on Article 5 of the Constitution, which regulates plebiscites and referenda, that we should submit the Law of "Model Cities" to the opinion of the sovereign [power], and that it should be the people who decide it.

There is no possibility this "invitation" will be accepted.

What the statement does is focus attention on the fragile legitimacy of entrenched political structures in Honduras, which operate without real support from the people. Hernández will have to work hard to demonstrate any broader popular support for the controversial policy, something no one has challenged him, or Porfirio Lobo Sosa, to document before.

Lobo Sosa and Honduras' Garifuna: CNN swallows propaganda

CNN headlined its story on the marking of 214 years of Honduran Garifuna history Hondurans honor African heritage.

But their story qualifies as propaganda for the Lobo Sosa government. It even includes, as if it were news or even a fact, this line:

Lobo predicted that he would be recognized as a defender of the rights of Afro-Hondurans by the end of his term.

Well, how likely is that to actually happen? What would be the basis of such a claim?

The Garifuna are an African-descendant group formally recognized as one of the multiple groups making up Honduran society under the International Labor Organization's Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (ILO 169), which was ratified by Honuras in 1994.

So if there is any credit to be claimed by Honduran governments-- which is debatable, as it was indigenous activists who pushed for recognition-- it would be earlier Honduran governments that deserve credit for recognizing the Garifuna.

In fact, since the 2009 coup, existing independent Garifuna activities have been under constant attack.

In 2009, in a statement on the Dia de la Raza, indigenous organizations noted attacks on the independent Garifuna community health center that had been staffed by Cuban doctors, and was Garifuna run and managed. Dr. Luther Castillo, the director of that clinic, was specifically targeted. The UNHCR noted that the project was supported by funding from Honduras' ALBA initiative, and that "Garífuna students who have traditionally had difficulty gaining entry into the medical faculty of the Honduran National University" were as a result "able to obtain their medical training at the Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM) in Cuba". The clinic was credited with treating over 140,000 cases prior to the coup. After the coup, the Micheletti government moved to take over the clinic.

Reports in 2009 also mention the reversal by the Micheletti government of Zelaya administration "authorization to teach in the Garifuna language in school and to teach the language itself". Santiago Jaime Ruíz Alvarez, in a study of Garifuna language transmission, noted that the production of text books in the language during the Zelaya administration was

the first time that the Ministry of Education of Honduras, at the very official level, has produced culturally and linguistically appropriate textbooks, teaching and support materials for school children in indigenous and Afro-descended communities.

So it is beyond ironic for Porfirio Lobo Sosa to be given credit for promising that, maybe in six months he will "sign an agreement to give indigenous people and Honduran blacks a preferential right to choose teachers and doctors from their own villages". These are things they have and have had, that the coup and its aftermath removed.

And there is plenty of evidence of continuing threats to Garifuna existence that are hardly being countered by the pro-business Lobo Sosa government.

Garifuna community radio, like that of other local groups, is threatened by new policies of the Lobo Sosa government, policies that drew statements of concern from UN officials. Garifuna station Faluma Bimetu has been repeatedly threatened. In 2010, during the transition to the Lobo Sosa administration, their station was vandalized and they were taken off the air by government forces. Now, through new licensing procedures, the Lobo Sosa government itself can clamp down on this and other independent voices.

Coverage of the Garifuna anniversary from resistance sources was, shall we say, somewhat different.

First of all, they called it a protest, not a celebration. These reports noted that Garifuna protestors who marched in Tegucigalpa were accompanied by other representatives of COPINH, the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígena de Honduras (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras), and that the demonstrators "demanded a halt to the dispossession of the lands of the Lenca and Garifuna peoples". COPINH is, of course, a core part of the Frente de Resistencia, something not evident in CNN's story.

Prominent in this account is Miriam Miranda, coordinator of the Organización Fraternal Negra de Honduras (OFRANEH) who was recently rescued from illegal detention due to international pressure on the Lobo Sosa government. OFRANEH, again, was one of the organizations that denounced the coup d'etat of 2009 and continues to engage in activism against the repressive actions of the Lobo Sosa government.

In a statement released after her detention, Miranda said

In Honduras the chaos by which the country was subsumed due to the 2009 coup d'etat perpetrated by the judicial and legislative powers and the armed forces, under the instructions of the U.S. right wing and of course the Pentagon, continues.

Despite the plastic smiles of state functionaries and their eagerness to achieve international recognition, the criminalization of social protest has sharpened with the regime of Porfirio Lobo, who with his sinister ways discredits his administration in the eyes of human rights organizations.

Repudiating the Lobo Sosa administration's official event that was all too closely covered by CNN, Miranda is quoted as saying

“we did not come to the Presidential Palace to ask to be received by a person who has not been able to resolve, through dialogue, a conflict with the teachers, we do not want to celebrate, nor do we even have reason to do so”.

She reportedly added that more than a toast in the Casa Presidencial, what the Garifuna people need is the respect for their human rights and access to the lands of their people.

CNN, it would appear, hasn't heard that Garifuna voice. It is too easily taken in by the kind of meaningless symbolic gestures that count as "recognition" of minorities in US politics.

The real political story, the one about land rights, rights of self determination, and resistance to economic exploitation that is displacing the Garifuna from their traditional communities in the name of development-- the actual legacy of the Lobo Sosa government in Garifuna territory-- CNN cannot be bothered to cover.