New Police Voice

After only two months in the position, Silvio Inestroza has been removed from the position as Police spokesperson. Replacing him is Héctor Iván Mejia, former police chief of San Pedro Sula. Inestroza was appointed to head the public relations department of the Police when Pompeyo Bonilla took over as Security Minister.

So who is the new head of public relations, the voice of the National Police in Honduras?

Hector Ivan Mejia last held this job as head of public relations of the National Police during the 2009 coup. When a video surfaced at CNN showing troops shooting out the tires of buses filled with protesters on their way to Tegucigalpa to protest the coup and forcible exile of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Mejia told CNN

"Protesters will be arrested for vandalistic acts but they will not simply be stopped on their way to protests"

as if the video didn't exist showing exactly that happening.

In an August 2008 essay on the media and the Police posted to a website, Mejia had described his vision of how the media should depict violence in Honduras. He asserted that the Honduran media have for too long reveled in the sensationalism of it, and used it to sell newspapers. In a section on how the media should act, he wrote:

- In these circumstances (the media depiction of violence in Honduras) it is necessary to establish the undeniable necessity to establish a social control that establishes what we should communicate, and how we should communicate.

- Coverage of criminal activities should be the object of rigorous, contextualized reporting.

- Citizens have the right to be informed, but the police and judicial procedures should be respected.

- You cannot be neutral to those who threaten the safety of the population.

- The media should play an active role in the defense of democracy, avoiding giving extreme significance to those aspects of violence that put the system of liberties in danger or at risk. They should establish different treatments between those who violate the legal and social norms, and those that respect them.

Mejia concluded that the press must properly contextualize all criminal acts, making clear in their reporting the socially important context, so that people are not led to the wrong conclusions. The press, for Mejia, should be a force for forming public opinion, in this case, against violence.

The decision to bring Héctor Iván Mejia back is curious. Just two months ago he was head of the San Pedro police department. When Pompeyo Bonilla assumed the Security Minister's job, Mejia was removed from that post, as were several other prominent police commanders.

While commander in San Pedro, Mejia was in charge of the botched investigation into the shooting of 18 workers in a shoe factory in September, 2010, where his police failed to collect the shell casings as evidence from the factory.

At the time, Mejia told CNN that the factory was in a neighborhood where drug trafficking proliferated, and that soon became the official "explanation" for the killings. He told the BBC at the same time:

"Apparently the murder was carried out as part of a turf battle between small-scale drug gangs, given that the neighbourhood has conflicts because of the presence of gang members."

After that, the crime was never investigated.

A few days later he ordered the San Pedro police to put down a peaceful demonstration by the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular in the center of San Pedro.

He dismissed Sandra Ponce's investigation of the Police shooting of alleged gang members in 2010 in Colonia Planeta, an outer barrio of San Pedro, as "unfair" and declined to present the firearms used by the police officers involved for forensic analysis, according to a UNHCR report.

Also in 2010, when a sixth reporter, television anchor Jorge Alberto Orellana, was killed in San Pedro, it was Hector Ivan Mejia, as chief of the San Pedro police, who floated the idea that he was killed for personal reasons, not as part of a systematic intimidation of journalists in Honduras. Again this became the official explanation without further investigation.

This year, when Congressmember Marvin Ponce said that a significant portion of the National Police were linked to organized crime, Hector Ivan Mejia dismissed the comments.

Quite a choice as official voice of the national police.

Too Gay For Honduras

I was frankly amazed to read in Thursday's El Heraldo that Ricky Martin, the Puerto Rican pop singer who is openly gay, might be denied a visa to enter Honduras and give a concert, solely because he's gay.

None the less, that's more or less what Áfrico Madrid, Interior Minister, (the man who banned Halloween in Honduras) told El Heraldo. In an interview he said that he had received pressure, though no written requests, from the church organizations of Honduras to deny him a visa because he was a bad example for families in Honduras. Madrid told El Heraldo:

"It is through the departmental rules that we will analyze the request they presented to hold the event and in all cases it is the management, based on the convenience and to safeguard the moral and ethical principles of our society, that will authorize or not the event."

