The Misión de Apoyo Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad en Honduras (MACCIH) announced Thursday that it would begin investigating, not the murder of indigenous activist Berta Cáceres, but the funding and government contracts of DESA, the company building the Agua Zarca dam for possible corruption and money laundering.
Mission spokesperson, Juan Jimenez Mayor announced the OAS mission would look into DESA, how it got its government contracts for the Agua Zarca dam and ENEE electricity purchase, and how it grew from a company with less than $1000 in capital in 2009 to have over $17 million in 2014. In particular, Jimenez Mayor said the Mission wanted to verify the source of the funds, and whether DESA was money laundering.
Another aspect of the Agua Zarca project that Jimenez Mayor said was interesting was the awarding of the original environmental license in 2010, and the enlarged project environmental license in 2011. The latter, approved by Dario Roberto Cardona, then sub secretary of the Secretaria de Recursos Naturales y Ambiente (SERNA). Jimenez Mayor noted that while Cardona was being prosecuted for issuing the expanded environmental license in 2011 without proper consultation with the indigenous communities around Agua Zarca, he wondered why the issuer of the first environmental license, then Minister Rigoberto Cuellar, was not being investigated for the same crime since the same problem exists with the first environmental license issued in 2010.
Jimenez Mayor also pointed to Congress, and its approval of an electricity buying contract from DESA to ENEE that called for ENEE to purchase more electricity than initially agreed on.
DESA denies there was an increase in its electricity production licensed by Cardona, and maintains it properly consulted with the municipality through open meetings, and that ILO 169 has not been codified into Honduran law.
The Agua Zarca project remains suspended. The recent withdrawal of two of the international funding agencies (the Netherlands Development Bank (FMO) and the Finland Fund for Industrial Cooperation (FINFUND)) has not resulted in its cancelation because much of the funding comes from the Banco Interamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE) which has not withdrawn its support.
Showing posts with label Rigoberto Cuellar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rigoberto Cuellar. Show all posts
Friday, July 14, 2017
Monday, August 31, 2015
"Central American Spring"?
The Economist published an article that provocatively asks in the headline if the 12 weeks of torchlight marches in Honduras is "A Central American Spring".
The paper quickly repudiates that idea in the body of the article. The Arab Spring was rapid and violent. Rather than a violent uprising, the Economist quotes Central American Business Intelligence as expecting slow, gradual change in Central America.
Slow, gradual change is not what the people protesting want: they are asking for the current president to resign.
For 14 weeks in Honduras the indignados, those upset with corruption and impunity in Honduras, have taken to the streets in all the major cities, carrying bamboo torches (not unlike the patio torches one can buy here in the US), seeking a Honduran International Commission against Impunity (CICIH in Spanish) and the removal of Juan Orlando Hernandez.
While there are no official crowd estimates, the marches clearly mobilize tens of thousands of people in both Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula alone. Also remarkable is the range of cities and towns where marches are taking place. They are substantial and peaceful.
In an attempt to defuse the crowds, Hernandez has called for facilitators and mediators from the Organization of American States and the UN to oversee what he calls "dialogue". This is in lieu of asking for a CICIH, which would be appointed by the UN to independently investigate corruption and impunity in Honduras.
Hernandez alleges his government's efforts to reform the government are sufficient if people just give the institutions a chance to operate.
But the institutions he wants the Honduran people to trust aren't operating.
A snail's pace would be fast compared to the Public Prosecutor's office, for example.
A trail of checks document the movement of money from the Instituto Hondureño de Seguridad Social (IHSS) through at least three front companies in Honduras into the National Party bank accounts including those of the Hernandez Presidential Campaign. When journalists made this public in May, they used copies of the checks from the actual prosecutorial case file shared with them. Despite this financial trail, no one has been charged, and no one even questioned, about these checks, checks that implicate the leadership of the National Party in corruption.
There are actually indications that the Assistant Public Prosecutor, Rigoberto Cuellar, may himself be linked to an influence-pedaling scandal, but he is not as yet the target of any investigation.
This is the face of impunity in Honduras. It is why the indignados are marching. And they are marching for a specific remedy that exists in action in their neighbor to the north, Guatemala.
In Guatemala, people are also marching weekly. Here, there is already an International Commission against Corruption and Impunity (CICIG in Spanish), sponsored by the UN at Guatemala's request, and funded by voluntary contributions from a number of different countries.
