Dictatorship: the ghost that haunts re-election in Honduras

The tweet from @Codigo504 is the kind of mordant humor I think of as typically Honduran:

Después del informe de OEA y el tuitazo de Almagro los cachurecos deben calcular bien sus próximas acciones. #CariasQueHubieraHecho?

After OAS’ report and Almagro’s tweet, the Cachurecos need to think very carefully about their next steps #WhatWouldCariasDo?

"What Would Carias Do?"

That's easy: hold on to power however he could. Tiburcio Carías Andino is the ghost hovering over presidential re-election in Honduras.

While the rhetoric used to justify the 2009 made re-election especially potent as a current political issue, the constitutional ban on re-election is not a long-established Honduran practice. It was inserted in the 1982 constitution that Oscar Arias famously called the "worst in the entire world" during his failed attempt to negotiate an end to the 2009 crisis.

The 1982 constitution was enacted as part of the exit from a long period of military rule, guided by the relationship of Honduras and the United States. One of the new features was the declaration in the Constitution that certain provisions could not be amended, including the prohibition on re-election and the definition of the term of the presidency as four years. These features have been described as "centerpieces" of the new 1982 constitution.

Why such an insistence that no future president would serve more than four years? It might seem at first that this was intended to forestall the kind of military dictatorships that had dominated Honduras from 1963 to 1982 (with a brief hiatus for an elected government lasting just over a year from 1971-1972). But that is too short a time frame to understand this provision.

Tiburcio Carías Andino is the ghost hanging over the understanding of the potential for a Honduran President to exploit electoral laws to hang on to power indefinitely. The Honduran people see Juan Orlando Hernández as seeking to follow the path of Carías, not of Policarpo Paz.

Carías Andino first took supreme executive control of Honduras in 1924, during a period of substantial political conflict. In 1932, he ran for election and started an unprecedented period of 16 years in that office. The constitution in force at the time prohibited consecutive terms as President, so Carías Andino initiated the writing of a new constitution. This allowed him to stay in office, and consolidate executive control.

Carías suppressed political opposition. His power ended in part due to protests that began in the capital city and in San Pedro Sula. In the latter case, the brutal suppression of the protests shaped a generation of political activists.

In the aftermath of his presidency, Honduras experienced a significant turmoil, starting with a presidential term by Carías hand-picked successor, Juan Manuel Gálvez. Toward the end of his term in office, a major strike against the dominant banana industry transformed the country, showing the power of labor.

The 1954 election for president did not produce a candidate with the then-required majority vote. (A majority is no longer  required by the 1982 constitution, leading to the election in 2013 of a president who received less than 38% of the popular vote, and contributing to the crisis of 2017. This non-majority clause can be seen as another haunting from the age of Carías Andino.)

In 1954, the resolution of the election was messy: the legislature was supposed to vote to decide who would be president, requiring a two-thirds majority. Two parties boycotted the required sessions, preventing this resolution. The Supreme Court was supposed to resolve a legislative failure to decide, but it was perceived as illegitimate due to being packed by Carías Andino. (Legislative packing of the Supreme Court by Hernández facilitated the decision that opened the way to his seeking re-election, another piece of the Carías playbook that he emulated.)

In the void of power, the vice president, Julio Lozano Díaz, took over, suspending the congress and instituting the writing of a new constitution. His extra-legal regime lasted two years, ending with a military coup. The candidate from 1954 who had received the most votes, Ramón Villeda Morales, was elected to a six-year term in 1957.

Villeda Morales initiated modernizing policies including modest agrarian reforms. By the end of his term, these led to opposition from conservative sectors of Honduran society. Under the constitution then in force, Villeda Morales himself was limited to one six year term as president. His party's nominee was expected to win, however, and to continue his policies.

That prospect was enough to initiate a military coup. The seizure of government initiated the long period that only ended in 1982 with the ratification of the current constitution. Its provisions about presidential election are shaped by the history that began with Carías Andino: a single term for president, without re-election, and no requirement for a majority, a run-off election, or any mechanism for resolving elections too close to truly be called like the one that once threw election to the Congress and then the Supreme Court.