"Representatives of the Christian churches, Evangelical and Catholic of Honduras, have asked that we not authorize the permission because he is not a good family example,....this is not the type of family that the laws of Honduras and Honduran society want to construct and promote in the young and the rest of the population."

Ricky Martin, openly gay since 2010, lives with his two children and his partner.

Just to be clear, Honduras cannot legally deny a person admission just because they are gay. As Sandra Ponce was forced to point out today in response to Áfrico Madrid's insanity, to deny him entrance would be a violation of the Honduran constitution, human rights, and international treaties to which Honduras is signatory.

But the fine points of law, like the Honduran constitution and human rights, often seem to be beyond the grasp of Áfrico Madrid.

Golpistas Are Nervous

The golpistas in Honduras are nervous after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued the announcement that it would proceed to investigate if it had jurisdiction over human rights crimes allegedly committed by those who carried out the coup and formed the de facto regime in 2009.

The ICC is an independent organization, not part of the UN, located in The Hague, Netherlands. It is governed by the Rome Statute, a UN treaty that establishes the court and the rules under which it operates. The court, funded by individual country governments, was established to "help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community."

The complain was lodged by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH for its name in French). FIDH sent an evaluation mission to Honduras in late July, 2009, and at that time confirmed serious human rights violations had and were taking place. They outlined their findings and concerns in a press release on July 30, 2009. At that time they called on the ICC to remind Honduras it was a member and if the situation continued it could come under the jurisdiction of the ICC. The de facto regime, through its human rights commissioner, Ramon Custodio Lopez, denied at the time that human rights abuses had taken place.

The ICC has assigned Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo to the case. Moreno Ocampo is an Argentinian who successfully prosecuted the Generals in Argentina in 1984 for human rights abuses. He announced that he would shortly conduct preliminary investigations in Honduras.

Sandra Ponce, the Honduran Human Rights Prosecutor, told El Tiempo that the ICC had not communicated with the current Honduran Government. She noted that

"The process of opening an investigation implies the prosecutor (of the ICC) wants to verify the information, and if it has merit, he will have to ask the permission of the Pre-Trial division of the ICC to open a case."

Among those accused of committing human rights violations are Roberto Micheletti Bain, Luis Rubí Avila, Jorge Rivera Avilez, José Alfredo Saavedra, and the military high command, command of the National Police, 18 people in all.

El Tiempo reported that one of the first things that happened after the announcement of the ICC was published in the press, was that the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubí Avila asked the Human Rights Commissioner, Ramon Custodio Lopez, to come to his office and discuss the announcement. Both Rubí Avila and Custodio Lopez are named in the complaint.

While neither Rubí nor Custodio spoke with the press, a judicial advisor to Rubi, Rigoberto Espinal Irías dismissed the human rights charges alleged by FIDH, claiming that many were "questionable" or "never happened", as documented in a report by his office to the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights.

"You cannot have an assassination where there wasn't one; its easy to put something on paper and build on top of it."

The attitude of that part of the Public Prosecutor's office is in sharp contrast with that of its Human Rights Prosecutor. Sandra Ponce told La Tribuna the visit of Moreno Ocampo was historic since it was the first visit ever by an ICC prosecutor to perform an investigation of Honduras. She pointed out that the government was obligated to cooperate with Moreno Ocampo and the ICC. She also explained that if any of the charges of political persecution were found to have merit, the ICC would have jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, El Heraldo spread the disinformation, sourced to the Colombian Ambassador to Honduras, Sonia Portillo, that the ICC doesn't prosecute individuals, just governments and institutions and used this to make fun of Ángel Edmundo Orellana. However the ICC website states specifically,

"The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an independent, permanent court that tries persons accused of the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes..."

Hmm, nothing there about trying governments or institutions, just persons. So much for the Colombian Ambassador's knowledge and the journalistic integrity of El Heraldo, which didn't bother to do even simple fact checking.

The repression that happened after the coup, the extrajudicial killings by the police and military (indivisible since the coup) that continue to the present, the illegal revocation of constitutional rights, all of these charges deserve an impartial thorough investigation. It will have to be started by the ICC, since there is no reason to believe it will ever happen Honduras.

