Canahuati Shamed?

Adolfo Facussé, head of the National Industrial Business Association (Asociación Nacional de Industriales, ANDI), started a rumor Monday that Mario Canahuati was going to resign as Foreign Minister.

Facussé told the press this was because Canahuati was distressed over not being included in the secret meetings between Lobo Sosa, Hugo Chavez, and Juan Manuel Santos. He said it was embarrassing for Canahuati to not be included in the meeting, when the Foreign Ministers of Venezuela and Colombia were. Instead, Arturo Corrales, Lobo Sosa's planning minister, participated.

"Don Mario Canahuati for respect and his own dignity, should resign from his position,"

Facussé told the press.

He further suggested that the Lobo Sosa government should respect Canahuati and if he didn't have the President's confidence as Foreign Minister, perhaps Lobo Sosa would appoint him to manage soliciting foreign investment. Facussé pointed out that Mario Canahuati was the former head of the Honduran Council of Private Business (Consejo Hondureño de la Empresa Privada, COHEP).

Why is Facussé trying to create a breach between Lobo Sosa and Mario Canahuati when there is none?

Perhaps it is because both he and Canahuati were backers of Micheletti, who just warned about the dangers of meeting that supposedly shamed Canahuati. Maybe he's warning Canahuati of business's unhappiness with Lobo Sosa's policies. Maybe its just that they were business buddies. We don't know.

Facussé specifically suggested Canahuati be put in charge of the "Honduras is open for business" conference to be held next week in San Pedro Sula. He took the opportunity to criticize the list of invited companies and individuals saying it was heavy on the industries with things to sell to Honduras and light on investors.

Facussé seemed not to know that Canahuati's Foreign Relations Ministry is in charge of the event and was responsible for the invitations.

In any case, Canahuati said he's not resigning and supports Lobo Sosa.

Supreme Court Delays Again

The Supreme Court appeals panel rejected the attempt of Gustavo Bustillo to recuse himself from the case because of a friendship with Zelaya. The court ruled his recusal "lacked legal justification." Apparently a judge isn't the best judge of when to recuse himself; the other judges know better.

The delay in reaching a verdict, however, continues, so the political effects are the same.

The three judge appeals panel met this morning and failed to reach a consensus on a verdict. They will now have to meet every business day until next Monday, at which time they must render a verdict according to Justice Rosa de Lourdes Paz Haslam.

So reset your Supreme Court alarm clocks for Monday, May 2.

Honduras diverts US Weapons to Cartels

The website "InsightCrime" reports on a US State Department cable (not yet released on Wikileaks) that indicates that light anti-tank weapons transferred to the Honduran military have ended up in the hands of the drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia. The cable was written on October 2, 2008 from the State Department, signed by Condoleezza Rice, to the US Embassy in Honduras.

The cable cites a Defense Intelligence report entitled "Honduras: Military Weapons Fuel Black Arms Market" released on July 2, 2008. This report notes that the serial numbers of light anti-tank weapons and M433 40 mm. grenades recovered in Mexico City, Ciudad Juarez, and in Colombia on San Andres Island matched the serial numbers of weapons delivered by the US Defense department to the Honduran Army's Second Infantry Battalion TESON training center, in 1992. TESON stands for Tropas Especiales de Selva y Operaciones Nocturnas, paratroopers. The M433 40mm grenades were transferred to Honduras in 1985. In April 2008, the Honduran Army could not account for the whereabouts of 26 of the original 50 light anti-tank weapons.

Light anti-tank weapons are one shot devices that replaced the bazooka after the Korean War. The weapon in question here is the either M72 light anti-tank weapon, a single shot 66 mm weapon with an armor piercing rocket, or the AT4 light anti-tank weapon, an 84 mm one shot anti-tank rocket that superseded the M72.

Honduras Weekly, a golpista newspaper, implicates the Zelaya administration in the loss of the weapons, but the weapons could have been leaked to the drug cartels any time after 1992 and the grenades any time after 1985.

The full text of the cable can be read here.

Supreme Slowdown

With the deadline for the appeals panel of the Supreme Court to render a decision on the charges against José Manuel Zelaya Rosales fast approaching, one judge has chosen today to resign from the panel, allegedly citing his "friendship" with Zelaya Rosales as the cause.

