Bumps in the Road Toward "Model Cities"

Xiomara Castro de Zelaya is the presidential candidate for LIBRE, the progressive party founded in the wake of post-coup activism in Honduras. She is also, as most readers of this blog certainly know, the wife of former President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, the target of the 2009 coup.

Xiomara became the consensus candidate for LIBRE in advance of party primaries, named as the presidential candidate by all the different movements within LIBRE-- a circumstance that actually required the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal to make adjustments in procedures designed to insist that each current have its very own candidate.

No other party has such a consensus presidential candidate, so until the primary elections are held in November, only LIBRE has a clearly designated leader. That puts Xiomara in the unusual position of being able to issue statements on urgent national issues on behalf of the entire party, something other parties are not able to do.

This week, she spoke out against the model cities agreement announced by Juan Orlando Hernández, challenging the constitutionality of the law and describing it as contrary to sovereignty:

On this occasion we would like to alert those who, without having all the elements to judge might plan now to subscribe to contracts in Honduras under the protection of the Ley de Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo, better known as the Law of the "Model Cities". This law has already been judged unconstitutional by the Special Counsel for the Defense of the Constitution and diverse qualified segments of Honduran society have judged it an affront to the sovereignty of our country, that extends illegal privileges to the subscribers while it converts us, the rest of the Hondurans, into strangers in our own territory.

Legal challenges to the law were also filed today by what Honduran media report are fourteen groups or individuals representing affected social sectors, including campesino groups and the Garifuna organization, OFRANEH (the Organización Fraternal Negra de Honduras).

Press accounts of these legal challenges echo Xiomara's statement, citing a motion filed in October 2011 by Oscar Cruz, the former attorney for the Defense of the Constitution in the office of the Public Prosecutor. Presented to the Supreme Court, the news reports note that this motion awaits action.

Cruz is quoted in news reports as saying the law is "a mockery of the state" and "a catastrophe for Honduras":

it proposes the creation of a state within the state, a mercantile entity with state-like attributes outside the jurisdiction of the state, to which will be handed over all the traditional attributes of sovereignty.

Add to this the statement by the godfather of Model Cities, Paul Romer, who is reported to be having second thoughts about the role he supposedly was going to play in Honduras.

The British newspaper The Guardian says Romer may quit because he "not been given the powers and information necessary to fulfil his role as chairman of the transparency commission, which is meant to ensure governance of the new development zones". The report says he and others supposed to form the "transparency" commission

will issue a statement distancing themselves from this week's announcement [of the first agreements to found model cities] and calling into question the legality of their appointment, which they say has not been published in the official gazette as required by Honduran law, ostensibly because of a challenge in the constitutional court.

Meanwhile, on behalf of LIBRE, Xiomara not only challenges the constitutionality of the law: she warned

those who might initiate projects under this unconstitutional approach of model cities, will be exposed to the loss of their investment.

Xiomara ended her statement with a proposition grounded in the unique position of LIBRE as the continuation of participatory citizenship that was central to her husband's administration:

we invite the president of the National Congress and his National Party, based on Article 5 of the Constitution, which regulates plebiscites and referenda, that we should submit the Law of "Model Cities" to the opinion of the sovereign [power], and that it should be the people who decide it.

There is no possibility this "invitation" will be accepted.

What the statement does is focus attention on the fragile legitimacy of entrenched political structures in Honduras, which operate without real support from the people. Hernández will have to work hard to demonstrate any broader popular support for the controversial policy, something no one has challenged him, or Porfirio Lobo Sosa, to document before.

Command Change in Honduras: US Role?

Did the United States force the removal of the Honduran Air Force Commander?

On September 1, 2012, the then-current head of the Honduran Air Force, Colonel Luis (or Ruiz) Pastor Landa  stepped down as head of the Air Force, turning over his command to Colonel Miguel Palacios.  

At the ceremony, Armed Forces Chief General Rene Osorio Canales lavishly praised Pastor Landa, and later told Radio Globo:

We're not happy; we're uncomfortable with these situations because we must be Hondurans with love of country..."

What did Osorio Canales mean by this?

On June 13, 2012, the Honduran Air Force shot down an alleged civilian drug plane, killing the two crew members.  One of the crew members, the Honduran press says, was a DEA agent who had infiltrated the drug cartel. This was not revealed to the press at the time. 

Shooting down suspected drug planes is controversial, on its face, an illegal act in violation of paragraph 3bis of International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO)  Convention on International Civil Aviation.

This is not to say there is universal agreement as to the meaning of paragraph 3bis.  As we wrote last April, the Convention says:

the contracting states recognize that every state must refrain from resorting to the use of military weapons against civil aircraft in flight, and that in case of interception, the lives of persons on board and the safety of aircraft must not be endangered.

It establishes that civil aviation aircraft are supposed to obey orders from military aircraft.  The Convention, however, recognizes a nation's sovereignty over its airspace, a loophole that in the past has been used by some nations to justify the downing of civilian aircraft.

