Lobo Sosa "Baffles" Taiwan Government

So says the headline in a story in the Taipei Times, posted date Dec. 26.

We sympathize: he often baffles us, as well.

The Foreign Minister of the Taiwanese government is quoted as saying

The bilateral relationship with Honduras remains “normal” and “solid” and “will not be affected” even if the country moves to develop economic and trade relations with China.

What sparked the comment? A statement published last week on the website of the Honduran Presidential Office. The website Centralamericandata.com published this translation:

President Lobo Sosa confirms intention to open diplomatic relations with China

President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, confirmed on Wednesday that there are clear intentions to open diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, a situation that should not affect relations with Taiwan.

The Honduran president said that in the XXI century, we can not continue to think that expanding relations with one nation means being an enemy to another.

The leader believes that China is a super attractive market because it has established itself as a world power in the economic and commercial sphere.

In this regard, he said that Beijing already has investments in Honduras through the Patuca III hydropower project, capital that could be extended to other projects.

That last sentence is all you really need to know. Honduras needs capital investors. China has capital.

The recent announcement really shouldn't come as a surprise. In September, the Honduran government hosted a visit by the China Development Bank.  At the time they received presentations from government ministers about potential projects to invest in Model Cities (now declared illegal), tourism, mining, and energy.

Taiwan has been a major investment partner of Honduras. They were among the few governments represented at Lobo Sosa's inauguration. They contributed Lobo Sosa fulfilling one of his campaign promises. The Taiwan government has publicly stated that it has no objection to the development of trade relations between Honduras and China.

But they thought they had assurances that was all Honduras was contemplating. The Lobo Sosa statement, however, calls for establishing diplomatic ties, and that would mean recognizing the government of mainland China, which is more of a sticking point. As the Taipei Times article puts it

Lin said that Taipei does not consider it acceptable for it’s diplomatic allies to recognize China while maintaining diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

“We don’t think double recognition is acceptable and we don’t think that will happen,” Lin said.

The principle guiding President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) “flexible diplomacy” has been that Taiwan and China do not attempt to poach each other’s diplomatic allies, Lin said.

According to the timeline offered by the Taipei Times, last week, after hearing that Honduras was thinking of establishing trade ties with China, Taiwan's Foreign Minister "said that while the ministry was not happy to see an ally establish a trade office in China, it did not oppose allies developing economic ties with Beijing".

Two days after that, the website of the Honduran Presidency posted the statement that starts with a call to establish diplomatic relations.

The next day, the ambassador from Taiwan to Honduras, Joseph Kuo, met with Honduras' foreign minister, Arturo Corrales, who said that

the country had yet to finalize a plan to set up a trade office in China and that its ties to Taiwan remain solid and will not be affected by Tegucigalpa forging an economic and trade relationship with Beijing....However, the ministry was unable to explain the discrepancy between Lobo’s statement and the information Kuo received from Corrales and the Honduran presidential office.

All very diplomatic. The article says Kuo expects to meet with Lobo Sosa himself soon to resolve the discrepancies.

But it isn't really just the statement posted on Lobo Sosa's website that is at issue: it is what he said to the press about the topic. On December 20, La Tribuna quoted his responses to reporters at a press conference:

“We are free, we can have have relations with any country in the world”

“it is the right that we Hondurans have to have relations with all the countries of the world, it is a sovereign right, who's going to place conditions on us saying with this one yes, with that one no”.

“I appreciate very much the fondness that Taiwan has for Honduras, but the fact that we are friends, that they give us affection doesn't mean that we cannot take a step for Honduras, to have relations with a country that is the second most developed country in the world today."

"China is the second economy in the world, it is a super attractive market, they have many resources for investment, in fact they have invested here in the Patuca III dam."

“To be a friend with one and for that reason to be an enemy of another, that makes no sense."

Not quite so diplomatic. Lobo Sosa's comments sound like a man in a long-term marriage trying to rationalize starting to date before getting divorced. The use of the term "cariño" and the "super atractivo" characterization of China is simply not the tone a diplomat would want his president to use.

Pity poor Arturo Corrales, stuck with making up to Taiwan for these public statements. Lobo Sosa seems simply not to have exercised any critical judgment before speaking; his "who's going to place conditions on us" and "that makes no sense" statements can be read-- and probably are being read-- as broader criticism of the policy position of the Taiwan government.

Of course, nothing in these statements to the press actually concerns diplomatic relations, specifically. It is only in the official statement on the presidential web site that this term is introduced. Every intemperate statement to the press could have been taken as about setting up trade relations. It is as if the presidential office doesn't know the difference, and added fuel to a fire that could easily have been kept low.

But that would imply that Lobo Sosa doesn't understand what he is doing. And surely that cannot be true. Can it? No wonder the Taiwan government finds him "baffling".
 

A Tale of Two Environments

Just about a week ago we wrote about the return of the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve to the UNESCO World Heritage in Danger list.

