No More Standards at All: So Much for Unalterable Constitutional Clauses

Honduran congress-members overthrow the myth of the "untouchable" articles of the Constitution.

Say what?

That's the headline on an AFP story by Freddy Cuevas, which notes that

There is a measure of irony in the changes approved Wednesday night...

Well, yeah...

The AP article includes an interesting characterization of the original motivation for including the language in the constitution that seems to block any revision of the constitution:

The permanent ban on re-election was imposed as the country emerged from a military dictatorship, and it was meant to break the vicious cycle of Honduran leaders perpetuating themselves in power for years...

This is a worth thinking about. The implication would be that Honduras had a history of elected presidents overstaying their welcome prior to the writing of the new constitution in 1982. The archetype for this in the 20th century would have to be Tiburcio Carías Andino, who maintained his position as head of state after being elected in 1932 until 1949.

But there is not, otherwise, any evidence that elected Honduran leaders in the 20th century took part in any "vicious cycle" of "perpetuating themselves in power for years". What actually dominated the post-Carías Andino period is a pattern of repeated military interventions removing elected leaders from office, and ruling as dictators or juntas.

Juan Manuel Gálvez was elected to succeed Carías Andino (and, it must be said, with his support); after the 1954 election did not produce a clear outcome, his vice president, Julio Lozano Diaz, seized control; he was in turn forced out by the military in 1956. A year later, elections under this military government gave Ramón Villeda Morales a six year term of office. This was cut short, again, by a military coup in 1963.

The military held power-- albeit with shifting leadership-- from 1963 until 1971, and again from 1972 to 1982. (Ramón Ernesto Cruz Uclés was elected in 1971 and removed from office less than two years later by the general who preceded him, Oswaldo López Arrellano.) So what would have helped stop the "vicious cycle" of perpetuation of power in the creation of the constitution of the 1980s would have been reducing the influence of the armed forces-- following the model, for example, of Costa Rica, which abolished the military after a devastating civil war ended in 1948.

All throughout 2009, the strongest argument the de facto regime could come up with to justify the coup d'etat was that it was necessary to protect the constitution against an attempt by the President Zelaya to prolong his term in office. Some US pundits agreed that changing term limits was one of the most dangerous things a Latin American government could do. Often these same commentators cited such moves by left of center governments, while staying silent on right of center governments doing the same thing. The occasional US scholar argued that we could assume that the only reason a sitting president in Latin America wanted to promote a constitutional assembly would be to allow re-election, rejecting Manuel Zelaya's repeated denials of this intention and ignoring the many other goals of constitutional revision advanced by his government.

The new congressional action needs to be voted on a second time, by a second congress, to be considered valid, so we won't know until after January 25 whether this symbolic gesture ends here.

To be clear, what the Honduran congress just did is in no way a substitute for what the Zelaya government was proposing, and what the Frente de Resistencia has continued to advocate. Both the Zelaya government and the Frente have pursued completely revisiting the constitution through a participatory forum, an assembly, not via amendment by the Congress, which these bodies argue is not truly representative of the will of the Honduran people or its broader interests and needs.

Juan Barahona of the FNRP said in comments to the AFP that what Honduran politicians

"want is to cleanse themselves of the coup d'Etat".

"For us, you cannot reform a constitution that does not exist; it was nullified on the 28th of June of 2009; since then, we have been in a de facto period".

So don't expect this to end advocacy for a constitutional assembly.

Congress versus the Supreme Court

There's an interesting fight brewing between Juan Orlando Hernandez, President of the National Congress, and Jorge Rivera Aviles, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Yesterday, Juan Orlando Hernández told the television program Frente a Frente there was a possibility that Congress would remove some of the magistrates of the Supreme Court. Proceso Digital has a transcript of the interview with Juan Orlando Hernández. The transcript in Proceso Digital disagrees with some of the details in the reporting in El Heraldo, La Tribuna, and La Prensa.

He said this in answering a question about pressure on the Supreme Court.

"As President of Congress, I can't be inconsistent, that is false, there are documents that wish to discredit members of the Court and assure us that the documents by which some judges were dismissed were falsified, and this is the object of a demand at international organizations that will condemn us it that's true; and I hope to know the document, I need to see view and see it, and if I can't do it...I should be dismissed."

The contention is that the legal warrant used to dismiss the 4 judges and a magistrate, was falsified, and that false document was used to justify their dismissal. He said that the Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH) has opened an investigation, and that the information sent to the CIDH and to Congress by the Supreme Court was incomplete and false.

"They [several magistrates] sent me a scanned copy of the dismissal letter which didn't agree with the report sent by the Court to the CIDH.

He answered a few more questions, and then he said perhaps the most interesting thing.