The justice, Gustavo Enrique Bustillo Palma, was elected by the full court to serve on the appeals panel along with Rosa de Lourdes Paz Haslam and Marco Vinicio Zúniga Medrano on April 17. Bustillo Palma was nominated to the Supreme Court by the Universities panel in 2008. He previously served as legal advisor to the Agrarian Institute in 1983-84 and again in 1985-86. He was also briefly legal council for the Customs service. He was a family court Judge in La Ceiba, and has taught law at several universities in northern Honduras. He serves in the Constitutional law section of the Supreme Court.

The five day clock was ticking and the Supreme Court had to render a decision tomorrow, April 27. The resignation makes that moot. The court will meet today or tomorrow or whenever they please, to select a new justice to serve on the appeals panel, resetting the clock to five days after that justice is selected.

Bustillo Palma has known since April 17 that he was assigned to this case. If he actually had a friendship with Zelaya, he should have recused himself immediately, not on the day before a verdict was due. If this really was the reason he recused himself, he acted irresponsibly by not doing so earlier. Its likely there's another, more political reason that's being left unvoiced here.

What the court decides has major political consequences. If it decides to nullify the charges, then it is certain that Honduras will be readmitted to the OAS at its early June meeting. If, instead, it decides to let the case proceed, or that the charges need to be reformulated (the other possible decisions) readmission is much less likely, although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Lobo Sosa last week to assure him she would push for it.

Restart your Supreme Court countdown clocks to look for a decision around May 4, next week, if they don't find another way to delay.

Mine! Mine! Mine! Oops!

The Honduran Congress is like the seagulls in the movie Finding Nemo. It shouts "mine! mine! mine!" at everything confiscated by the security forces directed by Oscar Alvarez. These government seagulls are using the funds "confiscated" from organized crime as if they are their own money, spending it outside of the official budget.

How much are we talking about? 211 million lempiras of confiscated funds and property to date. The confiscated money and property is managed by the Oficina de Administradora de Bienes Incautados (OABI) a division of the Public Prosecutor's office directed by Omar Zuniga, . The OABI has divided the 211 million lempiras between the security forces, the defense department, development projects, and funds for the poor (the 10 thousand lempira bonus program started by Lobo Sosa), as specified in the law rushed through congress last year.

Only one problem; the courts are ordering that the OABI give back some of the funds and property; three million lempiras here, another few thousand there. By the OABI's own projections they expect the courts to order restitution of an equivalent of 48 percent of the resources, or about 100 million lempiras of the 211 million lempiras currently controlled by the OABI.

This stupidity is the Ley de Disponibilidad Emergente de Activos Incautados which passed Congress in November 2010. The law demands that the OABI assign immediately, according to the specified percentages, the rights to use the funds under OABI control to the benefiting agencies. So who benefits?

The Public Prosecutor gets 26.6%
The Security Minister gets 26.7%
The Defense Minister gets 26.6%
The 10,000 lempira bonus fund gets 10%
The fund for marginal people gets 10%

Here's another stupid part: the law says the OABI guarantees the funds and guarantees the interest on any funds deposited with it. How can it do that, if it has to immediately give the funds out as windfalls to the above beneficiaries? There's no budgetary support for it to do this. The law says its up to the Finance Minister to guarantee the funds that need to be returned.

Thus, if restitutions are ordered by the court, the OABI is left with a budgetary problem, where to come up with the funds for restitution (not to mention property, which the OABI can sell). As the Zuniga, the director of the OABI notes, there is no budgetary support that guarantees the repayment should the OABI have to return funds, there's no budgetary line item in Congress for it. The law specifies that the Minister of Finance is the guarantor of the funds, so its his problem to find them, when the court orders a restitution.

Funding for the OABI comes out of the Public Prosecutor's office budget. Currently it does not include funds to manage the physical assets assigned to the OABI, the boats, houses, cars, and other physical property confiscated. Zuniga notes that for one confiscated property alone the OABI has spent 1.1 million lempiras on security and upkeep over the last several years.

