Dictatorship: the ghost that haunts re-election in Honduras

The tweet from @Codigo504 is the kind of mordant humor I think of as typically Honduran:

Después del informe de OEA y el tuitazo de Almagro los cachurecos deben calcular bien sus próximas acciones. #CariasQueHubieraHecho?

After OAS’ report and Almagro’s tweet, the Cachurecos need to think very carefully about their next steps #WhatWouldCariasDo?

"What Would Carias Do?"

That's easy: hold on to power however he could. Tiburcio Carías Andino is the ghost hovering over presidential re-election in Honduras.

While the rhetoric used to justify the 2009 made re-election especially potent as a current political issue, the constitutional ban on re-election is not a long-established Honduran practice. It was inserted in the 1982 constitution that Oscar Arias famously called the "worst in the entire world" during his failed attempt to negotiate an end to the 2009 crisis.

The 1982 constitution was enacted as part of the exit from a long period of military rule, guided by the relationship of Honduras and the United States. One of the new features was the declaration in the Constitution that certain provisions could not be amended, including the prohibition on re-election and the definition of the term of the presidency as four years. These features have been described as "centerpieces" of the new 1982 constitution.

Why such an insistence that no future president would serve more than four years? It might seem at first that this was intended to forestall the kind of military dictatorships that had dominated Honduras from 1963 to 1982 (with a brief hiatus for an elected government lasting just over a year from 1971-1972). But that is too short a time frame to understand this provision.

Tiburcio Carías Andino is the ghost hanging over the understanding of the potential for a Honduran President to exploit electoral laws to hang on to power indefinitely. The Honduran people see Juan Orlando Hernández as seeking to follow the path of Carías, not of Policarpo Paz.

Carías Andino first took supreme executive control of Honduras in 1924, during a period of substantial political conflict. In 1932, he ran for election and started an unprecedented period of 16 years in that office. The constitution in force at the time prohibited consecutive terms as President, so Carías Andino initiated the writing of a new constitution. This allowed him to stay in office, and consolidate executive control.

Carías suppressed political opposition. His power ended in part due to protests that began in the capital city and in San Pedro Sula. In the latter case, the brutal suppression of the protests shaped a generation of political activists.

In the aftermath of his presidency, Honduras experienced a significant turmoil, starting with a presidential term by Carías hand-picked successor, Juan Manuel Gálvez. Toward the end of his term in office, a major strike against the dominant banana industry transformed the country, showing the power of labor.

The 1954 election for president did not produce a candidate with the then-required majority vote. (A majority is no longer  required by the 1982 constitution, leading to the election in 2013 of a president who received less than 38% of the popular vote, and contributing to the crisis of 2017. This non-majority clause can be seen as another haunting from the age of Carías Andino.)

In 1954, the resolution of the election was messy: the legislature was supposed to vote to decide who would be president, requiring a two-thirds majority. Two parties boycotted the required sessions, preventing this resolution. The Supreme Court was supposed to resolve a legislative failure to decide, but it was perceived as illegitimate due to being packed by Carías Andino. (Legislative packing of the Supreme Court by Hernández facilitated the decision that opened the way to his seeking re-election, another piece of the Carías playbook that he emulated.)

In the void of power, the vice president, Julio Lozano Díaz, took over, suspending the congress and instituting the writing of a new constitution. His extra-legal regime lasted two years, ending with a military coup. The candidate from 1954 who had received the most votes, Ramón Villeda Morales, was elected to a six-year term in 1957.

Villeda Morales initiated modernizing policies including modest agrarian reforms. By the end of his term, these led to opposition from conservative sectors of Honduran society. Under the constitution then in force, Villeda Morales himself was limited to one six year term as president. His party's nominee was expected to win, however, and to continue his policies.

That prospect was enough to initiate a military coup. The seizure of government initiated the long period that only ended in 1982 with the ratification of the current constitution. Its provisions about presidential election are shaped by the history that began with Carías Andino: a single term for president, without re-election, and no requirement for a majority, a run-off election, or any mechanism for resolving elections too close to truly be called like the one that once threw election to the Congress and then the Supreme Court.

The US government in 1963, under the direction of President John F. Kennedy, cancelled aid, withdrew US military from Honduras, and called the Ambassador to Honduras back to the US. None of these actions led to the return of control to civilian government. General Oswaldo López Arrellano, who held power until 1971 and again from 1972 to 1975, eventually initiated new agrarian reforms, before falling out of power due to a bribery scandal involving the United Fruit Company.

His two successors, also military officers holding extra-judicial power, consolidated the ideology of the military as a stabilizing force that led to their institutionalization in the current constitution as the guarantors of democratic processes. That constitutional role was cited by the military as motivation for their actions in the 2009 coup d'etat.

Hernández has worked to make the army loyal to him. He has also invested, with substantial US aid, in the creation of new militarized police whose role in the 2013 election already was seen as promoting repression. The history of presidential manipulation of the armed forces, too, can be traced back to the Carías dictatorship that is providing so much of the model for the current president.