"Proposed dam construction on the Rio Patuca river", described as a current threat in the UNESCO press release, doesn't come from some alien force: it is a project of the current Honduran administration, acting against the protests of the indigenous peoples of eastern Honduras, who have not been consulted as they should have been under the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ILO 169, both international agreements signed by previous Honduran governments.

As we predicted, there has been little English language coverage of this threat, and what there has been focused on illegal logging and drug trafficking, the issues that the Honduran government prefers to emphasize.

Contrast the lack of analysis of threats to the Rio Platano Biosphere with coverage of the Honduran government's well-timed PR release about new protection of sharks in its waters, sent out two days after the UNESCO action, with the blessing of the Pew Environmental Trust.

No less a venue than the New York Times (albeit in a blog) covered this announcement, and other English language coverage has begun to follow, all faithfully following the lines of the original press release, congratulating Porfirio Lobo Sosa personally for leadership on shark preservation.

Predictably, no mainstream media are taking a critical look at the overall policies of the Honduran government with respect to environmental issues.

The CIA World Factbook, a fairly sober source, summarized current environmental issues in Honduras in 2010 succinctly:

urban population expanding; deforestation results from logging and the clearing of land for agricultural purposes; further land degradation and soil erosion hastened by uncontrolled development and improper land use practices such as farming of marginal lands; mining activities polluting Lago de Yojoa (the country's largest source of fresh water), as well as several rivers and streams, with heavy metals.

In the aftermath of the coup of 2009, we documented an acceleration in processing of petitions for environmental licenses by SERNA, the Secretariat of Natural Resources and Climate. By September 2009, SERNA had authorized 320 projects, valued at $368 million, for piers for cruise ships to dock on the Bay Islands, housing, pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, hotels, and restaurants.

Under the Micheletti regime and the successor Lobo Sosa government Honduras has seen renewed advocacy for continued mining concessions. For years, people in the communities affected by mining, assisted by international NGOs, have fought government mining concessions that have caused environmental damage and health threats.

What is at stake in the Rio Patuca is well understood in Honduras, if not elsewhere.

An article in the June 26 edition of La Tribuna helps explain why the indigenous people of the Rio Platano Biosphere-- who are not intruders, but are supposed to be beneficiaries of its designation as UNESCO World Heritage-- are opposed to the Patuca dam projects. This article describes the Rio Patuca as comprising part of

the hydrological basins of the Patuca and Coco or Segovia rivers, which are a fundamental part of the hydrological balance at a national level and especially for the residents located within the park, since it is thanks to those rivers where the sources of water originate that provide them this liquid, they use them as a means of transport, for obtaining water for the irrigation of their subsistence fields and for the development of their productive activities.

The Patuca river has a great force for what was visualized many years ago as the construction of hydroelectric dams on it. Currently there is beginning the construction of the Patuca Dam III, which is not located within the protected area but is upriver so that the positive and negative impacts will affect this National Park.

These carefully worded paragraphs, while suggesting that any "negative" impacts will be balanced by positive ones (presumably, not including wiring the indigenous settlements in the reserve, and so somewhat difficult to imagine), are still better reporting on the danger posed to the Rio Platano biosphere than anything that has appeared in mainstream English language press.

The "pobladores" (residents) mentioned are members of specific indigenous groups, and they have made their objections known eloquently, as a plethora of activist websites document. Cultural Survival, to take just one example, states that

Dams would obstruct commerce and trade for thousands of people. On stretches of river between the dams, the flows, currents, and channels would be altered; people whose knowledge of the Patuca has sustained them for centuries would no longer master the river. Fish would disappear. Flood cycles that regularly wash nutrients over their agricultural lands would be changed. And road construction would open their forests to an unstoppable invasion of loggers, poachers, ranchers, and drug smugglers. The government plans to build a military base to protect the construction project. “These impacts will be fatal for the survival of the Tawahka as a unique people,” says their elected leader, Lorenzo Tinglas.

Cultural Survival gives more detail on precisely how the forest will be changed by the proposed dams, despite their location outside the boundaries of the reserve:

In the river, fish species that migrate upstream from the ocean during part of their life cycle would be blocked by the dams, threatening local extinctions. Downstream from the dam, the river’s volume, flow, and temperature would change, altering the habitats of shellfish, reptiles, amphibians, plants, and bird species. Upstream, the reservoirs would submerge rainforest vegetation, soils, and organic matter, which would emit greenhouse gases as they rot.

What makes the contrast in environmental approaches to the shark reserve and the Patuca dam intelligible as policies of one and the same government?

Understanding that in the end, the current Honduran administration is motivated by business.

In the Caribbean, preserving sharks will help preserve and increase tourism. The Rio Platano Biosphere might well face a future of increased tourism, if current plans for new airports continue, but for the moment, wild rivers in Honduras are economically most beneficial if they are dammed for hydroelectric generation.