Department 19: A new political player in Honduras?

Over the past few months, a new phrase has cropped up repeatedly in postings from the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular: Departamento 19.

I knew what it indexed right away, because (among other things) I was on a PhD dissertation committee that introduced me to El Salvador's attempt to reincorporate Salvadorans living in the US in post-civil war politics and culture, as a 15th political division outside the boundaries of the national territory.

After reading the latest notice that mentioned the representation of Hondurans abroad as a new, 19th department, I wondered when and how this became a political reality?

Resistencia, the official web site of the FNRP, first mentions Department 19 on November 22, 2010, in an article about increasing the size of its representative assembly, including adding four delegates "of Hondurans who live outside the country".

On November 24, 2010, Vos el Soberano carried an update called "Camino al Constituyente" that seems to be the first mention of representation for Hondurans abroad on that site, in an interview with a Los Angeles based resistance member.

On January 19 of this year, in its coverage leading up to the February 26 Asamblea of the FNRP, Vos el Soberano published an entire article about how Departamento 19 would be well represented in the assembly. This report includes the entire document formalizing participation by Department 19 in the FNRP's political assembly, starting with a description of the composition of delegates:

In general terms, 17 delegates were approved for the so-called Departamento 19 (12 for the US, 3 for Spain, 1 for Canada and 1 for France) with the possibility of being augmented in a future national assembly.

And then came a post-Assembly report by Gerardo Torres Zelaya, that included the news that in the interim assembly, Carlos Mejía from California and Lucy Pagoada of New York represented this bloc.

Contained in Torres Zelaya's report is a statement that claims a higher significance for Department 19 than merely representation:

D19 is more than a territorial expression and has turned into one of the principal symbols of the will of an entire people to refound their country and has demonstrated that when we are speaking of struggle, frontiers are obsolete.

So where did the idea come from in the first place? Is it inherently, as Torres Zelaya suggests in this quote, revolutionary?

The earliest mention I can find for this concept, using Google, is an essay by a Honduran poet, Fabricio Estrada, called Broza de esmeril first published in February 2008. In November 2008, Estrada republished it on his own blog under the slightly revised title Brozas de esmeril, Honduras (roughly, an emery brush-- a brush that grinds).

This version includes the striking image I link to here, which embeds a map of the US inside the territory of Honduras (credited at the original site to Hugo Bautista). The text accompanying this map vividly summarizes facts which together demonstrate the potential significance of Hondurans in the US in Honduran politics. In a preface to his essay, Estrada wrote that

In the beginning, I created this proclamation or manifesto, believing in a "Paíspoesible" [a pun: poetically possible country], but given the boisterous failure of this collective proposal...I reclaim the words that are still valid beyond elitism and pawing in which has ended what originally was a revolutionary vision, a generational revolution, dream, fist, prodigy of the brotherhood among cannibal poets, an esthetic that overflowed the confinement of ego..."

What follows is a description of the situation of being a poet in Honduras in a time when with the internet "no one lives regionally".

Included in this essay, which takes the form of a numbered list, reflecting, among other things, on Honduras as a territorial entity and as a state of identity (see my translation of items 5 and 8 at the end of this post). Estrada critiques the fragmented historical identity of territorial Honduras, each part except Tegucigalpa, the capital city, yearning for a geographic other; and even the framing of Honduras as patria in Tegucigalpa the poet sees as a mystical illusion.

He ends his vision of fragmented identity by saying "that is without speaking of all that country in transit in Department 19".

So for more than two years before the FNRP took it up as a real entity, the idea that Honduras has the equivalent of a 19th state made up of the Honduran diaspora was already circulating in they cultural imaginary, specifically as part of writing that challenged the coherence of the nation-state as the grounding of identity.

The term seems to be used sparingly in economic writing over the last two years; for example, an editorial by sociologist Ricardo Puerta about guest workers programs, published online by Proceso Digital, unfortunately undated but on internal grounds from the first half of 2010, includes this description:

The so-called "Departamento 19" of the new Honduran nation, in "this globalized era of information", will continue being relevant at the macro and micro levels, for the desired local, regional, and national economic revival that is sought, and has not begun to arrive. A product of that, the Department 18, better characterized as "the Department with the growth growing for lack of generalized welfare", today already counts a total estimated population of 1.5 million compatriots, "scattered throughout the world", that represents almost 20% of all those born in Honduras and that can be found living within or outside of Honduras.