What is a Universal Periodic Review

November 4th.

That's the day that the UN conducts hearings as part of its Universal Periodic Review of the state framework for human rights in Honduras.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a once every four years dialogue between the 47 members sitting on the Human Rights Council and the national government of the country under review, plus any registered non-governmental organizations that ask to participate. The result, no sooner than 2 days after the hearing, is a report which contains a summary of the discussion plus a series of recommendations for the national government. It is up to the national government to carry those recommendations out. It is up to the UN to hold the governments accountable for non-compliance.

In the case of Honduras, the submissions can be found at the UN Office of the High Commissioner website here. The submissions include the government's report to the Human Rights Council, in every UN official language, a compilation of UN agency comments on conditions that arose since the last review, a summary of comments by third parties, and a series of questions submitted in advance by governments who are part of the Human Rights Council.

Honduras's own report was submitted on August 23, 2010. The report Honduras submitted is about the government structures, rules, and regulations that support the various areas of human rights that Honduras must report on in its periodic review. A quick review of the recent submissions by other Central American countries suggests that this is the correct content. The entire report consists of 134 paragraphs.

Paragraph 4 of Honduras's submission states

"The approach adopted in the universal periodic review involved the various Government agencies and branches of the State, all of which provided input to this report in their own areas of competence."

Except, of course, when they did not provide input.

A Tiempo article from Saturday noted that according to sources in the Executive branch, the report was completed without the collaboration of the Ministry of Security or the Supreme Court.

After a brief introduction, paragraphs 7-13, on the current political situation in Honduras, contain just about the only references to the coup of June 28, 2009 and the subsequent human rights violations that continue through the present. Paragraph 8 notes that Porfirio Lobo Sosa has complied with the terms of the Guaymuras Accords. Paragraph 9 identifies the official truth commission and its mission statement. Paragraph 12 lumps all human rights violations, from any time period, together and notes that investigations are either ongoing, or the cases have been determined to be common crimes.

Paragraphs 14-37 discuss political and civil rights, including the right to life, integrity of person, eradication of torture, prisons, access to justice, and freedom of expression.

Paragraphs 38-74 are concerned with economic and social rights, such as health, education, culture, ethnic groups, work, housing, and food.

Paragraphs 75-125 are concerned with the rights of vulnerable groups, such as some ethnic minorities, women, children, migrants, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered people, the old, disabled, and the right of everyone to a healthy environment.

The remaining paragraphs contain the report's conclusions.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (UNOHCR) conducted its own review on each of the above topics over the last year. For example, there is a report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education, another Special Rapporteur's report on extrajudicial killings, another on the independence of judges, and so forth. Each of these reports presents the UN's own take on the topic in question, and was available to the government of Honduras in crafting its own report. In addition, collectively the reports are summarized in a UN document included in the paperwork of the UPR for Honduras.

The UN paperwork notes that sixteen stakeholders submitted comments on the report, and provides a 14 page summary of those comments. You'll need to read Spanish, English, and French to take in the whole document, since not everything has been translated. The ten page Amnesty International submission from April, 2010 is located here on the UN website. Article 19, a group interested in freedom of the press, published their comment on their own website, located here. The other comments are probably filed in the same document archive as the Amnesty report, but I did not take the time to locate them.

Finally, there are a series of questions that the countries that make up the Human Rights Council have compiled. The countries who submitted questions include the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland. Their questions primarily focus on human rights violations arising out of the events of June 28, 2009, the de facto regime, and that of Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

A group of three representatives from the Human Rights Council, representatives of Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the Russian Federation, will compile a summary of the discussion and a series of recommendations for Honduras after the meeting. Honduras will then have a chance to respond to this document, and then it will be adopted in a subsequent meeting.

Honduras will be represented in the hearing by several cabinet ministers and presidential advisers, including Maria Antonietta Guillén, Áfrico Madrid, and Ana Pineda. Also representing Honduras will be the head of the legislative committee concerned with human rights, Orle Solis, and the Special Prosecutor for Human Rights, Sandra Ponce. The hearing will last 3 hours on the morning of November 4.

