That Pesky Zelaya Problem

Porfirio Lobo Sosa wants Honduras back in the OAS. Mario Canahauti, his Foreign Minister wants Honduras back in the OAS. José Miguel Insulza, OAS Secretary General, wants Honduras back in the OAS. Arturo Valenzuela, the Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs (or WHA as abbreviated in the leaked cables) of the US State Department wants Honduras back in the OAS.

All of the above named individuals know that the solution is simple: allow Manuel Zelaya Rosales to return to Honduras without facing the charges filed against him during the coup by the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubi. All of the above named individuals, except Canahuati, have made attempts to make that happen.

In his most recent visit to Honduras, concluded the 6 of December, Arturo Valenzuela recognized the efforts of Lobo Sosa to bring about reconciliation, but insisted that Zelaya be allowed to return.

"National reconciliation will have advanced when Honduras is capable of resolving the affair of the return of ex president Zelaya so that it can retake its place in the OAS....This is important for the full reinstatement of Honduras in the international community....The bottom line of what the international community asks in effect is that there be n actual process where the law is applied euqally to all sectors there be a real search for national reconciliation, and this (the return of Zelaya) is an important step that must be accomplished and done."

This is a new recognition by the US State Department of the political reality in the OAS, since until now, the US has not raised Zelaya as an issue in talks with Honduras.

But the right wing in Honduras, which includes the group that planned and executed the coup, stands as a roadblock. As we saw in our recent post on Trash Talking, those standing in the way include Luis Rubi, the Public Prosecutor who brought the charges that need to be dismissed, Jorge Rivera Aviles, the Chief Justice who blessed the coup by exonerating the military for forcibly exiling Zelaya Rosales, and even members of Lobo Sosa's own National Party such as Rodolfo Irias Navas, currently a Congressman and former head of the National Party caucus in Congress.

José Miguel Insulza recently told the AP that he wants the vote to readmit Honduras to the OAS to not be divisive.

"What I am looking for is that the voting not be divisive. It would be very divisive if 10 or 11 voted against it, even if we got a majority....The situation of Zelaya needs to be resolved"

Right now, by his estimate, there are 11 or 12 votes against Honduras.

The cost in Honduras is a truncated foreign relations program. It has put a halt to negotiations about Honduras's maritime boundary with Cuba, Jamaica, Belize, and Guatemala in the Caribbean; It has halted funding for the continued placement of monuments along its border with El Salvador. It kept Honduras from being invited to the IberoAmerican meetings held in Argentina on December 4, at which the group adopted a new "democracy clause" specifying how it would react to future attempted coups in the hemisphere. The cost is in international investment, slowed by the coup. The cost is a 17% reduction in international tourism at Copan in June 2010 when compared with June 2009.

Can Honduras continue to bear the costs?

Jorge Reina a terrorist? Ideas are not bombs

As new Honduras cables continue to emerge through Wikileaks, those of us with interests in Honduras are finding the revelations for the most part unsurprising, if distasteful.

Latest case in point is a patronizing summary by ex-Ambassador to Honduras Charles A. Ford providing his "insights" into then-President Zelaya. On Daily Kos, Charles II of Mercury Rising has provided a good analysis of the disturbing tenor of this cable, which can be read in full on quotha for those who can take it, courtesy of the inimitable Adrienne Pine.

Both Charles and Adrienne point out some of the more wretched indictments of a kind of easy assumption of US privilege, including the contempt Ford showed for Zelaya's roots in Olancho and Zelaya's apparent failure to understand that Tegucigalpa was not the big city, a role played in Ford's universe of model Honduran behavior by New Orleans or Miami. You know, where the Honduran elites go to shop so they don't look so, well, Honduran.

Charles also points to one of the curious and almost unintelligible opinions Ford expresses as facts:

Ford is also loose with accusations. He accuses Jorge Antonio Reina Idiaquez of having terrorist connections. At the time, Reina was UN Ambassador and no charges had ever been brought against him, nor have been. I am unable to discover any substantiation for this allegation, and it may well come out of the Contra Wars.

This had bothered me in reading the cable as well, but not because I had not heard such implications. Instead, for me it rang a bell. So I tried to trace back what I remembered, and I think the story is even less sensible than Charles thought.