Does the law seem poorly thought out, gentle reader? That's because it is. It allows the benefiting agencies to spend funds that don't really belong to the state, leaving future governments the responsibility of repaying those funds, when the courts order their repayment. By their own estimates, the courts will order repayment of about half those funds.

As we've said many times, the Honduran government is broke (and broken). This was an ill considered law that provided for windfall spending to reward a small number of powerful beneficiaries, and ones whose budgets for 2011 were already increased over previous levels. Now that the courts are ordering restitutions, the Lobo Sosa government will be forced to find funds it already doesn't have to pay back these obligations.

We doubt it will have the political will to take back these funds from future budgets of these powerful agencies, so look for further cuts in the budgets of education, culture, and development, already reduced in this year's Lobo Sosa budget.

DINANT: Helpless on Human Rights

We have been traveling throughout April, not always with the best of internet access.

So we missed posting when news broke that European banks were reconsidering or outright canceling their support of development of African palm oil projects in the Bajo Aguan-- where landowner Miguel Facussé, at times enjoying military support, has been engaged in a standoff with local peasant cooperatives that has led to the killing of dozens of campesinos.

But now Bloomberg has published a new report on the story, leading with the claim that DINANT Corporation-- the business entity involved-- has been wrongly treated.

The basic facts are these:

On April 8, a German development bank, DEG Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH, canceled a proposed loan reportedly worth $20 million, that (For German readers, there is a good long review of this part of the story in Neues Deutschland). Even in recent articles, bank spokespersons have refused to explain why they canceled this loan.

But shortly after, the French energy firm, EDF, canceled its agreement to buy carbon credits from DINANT. Reporting by Bloomberg contained only an unintelligible quote from CEO John Rittenhouse, who said “We take a responsible appraoch to our CDM portfolio.”

Longer articles elsewhere, including Reuters, were slightly clearer, quoting Rittenhouse as saying

“We have taken the situation in Honduras very seriously and have spent the past few months looking at our options in respect to our withdrawal...We have therefore issued our notification of termination to the seller and will no longer be involved in this project".

Why did these companies back off from the project?

The Reuters story notes that an "Environmental watchdog group CDM Watch" had brought human rights abuses to the attention of EDF. A Bloomberg story about the loan withdrawal by the German bank also cited CDM Watch, described there as a "Bonn-based environmental lobby", as well as FIAN, the FoodFirst Information and Action Network, based in Heidelberg.

The cancellations by these two European companies are not the end of the story; other financing could emerge, and the project is still under consideration by the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)

Bloomberg reports that the government of the United Kingdom had approved the Bajo Aguan project for buyers of carbon credits, noting that the energy and climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, has now sent letters requesting more information to, among others, DINANT itself and "Honduran authorities".

The project is still due for discussion at the UN's CDM Executive Board meeting on June 3. That body could still decide to give the project its blessing, despite the human rights issues it raises.

Hence Roger Pineda, treasurer of DINANT, coming out strong on defense in the latest Bloomberg story.

Pineda characterized the link to human rights abuses as "misleading".

Repeating a loathsome strategy seen in other Honduran human rights abuses, Pineda argued that the real crime here is that security guards have died:

The human rights organizations “don’t seem to care about the people who get killed by the peasants,” Pineda said.

That's right. DINANT has no responsibility for the 23 deaths of campesinos recorded by FIAN; and those peasant deaths and land claims should be canceled out by deaths of security guards, none of which has actually been linked to a campesino activists by anything but innuendo. The repeated claim that Bajo Aguan peasants are armed by Nicaragua has been used to justify military occupation. But even Honduran President Lobo Sosa had to admit the military did not find any weapons.

In a weird side argument, Pineda suggested that canceling the project would be bad for Hondurans because DINANT also is producing "food".

What food? Fried snack foods and artery-clogging palm oil, ubiquitous as the cooking oil of at least the north coast. The website of the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank calls for investment in Dinant to "increase production capacity in its snacks and edible oils divisions".

But of course, that is not the main argument Pineda has to offer. No, his strongest claim is that for some reason, the report documenting peasant deaths should not have been taken seriously because "FIAN didn’t approach Grupo Dinant before making its report". Apparently, had they just done that, he has an explanation for the violence:

A security company hired by Dinant killed five people in November last year because its guards were under attack, he said. There has been no legal action stemming from the killings, he said.