This unit, as noted in the Economist article, has been instrumental in uncovering and prosecuting corruption in the Guatemalan governments past and present. The transparency of these investigations served to mobilize the populace of Guatemala tired of corruption.
The CICIG has in fact, sought to bring charges against the President and Vice President of Guatemala for corruption. Over 100,000 people gathered last week in central Guatemala City to call for the President to resign. Their demands have now been endorsed by the country's Roman Catholic bishops.
In Honduras, at least for now, President Hernandez is not only rejecting the idea of an independent CICIH, he's actively working to discredit the idea through the public pronouncements of his advisor Ebal Diaz, who has made up "facts" to discredit the CICIG. Officially the National Party Congressional delegation is against the proposal as well. Mauricio Oliva, President of Congress, called it "foreign intervention".
Almost every other political party in Honduras supports the call for the CICIH. LIBRE supports it; the AntitCorruption Party (PAC) does too.
The Liberal Party recently held a "unification" meeting to align its congressional delegation with the thinking of its directorate. The idea of a CICIH was a key source of difference. The Liberals in Congress recently voted against legislation that would have put the call for a CICIH to a public referendum, legislation sponsored by LIBRE. At the time they said they voted against it because they thought it would delay prosecution, particularly of former Zelaya government officials. The directorate of the Liberal Party was in favor of a referendum, making the defection of its Congressional delegation a major issue. In the unification meeting, the party members agreed to vote for a CICIH if it comes up again. But it is unclear that the Congressional leadership will allow another vote.
Last Wednesday, the indignados held a national strike, calling for businesses to shut down and main traffic arteries in the country to be blocked. Roads were blocked for a time until the police broke up the protests, and some businesses shut down, but not most.
Last Friday's march ended at the Consejo Hondureño de Empresa Privada (COHEP) building where marchers met with business leaders. Whether this will result in businessmen supporting the marchers' goals is an open question, but the fact that talks were entertained is significant. COHEP supports the government; any change in support here would likely destabilize it.
Slow change indeed.
The paper quickly repudiates that idea in the body of the article. The Arab Spring was rapid and violent. Rather than a violent uprising, the Economist quotes Central American Business Intelligence as expecting slow, gradual change in Central America.
Slow, gradual change is not what the people protesting want: they are asking for the current president to resign.
For 14 weeks in Honduras the indignados, those upset with corruption and impunity in Honduras, have taken to the streets in all the major cities, carrying bamboo torches (not unlike the patio torches one can buy here in the US), seeking a Honduran International Commission against Impunity (CICIH in Spanish) and the removal of Juan Orlando Hernandez.
While there are no official crowd estimates, the marches clearly mobilize tens of thousands of people in both Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula alone. Also remarkable is the range of cities and towns where marches are taking place. They are substantial and peaceful.
In an attempt to defuse the crowds, Hernandez has called for facilitators and mediators from the Organization of American States and the UN to oversee what he calls "dialogue". This is in lieu of asking for a CICIH, which would be appointed by the UN to independently investigate corruption and impunity in Honduras.
Hernandez alleges his government's efforts to reform the government are sufficient if people just give the institutions a chance to operate.
But the institutions he wants the Honduran people to trust aren't operating.
A snail's pace would be fast compared to the Public Prosecutor's office, for example.
A trail of checks document the movement of money from the Instituto Hondureño de Seguridad Social (IHSS) through at least three front companies in Honduras into the National Party bank accounts including those of the Hernandez Presidential Campaign. When journalists made this public in May, they used copies of the checks from the actual prosecutorial case file shared with them. Despite this financial trail, no one has been charged, and no one even questioned, about these checks, checks that implicate the leadership of the National Party in corruption.
There are actually indications that the Assistant Public Prosecutor, Rigoberto Cuellar, may himself be linked to an influence-pedaling scandal, but he is not as yet the target of any investigation.
This is the face of impunity in Honduras. It is why the indignados are marching. And they are marching for a specific remedy that exists in action in their neighbor to the north, Guatemala.
In Guatemala, people are also marching weekly. Here, there is already an International Commission against Corruption and Impunity (CICIG in Spanish), sponsored by the UN at Guatemala's request, and funded by voluntary contributions from a number of different countries.