The Honduran military, since last spring, has been vocally in favor of shooting down drug planes, though at the same time they claim not to be capable of doing so without the purchase of new aircraft.

General Rene Osorio Canales, back in April, called shooting down civilian airplanes suspect of drug trafficking, "more effective than legalizing drugs" for combating the drug cartels.  In fact, the Honduran military itself advocated for shooting down civilian aircraft suspected of engaging in drug trafficking back in March, 2012 when they supported Juan Orlando Hernandez, president of Congress, in his call for such a procedure.

So why is General Osorio Canales unhappy?

It seems, based on the evidence at hand, that the head of the US Southern Command, General Douglas Fraser, met with Porfirio Lobo Sosa on August 24, 2012 in Honduras.  Ambassador Lisa Kubiske also was at the meeting.  Based on a letter from the Defense Minister, Marlon Pascua, translated below, General Fraser expressed his unhappiness with the current Honduran policy (unacknowledged) of shooting down civilian aircraft suspected of drug running; and objected to Honduras compromising an ongoing investigation of the DEA.  As Porfirio Lobo Sosa stated at the time, Fraser

"expressed his concern over some incidents that in some manner violated the agreements on aerial navigation."

Air Force Colonel José San Martin F. wrote an editorial in La Tribuna published on September 2 calling for a rewrite of paragraph 3 bis of the OACI Convention.  Colonel San Martin F. was frustrated by the Honduran Air Force's inability to respond in 2009 when a plane carrying deposed President Manuel Zelaya was trying to land in Tegucigalpa.  Paragraph 3bis, Colonel San Martin F. writes,

"unfortunately permitted that that violation [of Honduran airspace] went unpunished."

La Tribuna published a letter from Secretary of Defense, Marlon Pascua to his Foreign Minister, Arturo Corrales the same day stating:

With respect to what was discussed in our recent visit to the Southern Command of the United States in a meeting held this day with General Fraser and Ambassador Kubiske, and following the instructions of the President we have sent the following instructions:

1.  In the command structure we make the following changes

a) The Commander of the Air Force starting September 1 will be Colonel Miguel Palacios Romero.

b)  The head of the Air Force command starting September 1 will be Colonel Jimmy Rommel Ayala Cerrato.

2. [We will] restructure the Operations Center of the Air Force.

3.  [We will change] the general process of certification of the pilots in the finding, identification, surveillance and interception of civilian aircraft

4. Honduran Air Force pilots who have participated in interception missions in this year will be sent back for a process of reinduction and retraining.

The letter is signed Marlon Pascua Cerrato and dated August 24, 2012.

The letter from Pascua seems pretty clear.  The US Southern Command "requested" a change in the command structure of the Honduran Air Force in General Fraser's meeting with Porfirio Lobo Sosa, and Corrales is being told of the results of the meeting, what Lobo Sosa will order as civilian commander of the Honduran Armed Forces.  Its also clear that General Osorio Canales doesn't like it.

Nor do high ranking members of the Honduran Air Force.

The editorial by Colonel José San Martin F. on September 2 challenges the decision expressed in Marlon Pascua's letter to rescind the policy the Air Force had been using to train pilots.  He wants clearer guidelines about when he can shoot, and he wants shooting down civilian aircraft suspected of drug running to be the policy in Honduras. He best expressed this position in writing of his frustration at not being able to do anything in 2009 against the plane that was carrying President Manuel Zelaya trying to land in Tegucigalpa after the coup.  Unstated was his clear desire to shoot it down.

In March, General Osorio Canales seemed to be both for it, and against it on the same day, in articles in the same newspaper.  On the same day, in another newspaper, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, Osorio Canales's commander in chief, said that such a policy would be a violation of international law.  Even Osorio Canales, in one of the two articles, acknowledged that there needed to be legal changes before drug planes could be shot down.

It therefore seems likely this the adoption of a shoot-down policy was instituted by the military without civilian government approval.

Pascua's letter confirms that the United States forced the removal of Colonel Pastor Landa as head of the Honduran Air Force.

Agreement for a Model City

Juan Orlando Hernandez, the head of the Honduran National Congress announced Tuesday afternoon that COALIANZA, the Comisión para la Promoción de Alianzas Público-Privadas, had signed an agreement for the first of three model cities in Honduras.

The agreement will cover one of the regions being discussed as possible locations for a model city.  The three regions mentioned as possibilities for model cities are:  near Puerto Cortés, the Agalteca Valley or the Sicaya-Paulaya valley near Puerto Castilla, and Choluteca. According to COALIANZA, it must be located near to both an airport and a port.

Hernandez told the press:

"It should be noted that these model cities will be established in depopulated areas of Honduras.  It does not imply the displacement of people or social groups."

None of these regions is completely vacant. Reading between the lines, what Hernandez is saying is that there are no large cooperatives or powerful landowners in these regions, groups that might vocally protest the expropriation of the land on which they live and work. 

