Callejas Lauded for Pleading Not Guilty in FIFAgate

Rafael Leonardo Callejas Romero, National Party member and former president of Honduras (1990-1994), pleaded "not guilty" in a Federal Court in Miami, Florida to charges of money laundering racketeering, and bribery.

Honduran news paper La Tribuna labeled that a "master strategy". The reason why tells us a lot about justice in Honduras.

On December 3, 2015, the US Department of Justice unveiled charges against 16 more defendants in its on-going investigation into corruption in international soccer in the criminal investigation that is known as FIFAgate.  FIFA is the Federación Internacional de Futbol Asociacion.

The 16 new defendants were charged with 92 counts, including money laundering, racketeering, and wire fraud conspiracies.  The charges were announced after the overnight arrest in Switzerland that morning of the FIFA vice president, Alfredo Hawit, a Honduran citizen charged in the same indictment as Callejas.

Rafael Callejas, a member of the FIFA Television and Marketing committee, learned through the Justice Department release that he had been named in the indictment.

Subsequently the US government filed formal paperwork with the government of Honduras to extradite him to the United States.

Callejas originally decided to remain in Honduras and fight extradition, but on December 14 he boarded a private plane on a flight for Miami to turn himself in and face the charges.  The Honduran press later revealed that US Ambassador James Nealon had helped negotiate Callejas's return to the US.

On his arrival in Miami, Callejas was formally arrested and transferred to a holding cell.  Callejas was arraigned the next morning and pleaded not guilty to all charges.  Some Honduran press accounts had him returned to a holding cell. La Tribuna indicated that he traveled with a briefcase full of documents that name names as part of his proposed defense strategy.

Which brings us to the "master strategy" that La Tribuna announced in its December 21 edition.  We quote:

The defense of the ex-president, Rafael Leonardo Callejas, is resorting to a “master strategy”, legally speaking, by advising him that he declare himself not guilty, because now the US government must present its evidence, an expert told LA TRIBUNA.

At first glance this may not make sense to readers. In the Honduran legal system, despite judicial reforms, there is still an understanding that those charged with a crime who claim to be innocent must prove their innocence. The idea that the government always has to prove the guilt of the accused, fundamental to the US legal system, is thus not the norm, but rather, something that La Tribuna is seeing as the result of a great strategic move: pleading "not guilty" rather than "innocent".

In fact, La Tribuna helpfully expands on this understanding of the US legal system, seen through this peculiar Honduran lens:

The difference between the declaration of innocent and "not guilty" rests in the fact that in the first case, the accused has to present evidence to show directly his innocence; while in the second, the burden of proof is transferred to those who accuse him, according to the source.

Under the scenario of "not guilty”, it will be the federal attorneys of New York and the US Department of Justice that must provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate the guilt of the ex-leader, he added.

Think for a moment of the understanding of court procedure that this flawed explanation is reinforcing. Cleverly, Callejas is moving, not to prove his own innocence, but to challenge the accusers to come up with enough evidence to prove he is guilty. And it gets worse:

If they do not succeed in proving the charges, the judge will have no other alternative than to absolve him... although the case could remain open if in the future new evidence were to emerge, the interviewed expert specified.

The fact that bail has been accepted is a sign that the strategy worked, initially, but the decisive hearing will be the 16th of March, when the government attorneys will formally present the charges with the evidence of guilt, the source added.

There you have it: a Honduran vision of justice. The rest of the article offers the "information" that Callejas won't have to wear an orange jumpsuit because those are reserved for terrorists and violent criminals; and emphasizes how expensive the legal defense will be. But don't worry: his excellent legal team has come up with the brilliant strategy of pleading "not guilty", so now the prosecution is on the ropes...

Re-Election a Done Deal

Former Presidents may now seek re-election in Honduras.

That is the effect of the Constitutional Branch decision having been published at 5 pm on Friday in La Gaceta, the official publication of the Honduran government.

How the publication of this decision happened is informative: someone fast-tracked the process.

As we previously noted, last Wednesday afternoon the Constitutional Branch debated and passed a resolution unanimously declaring that the portions of the Honduran constitution and penal code that prohibit re-election of Presidents were unconstitutional. All 5 justices signed that decision, which was then leaked to the press by someone employed by the court, an "official" leak. 

