Why the OAS MACCIH Will Likely Fail

Multiple articles (here and here, for example) appeared in the press Wednesday echoing what we have been saying in for some time: that the OAS proposal for a Mission de Apoyo Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad en Honduras (MACCIH) seems designed to fail, given Honduras's, and more particularly Juan Orlando Hernández's, history of meddling in the judicial system.

The indignados marches formed the context and motivation when Juan Orlando Hernández proposed the Sistema Integral Hondureño de Combate a la Impunidad y Corrupcion (SIHCIC).  He made the proposal as an attempt to shut the indignados protests down.

At the same time he proposed a "national dialogue" to open up the process to improvement, but no part of the SIHCIC process involved actually generating concrete suggestions from the dialogues, and there was no actual legislative proposal or even a report resulting from them. 

Hernández chaired the first several meetings, with groups usually allied politically with him, then turned the entire process over to a congressman to oversee.

The SIHCIC proposal has five basic components:

• first, a support committee for the Public Prosecutor's office to include both Honduran and international jurists that would audit the actions of the Public Prosecutor's office and aid in the pursuit of corruption

• second, a similar support committee to oversee the Consejo de la Judicatura, the group that disciplines judicial misbehavior

• third, a group responsible for the security of judges and their families

• fourth, an observatory of the judicial system involving academic and civil society members

• fifth, a business integrity group that would promote transparency and ethical standards for businesses and could propose rules and legislation to support them.

The proposal suggests nothing about judicial independence. It keeps the existing balance of power, tilted extraordinarily strongly towards the executive branch, and in fact, would reinforce it. 

The indignados rejected this proposal precisely because it did nothing to further judicial independence.  They continued to call for the establishment of a CICIH along the lines of the CICIG which has been successful in Guatemala. 

However, some of the indignados, including a leader, Tomás Andino, believe that even a CICIH might not work.  Andino said:

Guatemala has a relatively greater independence of powers than Honduras, which does not function as a democratic state...Here, a U.N. commission would be embedded in a corrupt system.

Because the indignados and other groups refused to participate in Hernández' dialogue, given its closed nature and lack of a mechanism for incorporating any results of the dialogues into legislation, Hernández eventually asked both the OAS and UN for mediators and facilitators. 

The OAS sent John Biehl del Rio who met with many of the same groups that Hernández had, then met in turn with the indignados and other groups that had not participated in the dialogues.  However, he was partisan from the start.  He openly rejected the indignados' call for a CICIH and dismissed the opposition in Honduras in inappropriate ways. 

As a result of his recommendations the OAS instead proposed, and Juan Orlando Hernández accepted, the Mission de Apoyo Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad en Honduras (MACCIH), designed to take another two years to perform studies and make recommendations.

MACCIH, not unsurprisingly given John Biehl's antipathy for the indignados, parallels and expands on the SIHCIC proposal of Hernández.  It calls for the formation of a set of international judges and lawyers to advise the Public Prosecutor's office and provide technical support to the investigative services.  It uses the Centro de Estudios de Justicia de las Americas (CEJA) to write a series of reports and recommendations on the justice system in Honduras.  It invokes the OAS's Mecanismo de Seguimiento del Implementación del Convención InterAmericana contra la Corrupción (MESICIC) to evaluate and recommend legal changes necessary to fight corruption and bring Honduras into line with the Inter-American Convention against Corruption.  It also calls for the establishment of an observatory of the judicial system to monitor its progress.

A Woodrow Wilson Center report authored by Eric Olsen and Katherine Hyde pointed out nine weaknesses of the MACCIH proposal that, they say, "must be addressed if this and other efforts are to be more than mere window dressing".

For us the most relevant and pressing of their questions is this one, which we also have been asking:

The priority of the MACCIH seems to be assessment and recommendations for institutional reform.  There is little question that institutional reforms are needed, but I know of at least two internationally sanctioned, highly credible assessments of Honduras's law enforcement institutions and justice system in the last four years, and their findings and recommendations are very sound.  Yet the government of Honduras (both current and previous) failed to act on the vast majority of these recommendations.  The question is whether it is really necessary at this point to carry out additional costly assessments and evaluations and again develop reform proposals when much of the work has already been done.  Why not adopt the recommendations that have already been made by international bodies -- including ironically, the OAS just six months ago -- and get to work now.