The US government in 1963, under the direction of President John F. Kennedy, cancelled aid, withdrew US military from Honduras, and called the Ambassador to Honduras back to the US. None of these actions led to the return of control to civilian government. General Oswaldo López Arrellano, who held power until 1971 and again from 1972 to 1975, eventually initiated new agrarian reforms, before falling out of power due to a bribery scandal involving the United Fruit Company.

His two successors, also military officers holding extra-judicial power, consolidated the ideology of the military as a stabilizing force that led to their institutionalization in the current constitution as the guarantors of democratic processes. That constitutional role was cited by the military as motivation for their actions in the 2009 coup d'etat.

Hernández has worked to make the army loyal to him. He has also invested, with substantial US aid, in the creation of new militarized police whose role in the 2013 election already was seen as promoting repression. The history of presidential manipulation of the armed forces, too, can be traced back to the Carías dictatorship that is providing so much of the model for the current president.

So indeed, the question #whatwouldCariasDo appears to be the one that we all should be asking as we watch to see what tactics the modern successor to the authoritarian who scarred Honduran political memory might adopt.

Honduras has Two Truth Commissions

Honduras has two truth commissions: one set up and overseen by Porfirio Lobo Sosa, and one set up and overseen by Human Rights Platform, a confederation of human rights organizations, both Honduran and international.

Why is there a truth commission at all?

The establishment of a truth commission was one of the 12 points Oscar Arias proposed in the original San Jose Accord proposal. It survived in the Guaymuras (AKA Tegucigalpa-San Jose) Accord eventually signed by both Manuel Zelaya and Roberto Micheletti. It thus has its origins in the international community, not from Honduran aspirations.

The Tegucigalpa Accord was almost immediately violated by Micheletti, and declared no longer in effect by Zelaya, when Micheletti tried to unilaterally set up a government of reconciliation on his own. At the time, verification commission member Ricardo Lagos declared that these actions violated the accord. Nonetheless, the US has promoted what it calls full implementation of the Accord under the administration of Lobo Sosa, despite Lobo not being a party to the agreement which in any event was violated and declared dead by the two parties it attempted to reconcile.

And so Porfirio Lobo Sosa has established what he (and the US State Department) call a "government of reconciliation and unity", based on participation by representatives of opposing political parties. Just who this government unifies and reconciles is, of course, the question: it does not include participation by the Liberal party, and members of the UD party have disclaimed those party officials who agreed to serve in the government. Nor does it include what might be recognized as movements that actually opposed the de facto regime, such as the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP), or even supporters of Manuel Zelaya.

Not much unity there, and precious little reconciliation.

Nor was forming the "unity" government enough. Lobo Sosa has had to form the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called for in the Guaymuras Accords to address one of the requirements placed on Honduras as it seeks readmission to the OAS and the international community. But that brings us to why Honduras has two truth commissions.

The Official Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Eduardo Stein, a consultant at the time to the OAS, was commissioned by Lobo Sosa to write the charter of, and recommend foreign members for, this truth commission. Of the international candidates recommended, Lobo Sosa picked Michael Kergin and Maria Amadilla Zavala. To complement these, Lobo Sosa selected Honduran members: Julietta Castellanos and Jorge Omar Casco, with Sergio Membreño as secretary. This governmentally chartered truth commission is funded by countries including the United States and Spain, and staffed by the OAS.

According to his OAS biography Eduardo Stein got his doctorate in Communications Sciences from Northwestern University in 1978. He then taught Political Science and Communications at universities in Guatemala, El Salvador, and the United States. He served as an advisor to Panamanian President Aristides Royo (1980-82). In the 1990s he served as Panama's representative to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and then as the IOM Regional Project Counselor for Central America. From 1996-2000, Stein was Foreign Minister for Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu, a conservative who nonetheless signed a peace treaty with the Guatemalan URNG ending the civil war. In 2004-288 he was Vice President of Guatemala under President Oscar Berger Perdomo, another conservative president. More recently he has been a consultant to the OAS, and an OAS election observer/monitor. [The link to this biography could not be embedded as this was written.]

Michael Kergin is a Canadian career diplomat who entered foreign service in 1967. He served in the Canadian embassies in the United States, Cameroon, and Chile before becoming ambassador to Cuba in 1986. In the 1990s he held positions on political and international security affairs, and became the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Advisor. He became ambassador to the United States in 2000, serving until 2005. He is currently an adjunct professor in Political Science at the University of Ottawa, and a senior advisor at Bennett-Jones LLP.