An article in May 2010 in Proceso Digital on extending access to the national public health system to Hondurans in the US (allowing them to pay into the system for the benefit of their family members in Honduras) used "Departamento 19" but followed it immediately with a gloss (los connacionales en el exterior, "those who share nationality living abroad"), indicating that it is by no means in wide use or of automatically recognized meaning.

The language of a 19th department was there to be taken up by political actors. But it has not been uniquely associated with a revolutionary vision. In fact, the largest cluster of references to it, prior to the recent surge in its use by the Frente, comes from the Nationalist Party.

Already in October 2009, Honduran media used the term in covering Pepe Lobo's "satisfaction" with support from Hondurans living in Miami. This coverage made reference to the "leadership" of the Nationalist Party in "Department 19". Just last week, coverage of the lead-up to the Nationalist Party convention, under the slogan of "Nationalists united for Honduras, underlined the inclusion of Hondurans abroad:

“We have invited the 1000 attendees from the 18 departments as well as those of department 19 that symbolically represent the Hondurans resident in the US".

The contrasts between the two political groups in their approach to Department 19 are subtle: the Nationalist Party describes this as a symbolic gesture, and recognizes only Hondurans in the US; the FNRP is adding representatives porportional to the estimated residents abroad, from the four countries with the largest Honduran expatriate populations.

What the inclusion of Department 19 in texts from the extreme right to the left, from sociology to poetry, says overall is that we are seeing the emergence of a new consciousness of the global Honduran diaspora.

Salvador's Departamento 15 has become, in the analysis of Ana Patricia Rodriguez, Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Maryland, a medium for the creation of a trans-national "salvadoranness" in its disaporic community, mobilized by post-civil war Salvadoran politics. Will Honduras see something similar in the wake of the political upheaval begun by the coup d'etat?

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From Brozas de esmeril:

5- W live in Honduras, we assume it and that is what leads to us avoiding putting together $5,000 and going with a trustworthy coyote to the north. For one reason or another, Honduras retains us, it is an earthy, precambrian magnetism, full of contraries and premonitions... and nonetheless, we can bet what remains to us whether any Latin American wouldn't feel the same. We are in continual formation, this existential mobility is a beautiful broth, unstable, but definitely it is our essence. We look at the State from a position of mockery, everyone knows it, not even we ourselves believe in the task of national conformation, and nonetheless we intuit a country of the mind, much more open and grand than the anachronistic limits suggested by jurists in The Hague. Our country is a steppe and we are its untiring horses!

8-Honduras is a ball of steel wool... an emery brush... the fruit of the knives that Rubén Izaguirre visualized by means of his poetics... Honduras is attracted and dismembered from four historic magentic poles: those of the coast dream that in New Orleans there still live their patron-bosses, the gringo banana men who gave them keepsakes from La Lima to Olanchito.

Those of the Mosquitia still walk intoxicated with their Misquito Empire and their toasts continue giving halleluias for Queen Victoria of England.

Those of the East live buying and selling cheeses in Nicaragua... those of the West consider that they are an extension of Guatemala and those of the Southwest play with El Salvador. Only in Tegucigalpa does there survive a mystical Honduras, made visionary by the word "patria"; and that is without speaking of all that country in transit in Department 19.

Damning Statistics on the Police

The Honduran government held a press conference this weekend and gave out copies of the Human Rights report that Honduras filed with the UN this week. It has some damning statistics about how little crime is investigated in Honduras, and therefore why no criminals ever get caught. Remember that these are supposedly the numbers Honduras submitted; they are government sanctioned.