This unit, as noted in the Economist article, has been instrumental in uncovering and prosecuting corruption in the Guatemalan governments past and present. The transparency of these investigations served to mobilize the populace of Guatemala tired of corruption.
The CICIG has in fact, sought to bring charges against the President and Vice President of Guatemala for corruption. Over 100,000 people gathered last week in central Guatemala City to call for the President to resign. Their demands have now been endorsed by the country's Roman Catholic bishops.
In Honduras, at least for now, President Hernandez is not only rejecting the idea of an independent CICIH, he's actively working to discredit the idea through the public pronouncements of his advisor Ebal Diaz, who has made up "facts" to discredit the CICIG. Officially the National Party Congressional delegation is against the proposal as well. Mauricio Oliva, President of Congress, called it "foreign intervention".
Almost every other political party in Honduras supports the call for the CICIH. LIBRE supports it; the AntitCorruption Party (PAC) does too.
The Liberal Party recently held a "unification" meeting to align its congressional delegation with the thinking of its directorate. The idea of a CICIH was a key source of difference. The Liberals in Congress recently voted against legislation that would have put the call for a CICIH to a public referendum, legislation sponsored by LIBRE. At the time they said they voted against it because they thought it would delay prosecution, particularly of former Zelaya government officials. The directorate of the Liberal Party was in favor of a referendum, making the defection of its Congressional delegation a major issue. In the unification meeting, the party members agreed to vote for a CICIH if it comes up again. But it is unclear that the Congressional leadership will allow another vote.
Last Wednesday, the indignados held a national strike, calling for businesses to shut down and main traffic arteries in the country to be blocked. Roads were blocked for a time until the police broke up the protests, and some businesses shut down, but not most.
Last Friday's march ended at the Consejo Hondureño de Empresa Privada (COHEP) building where marchers met with business leaders. Whether this will result in businessmen supporting the marchers' goals is an open question, but the fact that talks were entertained is significant. COHEP supports the government; any change in support here would likely destabilize it.
Slow change indeed.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Honduras Wants A New Public Prosecutor In the Worst Way Possible
Here's how:
Back on June 25, the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubi, and his deputy Public Prosecutor, Roy Urtecho, resigned from office, to avoid impeachment. A committee appointed by Congress to investigate the Public Prosecutor's lack of progress on cases had found that prosecutors were complicit with organized crime, taking payoffs, and that a significant part of their budget was spent without accounting records.
The committee reorganized the Prosecutor's office and dismissed a handful of prosecutors. That created a situation where Honduras needed a new Public Prosecutor and deputy Public Prosecutor.
There was a procedure for this, a law spelling out the composition of a nominating committee that involved members of civil society representing churches, universities, and lawyers group.
A few odd things happened on the way to composing the committee. First, Congress hastily revised the composition of the committee, to include a new group, the Alianza por la Paz y Justicia. Then, Roy Urtecho, who had been forced to resign as deputy Public Prosecutor, was appointed by the Lawyer's Association (CAH) as their representative.
Urtecho's appointment gave some committee members pause, but they continued. Rather than debate names and select candidates proposed by members of the committee, they opened the process for self-nomination. They established a procedure to review nominees that included a lie detector test and psychological evaluation, with failure of either test explicitly supposed to disqualify a candidate. In the end, fifty-one people nominated themselves for the two positions.
Things started to fall apart as soon as the nominations closed. Try to follow the timeline here:
The nominating committee met and disqualified candidates who were not licensed lawyers in Honduras, as well as those who lacked some legal qualification (such as age) to be considered, or whose application was incomplete.
With the announcement that candidates would have to submit to lie detector and psychological tests (the same being used to evaluate police), reportedly many candidates withdrew their names.
Oscar Fernando Chinchilla (Supreme Court Justice) was named as among those failing the psychological test, along with Doris Imelda Madrid, and Lino Tomás Mendoza. Others signaled by the press as having failed one or the other of the tests include Manuuel Enrique Alvarado, Marco Antonio Zelaya, and Guillermo Escobar Montalván
Only 13 candidates passed both tests and the review of their application:
1-Ivis Discua Barillas.
2-María Antonia Navarro.
3-Gina González.
4-José Arturo Duarte.
5-AnÍbal Izaguirre.