Overnight between Wednesday and Thursday the political clamor on both sides of the issue was intense.

Officially, only the National Party is in support of the decision, and it was a National Party ex-president and National Party Congressmen that had challenged the constitutional provision.

This fact becomes important when you realize that the Supreme Court, as constituted, was also selected while the National Party controlled the government, and that the Constitutional Branch contains current president Juan Orlando Hernández's hand picked candidates.  While president of Congress and campaigning for President, Hernández carried out a political purge of dubious legality, removing four of the five justices in the Constitutional Branch, replacing them with his own choices.  He has since replaced that fifth justice, promoting him to the position of Public Prosecutor.

The three other major parties-- the Liberal Party, Libre, and PAC-- have all come out against re-election.  After all, the post-hoc justification offered for the 2009 coup was that somehow through the opinion survey of the Cuarta Urna, Manuel Zelaya Rosales would be able to be re-elected.

Since joining Congress as a Libre Party member, Zelaya Rosales himself has come out against presidential re-election, as has the leader of PAC, Salvador Nasralla.

Thursday morning at 8 am, Justice Lizardo of the Constitutional Branch tried to rescind his signature on the decision.  Such an act, if upheld, would have made the decision not unanimous and would have forced the entire 15 justices of the court to hear the case and issue an opinion.  Lizardo based his recanting on the precarious legal theory that because the Constitutional Branch had not notified the legal representatives of the parties of a decision, he had room to act. This was where matters stood when we last blogged about this.

However, the Secretary of the Constitutional Branch chose to ignore Lizardo's letter notifying him of the change, and went ahead to disseminate the decision to the legal parties.

He also forwarded the decision to the Secretary of Congress, who then quickly forwarded it to ENAG, the government division that prints La Gaceta. Publishing congressional and executive decrees in La Gaceta is what puts them into effect.

The Honduran Congress and Supreme Court have a long-standing dispute about when judicial decisions are effective, with those opposed to some Supreme Court decisions refusing to publish them, to try to ignore them. The Honduran Congress has historically tried to assert control over the constitutional effects of Supreme Court decisions, normally reviews and can even publicly discuss decisions before deciding to forward them to ENAG for publication. No such review was allowed to happen this time, a decision taken by the National Party leaders of Congress.

Everyone agrees that once a judicial decision is published in La Gaceta it is in effect. Normally the publication process takes weeks. ENAG normally publishes things in the order they are received, and it usually has a large backlog of things to publish, so that bills can take a month or more to be published.

Yesterday at 5 pm this decision was officially published in La Gaceta. Someone clearly rushed this one into print.

The upshot: on Thursday Rafael Callejas, who brought the case, convened his campaign to regain the Presidency which he held as a National Party member from 1990 to 1994.

Presidential Re-Election?!

Yesterday afternoon, the Honduran Supreme Court's Constitutional branch, consisting of 5 justices, reported that they had reached a unanimous decision invalidating part of Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.  Such a decision would effectively permit Presidential re-election.  This morning at 8:34 am, Justice Lizardo of that branch rescinded his signature and vote of approval for the decision.  That should make the ruling invalid, and because the decision is no longer unanimous, throw the case to the full 15 Justices for a decision.

The decision, announced yesterday and scheduled to be released today, was in a court case brought by former president Rafael Callejas and several National Party Congressmen, who sought to invalidate part of Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.  Longtime readers will remember that Article 239 was used, after the fact, to justify the coup against President Manuel Zelaya Rosales in 2009.  Roberto Micheletti Bain claimed that the Cuarta Urna vote was to enable Zelaya Rosales to run again for President.

This morning, in a letter addressed to the Secretary of the Constitutional branch of the Supreme Court, Carlos Almedaren, Justice José Elmer Lizardo Carranza rescinded his vote of approval:

"By this letter I make known to you that I rescind my signature on the accumulated case 1343-2014 and 243-2015....Because there's been no official notification of the plaintiff's lawyers by the secretary at this hour, 8:40 AM, this makes the decision not final"

So, while it was announced that Presidential re-election was about to be come legal through a Supreme Court decision, the future is a bit more murky now.  Stay tuned.