We would go further and suggest that Juan Orlando Hernández himself, while head of the Honduran Congress, was one of those who "failed to act on the vast majority of recommendations" for judicial reforms. While head of Congress he initiated questionable procedures to remove four sitting Supreme Court justices because he didn't like their ruling on Model Cities. Why does anyone, including the OAS, think that suddenly this will change, that the Honduran government will now act to implement the suggestions?

The MACCIH proposal has won support from James Nealon, US Ambassador to Honduras, who immediately after its announcement tweeted his approval.  But Foreign Policy magazine called it "more like a tool to appease the masses rather than an effective tool for reform."  Carlos Ponce of Freedom House said recently:

"The solution is not making more reports, but bringing change to Honduras.  We’re not talking about India or Brazil but a small country with lots of potential — but a lack of will to change. The families in power are in bed with factions in the government that also control the media. Corruption is linked directly to political parties, so you have to change the power structure."

Nothing in MACCIH even seeks to addresses this fundamental problem.  Without a demonstrated "will to change" there is no reason to expect MACCIH to bring about meaningful change in Honduras and more than previous studies cited in the Wilson Center report have.

 Meanwhile, Judicial independence in Honduras and Corruption in Honduras were the topics of two hearings last week at the Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR in English and CIDH in Spanish). 

The government of Honduras boycotted the hearings. That should give those supporting the MACCIH pause; is there any will to examine these basic questions?

César Ham: co-opted leftist

As noted in a previous post, the government assembled by Porfirio Lobo Sosa incorporates former rivals for the presidency (although not all of them: notably, Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos is not included).

César Ham, presidential candidate for the UD party, is one of those included, named as Director of the Instituto Nacional Agrario.

Tomás Andino, UD member active in the National Resistance Front, reacted to the agreement by Ham to serve in the present government by resigning from the party. Since then, a call has gone out for other UD members to resign as well. Fundamentally, what these members of the party are decrying is a betrayal of the revolutionary leftist roots of the UD party itself.

Campesino leader Rafael Alegría quoted in El Heraldo as saying that he didn't think it was possible for Ham to be part of the Lobo government:

They are making common cause with a party on the right in the country, historically responsible for the delay in the detention of poverty in our country

Those leaving the party over this issue may go on to political activism in other forms. But their departure raises the question, what happens to the UD? And, what is the role of Ham in the future of Honduran politics?

As news coverage in Honduras notes, the UD currently has three different factions. Ham, officially the leader, was strongly identified with President Zelaya in the lead-up to the June 28 poll. A "dissident" faction is headed by Renán Valdez. Separate from both of these is what is described as "a group of militants, founders of this party, among them the writer Matías Funes". Funes was quoted in August, 2009, fiercely criticizing César Ham for his personal corruption, his alliance with President Zelaya, and predicting he would withdraw from the presidential campaign to avoid an embarrassing electoral loss.

In the end, of course, César Ham remained on the November 29 ballot. Reporting on the November 21 meeting of UD directors that decided to continue with the election, news media quoted Ham as saying

The party assembly resolved this evening, after a wide-ranging debate and discussion, to participate in the electoral process in order to permit the people to have representation and defend their rights in the National Congress and mayoralties...in this way the Constitutional Assembly that the people demand can be reached...the Constitutional Assembly should not only be sought in the streets, but also in the political spaces such as the mayoralties and the National Congress.

In his letter resigning membership in the UD, Andino notes a history of cutting political deals with the leaders of other parties to gain advantage in the Honduran Congress. While this is politics as usual, as a revolutionary party, the UD is not supposed to cut such deals. Ham has not responded to the well-advertised letter from Andino, except to dismiss it during a press event where he announced his intention to implement a 2009 law facilitating expropriation of land for rural farm collectives to develop.

Perhaps harder for Ham to ignore is Andino's charge that

Power turns out to be irresistible to those gentlemen, because from it they derive privileges, such as the importation of luxury cars to then sell them.