6-Eugenio Edgardo Rivera.
7-Rolando Argueta.
8-Jair López.
9-Mario Salinas.
10-Rigoberto Cuéllar.
11-Marcelino Vargas.
12-Lisandro Sánchez.
13-German Enamorado.
So the final candidates must be on this list, right?
Not so fast.
Julieta Castellanos, rector of the public university, complains that when Luis Evalin, representative of the private universities, came back after a week out of the country he sought to change the rules agreed to by the other six members of the committee. Evalin missed the meetings where candidates' education was being evaluated. He also missed all the interviews
When the nominating committee reconvened last Tuesday, after the first round of tests had been administered, to see who had passed and who had failed, Evalin demanded a change in the way candidates were evaluated. He put forward a motion that called for polygraph evaluations of the twenty candidates who had been eliminated either during review of their resumes, or by failing the psychological tests.
Roy Urtecho seconded the motion, and the nominating committee, perhaps overwhelmed by the small number of individuals remaining in the pool, agreed. Evalin's side prevailed, on a 4-3 vote.
So by Wednesday those who had failed one of the confidence tests were allowed to take the other test, rather than be eliminated. That put Oscar Fernando Chinchilla back into the running, despite having failed the psychological test.
Evalin later told the press, "I represent the 19 private universities, respect them." Though Evalin was not present and therefore could not know what went on in his absence, he told the press that university faculty with international reputations had been rejected just for faults in their paperwork, and that there had been no interviews. Evelin argued for using experience rather than the results of tests to evaluate the candidates.
Also on Wednesday, Mauricio Villeda, Liberal Party candidate for president, called on Liberal Party Congressmen to abstain from voting for any candidate coming out of the nominating committee, arguing that the election would be illegal, and should be held after the new Congress is seated next January. If the Liberal Party had followed him, it would have denied the National Party sufficient votes to approve any candidate. PINU, another minority party in Congress, agreed with his position, as did Libre, which has no congress members currently.
Thursday the Alianza por la Paz y Justicia pulled out of the nominating committee. Its representative, Carlos Hernandez, said that
Everything was transparent and agreed to up until Monday, according to Hernandez.
The same day, Ramon Custodio, Human Rights Ombudsman, also pulled out, saying that he would not sully his good name. Julieta Castellanos also withdrew, echoing Hernandez's call for transparency. She continued:
So Thursday, the nominating committee met with three of its members missing (Hernandez, Custodio, and Castellanos). Present were Jorge Rivera Aviles, Roy Urtecho, Luis Evalin, and Edith Maria Lopez Rivera. They agreed to consider 27 candidates and whittle the list down to 5 names.
Candidates began withdrawing their names from consideration. Three candidates who had passed both tests withdrew early in the day: Jair Lopez, Jose Arturo Duarte, and Rigoberto Cuellar. Rivera Aviles later told the press that the nominating committee chose to ignore the withdrawal of candidates on Thursday.
By Friday morning, Rivera Aviles, as committee chairman, made it known that the nominating committee had settled on a list of five candidates, but was not releasing the names until later in the day in case any of the committee members who had withdrawn wished to vote their positions, possibly changing the outcome.
Nonetheless the list was leaked to the press from Rivera Aviles' Supreme Court staff:
Oscar Fernando Chinchilla
Maria Antonia Navarro
Rigoberto Cuellar Cruz
Ivan Discua Barillas
Rafael Argueta
At that point it became obvious that Chinchilla, Rivera Avile's hand-picked candidate to control the Constitutional branch of the Supreme Court, was going to get the nomination.
The members of the committee who had withdrawn refused to legitimate the procedures used by the rest of the nominating committee. The five candidates selected by the remaining committee members were proposed to Congress on Friday night. Interviews began the next day.
Saturday, while being presented to Congress for his inverview, Ivan Discua Barillas withdrew his candidacy, saying there was already a "fix" in for Chinchilla. Addressing Congress, he said to their faces
Porfirio Lobo Sosa called Discua's reaction "logical" but dismissed it as political.
To the surprise of no one, Honduras awoke Sunday morning to the announcement that Oscar Fernando Chinchilla had been elected the new Public Prosecutor for a term of five years.
Rigoberto Cuellar was elected as deputy Public Prosecutor, despite having withdrawn his name from consideration on Thursday.