The stakes are high for DINANT, so perhaps it is not surprising that they are exposing their best (worst?) arguments.

Not only did these two specific European companies decide that DINANT was perhaps a bad partner.

More generally, consultants in the sector-- at least in Europe-- understand that the liabilities that might come may not be worth the profits that remain questionable in the face of this unresolved and violent land dispute.

In its April 19 article reporting Roger Pineda's defense of DINANT, Bloomberg quoted Mark Meyrick, described as head of the Rotterdam-based carbon desk at Eneco Holding NV, a Dutch utility company.

Mr. Meyrick is clear:

“This is a question of proper due diligence” ... Projects must consult their so-called stakeholders as part of the process seeking United Nations- overseen approval for tradable credits... “In too many CDM projects, only lip service is paid to the stakeholder consultation, and the CER buyers and finance providers don’t check that properly.”

Roger Pineda clearly thinks DINANT is the one stakeholder that should have been consulted.

Score one for broader participation in consultation, and credit the tenacity not just of FIAN, but of the other organizations it acknowledges in its press release on the campaign to stop funding of the Bajo Aguan development project, including Honduran organizations COFADEH, CIPRODEH, and the Commission for Truth.

Now, can anyone get the UN CDM to read the reports of the UN Human Rights Commission?

The Impossibility of Transgendered People

It's hard enough being gay or lesbian in Latin America. Its even harder to be a transgendered individual, especially when your country's laws make that impossible, as those of Honduras do.

Everyone age 18 and over must have a national identity card issued by the Registro Nacional de Personas (RNP). Not having an identity card is illegal. The Registro Nacional de Personas says on its website:

The identification of the person is a fundamental human right because from it derives the legal recognition of important rights like nationality, relationship, the rights of children to demand parents comply with obligations, and the recognition of the rights of citizenship.

Unfortunately for that "fundamental human right", the RNP will not issue identity cards to transgendered individuals in their new identity. If you were registered at birth with the RNP as male, and you show up for your identity card photo dressed female, they will refuse to take your picture or to issue you an identity card. If you've plucked your eyebrows, they won't issue one as a male, either.

Honduran law has no support for the changing of identities. It has no support for changing names.

It's not that it's illegal, it's just not possible.

You are who and what your registration at birth says you are. The law of the Registro Nacional de Personas spells out the kinds of changes it is able to register. There is no law for the registration of changes of identity or gender. Being transgendered is inconceivable, and hence not possible under the existing law, written in 2004.

In Honduras gender and chromosomal sex are irretrievably linked and frozen in law at the registration of one's birth. Names are also frozen.

Even what Honduran authorities call hermaphrodites (better described today as intersex) people, born with genitalia that differ from expectations of normative male or female, are registered with a fixed gender of male or female at birth. In Honduras, an intersexed person can elect to have plastic surgery to establish a gender identity; but that identity is chosen for them by a chromosomal and medical exam deciding which sex is more completely expressed in the individual. Their choice of identity, their sense of themselves, does not enter into the decision.

And the imposition of state authority on the most intimate aspect of a person's identity doesn't stop there. Postsurgical intersex persons may be issued a new birth certificate by the hospital. However, the RNP does not recognize these new birth certificates for the purpose of establishing identity.

Likewise, transgendered individuals in Honduras may have plastic surgery to change their gender, and be issued new birth certificates. Again , the RNP does not recognize these changes, and refuses to issue new identity cards, other than cards describing the person they were at birth.

As the RNP correctly notes, a person without an identity in Honduras card cannot vote. They cannot get a drivers license. They cannot register a gun, attend university, leave the country, or open a bank account. This has immense implications for the lives of transgendered people. Because they cannot get an identity card that aligns with their actual personhood, they are open to being detained and harassed by the police. They can't get jobs, because you must have an identity card to work and pay taxes. This can limit their choice to illegal jobs, or to sex work. They may have to hide their gender identity in order to live and work legally. Honduras gives them no other choices.

There are people in Honduras trying to change these facts. The Violeta Collective, interviewed today in La Tribuna, provides a public face for this movement. Meanwhile, Honduras remains a deadly place to be trans-, gay, or bi-sexual.