In September of 2006-- barely nine months into the Zelaya administration, long before the independent actions that led Ford to express frustration with him-- Proceso Digital published an article about Mel knowing "since December 2005" that his chosen Ambassador to the UN, Jorge Arturo Reina, did not have a visa to enter the US.

According to an earlier Proceso Digital article, this lack of a visa was due to Reina being blocked for what the US embassy described as unspecified "terrorist acts".

But Reina himself volunteered what he thought were the actions at issue. Again quoting Proceso Digital:

Reina, brother of the ex-president Carlos Roberto Reina, now dead, remembered that in the 70s he had been accused of placing a bomb on the Palmerola air base, in the central Department of Comayagua, where the US military forces were based.

Reina went on to say that he had been legally cleared of these charges:

he denied his participation in this act, and said that owing to the fact that this was not true the judicial authorities exonerated him of the action and they sent him home in a kind of dismissal of charges.

The reporters, primed by this information, asked the US consul, Ian Brownlea, whether these were the "terrorist acts" in question, getting this gnomic response:

"ideas are not evils, but rather bombs...the place where the acts occurred doesn't matter".

Indeed. It would seem that the place where the acts occurred does actually matter, if the first half of this statement is, as it appears to be, a grudging agreement that the terrorist actions imputed to Reina involved bombs.

There is something confused in Reina's own account: Palmerola only became operational in 1981. I remember vividly reports of a bomb set off in a restaurant in Comayagua during the 1980s when I was living in the country, a restaurant my Honduran friends said was targeted because the US forces ate there. The New York Times story on this incident in 1987 says six US soldiers and six Hondurans were wounded.

Trying to find press accounts to date these events was a painful reminder that the US presence at Palmerola was not accepted peacefully, no matter what the US would like to tell its citizenry now.

The period from 1987 to 1989 saw a series of bombs or grenades exploded near places frequented by US forces, in La Ceiba, San Pedro Sula, and Comayagua, according to reports in the LA Times gathered in its archives. An LA Times article from 1989 reported two other incidents of attacks on US troops, one a bombing that definitely took place on the road from Comayagua to Palmerola. As late as 1994, the Orlando Sentinel reported on the explosion of a bomb in Comayagua that authorities said was intended for Palmerola.

Bombings drew a lot of press attention but there were other forms of protest as well. An Orlando Sentinel article from 1986 reported on a rally where Juan Almendares spoke out against the bad social effects of the base, promoting prostitution in Comayagua.

But Jorge Arturo Reina was not mentioned as a suspect in any English-language coverage of bombings on or near Palmerola. What he was, without doubt, was an outspoken critic of what he repeatedly called the US "occupation" of Honduras, which he said strengthened the right wing. He called for the withdrawal of US troops, and warned that death lists were circulating with names of many, including his own. (The news articles I consulted are pay for view, so I do not link to them here.)

Palmerola had already come to represent US occupation by 1983, when Reina was widely quoted criticizing increasing tensions with Sandinista Nicaragua as not in Honduras' interest. US newspapers, with remarkable uniformity, characterized Reina at the time as "leftist", at times taking care to note he was "not Marxist".

Reina criticized US basing at Palmerola for dragging Honduras into El Salvador's civil war as well. An article in 1983 in El Pais of Spain, describing him as secretary general of the "Liberal Alliance of the People" (Alianza Liberal del Pueblo, a movement within the Liberal Party), quoted him as saying

"The US refused to negotiate in El Salvador because it has an exclusively military version of the facts and considers that the cause of the Salvadoran crisis was Cuba and its solution uniquely military", adding that "Washington discovered later that the cause was not Cuba and that the situation does not have a military solution, but before this change of view thousands of deaths were produced".

These are the kind of views that undoubtedly made Reina, like Zelaya, appear not to be a friend of the US. But they hardly qualify him as a terrorist.

After all, as the US consul himself said, "ideas are not evils". Nor are they bombs.

But apparently unsubstantiated rumors are fine fodder for a US Ambassador's briefings to his successor.

