"Explosive, but no longer set in stone"

That's how Upside Down World subtitled a post by Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle on the effects and reception of recent action by the Honduran Congress.

As we wrote in a previous post, the Honduran Congress passed a law that, once ratified by being passed by the next session of Congress, explicitly makes it legal to hold public referenda on constitutional reform. We wrote that what the Honduran congress 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 [just] 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.

In a separate post, we pointed out the hypocrisy involved, since merely talking about asking the populace if they wanted to be asked their opinion about constitutional reform was equated, after the coup d'etat, to advocating for changes to the "set in stone" articles of the constitution, while this new legislative move was defended from the same charges.

But only an insider to Honduran politics like Pastor Fasquelle could provide a clear analysis of who wins, who loses, and the opportunities that this legislative move provides.

Pastor Fasquelle notes that Lobo Sosa had spoken in favor of constitutional reform before the coup. Lobo Sosa has made statements in the same vein since his election as president. So from that perspective, his advocacy for this is not entirely surprising, and in the present situation, it is politically expedient.

As Pastor Fasquelle writes

It should also be obvious at this stage that the National Party believes it has created the superficial changes necessary to prevent real, profound change from taking place.

This is the side of the argument that sees the congressional action as an attempt to preempt real constitutional change emerging from the will of the people.

But Pastor Fasquelle thinks that the political establishment has unleashed more than it intended:

A critical analysis of the amendment, in context, needs to take into account the dangers and should recognize its opportunistic and partisan intent. At the same time it must also recognize there has been an opening and that opportunism has created an actual opportunity.

He points to the endorsement by former President Zelaya of the action by the Honduran Congress as part of his evidence that the unintended consequences may be broader than the intended ones:

The amendment has changed the rules, and opened possibilities for the Resistance, despite the intentions of its authors.

Writing as a member-- not a spokesman-- of the Resistance, Pastor Fasquelle notes the FNRP

needs no official recognition to call for a referendum for a Constituent Assembly and to demand the repeal of amnesty for human rights violators on the day the law is officially passed. And soon the Congress may be facing an even bigger challenge: a drive to collect the one hundred thousand signatures needed to call a referendum on the abolition of the Armed Forces has already been announced.

This is where the experience that the Resistance gained in mobilizing a drive for signatures on a petition for a constitutional assembly might be seen, in retrospect, as a more significant form of political action than forming a conventional political party would have been.

Not that Hondurans can expect that the consequences of this legislation will unroll without additional drama. The right-wing Unión Civica Democratica has voiced fierce opposition to the measure, and has every possibility of being more influential in Washington than any of the other positions Pastor Fasquelle outlines, because as he notes the UCD

also has increased its presence in Washington, where it has now ever more powerful congressional allies, to pressure the Obama Administration against what its members believe to be an action as criminal as they claimed Zelaya’s poll to be.

US policy toward Honduras has hardly been coherent or progressive even before the elevation of a more right wing House of Representatives brought about by the 2010 elections. The indications that House members will politick on an overly simplified storyline of right wing nightmares are already clear. How will the recent action of the Honduran Congress that has been promoted by the US right as guarantors of constitutional integrity factor into this going forward?

Thanks to Quotha for reposting Pastor Fasquelle's published essay and ensuring it came to our attention quickly.

Lobo's Model Cities

Yesterday Porfirio Lobo Sosa gave a long press conference about model cities and his unqualified support for the idea. From it, it's clear that Honduras will go ahead with the plan, with the National Congress scheduled to hold the first debate on legislation today. It's been fast-tracked, though it will take until 2012 to make all the constitutional changes that are needed to allow model cities. Nonetheless, it's interesting to hear what Lobo Sosa thinks about the idea, and how he conceives of the implementation.

He's thinking of areas of about 33 square kilometers, not the 1000 square kilometers that Romer calls for. He sees nothing wrong with ceding sovereignty over such an area for 80 or more years to either foreign governments or national or international businesses while they go about their business. He said:

"This is nothing for Honduras, above all it will be an unpopulated place not appropriate for agriculture, where now we have nothing and afterwards we will have factories, schools, secondary schools, hospitals, like in the cities of more developed countries."

But El Heraldo reports that Lobo Sosa said that if any campesino or land owner doesn't want to sell his or her land, that

"[they'll] rent their land, that means profits, there's nothing pre-negotiated, first the law, first the rules, and after that, we'll see."

which would indicate these are not unpopulated places. This was clear from another statement of his,

"If there are land holders there, they'll have the option to sell their land, or rent it."

but presumably not withhold it!

The President will have veto power over who administers the model cities.

The rush is to get it approved in this Congressional session, which ends this week, because if not, they won't finish all the approvals until the 2012 session, because of all the constitutional changes that are required. Lobo Sosa wants this done during his administration.

Lobo Sosa indicated the government was looking at Ocotepeque, Trujillo, the Agalta valley, and near the port of Amapala on the Pacific coast, as possible locations for a model city. He projects they will provide up to 3 million new jobs, all of which, Lobo Sosa assures, will go to Hondurans.

