Who's Who in Hugo Lloren's Cable

Looking at the list of people receiving Hugo Lloren's cable available from Wikileaks, presented in our previous post, there's something odd in the list of recipients.

Here's the list of addressees:

FM AMEMBASSY TEGUCIGALPA
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 0237
INFO RUEHZA/WHA CENTRAL AMERICAN COLLECTIVE IMMEDIATE
RUEHCV/AMEMBASSY CARACAS IMMEDIATE 0735
RHEHAAA/THE WHITE HOUSE WASHDC IMMEDIATE
RUEAIIA/CIA WASHDC IMMEDIATE
RHEFDIA/DIA WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATE
RUEIDN/DNI WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATE
RHEHAAA/NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATE
RUMIAAA/USSOUTHCOM MIAMI FL IMMEDIATE

and further, in the body it notes distribution to:

WHA FOR A/S TOM SHANNON
L FOR HAROLD KOH AND JOAN DONOGHUE
NSC FOR DAN RESTREPO

Tom Shannon was, at that time, nominated as ambassador to Brazil but was still Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs. His nomination to become ambassador was held up by Senator Jim DeMint (R, NC).

Harold Koh was appointed by President Obama to be the Legal Advisor to the Secretary of State. Under President Clinton he had been Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor.

Joan Donoghue, at the time of the cable, was Principle Deputy Legal Advisor at the State Department, having for the six months ending in June 2009 been the acting Legal Advisor. She has served in a number of roles in the State Department since her most recent tenure there began in 2007, including giving advice to the State Department on the development, interpretation and application of international human rights law. She has since been nominated and appointed a judge in the International Court of Justice.

Dan Restrepo, at the National Security Council, was President Obama's senior adviser on Latin American Affairs during the campaign. He was appointed as Senior Director of the Western Hemisphere Affairs council of the National Security Council, the post which he occupied at the time of this cable.

Other addressees include the Western Hemisphere Affairs Central American Committee in the State Department, the White House, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the National Security Council (NSC) and SOUTHCOMM, the Southern Command of the US Military.

The last addressee, however, puzzles me. That addressee is the US Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, at the time just reoccupied by Patrick Duddy. Duddy had been appointed ambassador under President Bush, but was thrown out of Venezuela by Hugo Chavez in September 2008, for alleged complicity in the coup plot against Chavez. He was subsequently re-appointed under the Obama administration and after Obama met with Hugo Chavez in April 2009, was allowed to resume his post in Caracas in July 2009.

Why is the cable addressed to the US Embassy in Venezuela? Wikileaks does not currently have any related traffic from either Honduras or Venezuela, but promises more cables from each country will be posted in coming weeks. Maybe some of that traffic will help clarify the inclusion of this one other embassy in communication about the Honduran coup.

Hugo Llorens Concluded Coup was Utterly Unjustified

------- Comment -------

¶19. (C) The analysis of the Constitution sheds some interesting light on the events of June 28. The Honduran establishment confronted a dilemma: near unanimity among the institutions of the state and the political class that Zelaya had abused his powers in violation of the Constitution, but with some ambiguity what to do about it. Faced with that lack of clarity, the military and/or whoever ordered the coup fell back on what they knew -- the way Honduran presidents were removed in the past: a bogus resignation letter and a one-way ticket to a neighboring country. No matter what the merits of the case against Zelaya, his forced removal by the military was clearly illegal, and Micheletti's ascendance as "interim president" was totally illegitimate.

¶20. (C) Nonetheless, the very Constitutional uncertainty that presented the political class with this dilemma may provide the seeds for a solution. The coup's most ardent legal defenders have been unable to make the intellectual leap from their arguments regarding Zelaya's alleged crimes to how those allegations justified dragging him out of his bed in the night and flying him to Costa Rica. That the Attorney General's office and the Supreme Court now reportedly question the legality of that final step is encouraging and may provide a face-saving "out" for the two opposing sides in the current standoff. End Comment.

These are the last two paragraphs in a cable sent from Tegucigalpa in July, 2009, by US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens.

The cable, included among a massive release of documents by Wikileaks, has already been discussed by the Miami Herald. They chose to emphasize the fact that the ambassador reached the conclusion that the coup was "clearly illegal".

That conclusion should come as no surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention to the facts, and tells us more about the ability of the US media to refuse to understand those facts than about the content of the cable or US policy.