Inflation: The Beans Did It

Blame the beans. The Honduran economy continues to get bad news. This time it's on the inflation front. November, 2010 inflation added a further 0.8 percent to the cumulative inflation for the year, bringing the total to 6.4% so far this year. This is more than double the inflation rate of 2009.

The Banco Central de Honduras (BCH) released the November Consumer Price Index, and it contained the bad news. The target established by the BCH for all of 2010 was 6% (except for El Heraldo, which claims it was 6-7%), so at the end of November we've already exceeded the target inflation for this year by 0.5% with all of December to go.

The main source of inflation? The BCH report identifies food, especially those pesky beans as the main cause of inflation in November. Oh and pork, eggs, and all the other 33 foodstuffs in the canasta basica. The BCH say that food costs account for about 75% of the inflation rate this month.

While El Heraldo claims the price controls passed by the government, which went into effect on November 19, have worked and kept inflation in check, other papers, such as Tiempo, have pointed out in recent days that the price controls are toothless, because there's no one to enforce them. The law contained funding to hire and train 300 inspectors to enforce it, but of course, that takes time, maybe months. In the meantime, caveat emptor.

Both Tiempo and El Heraldo pointed out there were no beans or pork to be found in Tegucigalpa farmers' markets as recently as December 5. Everyone who can find beans to buy that aren't at a Banasupro store is paying more than the government mandated 70 lempiras for 5 pounds of beans. Red beans were "frozen" at 14 lempiras a pound, but are, according to the Consumer Price Index, priced at a weighted average of 20.25 lempiras a pound in November.

Nor is the burden borne equally around the country. The BCH report shows that inflation is highest in Juticalpa and Danli, at 1.8% in November, followed by western Honduras (Santa Rosa de Copan) at 1.5% and central Honduras (Comayagua) at 1.5%. In fact, just about everybody outside of Tegucigalpa has an inflation rate higher than the "official" inflation rate for the country according to the BCH report. Only the San Pedro (0.5%) and La Ceiba (0.7%) regions have lower inflation.

What does this mean? It is bad news for the Lobo government, which continued to resist price controls until long after things got out of control. Missing your inflation target will have implications with the IMF perceptions of your management of the economy.

But ultimately its bad news for anyone who eats, and that's everyone in Honduras.

Trash Talk

No, I'm not going to discuss the back and forth between Manuel Zelaya Rosales and Porfirio Lobo Sosa. You can read about that trash talking somewhere else.

I'm talking about what politicians do. Politicians say things for many reasons, but generally because they are politically expedient, truth doesn't matter.

Rodolfo Irias Navas did some trash talking to La Tribuna on December 9, 2010, saying he was tired of the double standard of foreign leaders when it comes to impunity. He says they are asking for impunity for Manuel Zelaya Rosales, in violation of Honduran law.

Who is the politician, you ask? He's a former president of the Honduran Congress and a conservative leader for the National Party. What he said, exactly is

"When they ask you to accept ex-president Zelaya, and that we forget the crimes that he committed that are not covered by the amnesty, it appears to me that they are requiring us to violate the constitution of the Republic and the rule of law.....It is sad and it makes me sad when foreign functionaries come here with the double morality, they come to say that there's impunity in Honduras, and on the other hand, they're twisting our arm behind our back to get us to violate the constitution and the laws of the country."

That would be sad, if it were true, but politicians say things that aren't true all the time, if it advances their cause.

What Irias Navas's statement is really all about is clearer when you combine it with a new statement by Chief Justice Jorge Rivera Avilés, who says

"Ex-President Zelaya, in the moment he comes to Honduras, must be captured and placed at the order of the courts.....They have to defend him oportunistically, in the sense that some interpretations can be made, but on this I may not pronounce, because despite having my own criteria, that would be prejudging."

But of course, Rivera Avilés has already prejudged the case. He continues

"They'll send him to jail, or they'll give him an alternative sentence."

Apparently exoneration is not a possibility in Rivera Avilés's universe.

All of this political talk, because that's what it is, is about taking up a position in opposition to Porfirio Lobo Sosa and his attempts to regain international recognition for Honduras. Irias Navas told La Tribuna

"The situation of President Lobo is difficult"

Yup, and its people like Rodolfo Irias Navas and Jorge Rivera Avíles and Luis Rubí who make it difficult.