This is, of course, a reference to Ham's use of congressional import privileges, which was prohibited by UD party rules. When initially faced with the charge in January of 2009, Ham denied it. As reported at the time, it was a faction of the UD itself that brought these charges to public attention. Ham, admitting the use of this privilege, argued that the vehicles were sold to raise funds for the use of the UD party assembly.

Ham started his tenure as Director of INA with this somewhat less than ringing vote of confidence from Porfirio Lobo Sosa:

César Ham is nobody's fool, he is going to respect the law and the constitution of the Republic. He is going to try to come out very well from his position, to serve the campesino sector well... César is going to do well...they are going to do well, they are not going to violate the law, they are not going to do anything that would signify generating an instability in the country because we know that this would not suit us.

According to coverage of the inauguration of Lobo Sosa in El Heraldo, when he mentioned former presidential candidate César Ham during his inaugural address, the crowd that had applauded his comments on Bernard Martinez booed so loud that it overcame the loudspeakers and made his citation of Elvin Santos inaudible.

So who is César Ham? A biographical sketch published in El Heraldo on November 24 describes him as a second-generation leftist, son of a union activist father, with a history of activism at university and afterward. A founding member of the UD party, and a congressional member elected from that party, he nonetheless traced a shaky course within the UD. In this article, he explicitly called on Hondurans resisting the coup to vote for him, rather than follow the call of the Resistance Front to boycott the election.

The UD party, or Partido Unificación Democrática, was officially recognized in 1993, formed from leftist movements that could not be recognized until the Treaty of Esquipulas gave former guerrilla groups recognition as political parties.

INA, which César Ham now runs, has a mission described on its official website:

To maximize the national peasantry. facilitating access to land for the vocation of agriculture and cattle ranching through the expropriation and adjudication, offering legal security in the tenancy, of land assigned, by granting titles in Freehold, accompanied by an effective program of business rationalization that considers attention to organizational aspects and technological advances in productive units, with the goal to generate high production and productivity that will facilitate the insertion of the producers in the local, national, and international market, converting them into efficient, profitable, and self-sustaining businesses, generators of employment and income for the benefit of the great majority.

What does this mean? INA is critical to farmers seeking land titles. INA was one of the sites of resistance to the coup d'etat, occupied by campesinos until they were forcibly dislodged at the end of September under the de facto regime.

César Ham, embattled within his own party, repudiated by the Resistance Front, appointed by Pepe Lobo against strong public disapproval, faces skepticism on every side. Political commentator Juan Ramón Martinez is quoted as expecting him to create problems that will have to be solved by the Minister of Agriculture, in a cabinet characterized as internal unity or ideological coherence. For this commentator, the Lobo Sosa cabinet is temporary, expected to be transformed into a more conventional form not long after July or August. It may be a short run for this leftist turned accommodationist.

Fallout from UD participation in Lobo government

In an open letter dated January 28, translated and published in both Spanish original and English by Adrienne Pine, UD party member Tomás Andino, former member of the UD Directivo Nacional and former Diputado suplente (substitute congress-member), renounced his party membership to protest the loss of direction signaled by other party members, Marvin Ponce and Cesar Ham, accepting positions in the National Party-led government.

Ham, as we noted in the previous post, has been sworn in as a member of the Lobo cabinet. Ponce was named to a leadership position in the National Congress.

Most significant going forward, Andino calls on other members of the UD, the sole leftist party authorized by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, to join him to build a new electoral movement through the National Resistance Front:

It is my opinion that the political option of the people should be built from the base of the Popular Resistance, and as such I invite all honest UD members to leave the party so we can join together with other sectors of the revolutionary left to turn it into a huge political movement that will bring Honduras to socialism.

Andino has been participating in the Resistance since the very first day of the coup; you can listen to his first-hand report broadcast June 29 on Radio Liberada, in which he describes the farce of Congress on June 28, reminding us that the "justification" of the coup d'etat that day was a forged letter of "resignation". In November, Andino rejected his party leaders participation in the election, against the call for boycott by the Frente.

While it is still unclear how the Frente will decide to pursue its goals, and the UD party has been a tiny minority throughout its brief history, this is how new political movements are born.