And we are sure that everyone who watched this sausage being made is reassured that the Public Prosecutor's office won't be corrupt this time around.
Back on June 25, the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubi, and his deputy Public Prosecutor, Roy Urtecho, resigned from office, to avoid impeachment. A committee appointed by Congress to investigate the Public Prosecutor's lack of progress on cases had found that prosecutors were complicit with organized crime, taking payoffs, and that a significant part of their budget was spent without accounting records.
The committee reorganized the Prosecutor's office and dismissed a handful of prosecutors. That created a situation where Honduras needed a new Public Prosecutor and deputy Public Prosecutor.
There was a procedure for this, a law spelling out the composition of a nominating committee that involved members of civil society representing churches, universities, and lawyers group.
A few odd things happened on the way to composing the committee. First, Congress hastily revised the composition of the committee, to include a new group, the Alianza por la Paz y Justicia. Then, Roy Urtecho, who had been forced to resign as deputy Public Prosecutor, was appointed by the Lawyer's Association (CAH) as their representative.
Urtecho's appointment gave some committee members pause, but they continued. Rather than debate names and select candidates proposed by members of the committee, they opened the process for self-nomination. They established a procedure to review nominees that included a lie detector test and psychological evaluation, with failure of either test explicitly supposed to disqualify a candidate. In the end, fifty-one people nominated themselves for the two positions.
Things started to fall apart as soon as the nominations closed. Try to follow the timeline here:
The nominating committee met and disqualified candidates who were not licensed lawyers in Honduras, as well as those who lacked some legal qualification (such as age) to be considered, or whose application was incomplete.
With the announcement that candidates would have to submit to lie detector and psychological tests (the same being used to evaluate police), reportedly many candidates withdrew their names.
Oscar Fernando Chinchilla (Supreme Court Justice) was named as among those failing the psychological test, along with Doris Imelda Madrid, and Lino Tomás Mendoza. Others signaled by the press as having failed one or the other of the tests include Manuuel Enrique Alvarado, Marco Antonio Zelaya, and Guillermo Escobar Montalván
Only 13 candidates passed both tests and the review of their application:
1-Ivis Discua Barillas.
2-María Antonia Navarro.
3-Gina González.
4-José Arturo Duarte.
5-AnÍbal Izaguirre.
6-Eugenio Edgardo Rivera.
7-Rolando Argueta.
8-Jair López.
9-Mario Salinas.
10-Rigoberto Cuéllar.
11-Marcelino Vargas.
12-Lisandro Sánchez.
13-German Enamorado.
So the final candidates must be on this list, right?
Not so fast.
Julieta Castellanos, rector of the public university, complains that when Luis Evalin, representative of the private universities, came back after a week out of the country he sought to change the rules agreed to by the other six members of the committee. Evalin missed the meetings where candidates' education was being evaluated. He also missed all the interviews
When the nominating committee reconvened last Tuesday, after the first round of tests had been administered, to see who had passed and who had failed, Evalin demanded a change in the way candidates were evaluated. He put forward a motion that called for polygraph evaluations of the twenty candidates who had been eliminated either during review of their resumes, or by failing the psychological tests.
Roy Urtecho seconded the motion, and the nominating committee, perhaps overwhelmed by the small number of individuals remaining in the pool, agreed. Evalin's side prevailed, on a 4-3 vote.
So by Wednesday those who had failed one of the confidence tests were allowed to take the other test, rather than be eliminated. That put Oscar Fernando Chinchilla back into the running, despite having failed the psychological test.
Evalin later told the press, "I represent the 19 private universities, respect them." Though Evalin was not present and therefore could not know what went on in his absence, he told the press that university faculty with international reputations had been rejected just for faults in their paperwork, and that there had been no interviews. Evelin argued for using experience rather than the results of tests to evaluate the candidates.
Also on Wednesday, Mauricio Villeda, Liberal Party candidate for president, called on Liberal Party Congressmen to abstain from voting for any candidate coming out of the nominating committee, arguing that the election would be illegal, and should be held after the new Congress is seated next January. If the Liberal Party had followed him, it would have denied the National Party sufficient votes to approve any candidate. PINU, another minority party in Congress, agreed with his position, as did Libre, which has no congress members currently.