Welcome to the 1980s

Daily life in Honduras is increasingly much like it was under the military dictatorship of the early 1980s. In the name of security, the country is gradually being militarized.

Yesterday came word that the Department of Copan, along the border with Guatemala, is the latest place to become fully militarized.

Without warning on Wednesday, Operation Fuerza Cabañas, an indefinite deployment of 8 combined military and police units, a total of 350 troops, to the northern part of the Department of Copan, took control of the towns of La Entrada, Florida, San Antonio, El Paraíso, Cabañas, Santa Rita y Copán Ruinas. Police and military began combined patrols, stopping and identifying people walking and driving, and set up 24 hour checkpoints at various points along roadways.

The official policy of joint policing involves placing roadblocks and checkpoints where military and police review the identity papers of everyone who passes that point, by car, bus, truck, or on foot. They inspect everything in and on any vehicles. They pat people down, looking for weapons.

The policy also involves combined patrols walking through neighborhoods, entering houses rounding up people they suspect of being criminals, without warrants.

Most troubling are getting reports from correspondents throughout the country of more disturbing checkpoints set up at night, where the people stopping vehicles are masked, do not wear uniforms, and are heavily armed.

This is precisely what daily life was like in the early 1980s under the last military dictatorship. Travel through the country meant being stopped by army and police units, having everything in your car inspected and potentially queried, up to and including books based on their covers. It meant having buses stopped, young men removed, some taken to military bases for further investigation-- something that happened not just to Honduras we now, but to RNS as well.

First to be militarized in the current campaigns were parts of Colón and Olancho, allegedly to take over security. The military immediately established checkpoints, took over and still control the INA regional headquarters, and began rousting the campesinos of the Movimiento Unido de Campesinos del Aguan (MUCA) who have occupied African palm lands they argue were improperly taken from them by large landowners such as Miguel Facussé. The occupation of this region is indefinite.

In the case of the Copan campaign, the publicly stated purpose is to bring security to the residents of the area. The department of Copan is one of the places where Mexican drug cartels are reported to have established safe houses.

Press accounts of the rationale of this latest deployment is mixed. SDP reported it was strictly an anti-drug campaign. Honduran domestic sources called it a response to the assassination of a congressman from Copan by supposed gang members from Guatemala.

If there were any doubt that militarization is meant to intimidate local populations, Oscar Alvarez, the Security Minister for the current government, has dispelled that with numerous threatening statements.

He said of the campaign in the Bajo Aguan,

"we have the names of a few of the leaders who incite the humble campesinos to take the roads; they will be captured and placed at the order of the prosecutors....We cannot permit that they muddy the name of Honduras and bring water to their mill, which is not the water of honest campesinos, but of persons that wish to discredit the rule of law and the actions of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa."

Is the fascism of the 1980s the future of Honduras?

Dario Euraque: Required Reading

In cities across Honduras, the release of historian Darío Euraque's book, El golpe de Estado, el patrimonio cultural y la identidad nacional [The coup d'etat, cultural patrimony, and national identity] is being marked, starting this coming week.

The event marking the release of the book in San Pedro Sula will be December 11.

We won't be there in person; but as we have since June 28, we will be there in spirit for our colleague and for others who, like him, struggled and continue to struggle to bring Hondurans into a conversation of what it means to be a people without giving into the logics of the modern nation-state.

Euraque has a record of publication which is, quite simply, indispensable to anyone wanting to understand cultural identity in modern Honduras. A previous book, Conversaciones históricas con el mestizaje y su identidad nacional en Honduras [Historical conversations about mestizaje and national identity in Honduras], published in 2004, reframes the conversation about Honduras' roots in indigenous, African, and European populations and how that diversity has come to be misrecognized.

Even earlier, in the 1996 Reinterpreting the Banana Republic, Euraque established a unique focus that refused to homogenize the Honduran past, and that resisted easy simplification. For anyone studying the north coast, it was an unparalleled examination of the local social networks and their influence in the 20th century history of the Honduran state.