Instead, we would emphasize the point by point summary of the arguments of coup supporters and the devastating rejection of those points:

¶3. (SBU) Defenders of the June 28 coup have offered some combination of the following, often ambiguous, arguments to assert it's legality:

-- Zelaya had broken the law (alleged but not proven);

-- Zelaya resigned (a clear fabrication);

-- Zelaya intended to extend his term in office (supposition);

-- Had he been allowed to proceed with his June 28 constitutional reform opinion poll, Zelaya would have dissolved Congress the following day and convened a constituent assembly (supposition);

-- Zelaya had to be removed from the country to prevent a bloodbath;

-- Congress "unanimously" (or in some versions by a 123-5 vote) deposed Zelaya; (after the fact and under the cloak of secrecy); and

-- Zelaya "automatically" ceased to be president the moment he suggested modifying the constitutional prohibition on presidential reelection.

¶4. (C) In our view, none of the above arguments has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution. Some are outright false. Others are mere supposition or ex-post rationalizations of a patently illegal act. Essentially:

-- the military had no authority to remove Zelaya from the country;

-- Congress has no constitutional authority to remove a Honduran president;

-- Congress and the judiciary removed Zelaya on the basis of a hasty, ad-hoc, extralegal, secret, 48-hour process;

-- the purported "resignation" letter was a fabrication and was not even the basis for Congress's action of June 28; and

-- Zelaya's arrest and forced removal from the country violated multiple constitutional guarantees, including the prohibition on expatriation, presumption of innocence and right to due process.

This reads almost exactly like a summary of the arguments we have made, in this blog and its predecessor, Honduras Coup 2009.

We also like the ambassador's choice of words for paragraphs 11 through 13 of his cable, which he entitled "The Article 239 Canard". As he properly noted, this was only cited post-facto to retroactively claim that President Zelaya had removed himself from office by advocating constitutional reform. The US Embassy cites numerous good reasons for rejecting this entire line of argument.

Most wonderful in this section is the final paragraph:

¶13. (C) It further warrants mention that Micheletti himself should be forced to resign following the logic of the 239 argument, since as President of Congress he considered legislation to have a fourth ballot box ("cuarta urna") at the November elections to seek voter approval for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. Any member of Congress who discussed the proposal should also be required to resign, and National Party presidential candidate Pepe Lobo, who endorsed the idea, should be ineligible to hold public office for 10 years.

This is indeed the case; but look who's in the Presidential Palace now, with full US recognition.

Finally, we fully endorse the conclusion in paragraph 18 that the illegal actions of the Honduran Congress did more than remove Zelaya; they were an illegal removal of an entire branch of government by the other two branches, a violation of the very notion of checks and balances:

In the absence of any of these conditions and since Congress lacked the legal authority to remove Zelaya, the actions of June 28 can only be considered a coup d'etat by the legislative branch, with the support of the judicial branch and the military, against the executive branch. It bears mentioning that, whereas the resolution adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect was to remove the entire executive branch.

There is every reason to expect more material posted on Wikileaks will be relevant to understanding US policy in Honduras.

The question this July 2009 cable raises is, why was the US so timid in its actions when it had access to such a clear exposition of the issues?

Dreams of an Insurgency

On November 15, armed guards at one of Miguel Facussé's African palm plantations in the Bajo Aguan community of El Tumbador, shot and killed 6 campesinos who they said were trying to invade the plantation.

The police declined to investigate the latest shootings. They neither recovered the bodies nor collected any evidence.

After these latest killings, Porfirio Lobo Sosa ordered the complete militarization of the zone.

Oscar Alvarez, Honduras' security minister, claims to have information through the Police intelligence unit that there are armed groups intending insurrection forming in the Bajo Aguan.

This is not a new claim; it was made at least as early as February of this year. There's no public evidence to support the claim.

Then on Wednesday, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, declaring that there was good evidence that there was an arms cache somewhere in the Bajo Aguan with 1000 AK-47s and M-16s in the hands of groups being trained to attack the government of Honduras. Lobo Sosa knows this because Security Minister Alvarez told him it was true.

Lobo Sosa indicated a massive, secret operation was underway in the Aguan, to clean out all the known arms caches in the Bajo Aguan:

"We have traces of the people who have been voyaging outside of Honduras to receive training, we have them all located, including the places where they are being trained outside of here, of Honduras; it's a large quantity of arms they have, and we're going after them."

No one outside of the military and the national police knows the target(s) of this investigation. Lobo Sosa claims the current operation will put an end to the killings in the Bajo Aguan.

The first, and so far, only target, was the INA regional office in the Bajo Aguan, which the military and police took over in an early morning raid yesterday morning.

They found nothing.

Why target INA? it might have something to do with the history of the land where the latest massacre of peasant activists took place.