Thursday the Alianza por la Paz y Justicia pulled out of the nominating committee. Its representative, Carlos Hernandez, said that
"We are not going to participate in a process where they break the rules at the last minute, I don't know what their motivations are, but the rules were established and unfortunately they changed, and if this isn't undone, we won't participate."
Everything was transparent and agreed to up until Monday, according to Hernandez.
The same day, Ramon Custodio, Human Rights Ombudsman, also pulled out, saying that he would not sully his good name. Julieta Castellanos also withdrew, echoing Hernandez's call for transparency. She continued:
"Everything that happened from Tuesday onward, that's the responsibility of four members...We cannot in conditions where there isn't a transparent explanation, of what has happened, continue the participation of the University"
So Thursday, the nominating committee met with three of its members missing (Hernandez, Custodio, and Castellanos). Present were Jorge Rivera Aviles, Roy Urtecho, Luis Evalin, and Edith Maria Lopez Rivera. They agreed to consider 27 candidates and whittle the list down to 5 names.
Candidates began withdrawing their names from consideration. Three candidates who had passed both tests withdrew early in the day: Jair Lopez, Jose Arturo Duarte, and Rigoberto Cuellar. Rivera Aviles later told the press that the nominating committee chose to ignore the withdrawal of candidates on Thursday.
By Friday morning, Rivera Aviles, as committee chairman, made it known that the nominating committee had settled on a list of five candidates, but was not releasing the names until later in the day in case any of the committee members who had withdrawn wished to vote their positions, possibly changing the outcome.
Nonetheless the list was leaked to the press from Rivera Aviles' Supreme Court staff:
Oscar Fernando Chinchilla
Maria Antonia Navarro
Rigoberto Cuellar Cruz
Ivan Discua Barillas
Rafael Argueta
At that point it became obvious that Chinchilla, Rivera Avile's hand-picked candidate to control the Constitutional branch of the Supreme Court, was going to get the nomination.
The members of the committee who had withdrawn refused to legitimate the procedures used by the rest of the nominating committee. The five candidates selected by the remaining committee members were proposed to Congress on Friday night. Interviews began the next day.
Saturday, while being presented to Congress for his inverview, Ivan Discua Barillas withdrew his candidacy, saying there was already a "fix" in for Chinchilla. Addressing Congress, he said to their faces
"I don't have godfathers and I don't want them because I value my abilities; I want to tell you legislators that are here and don't bear the blame. The decision over who will be Public Prosecutor was taken last night (Friday) at 9 pm by the [National] party leadership; and I tell you with conviction that to that class, Honduras isn't important."
Porfirio Lobo Sosa called Discua's reaction "logical" but dismissed it as political.
To the surprise of no one, Honduras awoke Sunday morning to the announcement that Oscar Fernando Chinchilla had been elected the new Public Prosecutor for a term of five years.
Rigoberto Cuellar was elected as deputy Public Prosecutor, despite having withdrawn his name from consideration on Thursday.
And we are sure that everyone who watched this sausage being made is reassured that the Public Prosecutor's office won't be corrupt this time around.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Money, money money...
There, got your attention?
We have been arguing for more than a year now that the coup d'etat of June 28 and its continuing aftermath were not ideological-- unless the ideology involved is capitalism.
The forces behind the coup were shown to be a cadre of business-owners in early analyses by Leticia Salomon and other Honduran scholars. Resistance to a living wage and to union contracts was only the most visible evidence of this direction of the de facto regime, continuing in the Lobo Sosa administration. Government agencies charged with protecting the environment were converted after the coup into rubber stamps for developments damaging to sensitive ecological zones, and even to the health of the Honduran people.
The fingerprints of this shift back to favoring business interests of a small elite are also found all over concessions of rights for power generation, even if it is hard to connect the dots due to an almost total absence of real reporting in mainstream Honduran and foreign news media.
Yesterday, El Libertador published a formal statement by the Frente de Resistencia about the "harmful contracts for renewable energy" granted to "the golpista oligarchy". The contracts in question are for thermal generation of electricity. The Honduran National Congress has, according to this report, approved the concession of more than 50 watersheds for this purpose to private companies.
One of the main arguments against these contracts, advanced by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Empresa Nacional de Energía Eléctrica (STENEE), the union of the national electrical workers, is that the contracts for ENEE to buy the energy produced guarantee an overly high price: reportedly 12 US cents per kilowatt hour, far above the previously negotiated price of 5 US cents per kilowatt hour.