Turns out it's Hard to Ignore a Coup

First, it was Dana Frank's Op-Ed in the New York Times, a piece still drawing strong reactions in Honduras.

A concerted effort followed to publish non sequiturs by diplomats not precisely refuting her analysis-- since that is not actually possible-- but blowing smoke about, for example, alleged advances in human rights law. Frank's strong statement (in agreement with human rights organizations in Honduras) opposing increased US security aid to Honduras, because it is used against the people, also drew support from a former US ambassador to El Salvador with experience in Honduras, Robert White, whose letter to the New York Times was not printed along with the two opposed to Frank. But you can read Ambassador White's letter in full at quotha, where he concludes that

Instead of using the leverage provided by a unanimous vote of the Organization of American States to restore constitutional government to Honduras, the Department of State fumbled its responsibilities and propped up the coup regime long enough for it to survive and taint the 2009 presidential election.

Then late last week, NPR broadcast an extraordinary two part story by Annie Murphy, a fellow in the Investigative Reporting Program at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Part one, called "In Honduras, Police Accused of Corruption, Killings", does an excellent job of sketching out the disaster caused by police impunity and corruption, without falling into the easy narrative of assigning the cause to drug trafficking alone. In a major departure from too much of the English language reporting, she allows Berta Oliva of COFADEH to make the case of human rights activists in Honduras against US security aid:

"We've asked the U.S. to stop giving aid to security forces here, and we're going to keep asking them to stop."

But it is part two that has the most extraordinary news, although it would be easy to miss the fact that it is news.

Called "'Who rules in Honduras?' Coup's Legacy of Violence", the second segment of Murphy's report economically describes the events of the coup, and the aftermath in which lobbyists managed to get US government opinion turned against returning the democratically elected president to office to complete his term, and towards the spurious solution of conducting elections (under a de facto regime, without international observation, and after months of violent repression and suspensions of civil rights).

Murphy gets unlikely people on the record supporting the critique of US reaction to the coup, and identifying it as having on-going impacts that neither the Lobo Sosa government nor the US want to recognize. As she writes,

Many [in Honduras] say the outcome of the coup is what pushed Honduras to where it is today: the world's most violent nation, according to the U.N.

Murphy also quotes include former ambassador to Honduras Cresencio Arcos, and Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst. Armstrong describes the US reaction to the coup from the perspective of a senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is quoted saying

when you look at what was actually happening in Honduras, [Zelaya] really was a continuation of a halting but definitely forward-moving consolidation of democracy.

The thing that made us sit up and take notice, though, was what Murphy records from Rafael Callejas, president of Honduras from 1990 to 1994. Governing from the Partido Nacional, Callejas might be expected to support the arguments of the current administration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Instead, he argues that Zelaya was "too brash"

but says illegally ousting him has had huge repercussions.

"We're in a crisis. We went back 20 years. We lost again the issue of democracy," Callejas says. "Who rules in Honduras now? Really? Who rules? The people? The system? Or strength? I mean, that's the question that has to be solved."

That's news. When former Honduran presidents of the same party that gained power in the 2009 election says "We lost again the issue of democracy", that's news.

Unfortunately, no one now seems to be concerned to help Honduras regain the two decades of progress toward "consolidation of democracy".

To do that, you first have to admit what happened: and the US, the one country with the influence and resources to make a difference, has tied itself to the claim that Lobo Sosa presides over a government of "unity and reconciliation" that is improving human rights and cleaning up the security forces.

Reports like those by Murphy, and the refusal of scholars like Frank to be silenced, are critical to challenging that storyline.

Fissures in the Nationalist Party

Ex-president Rafael Leonardo Callejas acknowledged the necessity of working on the unity of the Nationalist party in light of the latest decisions of the president, Porfirio Lobo...