And of course, Euraque coined the term "mayanization" to label the process through which deliberate promotion of an image of the Honduran precolumbian past as entirely Maya-- thus making the histories of other Honduran indigenous groups valueless and invisible.

I have had the privilege of reading a draft of Euraque's latest book. It offers a unique, and to me still painful, record of how the practice of liberatory historical research became one of the targets of a reactionary right-wing coup in Honduras. Like all Euraque's works, it is meticulously supported by a rich documentary record. It is a kind of study that really is without equal, despite two decades (or more) of examinations of the pernicious tangle of nationalism and "cultural heritage" (the conceptualize of the physical remains of past people in an area as a property owned by the modern nation, often bolstering that nation's claim to coherent historical reality).

We do not know yet how the book will be distributed in the US. But we will relay that information as soon as we have it, and will hope readers of this blog who have sufficient Spanish will read it. And we look forward to a long future with Dr. Euraque's voice speaking clearly about issues of culture and politics in Honduras.

When Citizens Aren't Equal

Áfrico Madrid, the Honduran Foreign Minister says naturalized citizens cannot engage in political activity. We wonder what constitution and set of laws he's been reading. His position would seem to violate the Honduran constitution and Ley de Migración y Extranjeria (Decreto 208-2003).

First to what Madrid told La Tribuna.

"The country is not a field in which the foreigners can do what they want and for this we are going to apply the screws [to them]...."
"The constitution of the Republic and the Ley de Migración y Extranjería facilitate evaluation of those persons who have acquired naturalization, including suspending and deporting from the country, this is a power the State has."

Well, yes that is a power the State has, but only under carefully defined circumstances as we will see below.

The only named individual to be threatened is Federico Alvarez, a Costa Rican citizen, former president of the Central American Development Bank, and 40 year resident of Honduras. During the de facto regime, Michelletti got Congress to pass a bill giving him naturalized citizenship. But Madrid, and Porfirio Lobo Sosa, claim that Alvarez and five "foreigners" are targeted for expulsion because of political activity.

Remind anyone of the excuse Micheletti's Foreign Minister, Oscar Matute, used to expell Father Andres Tamayo?

What they did then appeared to us at the time to be without merit in Honduran law.

This looks to us like more of the same creative fabrication of Honduran law.

Now in Federico Alvarez's case, Madrid may have a leg to stand on, if, as claimed, Alvarez did not complete the application process for naturalization. Honduran law is clear. Foreigners may not engage in politics in Honduras. But, once you're naturalized, a citizen can engage in politics. The things you, as a naturalized citizen cannot do are spelled out in the Honduran constitution.

A naturalized citizen is a full citizen according to the constitution of Honduras, except for certain clearly spelled out specific things in the constitution.

Article 26 says a naturalized citizen of Honduras cannot:

- Perform official acts on behalf of the Honduran government in your birth country.

Article 42 establishes the grounds by which you can lose citizenship.

- Supporting an enemy of Honduras in a time of war.
- Giving support to a foreigner or foreign government against the government of Honduras.
- To act politically for a foreign government or military, without the permission of Congress.
- by restricting the freedom to vote, adulterate ballots, or employing fraudulent means to circumvent the popular will.
- by supporting re-election of the President of the Republic.
- by, as a naturalized citizen, residing more than 2 years outside of Honduras.

Article 42 goes on to state that for the first two offenses, Congress must issue a law revoking citizenship. For next two, the Executive must issue a decree, and for the last two, the Executive must issue a decree, and there must have been a legal condemnation in the appropriate judicial court.

Decreto 345-2002 (ratified by Decreto 31-2003) establishes that you lose your naturalization if you

(1) accept citizenship in another country
(2) your naturalization letter is revoked for legal reasons.

The Ley de Migración y Extraneria establishes in Article 65 the following reasons a naturalized citizen can lose their citizenship.

(1) By becoming a naturalized citizen in another country
(2) By the cancellation of your naturalization papers
(3) when justified by serious reasons which show the citizen unworthy of Honduran nationality.
(4) when they made a false declaration to aquire citizenship.

That's it.

There's nothing there about a naturalized citizen not participating in the political life of the country. That would make them second class citizens, not something the Honduran constitution contemplates.