Unlikely to be a coincidence, on August 25, El Heraldo published an interview with Honduran businessman Fredy Násser of the energy development enterprise Grupo Terra. The theme of the article: there is a reason why they haven't invested in "clean energy" in Honduras, they would love to, and they have lots of investment funding from the Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE), the German Development Bank, and the Dutch Development Bank. Násser was among the businessmen singled out by Leticia Salomon in her analyses of the business interests behind the coup of June 28, 2009.
El Libertador claims that the concessions for energy generation rely on forged signatures of mayors of affected towns, and thus that they were "negotiated" without consultation of the citizenry. One of the hallmarks of the Zelaya administration was a push for citizen participation, and one of the counter forces against that administration was a desire to return to a system in which representatives without accountability speak for the people.
So, the Frente calls for mobilization to
Rigoberto Cuellar, the Secretary of Natural Resources in the Lobo Sosa government, defended the new contracts, saying his ministry will ensure that the contracts will be the least expensive possible and environmentally sensitive. He stated firmly that the entire process of letting contracts adhered completely to the requirements of the law. The one thing absent from his public statements: any comment on how, or whether, the proposed new energy facilities have been discussed with the local communities.
But, as Fredy Násser would argue,
The only way out of poverty? or the only way to "generate wealth"?
We have been arguing for more than a year now that the coup d'etat of June 28 and its continuing aftermath were not ideological-- unless the ideology involved is capitalism.
The forces behind the coup were shown to be a cadre of business-owners in early analyses by Leticia Salomon and other Honduran scholars. Resistance to a living wage and to union contracts was only the most visible evidence of this direction of the de facto regime, continuing in the Lobo Sosa administration. Government agencies charged with protecting the environment were converted after the coup into rubber stamps for developments damaging to sensitive ecological zones, and even to the health of the Honduran people.
The fingerprints of this shift back to favoring business interests of a small elite are also found all over concessions of rights for power generation, even if it is hard to connect the dots due to an almost total absence of real reporting in mainstream Honduran and foreign news media.
Yesterday, El Libertador published a formal statement by the Frente de Resistencia about the "harmful contracts for renewable energy" granted to "the golpista oligarchy". The contracts in question are for thermal generation of electricity. The Honduran National Congress has, according to this report, approved the concession of more than 50 watersheds for this purpose to private companies.
One of the main arguments against these contracts, advanced by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Empresa Nacional de Energía Eléctrica (STENEE), the union of the national electrical workers, is that the contracts for ENEE to buy the energy produced guarantee an overly high price: reportedly 12 US cents per kilowatt hour, far above the previously negotiated price of 5 US cents per kilowatt hour.
Unlikely to be a coincidence, on August 25, El Heraldo published an interview with Honduran businessman Fredy Násser of the energy development enterprise Grupo Terra. The theme of the article: there is a reason why they haven't invested in "clean energy" in Honduras, they would love to, and they have lots of investment funding from the Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE), the German Development Bank, and the Dutch Development Bank. Násser was among the businessmen singled out by Leticia Salomon in her analyses of the business interests behind the coup of June 28, 2009.
El Libertador claims that the concessions for energy generation rely on forged signatures of mayors of affected towns, and thus that they were "negotiated" without consultation of the citizenry. One of the hallmarks of the Zelaya administration was a push for citizen participation, and one of the counter forces against that administration was a desire to return to a system in which representatives without accountability speak for the people.
So, the Frente calls for mobilization to
defend in a permanent way our natural resources, that should be developed under public policies with participation and direct benefit for the communities. Only under this procedure can we support clean energy projects.
Rigoberto Cuellar, the Secretary of Natural Resources in the Lobo Sosa government, defended the new contracts, saying his ministry will ensure that the contracts will be the least expensive possible and environmentally sensitive. He stated firmly that the entire process of letting contracts adhered completely to the requirements of the law. The one thing absent from his public statements: any comment on how, or whether, the proposed new energy facilities have been discussed with the local communities.
But, as Fredy Násser would argue,
it is necessary to generate wealth and the spaces necessary to develop opportunities for our people. The governments have to realize that this is the only way out of poverty.
The only way out of poverty? or the only way to "generate wealth"?
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