Maria Amadilla Zavala is former President of the Supreme Court of Peru. She has also served as Peruvian Minister of Justice, and as Peru's representative to the OAS. She is reportedly close to the current conservative President of Peru, Alan Garcia.

Julieta Castellanos is currently Rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras. She has also served as a consultant to the UN Development Program

Jorge Omar Casco is a former Rector for the National Autonomous University and a lawyer.

Sergio Membreño, who serves as the commission's secretary, is a university professor and participant in Transformemos a Honduras.

The Alternative Truth Commission

The Honduran Human Rights Platform is made up of representatives from the Centro de Investigación, Prevención y Tratamiento de Víctimas de la Tortura (CIPTVT), the Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH), the Centro de Derechos de Mujer (CDM), the Centro de Investigación y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos en Honduras (CIPRODEH), and the international anti-hunger organization Food First Information and Interaction Network (FIAN).

The Human Rights Platform coalition, unconvinced of the impartiality and human rights mandate of the official truth commission, decided to set up and fund its own truth commission with international representatives Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Rigoberta Menchu, Francois Houtart, Mirna Antonieta Perla Jimenez, Nora Cortiñas, and Elsie Monje. Its Honduran representatives are Helen Umaña and the Father Fausto Milla. This truth commission is funded by donations from individuals and non-governmental organizations (to donate, see the link here).

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel is an Argentinian, trained as a sculptor and architect, who in 1974 relinquished a teaching post to devote full time to coordinating the activities of non-violent Latin American groups through a group which he helped found, Servicio, Paz, y Justicia. He initiated a successful campaign to create the United Nations human rights commission. The Argentinian junta imprisoned him in 1977 and released him in 1978 under restrictions. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for his work on human rights.

Rigoberta Menchu, a Quiche Maya activist from Guatemala began work on women's rights in Guatemala as a teenager. Her father, mother, and brother were arrested, tortured, and killed by the Guatemalan government. She joined the Committee of the Peasant Union (CUC) and participated in strikes to improve farm worker conditions on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala in 1981. She joined the 31 of January Popular Front and taught resistance to military oppression. By the end of 1981 she fled Guatemala to Mexico and began working to organize resistance to oppression from abroad, in addition to working for peasant rights. She was part of the founding of the United Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition in 1983. In 1986 she became part of the National Coordinating Council of the CUC. She won a Nobel Prize in 1992 for her work on indigenous peoples' rights. She is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador promoting a culture of peace.

Francois Houtart is a Belgian sociologist and Catholic Priest. He served as a consultant to the ecumenical council of Vatican II. He serves as an advisor to the Centre Tricontinental (CETRI) which he founded in 1976 to promote dialogue and cooperation between third world social groups. In 2009 he won the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence.

Mirna Antonieta Perla Jimenez is a justice of the Supreme Court of El Salvador. She testified before the Inter American Commission on Human Rights in 1988 and 1992, and testified before the UN in 1988, 89, 90, and 1992. She was Vice President of the International Federation of Human Rights in Paris (1988-90). She served as Vice President of the Comision para la Defensa de Derechos Humanos en Centroamerica (CODEHUCA) 1988-92 and a member of the Human Rights commission in El Salvador (1992-93).

Nora Morales de Cortiñas is a defender of human rights and member of the Asociacion de Madres de Plaza de Mayo, an Argentinian human rights organization that was formed initially by mothers whose children were disappeared by the Argentinian dictatorship of 1976-1983. She is a social psychologist and professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Sister Elsie Monge is a Maryknoll nun who is known for her efforts for human rights in Ecuador. She has taught grade school in Guatemala, and high school in Panama before returning to her native Ecuador. In 1981 she served on the Ecumenical Commission for Human Rights (CEDHU) in Ecuador, becoming its Director in 1994. In 1996 she become president of the Federation of Human Rights in Ecuador. In 2004 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Ecumenical Commission for Human Rights.