The government report said first that 80% of all crimes are never reported in Honduras. They then said that of those 20% of crimes that are reported, a further 81% are not investigated by the police. That means that only 3.8% of all of the crimes that happen in Honduras are even investigated by the police! The report goes on to state that the police also fail to carry out arrest warrants, that 80% of the arrest warrants issued are never executed by the police! One wonders what they are so busily doing that they can't do their job.

The same report asserts that Honduras has made progress or completed all 129 items in the November, 2010 as part of its Universal Periodic Exam. This includes resolving the case of the dismissed judges mentioned in the previous post. Amnesty International called them on obfuscating their position on the judges in their presentation to the UN this week (at about 18:30 into the video of the session). Almost every comment on the Honduran government's position paper mentioned the lack of any proposal to deal with the incredible level of impunity demonstrated above.

Today, Tiempo reports that the Asociación de Jueces por la Democracia demands Ana Pineda, Honduras's Human Rights minister, step down because she's been ineffective since she assumed office last November. She has not been able to moderate the human rights violations that continue to occur in Honduras.

"Minister Pineda should resign if she has dignity. The death of the teacher (on Friday in Tegucigalpa) is caused by the repression ordered by the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa.....Minister Pineda is not being realistic. There are serious indications that the government of Honduras has done nothing,"

said the AJD spokesperson.

What it boils down to, is that Ana Pineda talks a good line when it comes to human rights. She's pushed changes in laws, supposedly established a hate crimes investigative unit in the police, and called on Honduran society to be more tolerant of gays, lesbians, and transvestites after the US Embassy issued a statement warning Honduras on its continued ignoring of these hate crimes.

But nothing has changed in Honduras, as the above crime statistics demonstrate. There has been no improvement in the actual lived experience of Hondurans when it comes to the human rights situations that Pineda claims to have resolved. There's still no investigation of hate crimes against the press, or LGBT people. She hasn't even spoken about the problem with paramilitary mercenaries imported by the land owners in Honduras, widely acknowledged as responsible for the majority of the deaths in the Bajo Aguan.

Its all talk; there's no action; Honduras may as well not have an human rights minister for all the effect her office has had on Hondurans.

Those statistics represent lawlessness, impunity. Until that situation begins to improve, all the fine words of the Honduran Human Rights minister mean nothing.

Dismissed Judges Get a Hearing

On Friday, March 25, the Honduran judges dismissed by the Supreme Court over coup related statements, will get a hearing before the Comision Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH), the OAS's human rights body. Giving testimony in the case will be the Asociación de Jueces por la Democracia (AJD) and the Centro por la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional (CEJIL) as well as representatives of the Lobo Sosa government.

The hearing is scheduled for 11:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. local time in Washington, D.C. You can watch the hearings live on the OAS website here. Afterwards, the video of the hearing will be posted to their website here.

"State of Emergency" in the schools (K-12 only)

Vos el Soberano has posted the complete text of Decree PCM-016-2011, dated March 18, in which Porfirio Lobo Sosa grants himself extraordinary powers to fire, hire, and generally run the school system.

This is only the latest in a string of sweeping declarations of "emergency" by Lobo Sosa, that echo the state of emergency decrees through which Roberto Micheletti asserted control by his de facto regime.

This decree cites Article 9 of the Ley de Contratación del Estado as allowing for such declarations when "continuity of, or the opportune offering of, State services" is affected. One thing we learned from Roberto Micheletti is to always check the original to see what the claimed authority actually says, so here is Article 9 in its entirety (see end of post for Spanish original)

ARTICULO 9.-Emergency situations.
The declaration of a state of emergency will be made through a Decree by the President of the Republic in the Council of Ministers or by vote of two-thirds of the respective Municipal Corporation.

The contracts that are agreed to in situations of emergency, will require later approval, by agreement of the President of the Republic, emitted by means of the corresponding Cabinet Minister, or of the Directing Junta or Council of the respective Decentralized Institution or of the Municipal Corporation, if it is relevant.

In whichever of the cases the result should be communicated to the control bodies, within 10 working days following, provided that the celebration of contracts is foreseen.