With these words, La Tribuna highlighted what we've been observing for a while: there is a division in the Nationalist Party, in its own way perhaps as bad as the divisions within the Liberal party in Honduras.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the deep rift that has developed between Ricardo Alvarez, head of the Nationalist party and Mayor of Tegucigalpa, and Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

It is normal in Honduran politics for the president to appoint only members of his party to ministerial positions, and to then pack their employment rolls with party loyalists as well. Under pressure to manufacture a "government of unity and reconciliation", Lobo Sosa didn't do that. He not only appointed opposition party members to Ministerial posts, but also allowed them to hire whomever they pleased. And some of those appointments have brought him criticism from party loyalists.

Most visibly, for weeks, Ricardo Alvarez has been calling for Cesar Ham's head, demanding Lobo Sosa replace him and all the other "reconciliation" government members from other parties with National party loyalists. This concern also seeped into his response to Lobo Sosa's recent removal of Oscar Alvarez, Mario Canahuati, and other government officials.

In reaction, Ricardo Alvarez is reported to have said

"With respect to the changes I can say that I respect the decisions (but) I cannot say in this moment whether I share them or not because I do not understand them, because we are talking about five ex-officials of the first order, good Hondurans, excellent employees, and extraordinary Nationalist party members."

Two of those dismissed (Oswaldo Guillén and Nasry Asfura) are followers of Ricardo Alvarez's movement within the National party, and Oscar Alvarez was widely rumored to be a protege.

Lobo Sosa and Ricardo Alvarez were supposed to meet this morning to discuss the firings, but at the last minute, Lobo Sosa canceled out.

(He opted instead to attend a ceremony at which he was awarded an honorary doctorate for his "support of non-discrimination" for hosting the Summit of Afrodescendent Peoples in August. The honorary degree was conferred by the Centro de Estudios para la Democracia Popular of Chile, la Universidad Internacional Euroamericana de España y la Universidad de la República de Chile. You can see why that would be more important than meeting with the leader of a major movement in the party of which he is the sitting president.)

He attributed the criticism from his fellow party members to "ambitions and economic interests."

Oscar Alvarez and Mario Canahuati, like Ricardo Alvarez, have presidential aspirations. This is a complication in relationships within the Nationalist party, including those to Porfirio Lobo Sosa. While a Honduran president cannot run for re-election, he certainly can extend his influence through relationships with candidates vying within his party for nomination.

Exhibit A: ex-president Callejas, stepping in to try to promote party unity, he says. No fan of Lobo Sosa's "government of reconciliation", he called on Lobo to rethink it before the end of the year and undo it.

So are Ricardo Alvarez and Rafael Callejas being unfair to Lobo Sosa? Maybe not.

While Lobo Sosa states that those dismissed were fired because they failed to meet his goals for them, Eduardo Facussé noted that the dismissals favor the presidential candidacy of the head of the Congress, Juan Orlando Hernandez, to the detriment of Ricardo Alvarez.

Although his critics within the Nationalist party are not his rivals for office, because he cannot be re-elected, they are potential rivals for leadership within the party. Lobo Sosa has promoted positioning of the Nationalist party as a force of "Christian humanism" since before he was inaugurated, a position also endorsed by Ricardo Alvarez.

More distinctive has been his allegiance to the idea of what originally was called a "government of unity and reconciliation" when the US promoted it as evidence of unification after the coup. Long after there is anything to gain from this concept, long after it has become a problem for him with his own party, and despite a lack of effectiveness on the part of some of his "unity" appointees, Lobo Sosa seems to think this distinction is worth defending.

Hence his reply to the harangues from his own party:

"It's not important to me, the price I have to pay for the intolerance of a few leaders of my party who question constantly my government of integration...they will not vanquish me."

Echos of the 1980s

Hey, La Prensa, the 1980s called and they want their rhetoric back!

I knew something was wrong when I read the story in Jorge Canahuati's La Prensa on March 1 entitled "Guerrilla cell arming itself in the Bajo Aguan". The article, which claims to be based on a military intelligence report in their possession, makes a series of unbelievable claims about the campesinos opposing Miguel Facussé's title to several farms of african oil palms in the Bajo Aguan.

In a nutshell, it accuses the campesinos of allying themselves with drug traffickers for protection, organized by non-governmental organizations "of a socialist type" and by Jesuits "with communist ideologies". The alleged report claims to have studied 54 campesino cooperatives that through misadministration and corruption sold off their lands in 1993, but now want it back.