So indeed, the question #whatwouldCariasDo appears to be the one that we all should be asking as we watch to see what tactics the modern successor to the authoritarian who scarred Honduran political memory might adopt.

Ducktatorship in Honduras

I believe that we are on the brink of an imminent dictatorship which will be led by the current president of the National Congress.

So says Edmundo Orellana, a lawyer and former Public Prosecutor for Honduras, about Juan Orlando Hernandez's subjugation of the Supreme Court in Honduras.

This story was the part of the front page of the web edition and print edition before El Heraldo removed all links to it from their front web page.

What I see is that the next person to occupy the presidency will be a reincarnation of General Tiburcio Cárias Andino.

Cárias Andino was the longest ruling of Honduras's 20th century dictators, from 1932-1949.

German Leitzelar, a Congressman from the PINU party, agreed with Orellana, and said that Juan Orlando Hernandez has the agenda of being elected president then staying in power for more than the term of four years.

Leitzelar asserted that now that he's subjugated the Supreme Court to the Legislative branch,

All that needs to happen for what Edmundo Orellana said is to reform the article that prohibits re-election [of the president] and if you have succeeded in arranging it properly, you have arranged for a constitutional dictatorship.

According to both Leitzelar and Orellana,  Juan Orlando Hernandez is sure to win the 2013 presidential election because he has all the mechanisms of power behind him.

This is an oblique reference to the blatant fraud in reported vote counts from the ballot boxes in the primary election, where 26 percent of the ballot boxes failed an international audit, and where a post-election audit by the International Institute for Democracy showed Juan Orlando Hernandez with 7% fewer votes in the primary for the National Party than the official total. That would have been enough to make Ricardo Alvarez, Mayor of Tegucigalpa, the winner of the National Party's nomination for president.

Leitzelar said that Juan Orlando Hernandez has the political goal of becoming the leader of the country and is attempting to remove all the obstacles that present themselves to attain that goal.

Among the obstacles was the appeal Ricardo Alvarez brought before the Supreme Court the day before Congress voted to remove four Supreme Court justices.

Alvarez is asking that the Supreme Court order the Election Court to actually count all the votes from the primary election.

But it is not just Juan Orlando Hernandez who delivered this blow to democracy in Honduras; it is Porfirio Lobo Sosa too, who supports the action, even if he didn't actually put Juan Orlando Hernandez up to it.

Lobo Sosa showed his complete disdain for an independent court, as called for in the Honduran constitution, when he told journalists in a Christmas lunch yesterday:

If there is a law there [in review by the court], before issuing an opinion they should at least consult with those who wrote the law, or those who approved the law; I think [what happened to the Supreme Court justices] is totally just because the powers are independent, but complementary.

Lobo Sosa went on to add:

We should understand that here no one is above the people, the first power of the State is the Legislative branch because it is the one elected.

The Honduran Constitution, Article 4, actually specifies that there are three independent and equal  powers, not that the Legislative branch is above the other two.

The PINU party released a statement Saturday that read in part:

These decisions [of the Congress] are characteristic of dictatorial governments that seek control of the democratic institutions through intimidation and abuse of power.

Or as German Leitzelar put it:

When we have an animal that quacks like a duck, has feet like a duck and feathers like a duck, then its a duck

The Burning of Markets: History Repeats Itself

Comayagüela lies across from Tegucigalpa, separated by a mostly dry riverbed. Most North Americans probably spend little time there; there would be almost no reason to do so.

Unless you want to go to the traditional markets. Hundreds of market stalls selling everything from sneakers to food.

The first time I went there, in the late 1970s, I found something magical: tiny fired clay whistles shaped like birds. Never found out where they were made; just fell in love with them.

On Saturday, the markets burned. The AP story says more than 1800 stalls were destroyed. Photos show images of incredible destruction in the Colon and San Isidro markets.

Not surprisingly, Honduran newspapers give much more detail. El Tiempo's story on Saturday describes a six hour fight against the fires. The cloud of smoke is likened to a nuclear explosion.

Tiempo described the apparent beginning of the fire, saying that the most common eyewitness account was

that a spark began the blaze in the sector of piñatas in the Colon market, and as it was 12:15 midday and there was a scorching sun, three minutes were enough to unleash a fire of the greatest proportions that has been seen in the capital.

But this is not the first time Tegucigalpa has witnessed these markets burning. Colleagues who are Honduran history students provided the image reproduced here. It shows the market of San Isidro in April 1924, after it was burned "in a context of war and disputes between the caudillos of the time" (to quote one of my correspondents).

A special feature article published by El Heraldo describes the 1924 fire as the first to afflict the market, and identifies the powerful political bosses in conflict as Tiburcio Carías Andino, Vicente Tosta and Gregorio Ferrera. Carías Andino, of course, became the long-running dictator of mid-century Honduras.

El Heraldo goes on to list a litany of more recent fires in these markets: one in the Alvarez market in the late 1980s; another at the end of the 1990s in the Colon market; the destruction in the Colón, Las Américas, San Isidro and Quinta Avenida markets of 218 stalls, on July 30, 2009; and 20 stalls destroyed in the Galindo market just this past October 23.