The UN may broadcast a webcast of the hearing. Currently only webcasts for November 1 are listed. Technical note, the webcast requires Real Player be installed.

Is the firing of justices actually legal? Part I

Honduras' Supreme Court has voted, 10-5, to reaffirm its firing of justices who were opposed to the coup d'Etat that removed President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales in June of 2009, insisting this is a necessary defense of legality. With this, as we have previously noted, they reinforce their history of obstinate self-defense of actions that align the court with the coup.

But what, precisely, is the legal basis that the majority on the court claims? and what can this tell us about the nature of the Honduran Supreme Court, and its role in what is clearly a fragile constitutional state? To answer this, we need to trace through the thicket of Honduran law yet again, which will require more than a single post.

The president of the court has been firm: his actions were not retaliation for the opinions of the dismissed justices; they were a judgment that those justices had violated ethical rules. Yet to date, he has been unwilling to release the actual document of the court's decision, that might clarify this puzzling claim, even in response to the request by Sandra Ponce, Fiscal de Derechos Humanos in the Lobo Sosa government.

Let's go back to an article published in La Prensa on May 6, quoting Supreme Court spokesman Danilo Izaguirre, that gives us a beginning point to trace the specific violations for which the anti-coup justices were supposedly disciplined. According to Izaguirre, the following crimes were charged against each:

• Adán Guillermo López: "having participated in the violent demonstration in the outskirts of Toncontín airport on July 5, 2009 that concluded with a confrontation with police agents"; specifically, ending up with a wound in his left knee is described as "conduct incongruent with the legal norms that rule the discharge of justices and magistrates"



• Ramón Enrique Barrios "made declarations in a newspaper affirming that there was not a constitutional succession, published on August 18, 2009". Barrios argued that his statements, made in the course of teaching law at the UNAH campus in San Pedro Sula and only later published, were protected under academic freedom.



• Tirza Flores Lanza "absented herself from her judicial office on the 30th of June, 2009, being found that day in Tegucigalpa taking actions that are not inherent in her position without having a leave", in particular, taking part in filing a legal document.

While the specific charges against the other two dismissed at the same time, justice Luis Alonso Chévez de la Rocha and public defender Osman Fajardo Morel, are not noted, they are described in other sources as being accused for having taken part in the same demonstration as Guillermo López, on the day that Manuel Zelaya attempted to return to Honduras by air the first week after the coup.

It would seem almost impossible to deny that these individuals were punished by the Supreme Court for being on the other side of the debate about the legality of the coup.

The same article, relying on the spokesman of the Supreme Court, provides us the beginning point to trace the purported legal basis for these actions, giving citations of specific legal codes held to be violated for López, Barrios, and Flores Lanza.

To follow the apparent logic of the Supreme Court, we need to turn to those legal claims, a task that will take us back into questions of the organization of Honduran government and the still weak integration of judicial reforms that has been underway in the past decade. The complexity of these issues requires a series of separate posts.

But at the end of the day-- regardless of the way that legal codes are being marshaled-- the Supreme Court's own spokesman confirmed, on May 6, that the actions for which these justices are being disciplined were their expressions of opposition to the coup.

No matter what the legal framework, the choice to pursue these individuals is political, as even Porfirio Lobo Sosa points out.

Rivera Avilez: "I'd rather resign...."

Supreme Court Chief Justice Jorge Rivera Avilez said yesterday that he'd rather resign than give in to political and economic pressures, international and national. Rivera Avilez spoke yesterday in response to Lobo Sosa's comments on Tuesday about the Supreme Court's reaffirmation of its decision to fire four judges and a magistrate for opposing the coup.

He said that the upper levels of the three branches meet regularly to discuss and analyze the political problems of the country, "but they have never pressured us to twist the law, in this way we keep applying [the law] in a straightforward manner." In referring to Lobo Sosa's comments on the Court's decision, he said "He looked at it from the point of view of politics, and possibly, for his politics, it affects it, but politics should never be above the regulations, and we have to respect the constitution and the laws." Rivera Avilez denied that Lobo Sosa had interfered with the Court, as some organizations such as the Unión Civica Democratica had alleged.