The Honduran government of the 1970s and 1980s had a single minded agrarian policy. If a group of campesinos wanted land, they were made to form agricultural cooperatives and the cooperative was then given land at the discretion of the state.

In the Bajo Aguan, the campesinos involved were largely from more highland departments of Santa Barbara, Lempira, Intibuca, and so on, forced to move into the tropical lowlands of Honduras to have access to land. The government of the 1980s failed to learn what the Spanish colonial government learned in building the eighteenth-century fort at Omoa: when you make highland people relocate to the lowlands, they die of malaria and other tropical diseases that only rarely occur in the highlands. Yet the government of Honduras continued to encourage people from the highlands to "emigrate" to the lowlands to gain access to land. The land campesinos were moved to in large numbers in the 1980s previously had been developed for agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s by banana companies, then abandoned as banana production became uneconomical.

In exchange for the land, cooperatives were directed, as part of national agricultural policy, to plant export crops like sugar cane, african palm, and to a lesser extent cacao, and were given low interest loans to buy the equipment and fertilizers necessary to plant and harvest these crops. They were not given guaranteed markets, or price guarantees on their crops, and had to compete with the oligarchy, who already controlled the markets for these raw agricultural goods and set the prices. Many cooperatives went badly into debt when market prices were low for their crop, and disbanded, though others managed to survive.

The supposed intelligence report alleges that Miguel Facussé and a Nicaraguan, Reynaldo Morales, bought up land as cooperatives failed and sold land to pay off their debts. The campesinos contest this, pointing to agrarian policy under Rafael Callejas in the early 1990s, under the Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector. Through this law, the government expropriated land it had previously given to campesino cooperatives, and turned it over to modern industrial farmers. The timing of this policy is not coincidentally linked to the paving of the road from La Ceiba into the Aguan valley, and back up to Olancho, which happened in the 1980s, giving this region decent access to the national market for the first time.

The alleged report, La Prensa tells us, singles out and analyzes the positions of a number of named organizations. The Movimiento Unido de Campesinos del Aguan (MUCA) is said to be more heavily armed than the National Police and supposedly is causing "thousands of dollars of losses daily to businesses" and scaring away international investment. Here's the most ludicrous part: La Prensa tells us that a named campesino leader affiliated with MUCA, and a named campesino leader affiliated with the resistance, are purchasing arms and waiting for FARC, the Colombian guerrilla movement, to come and train them in how to use them! Even more ludicrous is the allegation that these resistence leaders also head a band of kidnappers. The report claims there are orders out for their arrest. Both of these named individuals would be easy to find and arrest, since neither is in hiding, were there actually any such arrest warrants.

The report goes on like this, a fantasy with no anchor in reality, laughable if things like this didn't kill people. It talks about school teachers, assuring us that in the end, they won't support the campesinos. It talks about the Comité de Organizaciones Populares del Aguán (COPA), which sided with the resistance during the coup. It describes the Catholic Church "trying to fortify its political party, the Christian Democrats", and that the priests in the region are Jesuits, and are marxist advocates of liberation theology.

Rafael Alegria, head of Via Campesina and a leader in the resistance, rightly denounced this fantastic story. He reports he talked with the military spokesperson, Ramiro Archiaga, who denied the existence of any such military report and said he would ask La Prensa for a written explanation. Alegria attributed this bit of disinformation to the security minister, Oscar Alvarez.

A pseudonymous source, published and translated yesterday by Adrienne Pine at quotha.net, attributed this campaign of disinformation directly to La Prensa's owner, Jorge Canahuati Larach, along with Maria Antonia de Fuentes, Ana Morales, and Nelson Garcia.

Whatever the source of this disinformation, it is dangerous. It is meant to provoke bloodshed. It is a reminder that "newspapers" such as Canahuati's La Prensa and El Heraldo have not changed since they served as media to churn up enough controversy to incite and then justify a military coup d'etat. Maybe the rhetoric is from the fight against communism of the 1980s; but the tactic is that of yellow journalism of the 19th century.