More, More, I'm Still Not Satisfied

General Rene Osorio was hoping that the 2012 budget would include an increase in the size of the military, by 1000 to 2000 soldiers.

He said he'd be happy if they even had to do it in increments, say 1000 this year, and 1000 next year. He also made it clear he wants 40 million lempiras more (slightly more than $2 million) just to support Operation Lightning, the military deployment with the police which Porfirio Lobo Sosa ordered back in October.

Why you ask, does the military need to increase in size?

Osorio cites an increase in the size of the Salvadoran military as justification. We are hoping that doesn't mean he is planning for another Central American war.

Closer to home, he argues that he needs more troops to support Operation Lightning.

Then there's forest protection, part of the mission creep in the military we wrote about here and here. Osorio already got funded in the 2012 budget to add the 2000 new soldiers destined for a special "forest protection" brigade. Congress member Rigoberto Chang Castillo noted that the 100 million lempiras dedicated for the forestry protection brigade are part of the 2012 budget.

Apparently Osorio wants the 2000 soldiers already funded for the "forest protection brigade", and 2000 more soldiers on top of those.

Mainly what he got handed in the 2012 budget was a 25% across the board budget cut.

So he's going to talk to his boss, Porfirio Lobo Sosa:

We are thinking of talking with president Porfirio Lobo to explain to him that the Secretariat of Defense should not have its budget cut, and logically also the Secretariat of Security.

So far, Osorio says, the deployment of troops in Operation Lightning has cost $17 million lempiras (about $900,000):

We cannot stay in the streets with the ordinary budget we have... If the president makes the decision that we need to increase (the soldiers in the streets), he better have more budget.

Osorio clarified to El Heraldo that the extra funds to support Operation Lightning are needed for food and fuel.

Public reaction (in the form of comments on newspaper articles) suggests that Osorio's arguments aren't persuasive to most El Heraldo and La Prensa readers, who oppose any additional funds for the military.

One commenter noted that both the police and the military have the same excuse, "they don't have sufficient budget to do anything" so they just get paid and sit on their ass for the last two years.

Another pointedly noted, "didn't we pass a Security Tax to cover these costs?"

Osorio's boss, Defense Minister Marlon Pascua said he's not that worried about the cuts to the military in the 2012 budget. He noted that there will be funding available shortly from the seized assets program (the proceeds of selling allegedly drug related assets), funding which is split between the Defense Ministry and the Security Ministry.

Rigoberto Chang Castilllo noted that the Finance Minister has set aside a special fund to help pay for Operation Lightning. He argued that the cuts to the military could be easily absorbed by reducing their office equipment and supply budget by 20%, without endangering their military readiness.

Now to wait for Osorio to explain why photocopiers are indispensable to the mission of the armed forces.

(title with apologies to Tom Lehrer)

Military Mission Creep 2: Give Us Police Powers

General Rene Osorio, head of the Honduran Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, suggested today that he would like constitutional changes that would give the military some police powers, like the ability to stop and search anyone, the general ability to search property, the ability to legally carry out raids, and other unnamed police powers.

The granting of police powers to the military would require constitutional changes, to make these part of the mission of the Armed Forces. Osorio said:

"We're not putting ourselves in the place of police; we want to help and support them with our own troops and our intelligence work."

But that's exactly what Osorio is proposing, that the military mission be changed, added to, and that training be supplied to his troops so that they do things in a legal fashion, like arrest and hold people.

As Osorio said, all of this will require changes to the constitution, the laws, changes to the military charter, changes to international treaties, all because Porfirio Lobo Sosa wants a single point of contact to coordinate the actions of the Police and Military, "to make them more effective and successful against delinquency."

Lobo Sosa grew up in an era where the Police and Military were the same thing in Honduras. This proposal to return to those days does not appear to bother him in the slightest; but it bothers those concerned with human rights and democracy in Honduras from all sides of politics.

Thus we have statements from the Rector of the National University, Julietta Castellanos opposing any unification of police and military, and the Judges' association saying its illegal.

German Leitzelar, who presided over the original separation of the Police from the Military, thinks a single Ministry with authority over both is OK so long as there's no unification of their actual operations. In contrast, General Jorge Estrada, ex-judicial auditor for the military, said that

"We have to be clear that from the point of view of the functions and strategies, to join the police with the Armed Forces would be a step backwards, to resort to the past, and we all know how that turned out."

The problem is that the Armed Forces aren't Police; what police do is not part of the mission or training of the armed forces. Osorio asking for police powers for the Armed Forces is troubling given the military's history of human rights abuses, such as extrajudicial killings and the illegal detention of Honduran citizens.

To merge them in the midst of international condemnation of violence against Honduran citizens by security forces is, at the least tone-deaf, and just possibly, one of the more obvious signs of rejection of opinion in the international community.

Guerrillas in the Mist

So Friday someone shot up a combined military and police patrol, part of the Xatruch II operation, in the Bajo Aguan, just as it was about to turn into the La Consentida orange plantation of Rene Morales. One police officer and one soldier were killed, and three others wounded.

The initial description was that the attack was made with shotguns, but later it was characterized as employing large caliber weapons, e.g., military rifles.

Interestingly, there's no indication from press accounts that those "ambushed" either returned fire, or came under fire beyond the initial salvo that killed two and wounded three others. The encounter is not described as a firefight. No suspects were either found or detained in the region.

The military has concluded the attack was not the work of campesinos, because of the strategy used. Police reached the same conclusion, according to spokesperson Juan Martinez. They point to the use of surprise and violence as un-campesino-like behavior. Like the media, the security forces characterize the event as an ambush.

The reaction by security forces was to stop and question all foreigners coming through the district, although to no avail:

"None of them could be tied to anything illicit,"

said Martinez.

But that, of course, did not stop the military from reaching conclusions.

"It's a dedicated band of guerrillas,"

said Joint Chiefs Chair General Rene Osorio on Sunday.

There is another, unexamined, group in the Bajo Aguan that has both licensed and unlicensed weapons of the type used in the attack, and military training.

During the 2009 coup, landowners there hired paramilitary mercenaries from Colombia and Paraguay to be the "guards" on African palm plantations.

According to the UN Working group on Mercenaries in 2010, more than 120 paramilitaries from various Latin American countries are present in the Bajo Aguan.

The military, as part of Xatruch II, has not apparently thought to inspect, regulate or interdict the arms used by these paramilitary guards, only those campesinos were suspected of using.

Until the paramilitary guards employed by land owners in the Bajo Aguan are subject to the same scrutiny as the campesinos, the military surely cannot conclude that there is a band of foreign or foreign-trained guerrillas operating in the Bajo Aguan.