Lets see. 33 square km. is about 13 square miles, or smaller than Whittier, California, population 83,000 and exactly the size of the affluent Calabasas, California, population 22,000. Industry, California, is an industrial city of about 12 square miles, with 2500 companies generating about 80,000 jobs but it only has 777 residents.

Hong Kong has a population density of about 6400 people per square km. At that density, a model city of 33 square km. in Honduras would have about 211,000 residents.

Hong Kong is a bad success story for Romer to have chosen. Not only does he ignore the historical contingencies of his example, but he ignores the historically poor distribution of income there as well, the worst in Asia.

Who benefits in Hong Kong? The gini index measures how income is distributed across households from the poorest to the richest. To the extent that that curve differs from a straight line, income distribution is skewed. Values range between 0 and 1. The lower the number, the more evenly income is distributed. The closer the value is to 1, the more income is concentrated into fewer and fewer families.

The gini index of Hong Kong was .53 in 2008, while Honduras had a gini index of .56 in 2010. That means Hong Kong and Honduras already have similar income distributions, with lots of poor people and a few wealthy households. Would you expect something different in a model city? Why?

This income distribution is what you would expect from little regulation of capitalism. Most European countries have values in the range .2 to .3, while the US has a gini index of .45. The rich get richer, the poor stay poor, and the middle class gets poorer as capitalism is regulated less.

So tell me again how model cities will be good for Honduras?

Update: The legislation was indeed fast-tracked, and has passed. Other blogs are now paying some attention as well. This has led to Romer himself correcting Honduran press reports: Lobo Sosa either said or should have said that these would be 33 km on a size, and thus 1000 km. We would note that the decreto that was passed has nothing about proposed size. We stand by our opinion that this is a bad idea that makes no sense and note that using real people's lives as an abstract experiment should be considered unethical.

Bad Model Cities

Under the rubric of "Model Cities" the Lobo Sosa administration presented a law to Congress which will give the government the right to expropriate any contiguous region of land for the use of "Special Administrative Regions" which will be owned in full by the government, but have their own fully autonomous court system, not answerable to the Supreme Court. This is based on Stanford economist Paul Romer's ideas about "Charter Cities".

Romer's idea of Charter Cities, documented here and here, was advanced by him as a development initiative for poor countries. His specific analog is Hong Kong, which he says brought so much good to China. Romer seems to ignore the fact that it brought no good to China for 156 years, from 1839 until 1997 when it was removed from its status as a British colony and merged, fully formed and developed, as a part of China. It was only when integrated into modern China that it brought any good to the country.

According to La Tribuna's description, these Special Administrative Regions pretty closely model what Romer is suggesting. A large region of land (Romer recommends 1000 square km.) would be allocated by the Honduran government, with a charter set by the National Congress. Mind you, Romer sets the target developed population at 10 million, more than the entire population of Honduras. The Charter outlines the basic set of rules under which the city will begin to operate. It is, however, not answerable to Honduran law or the Honduran constitution and may establish, within the guidelines of its charter, any set of laws it wishes using the form of government specified in the charter (eg, it need not be representative of the population in any way).

As Romer sees it, investors will fund these charter cities by setting up services and collecting fees for them (water, sewer, electricity, etc.). Land title either remains with the national government, which then benefits from the rents on the lands, or is transferred to the development authority, which then finances itself by leasing (not selling) land to developers.

Romer says these are not gated communities for the rich. He sees this as the natural evolution of the maquila, with the first residents being maquila workers assembling garments and making toys, people with little formal education. He holds the mistaken belief that such workers today already can afford city services (electricity, water, sewer) and rents on their existing salaries. Everyone would have to rent, in Special Administrative Regions. No one would own their own residence.

These regions are sort of like today's Export Processing Zones that house the maquilas, except that they will have residents who are no longer full Honduran citizens, governed instead by the laws and rules set up by the local administration to administer these areas. There is no requirement for worker participation in the local government, for example. It harkens back to the banana company towns, with the potential for all the benefits and worker abuses, except that these would be industrial rather than agricultural workers.

Why is this idea attractive to the Honduran government? It might be the claimed potential for development of the host country, although Romer basically glosses over that part in his descriptions; but I think it specifically is attractive to the Honduran government because such zones are claimed to attract the people who currently leave the country to pursue social and economic opportunities in other countries. It is said to bring home all the migrants who currently enter the US illegally after traversing Guatemala and Mexico and being victimized by criminals in those countries.

Romer came to Honduras on January 3 and presented the idea of constructing a charter city in Trujillo to the BCIE, Juan Orlando Hernández, and Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Romer is interested in setting up and financing a demonstration project in Honduras if the government will only turn over the land to him for a few years. Juan Orlando Hernandez said of the pilot

"There are many countries that are fighting to be the site of this project. Honduras has all the possibilities to do it and the government, we are interested in doing it to benefit all the population."

It's clear that this law was fast-tracked after Romer's visit. Perhaps the government should, as Mario Argueta noted in an editorial in El Heraldo, remember previous development attempts that gave concessions to foreigners. They all failed, and were bad for Honduras.

Are Special Administrative Regions Lobo Sosa's solution to the Bajo Aguan problem?

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?