El Tumbador, the site of the massacre, in the 1980s formed part of the Centro Regional de Entrenamiento Militar (CREM). CREM, just outside Trujillo, was where US military advisers trained Salvadoran, and later Nicaraguan Contra forces, in the US's battle against leftists in Central America.

There's a long history of conflict over this land, home to some important archaeological remains investigated in the 1970s by Paul Healy. In 1983 I was advised by the Honduran military that the US base commander had denied me permission to verify the safety of the Selin Farm archaeological site, which I was checking as a representative of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

After the CREM facility was decommissioned, campesinos moved in and established the community of Guadalupe Carney in the remains of the base. Guadalupe Carney has been the site of killings of as many as 17 campesinos in struggles over rights to the land.

Today, both the Movimiento Unificado de Campesino del Aguan (MUCA) and the US citizen Temistocles Ramirez claim El Tumbador. So how does Miguel Facussé come into it?

The Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA) says that the government, not Miguel Facussé, owns the land in question at El Tumbador.

The documentation is stored in the INA regional office in Sinaloa, in the Bajo Aguan. César Ham, current head of INA (a cabinet position in the Lobo Sosa government, remember), said that Facussé appropriated 565 hectares of government land inappropriately, land which belongs specificially to INA, land that was part of CREM.

Oscar Alvarez, the security minister, says that armed groups in the Bajo Aguan are funded by NGO's that are trying to destabilize Honduras. According to him, it's Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who are supporting these supposed clandestine groups. This charge has drawn a categorical denial by Nicaraguan Authorities.

Rafael Alegria, campesino leader and one of the voices of the FNRP called Alvarez's allegations a smoke screen designed to disorient public opinion.

The de facto regime made similar claims about the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP) right after the coup, and harrassed and deported many Central Americans during its 7 month reign. In fact, Oscar Alvarez goes further, and revives a claim that in the 1980s, "several Hondurans were recruited in Nicaragua and then trained in Cuba to try to destabilize the Honduran government".

In fact, there is a large paramilitary organization in the Bajo Aguan right now, armed with AK-47s and M-16s, and protected by powerful individuals, just as Porfirio Lobo Sosa claimed. Except that it's not a campesino group. It's the armed guards hired by DINANT corporation to guard facilities in the Bajo Aguan.

Honduran resistance members argue that these private police forces are being trained by Colombian groups like the Mano Blanco, linked to similar violence against campesinos in Colombia. Reports of former AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) operatives being hired by Honduran elites were treated seriously by the UN in fall 2009. It is publicly acknowledged by Honduras and Colombia that security forces from Colombia are in Honduras this year on a "training" mission.

It was the spokesperson for DINANT corporation, Roger Pineda, who told HRN radio the unbelievable story that the El Tumbador finca guards were attacked by a group of 200 campesinos armed with AK-47 rifles. Press photographs circulated that showed several of the corpses allegedly holding (in what appeared to me to be a completely unnatural manner) AK-47s.

It's among DINANT corporation's paramilitary guards that Oscar Alvarez needs to look for his arms cache.

But instead, credit the new military operation for the successes it can report: in traffic stops they found 27 people carrying pistols and even a shotgun, without having the proper documentation of their right to own these guns

So José Luis Muñoz Licona, director of the National Police called the operation a success.

Tale of Two Polls

November's news from Honduras has brought us piecemeal reporting on the results, though not all the data, from two different opinion polls in Honduras. These show an interesting evolution in opinion in Honduras, though you couldn't tell that from the press coverage.

The first poll, carried out by Vanderbilt's Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), is covered in recent stories in El Heraldo and La Prensa. Press coverage was sparked by the public release of the LAPOP report Cultura politica de la democracía en Honduras 2010, part of their Americas Barometer series. [While the link to the PDF appears to be working erratically, the technical information page establishes the information used here.]

This report is based on data from a poll carried out in January and February of 2010, just after Porfirio Lobo Sosa was inaugurated. LAPOP describes it as a stratified and clustered sample of 1596 respondents, with a margin of error of 2.75%. Previous commentary on the poll appeared in LAPOP's Insights series in August.

LAPOP has been issuing press releases based on analyses of the data since at least April. We covered an earlier one in this post.

On November 8, El Tiempo reported the results of a Centro de Estudios para la Democracia (CESPAD) poll carried out in September, 2010. This poll, carried out by a European polling agency and funded by OXFAM, surveyed 800 respondents and bears a reported margin of error of 0.07%. Their report can be downloaded here.

Polls measure sentiment at the time they were carried out, which can stay relatively stable or change in response to changing knowledge or conditions.