The latest fire, according to Tiempo, completely destroyed 846 market stalls in the Colon market; half of the 800+ stalls of the San Isidro market; 60% of the Quinta Avenida market; as well as three rows in the Alvarez market, 10 businesses of the San Miguel market, plus other shelters across from the church of Maria Auxiliadora on First Street, and others on Sixth Avenue along the Colon and San Isidro markets. Estimates are that 5000 small market businesses were affected.

The writers of El Heraldo take the opportunity to blame the market people for the repeated fires that destroyed their livelihood, calling the markets "badly constructed" and "in disorder", "for lack of an integrated vision that would permit them to have worthy installations".

Coming right after a description of the 1924 fire, this characterization struck me as inconsistent with what the historic photo shows: the burned facility then was a formally built masonry arcade, surely a "worthy installation".

But there is a narrative being advanced here of backward common people, for whom the fire of 2012 might act as a kind of housecleaning. Historically, though, it might make more sense to pay attention to the tenor of the communications from my correspondents, who note that with the absorption of Comayagüela by Tegucigalpa in 1937,

the people of Comayagüela were condemned to subsidize with their taxes the administrative cost of Tegucigalpa...the same way that in the colonial epoch, when the Spanish appropriated Tegucigalpa and displaced the indigenous population to Comayagüela, where they were gathered together to be used in labor gangs of Tegucigalpa during the day.

Ricardo Alvarez, the current mayor of Tegucigalpa (and primary candidate for President for the Partido Nacional) has called for the relocation of the market stalls to a different site, as yet unidentified.

He also called for the US to send ATF agents to investigate the cause of the fire, which he described as "very unusual" because it "spread from one marked to another like nothing that has happened before". Perhaps reflecting the disquiet raised by two deadly fires in such rapid succession, Alvarez said that a serious investigation was needed to disprove his suspicion that the market fire was deliberately to "destabilize" the country, saying

"I hope that I might be mistaken in that perception".

Mistaken or not, by spreading this innuendo, he is losing no time in making political capital out of the tragedy of thousands of people.

The exploitation of the working people of the capital city has a long, long history. It shouldn't be surprising that this latest disaster can be so quickly turned into propaganda by a politician. It may not be precisely the same as Carías Andino, Tosta and Ferrera burning the market during their struggle for power. But it has the same stench.

"The 1990-2010 crisis in historical perspective" by Miguel Cáceres Rivera and Sucelinda Zelaya (Part 1 of 4)

In the first days after the coup d'Etat of 2009, Honduran scholars rapidly produced reports putting the coup in necessary economic and political context. One of the most creative of these works was by economist Miguel Cáceres Rivera in the form of a Letter to a Honduran friend who is away.

Now he and historian Sucelinda Zelaya (Professor of History at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras) have published an analysis of the economic factors in three major crises of the last 110 years, culminating in what they call "the crisis 1990-2010", which led to the coup d'Etat. Their analysis, in six short but dense pages, makes clear how Honduras went from a country of cattle ranchers and farmers to one dominated by a small, monopolistic business class. It is essential reading.

The three crises that these scholars identify came in the first third of the 20th century, from the end of the 1950s through the mid-1970s, and the most recent, starting in 1990 through the present. Anyone familiar with Honduran history will immediately realize they point to the prior incidents in modern Honduran history where constitutionally elected governments were succeeded by long-term dictatorships. Because the analysis is long and packed with detail, I am breaking up my discussion into separate parts, one for each crisis they identify and a final post translating in full their analysis of how these crises led to the coup of 2009.

It pays to read the entire argument. Think of it as a primer in Honduran political economy.

First crisis

Starting between 1880 and 1900, banana production took the role of primary source of capital previously held by mining and cattle-ranching.

The authors note that initially, there existed a possibility for small-scale banana production to lead to wider distribution of economic benefits, in the same way that coffee growing did in Costa Rica, but that this possibility was blocked by the growth of foreign-owned monopoly banana companies made possible through Honduran government concessions.

In their analysis, this led to a substitution of "taking [political] power and appropriating public funds as a form of compensating for this limitation", making governance the route to wealth for those who had previously profited from mining and ranching.

Because the political struggle between the two major parties led to "frequent coups d'Etat" accompanied by armed conflicts, a "food crisis" of reduced production developed, followed by a "demographic crisis" of slower population growth among the campesino population, the majority of the population.

This "crisis of reproduction" took place in the non-banana growing areas, making up 12 of the 17 states of the country at the time. While the area closest to Tegucigalpa, hardest hit by conflicts, saw greatest population declines, the area along the north coast from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba, center of banana production, saw its population grow.

The dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías Andino followed this period of governmental upheaval. Per capita income of the population outside the banana-producing area went up, and the small business elite grew into a larger-scale industrial elite, using the capital they were accumulating.

Self-conscious of their economic contribution to the production of the country and their position on the social scale, this industrial class demanded and proclaimed for itself a share of political power towards the end of the 1940s.