"Today the Court said that the Congress cannot remove a prosecutor, but it warranted that it can remove a President, and that is contradictory and they need to be consistent in their actions and this is a topic we will deeply tackle next."

El Heraldo claims that 4 of the Supreme Court magistrates are in Congress's sites.

In the meantime, Jorge Rivera Avilés, the Chief Justice, denies there was any falsification.

"There has been no falsification of any document, the information that has come to the President of Congress has no relationship to reality."

The Chief Justice said that if Congress wants to investigate the Court,

"First it has to qualify a just cause,which then they have to make known to the Secretary of Security and the Prosecutor's office; once that's established, they will analyze if there is a just cause for the Congress to continue."

So in Jorge Rivera Avilés's world, Congress can only investigate the Supreme Court if the Secretary of Security (Oscar Alvarez, an Executive branch appointment) and the Prosecutor (Luis Rubí, appointed by Congress) agree they have a good reason to proceed.

I have not found the above procedure codified in any Honduran law. I have not been able to locate the scans of the dismissal letter which Hernandez says are circulating on the internet.

Reading between the lines, the four magistrates of the Supreme Court who signed the original dismissal letter before the full court reviewed the dismissal of the judges and magistrates last year are the ones that are being investigated by Congress.

Apparently at issue for Hernándezis whether or not the Court issued a permission for members to march in support of the de facto regime or the UCD, yet sanctioned members who marched against the de facto regime. Voselsoberano used to have a scan of a circular that purported to be such a permission, but the story archive appears to be empty now.

Stay tuned.

Double Standards

So did Porfirio Lobo Sosa remove himself from office when he talked about reforming the constitutional article about presidential re-election this week? Lobo told HRN radio
"If the people want re-election, then lets have that, and if they don't want, we won't have it....In the end, the people decide....the worst thing we can do is deny the right of the people to decide."

All of this conversation about re-election and letting the people have a voice, currently absent, in how the country is run, centers around proposed reforms to Article 5 of the Honduran constitution. Article 5 governs plebiscites and referenda and sets the rules for holding them.

Under the current rules, it takes the action of 10 Congress people plus the President and a resolution from the Secretary of State's council, or 6% of the electorate to bring the question of holding a plebiscite or referendum to the attention of Congress, which must then get a 2/3 vote of support to hold it.

The Resistance passed this threshold in their call for a constitutional convention, obtaining the signatures and fingerprints of 1.3 million registered voters, or about 25% of the registered voters, but Congress ignored them.

But back to re-election. Remember the infamous Article 239 of the Honduran constitution? The one that the backers of the coup and the de facto regime claimed automagically removed Manuel Zelaya Rosales from office for talking about re-election? Miguel Estrada claimed it. Octavio Sanchez made the same claim. Micheltti repeated it incessantly.

The claim ignored the due process requirements of the Honduran Constitution and was nonsense.

Today no one is saying Lobo Sosa removed himself from office by talking about re-election.

Why not?

UCD Lobbies Congress

The Unión Cívica Democrática, represented by Jimmy Dacaret and others, is in Washington, D.C. today to lobby Congress. Dacaret said they had meetings planned with Congressman Connie Mac (R., FL) , David Rivera (R., FL), and Lamar Smith (R., TX). They had also planned to meet with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen(R., FL) but she was traveling with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Haiti.

So why have these intrepid golpistas come to the US Congress? Dacaret told El Heraldo

"In the first place what we are looking for is cooperation; second that they help us with strengthening the UCD, also we will lobby for the cooperation with Honduras."

Interesting priorities. They are lobbying first for cooperation between the US Congress and the UCD, then strengthening of the UCD by Congress, and only then for cooperation between the US and Honduras. I suspect they're seeking more financial aid through the International Republican Institute (IRI), which initially funded them into existence in Honduras.

The UCD also intends to propose the implementation of Social Auditing of the aid programs to somehow guarantee the aid is getting to the poor in Honduras. I guess they think they're the government and can implement new rules around international aid.

What's next? The Mara Salvatrucha lobbying Congress?

Kidnapped Campesino Leader Escapes

The good news came through late yesterday: Juan Chinchilla, kidnapped leader of the peasant movement under attack in the Bajo Aguan, was free.

Now the details are coming out, and it is critical that they not be passed over lightly.

The article in today's Tiempo is headlined Director of MUCA escapes from his captors.

"Escapes" is the key word here. Despite massive mobilization intended to apply pressure on the Lobo Sosa government to seek his release, there is no reason to give credit to them, as Adrienne Pine suggests is happening in email communications.

Chinchilla was kidnapped on Saturday. His motorbike was found, riddled with bullet holes, near Tocoa.

According to Tiempo, he was found after his escape on the highway near Trujillo, the major city on the north coast of Honduras nearest to the Bajo Aguan settlements. Tiempo says Chinchilla has declined to talk to the police and has yet to take part in a press conference.