Poll results can also be influenced by the way questions are asked, which is why analysts always need to see the specific wording of a question. At its extreme, so-called "push-polling" involves asking questions in ways that, while purporting to solicit opinion, actually seek to change opinion. This verges from spreading outright falsehoods to simply framing an issue in ways likely to give people a bad impression and raise negative feelings.

Push-polling is considered a political strategy, a way to distort people's ideas. But there is a broader literature on polling that asks whether polls themselves can influence opinion, either through "bandwagon" effects (or contagion-- moving to the winning side), or through what in elections is called "strategic voting": making a choice that is not the one you really most support because your assessment is that what you most support has little potential of happening. Research results do support the existence of such strategic opinion shift.

So polls need to be considered historically and with attention to the specific questions asked.

In the wake of the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the LAPOP poll from January/February question PN4 asked "In general, would you say you were very satisfied, satisfied, unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with the form of democracy in Honduras?" La Prensa reported that 53.6% of their respondents were satisfied with Honduran democracy, and a further 12% were greatly satisfied. 31.6% told LAPOP they were unsatisfied, and a further 2.9% were very unsatisfied.

In its poll, taken in September, CESPAD obviously did not ask precisely the same question. Instead, it included two questions that generate comparable opinion; and those opinions completely reverse the picture of satisfaction LAPOP's earlier poll presented.

CESPAD found a huge level of dissatisfaction with the condition of democracy in Honduras. In answer to the question, "Are you satisfied with the current democracy or think that things should become more democratic?", only 14% of respondents reported that they were satisfied. A full 86% reported that they were unsatisfied and felt things should become more democratic:

	Satisfied/Very Satisfied	Unsatisfied/Very Unsatisfied
LAPOP February	66%	34%
CESDPAD September	14%	86%

In September, only 15.4% of the respondents felt that Honduras had overcome the crisis set off by the 2009 coup, with a further 8% thinking Honduran democracy was functioning normally. The remainder either felt that Honduran democracy was in crisis (50.0%) or felt Honduras had no democracy (21.4%) or weren't interested (5.1%).

Compare this to the January/February LAPOP survey question HONCRSPOL7: "How satisfied were you with the solution to the political crisis of 2009?". Note that this question contains the assumption that the political crisis had ended, presumably with the election of Lobo Sosa in November 2009. In early 2010, LAPOP reported that 59.6% of respondents were satisfied with whatever they saw as the solution to the political crisis.

If we take these two questions as measuring about the same thing, then sentiment about whether the coup of 2009 has been resolved has eroded from 59.6% in January/February to 23.4% in September. A much higher proportion of the population in September thought the democracy was in crisis or there was no democracy in Honduras (71.4%) than believed in February that the crisis had been resolved (23.4%).

In January/February LAPOP followed their question about how satisfied with the "solution" to the crisis people were with another (HONCRSPOL8) that asked respondents what their preferred solution to the crisis was. The questionnaire provided a predefined list of answers that were to be scored, along with the instruction that the list of potential answers was not to be read to the respondents. The list of preferred solutions to the crisis did not include holding elections.

Here, 42.2 percent of the LAPOP respondents preferred reinstating Zelaya in some way for a period of time (31.2 % until the end of his term in January 2010, while a further 11 % said restore Zelaya and allow his reelection).

29.8% thought Micheletti should continue in power, another 11% thought a third party should be appointed to head the government as a solution.

Finally, 8.1% thought the solution to the crisis of 2009 involved trying those who broke the law.

All of the other proposed solutions were favored by under 2% of those surveyed.

In contrast, CESPAD found that in September, 76% of their respondents felt that a solution to the crisis would require an agreement among all the actors in the crisis. 65% felt that this was the only way to solve the crisis, and a further 11% felt that it was necessary but would not resolve all the underlying issues.

These respondents didn't feel the crisis was over in September, and it is likely that they would define "the crisis" differently than respondents did in January and February. Then, the proposal being put forward politically by everyone from the newly elected Honduran government to the US State Department was that the November 2009 elections had put the coup behind. Now, half a year further on, people can see that has not really happened.

Changes in popular opinion between the two polls suggest the campaign to promote a constitutional assembly by the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP) is bearing fruit.

In January/February, LAPOP asked "Are you in favor of forming a constitutional assembly?" (HONCRSPOL5). A largely majority of their respondents were not in favor of a constitutional assembly (70.5%) with only 29.5% in favor.

In September, CESPAD found that things had turned around, so that when they asked "Are you in favor or against convening a constitutional assembly?", a majority of their respondents, 55%, were in favor, with 45% opposed.

As we have noted in other posts, in recent months politicians from all the major parties have begun to single willingness to talk about changing Article 5 of the constitution to allow polling the public to find out their opinion, and Lobo Sosa is willing to talk about holding a constitutional convention.