When situations of emergency occur due to natural disasters, epidemics, public calamity, necessities of defence or related to states of emergency, or other exceptional circumstances that substantially affect the continuity or opportune and efficient provision of public services, the construction of public works, the purveyance of goods or services or the lending of consulting servces that might be strictly necessary, without subjecting them to the requirements of solicitation of bids and the remaining regulatory dispositions, without prejudice to the functions of auditory control.

It is an ambituous stretch to use a law intended to absolve government from the need to submit contracts for competitive bids in the case of natural disasters, epidemics, of defense emergencies to allow the government to arbitrarily suspend teachers and replace them. But this is a now-familiar pattern: laws in Honduras seem to exist to be mined for phrases that can be taken out of the context for which they were intended, to underwrite impunity.

This is actually what dictatorship looks like when it is cloaked in the guise of representational government.

And while constraints of time prevent me from translating and commenting on this whole document now, it is worth noting that the preamble-- always the most creative and revealing thing in these documents-- recycles the arguments made by the discredited Ombudsman, Ramón Custodio, against teachers' unions, portraying retaliation against unions as required by international human rights conventions that guarantee a right to education.

Perversity seems to be the rhetorical mode of Honduran government in the post-coup era. How better to slough off the stench of human rights violations deserved for causing the death of your own citizens by releasing the army on them, then to claim that the protests you are suppressing are themselves a violation of human rights?

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ARTICULO 9.-Situaciones de emergencia.

La declaración del estado de emergencia se hará mediante Decreto del Presidente de la República en Consejo de Ministros o por el voto de las dos terceras partes de la respectiva Corporación Municipal.

Los contratos que se suscriben en situaciones de emergencia, requerirán de aprobación posterior, por acuerdo del Presidente de la República, emitido por medio de la Secretaría de Estado que corresponda, o de la Junta o Consejo Directivo de la respectiva Institución Descentralizada o de la Corporación Municipal, si es el caso.

En cualquiera de los casos deberá comunicarse lo resuelto a los órganos contralores, dentro de los diez (10) días hábiles siguientes, siempre que se prevea la celebración de contratos.

Cuando ocurran situaciones de emergencia ocasionados por desastres naturales, epidemias, calamidad pública, necesidades de la defensa o relacionadas con estados de excepción, u otras circunstancias excepcionales que afectaren sustancialmente la continuidad o la prestación oportuna y eficiente de los servicios públicos, podrá contratarse la construcción de obras públicas, el suministro de bienes o de servicios o la prestación de servicios de consultoría que fueren estrictamente necesarios, sin sujetarse a los requisitos de licitación y demás disposiciones reglamentarias, sin perjuicio de las funciones de fiscalización.

Police Deny Responsibility for Death

The Deputy Director of the National Police, René Maradiaga Panchamé, a former unit leader in Battalion 3-16, says the police are investigating the death of Ilsa Ivania Velásquez during the teacher's protest, but he's sure they, the Police, aren't responsible.

"Everything is in the process of being investigated. There's an investigation. There's video, the investigators will use all these situations [sic]."

But he told reporters the Police are not involved in her death:

"the investigations are what will produce the final determination of these facts."

Lets see, the investigation has only just started, but even before the investigation gets rolling, Panchamé can tell us the Police aren't responsible for her death.

Does that give anyone confidence that there's a real investigation into her death? or are the results of the investigation being foretold to block any chance the Police could be found responsible?

I guess he's just echoing the official line, dictated by the executive branch, which issued a statement on her death that also claims the National Police are not responsible.

I guess they haven't gotten used to actually investigating crime in Honduras. After all, as the US State Department notes,

Honduran law enforcement authorities' ability to prevent, respond to, and investigate criminal incidents and prosecute criminals remains limited, further strained by the necessity of policing the increased number of demonstrations since the June 28, 2009 coup.

Maybe the National Police should just stick to brutalizing demonstrators. At least they've demonstrated they know how to do that.

Does the death of a teacher count as a human rights issue?

Porfirio Lobo Sosa has taken a hard line against teachers' unions, saying he will not talk to them until they return to the classroom and stop going out on strike. The response from the unions has been nationwide protests that yesterday and again today were received violently by security forces.