Rivera Avilez also denied that the judges had been fired for opposing the coup, and said that the court file lists the causes, but the Court has not made the reasons public. Congress has asked for a report into the reasoning behind the decision, and the Prosecutor for Human Rights, Sandra Ponce, has asked the court for its decision so she can open an investigation.

Meanwhile, Lobo Sosa said that if Rivera Avilez wants to give up his position because of political pressure, "Its his decision."

Lobo Sosa Insinuates Bajo Aguan campesinos are armed

In remarks quoted in El Heraldo as of 10:43 pm Monday April 12, Porfirio Lobo Sosa dangerously escalates his rhetoric, drawing connections between the campesino activists of MUCA who are occupying land in the Bajo Aguan, and unnamed foreigners who he insinuates have provided guns to the self-identified peaceful activists.

"No voy a permitir grupos armados de ningún tipo en Honduras y lo quiero repetir: no voy a permitir grupos armados en Honduras."

El Heraldo stated that Lobo Sosa said this in response to questions about why he has sent 2,000 military into the area

where campesinos advised by foreigners have invaded dozens of hectares of already cultivated land.

The claim that the MUCA movement is advised by foreigners is a way to divorce their actions from Honduras, to make these farmers into a dangerous other.

El Heraldo notes that Lobo Sosa

has asserted that behind the land conflict in the Bajo Aguán "there exist political interests"

and goes on to add that

some sectors do not discard the presence of armed groups in the region.

A subsecretary of the Ministry of Security, Roberto Romero, is quoted at length as arguing that this militarization of the Aguan in no way violates the spirit of supposedly ongoing negotiations:

"The negotiations have been respected and at the moment the only thing that the secretary of Security has done, with instructions from the President, is comply with a constitutional mandate, which is to generate spaces of trust and augment the security in this zone, in such a way as to control the flow of arms."

Lobo Sosa himself reinforces this grand lie:

"What they (Army and Police) are going to do is remind people of the Ley de Tenencia y Portación de Armas (Law of ownership and carrying of Arms) that establishes penalities of nine years in prison for anyone who carries arms in an irregular way."

Meanwhile, Sandra Ponce, who has the title of "Human Rights Advocate" (Fiscalía de Derechos Humanos), explained that in response to complaints she had initiated an investigation which has already found that

what official sources say is that the mobilization does not equate with a repressive action against persons of the campesino movement, but rather to operations against drug trafficking.

Univision quotes Ponce more succinctly as saying

The police have no order to dislodge the farmhands and their mission in Tocoa is to lower the arming and the drug trafficking in the region.

But who's arming here? not the campesinos.

In this atmosphere of intimidation, MUCA is reportedly expected to come to a final decision today about the no-longer-negotiable offers from the Lobo Sosa government. But the militarization, we are asked to believe, has no specific relationship to the campesino actions.

And the Honduran news media add fuel to the flames, editorializing that MUCA is following a "hard line" and repeating that the businessmen disputing land rights "have asserted that the occupation of the land is aided by foreigners" and that Lobo Sosa "fears that the actions of the campesinos are politically motivated and that they seek to disparage his government with the theme of human rights", concluding that

the greatest risk that presently exists is to continue giving time for radical groups so that they can totally take control since what they want is a greater confrontation to impose their manicheanism by violence [sangre y fuego].

The solution, according to the editorialist for El Heraldo, is simple; people just have to stop thinking that police actions in the middle of a tense land dispute have anything to do with that dispute, and it is up to the campesinos to see that they don't give anyone the idea that a massacre is about to happen or they will show they are tools of the radical left:

the peasants of MUCA have the opportunity today to give the lie, through deeds, to those that see them as instruments at the service of the radical left. They only have to accept the proposal of the government of Lobo....

So we hope, then, that in the meeting today a definitive agreement will be reached so that the government can dedicate itself to confronting grave national problems such as insecurity, without its actions being misinterpreted like yesterday, that deployed armed forces and police to combat common delinquency and organized crime in Cortés, Atlántida, and Colón [coastal departments], and that stirred up such an ado saying that a "genocide" was being prepared against the campesinos of the Aguan.