Helen Umaña is a professor of literature at the National Autonomous University of Honduras-Sula Valley. She was raised in Guatemala, where her family lived in exile. She both graduated from, and taught at, the University of San Carlos in Guatemala. She received the 1989 Honduran National Literature Prize for her literary criticism about Honduran writing.

Father Fausto Milla Nuñez, a native of Guarita, Lempira, Honduras, is diocesan priest of the church of San Martin de Porres, Santa Rosa de Copan, Honduras. He was educated in El Salvador and Colombia. He taught school for 17 years in Popoyan, Colombia. In 1963 he was called to the priesthood, and was ordained in 1964. In 1969 the then Bishop of Santa Rosa, Monseñor Carranza Chévez, posted him to the church in Guarita, which a few months later bore the brunt of the so-called Soccer War of 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. He was transferred to the church in Cerquin in 1970 where he began his work in human rights. This assignment also began his interest in Lenca culture and foodways. He was jailed in 1981 by the Honduran military junta and went into exile in Mexico. In 1985, he returned to Honduras assigned to Santa Rosa de Copan, where he returned to the community organizing and human rights work he had been doing since before his exile in Mexico.

These are the kinds and quality of people selected by Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the Human Rights Platform to form their respective truth commissions, to look into the events surrounding the coup d'etat of June 28, 2009, the de facto regime that seized power, and the human rights abuses that resulted. The government's truth commission began work in May. The Human Rights Platform's truth commission will begin work on June 28.

I know which group I think is more qualified. Which group seems more qualified to you?

Misrecognition

As we previously noted, supporters of the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the government itself are desperate to find any indication of "recognition" that they can. So pro-coup Honduran news media claimed that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had "recognized" Honduras by signing an accord to reauthorize a border dispute commission.

Now, Danilo Valladares writing for IPS notes that Nicaragua officially disclaimed such an interpretation:

In a statement issued by Managua after their meeting, representatives of leftist parties, including the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) headed by Ortega, said they had decided "not to recognise the de facto government of Honduras."

The IPS article also includes comments from Ángel Edmundo Orellana Mercado, who resigned his post in the Zelaya cabinet days before the coup, then refused to participate in the post-coup Congress in protest against its illegal actions on June 28. Orellana was the author of a series of important editorials contesting the innovative attempts by the de facto regime to retroactively cleanse the coup of the stain of illegality.

IPS notes that Orellana argued against too-easy agreement to reintegrate Honduras in regional organizations like SICA and the OAS. Commenting on the Truth Commission set up by the Lobo Sosa government as part of its attempt to gain re-admission into OAS, Orellana said

"A bad precedent could be set if the commitments outlined there are not fulfilled and everything that happened is simply pardoned".

This is, of course, precisely what has been set in motion by the Honduran Congress passing a decree granting amnesty for "political crimes", which has been criticized by legal experts.

The IPS story repeats the claim seen in most recent articles that only 30 countries world-wide have recognized the Honduran government. This is far less than the number of countries claimed by the Lobo Sosa administration.

Among the Central American countries, as it properly points out, only Nicaragua has so far refused to recognize Lobo Sosa's government. The newly elected president of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, has gone even further than Oscar Arias, saying

"We will be advocating, as we have up to now, the full and total reincorporation of our beloved sister republic of Honduras in all of the region's bodies".

Mauricio Funes, president of El Salvador, is reported to have stated that "Honduras will be fully integrated in SICA" by its scheduled July 20 meeting.

Renzo Rosal, described as assistant director of the Central American Institute for Political Studies, is quoted in the IPS article as saying that before Honduras is re-admitted to SICA,

"Issues that should be discussed are the role of the Honduran army in a democratic society; the historical two-party system in Honduras; the reconstruction of the social fabric; and the role that the OAS and SICA should play to help solve conflicts like the one in Honduras".

That would seem a very ambitious agenda to complete before July 20. Notably, it is not within the charge of the Truth Commission, which has been explicitly warned off such fundamental areas of Honduran political life.

The closest approximation to this agenda is, in fact, the manifesto issued by the Frente Popular de Resistencia following the meeting it convened in La Esperanza earlier this spring, which also called for reconsidering the role of the army, the place of the historical two party system, and the reconstruction of the social fabric. Good ideas; maybe someone should invite the authors to the table for real dialogue.