Lobo Sosa has played on the frustration parents feel about the discontinuity of education of their children, and the effect that is likely to have on their future.

It is far easier to portray striking teachers as an enemy, because it is the strike that leads to suspended classes; far harder to convey the argument that it is the government that has the responsibility for these strikes, by not resolving the issues involved, which involve government defaults on funding teacher's pensions, failure or lateness of payment of salaries and benefits, and, most recently, proposals that teachers unions interpret as aimed to privatize education.

So, as is almost routine in post-coup Honduras under the security regime of Oscar Alvarez, not only the police but the military are sent in to combat protesting teachers.

This policy has now led to the predictable outcome: the death of a striking teacher, Ilse Ivania Velásquez, who Vos el Soberano reports was hit in the head by a tear gas canister, then run over by a vehicle described as a "tanqueta".

The story in El Heraldo describes the action as intended to remove striking teachers and Resistance members from the Boulevard Centroamérica in Tegucigalpa. Its description of the cause of death was, perhaps predictably, quite different than that on Vos el Soberano:

According to versions from witnesses, the educator was thrown to the ground by a stampede of teachers that caused serious wounds to her face.

Afterwards it happened that the woman was run over by a vehicle that was crossing the area. Up till now, none of the versions has been confirmed.

In a separate story, El Heraldo specifically disputes the claim that she was run over by a vehicle. Their story clarifies that the tanqueta in question was a water tanker, the kind of vehicle used to fuel the water cannons that were turned against the teachers by the police and military.

This additional coverage explains that teachers were attacked with batons and tear gas grenades when they tried to stop a commission named by Lobo Sosa from entering the building where the Instituto de Previsión Magisterial (INPREMA) has its headquarters. INPREMA is at the center of the pension dispute with the Lobo Sosa government, and the teachers have rejected this commission, whose motives they (quite reasonably) distrust.

El Heraldo does admit that the action was being carried out by the National Police and the Cobra unit of the military, but manages to blame the teachers and resistance members for the death.

International news stories echo the claim that Velásquez was run over after falling in the crowd, while fleeing from tear gas being fired into the protest.

Vos el Soberano describes her as the sister of Manfredo Velásquez, who disappeared in the repression of the 1980s. She was also the sister of Zenaida Velásquez, described as the first president of the Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH, Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras).

These are reminders that there are deep roots to the resistance in Honduras.

Virgin Appears, Attacked!

A month ago, La Tribuna reports, ENEE, the state electric company, cut down part of a tree whose branches threatened a power line near San Pedro Zacapa, Santa Barbara. The tree is a half mile up the road to San Pedro Zacapa from the paved road that runs between Pito Solo and Santa Barbara.

Six days ago, Mario Aguilar, age 21, noticed a brown image on the surface of the cut face of the tree, an image which he says is the Virgin Mary, and which was not there previously.

While Mario Aguilar saw the image as the Virgin Mary, still others saw it as the Virgin of Suyapa (a Marian image and Patroness of Honduras) and wondered if she had come to visit. Some others saw the image as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Patroness of Mexico. Still others saw an image of Christ.

Since Mario Aguilar discovered the image, people have been coming every day to light candles and pray for miracles. To that end, an impromptu stone altar has been placed on a horizontal face of the cut, on which the candles are placed. One visitor is quoted as saying

"What's important is that these images show us that a God in the heavens has always existed and he protects and loves us."

No Catholic priest has yet visited the site. Municipal officials in Zacapa have promised to erect a fence around the image and build a chapel next to the image.

But overnight the image was attacked by someone with a machete who whacked the image a number of times, including slices across the figure's face. The police are investigating the act as

a criminal act against the faith of the people who live in this zone.

La Tribuna believes that there may be a consensus building in the region that the Virgin appeared to tell people to confront the delinquency in this, and other parts of the country.

"It appears to me that it is a call to reflect, for so much crime and delinquency which happens in Honduras and mainly in these parts which are so isolated,"

said one believer quoted in La Tribuna.

In the meantime, believers continue to flock to the image, as La Tribuna says, making this part of Honduras less isolated.