So for more detailed coverage, readers need to turn to the website of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, of which Chinchilla is also a leader.

There, Wilfredo Paz, another leader of the FNRP, is quoted as saying Chinchilla

"is in good condition, although very worn for the beating and torture they applied.”

Paz is quoted as saying Chinchilla is being kept safe in an undisclosed location. He went on to explain that Chinchilla untied himself while his guards were asleep.

Perhaps most troubling is that Paz reported that Chinchilla's guards were not all Honduran:

"Some spoke English, while others spoke a language he could not understand."

I originally wrote the following paragraph as the conclusion for this piece:

Watch for the Honduran police to dismiss this crime as unrelated to the political circumstances in the Aguan; to blame Chinchilla and to try to imply that he was engaged in drug trafficking; or to blame it on a generalized climate of violence. And don't be fooled.

Then, before posting, I checked for more Honduran news stories. Turns out I could not even imagine how bad the spin would be. This is from El Heraldo's story:

In relation to this act of delinquency, the legal advisor of the Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA), Marco Ramiro Lobo, asserted that what those who grabbed Chinchilla were attempting was to 'boycott' the negotiations [with Miguel Facussé, in which he was a participant].

“We are concerned that this act will provoke distortion in the negotiations", said Lobo.

Confused about who these people were, who might have been motivated to promote a breakdown in the negotiations? Read on:

Ramiro Lobo did not directly accuse the businessman Miguel Facussé for the disappearance of the campesino leader, although he stated that “the primary suspects probably come from this sector”.

Maybe there is another way to read this, but I doubt it: the INA representative is subtly implying that this was an inside job-- by MUCA. Think I am reading too much into the way Heraldo presented the story? read the first (and at the moment, only) comment on the story:

I don't know why this sounds like a sham to me, an invented kidnapping that didn't yield the outcomes that they wanted...

Well, I know why it sounded like a sham to you. Because that's how Heraldo wants you to react, and they carefully chose their words to give the impression that it wasn't really a kidnapping.

Don't be fooled.

Zelaya Case Update

The judge Claudio Aguilar of the Unified Criminal Court of Francisco Morazan has recused himself and his court from the case brought by the Public Prosecutor against Manuel Zelaya Rosales. The judge ruled that because Zelaya was representative to Parlacen, he was a high government official and that his court did not have jurisdiction as these cases under Honduran law must be tried by the Supreme Court.

This reading of Honduran law agrees with our analysis, that of the UCD, and others who were surprised the case was continuing to be heard in a lower level criminal court.

This effectively discards the motions for nullification placed by the public defenders he appointed for Zelaya.

A spokesperson for the court said that by the middle of next week the Supreme Court would appoint a judge to hear the case.

The public defenders said they would remain on the case.

Control of Corruption

So just what is this indicator called "control of corruption" for which the Lobo Sosa government would like to allocate blame to Manuel Zelaya Rosales?

The Millennium Challenge Corporation scorecards are built from data assembled by a variety of third parties. This particular indicator is one of six assembled by the World Bank ('voice and accountability', 'political stability and absence of violence', 'government effectiveness', 'regulatory quality', 'rule of law', and 'control of corruption').

The World Bank says the 'control of corruption' measure

captures perceptions of the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as "capture" of the state by elites and private interests.

Note that last part, about capture of the state by elites and private interests. That's a big part of the problem in Honduras. Not to say that there isn't corruption by government officials for private gain because there certainly is, though no one has quantified it. However, the capture of the state by elites is a significant factor in this indicator, and the coup d'etat exposed just how tightly the Honduran state has been captured by "elites and private interests".

As our previous post shows, the MCC scorecards don't support the claim that this measure was the key to Honduras not being selected for a new Compact. Here's a chart of the World Bank data on this measure from 1996 to 2009:




What the chart shows is that 71%-80% of the world's countries rate better than Honduras on this measure, and that the results haven't changed that much, regardless of which party is in power, since 1998.

Our previous post also noted that Honduras had some problems during the MCC Compact in the 'rule of law' measure. According to the World Bank, 'rule of law'

captures perceptions of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of the contract enforcement, property right, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.

The World Bank supplies data from 1996 through 2009 for this measure. Here's the chart:


As you can see, here the chart again shows Honduras with a low score, with 70% to 82% of the countries rated scoring better. It shows a pattern of year to year gains, then a steep crash under the Maduro administration, and then slight gains again under Zelaya.

Politicians, of course, are not required to pay any attention to actual data. In the Honduran context, it is probably great politics for the Lobo Sosa administration to blame this decision on Zelaya. But failing to come to grips with the actual history of performance is unlikely to help the country make a case to the MCC for a future Compact.

It isn't hard to find the data; what may be lacking is the will to face the facts.