Public opinion changes.

LAPOP's press releases this week were based on old data. There is newer, and therefore, more relevant, opinion research available, which tells a different story.

That's the tale of these two polls.

Forget It

In Porfirio Lobo Sosa's world, everyone who did anything connected with the coup of June 28, 2009, would be pardoned, if only the National Congress would give him that power.

Lobo Sosa announced this Friday after returning from a visit to Taiwan. He said he'd like to pardon Manuel Zelaya Rosales and the military, since he doesn't want to see anyone behind bars. He noted he's already had conversations with the National Congress about getting them to grant him the authority.

Lobo Sosa says that this is merely a power that other presidents have had, and that his mandate, derived from his election, is to bring peace and reconciliation.

"Because of this, as I have said and repeated, I don't want to see "Mel" in jail, I don't want to see the military in jail, not anybody; we've got to pardon everyone; we're buried in the past and that which divides us.....I would pardon everything derived from the 28th of June and I say lets look forward and forget the past."

Lobo Sosa wants the issue of the coup and June 28 to be closed once and for all, so that he can get on with his 28 year neoliberal National Plan without having to constantly fight for international recognition and funding. It's what he promised he would do once elected, but this issue of the coup keeps getting in the way, taking up all his time and energy.

George Santayana said, in the context of a theory about how knowledge is acquired, that

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
(in Life of Reason 1)

Honduras needs the self-knowledge about what happened on June 28, 2009. By attempting to sweep it under the rug, Lobo Sosa looks for a facile solution to move forward, but instead only prolongs the time to self-knowledge.

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.

Patrimony and Cocaine

Customs agents at the Ramon Villeda Morales airport found cocaine inside a replica of a prehispanic figure sent for shipment out of the country last week.

Nearly 2 kilos of cocaine were enclosed inside the object, part of a group of 27 packed in two boxes.

On November 13, El Tiempo reported that the alleged sender had been identified as Ismael Ramírez, resident in San Pedro Sula, while leaving open the possibility that his name was used without his authorization.

The package was being shipped to an individual in Barcelona, Spain, named variously "Salomón Guerra" or "Salomón Porra".

The replica containing the cocaine in this shipment was described as made of a mixture of cement and stone, about two feet tall, and judging from the picture in El Tiempo, is a somewhat bad impression of one of the much larger stelae of Copan.

Mixtures of stone and cement have been used with greater and lesser degrees of skill to make replicas of stelae for quite some time; the best such work is actually on view in the site of Copan itself, where many of what look like original sculptures are actually replicas prepared under the supervision of international archaeologists. The object involved in this drug shipment is clearly of quite another order of artistry.

Another 26 small statues made of modern composite material were included in the shipment. Similar objects, often still wet and covered with hastily applied black or green paint, are commonly offered to tourists who visit the archaeological ruins at Copan by vendors outside the park.

The amount of cocaine involved-- two packages totalling two kilos-- is relatively small. What is most troubling about this news is that the authority of the Honduran national patrimony agency is being actively exploited to try to facilitate the export of drugs. Paperwork accompanying the shipment was supposedly from the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, authorizing the pieces, from the Copan region, to leave the country.

Indeed, the article in Tiempo credits airport staff as originally questioning the papers from the Institute because they suspected the objects were actual antiquities being smuggled out against Honduran law, under the guise of replicas.

Speaking strictly as a professional, the objects illustrated in news articles shouldn't have caused even a moment of uncertainty about their legitimacy. They are tchotchkes, souvenirs, and my only question would be why anyone in Spain would want to import them.

Not that the linkage of Precolumbian artifacts and drugs is entirely novel. Archaeological materials and drugs seem to circulate through the same channels. There is a thriving trade in illegally exported Honduran antiquities, and in recent years, theft of colonial art has been especially heated, again for illegal exportation. To quote Neil Brodie, an expert in the illegal traffic in antiquities,

Direct links between drugs trafficking and antiquities smuggling in Central America for instance have been reported on more than one occasion. In Belize and Guatemala jungle airstrips are used by criminals to smuggle out drugs and antiquities...while at the receiving end a smuggler’s plane arriving in Colorado from Mexico was found to contain 350 lb of marijuana and many thousands of dollars-worth of Pre-Columbian antiquities.

Press coverage to date leaves open the question of when the drugs were inserted in the replica stela, and whether this was done by the original maker or after the object was acquired. The former, obviously, would indicate a more serious tie between the cultural heritage industry and drug smuggling. But even if, as we hope, the smugglers in this case simply seized opportunistically on a cheap, easy to find, hollow container for drugs, the case is a troubling one.