La Tribuna reports that a funding partner for this model city will be the US company MKG Group, which has agreed to invest some 15 million lempiras ( or $7.8 million dollars ).  Michael Strong, identified an executive with the company, is reported to have said:

"The future will remember this day as that day that Honduras began developing.  We believe this will be one of the most important transformations in the world, through which Honduras will end poverty by creating thousands of jobs."

We were unable to locate any information on MKG Group, though the Michael Strong in question is, we believe, the Michael Strong associated with FLOW and the Free Cities Institute. Strong formed the Grupo Ciudades Libres LLC, a Nevada Company, with Kevin Lyons in 2011. 

Another group that claims to be involved is the Future Cities Development Corporation, one of whose founders is Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, nobel laureate in economics. This group has previously been linked by The Economist to the Model Cities project in Honduras.

Hernandez said that the main funding partner of the project, whose identity will be revealed later, is a Canadian company that has been investing in development regions worldwide for the last 15 years, but he would not identify the company.

According to COALIANZA, the project will provide 5000 direct and indirect jobs this year, 15,000 next year, 30,000 in 2014, and 45,000 in 2015.

The agreement must still be approved by the rubber-stamp Honduran Congress, and the Executive Branch must appoint a governor.

Questioning the State Department: Human Rights "Progress" in Honduras?

UC Santa Cruz historian Dana Frank, in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, strongly criticizes the US State Department for its recent affirmation that Honduras is making sufficient progress in correcting human rights abuses to allow disbursal of foreign aid funds sequestered by congressional mandate.


This finding recently received publicity, ironically, because of one small exception: the admission by the State Department that Porfirio Lobo Sosa's hand-picked police chief, Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, has a suspect history. As Frank writes:

the State Department did announce that it was withholding all U.S. funds to Juan Carlos (El Tigre) Bonilla, the national chief of police, or anyone under his direct supervision, until an investigation of his alleged death squad activity has concluded.

You would think that the fact that the president of Honduras appointed, and continues to support, someone with such a tainted history during a period when in theory the government is committed to clearing up corruption in the police would have raised questions about the Lobo Sosa administration, not just Bonilla. But apparently not: the vast majority of US funding that was subject to withholding has now been approved for release.

Why? Frank, in her final paragraph, reaches the same conclusion as most other observers of the situation; the US administration

is obsessed with an unwinnable, militarized drug war in Latin America, and as result appears to be willing to back almost any government that will allow it to expand its military presence in the region.

Frank cites the almost unbelievable numbers that have been tallied since 2009, when Honduran rule of law was disrupted by a coup, boundaries between military and policing began to be blurred, and the security forces were unleashed by the government to silence dissent:

• 10,000 human rights complaints against security forces
• 23 journalists killed
• multiple reports by international human rights groups about repeated abuses of due process, denial of constitutional rights, and violation of human rights.

Want to read more details? Start with the links provided by the UNHCR. Or those maintained by Reporters Without Borders.

Too internationalist for you? Then visit the website of Freedom House, generally considered a centrist organization. In a report dated July 4, 2012, Freedom House writes that in the past year,

Honduras continued to suffer from human rights violations, impunity, and corruption.

But none of this convinced the State Department to use the leverage provided by Congressional direction to withhold a small percentage of funding--"20% of a portion of U.S. police and military aid", to quote Frank-- to try to move the Honduran government away from its current posture.

What is that posture?

In June, Maria Antonieta Guillen represented the Honduran government in testimony to the UN.  She argued that the government had to walk a "fine line" to "avoid delinquency by minors" while "preserving the integrity of the diverse centers of rehabilitation". Deadly prison fires over the past year have exposed the reality: overcrowding, large numbers detained without charges, and the criminalization of practices of the young. As sociologist Leticia Salomon wrote, these fires are "evidence of the collapse of the system".

Guillen argued that, since human life is the fundamental human right, policing cannot be said to violate human rights, because it is the prevention of violent crime. Whenever accusations of human rights violations are raised, the Honduran government's response is either that the crimes were private (explaining away the systematic and unprecedented increases in crimes against activists and journalists); or that the security forces were acting to combat crime. These justifications betray a fundamental difference in how the Honduran government understands the role of security forces and the status of human rights.

It would be one thing for the State Department to admit that Honduras has not improved its record, and make a case-- however it might want-- that US national security interests outweigh this failure. That at least would not involve giving a blessing to a regime uninterested in improving actual human rights, and incompetent to do so in any event.

What is tragic is that, by certifying progress that no one else sees, the US State Department is lending support to assertions about what is needed for social order in Honduras that are directly at odds with values the US espouses.

Progress Report on Police Anti-Corruption Reviews

The Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP) has reportedly issued a press release stating that the 24  police officers of all ranks who have not submitted to the proof of confidence testing required by the DIECP will probably be fired.

The DIECP reported that none of the 24 had provided a reason for not showing up for their scheduled appointment. The DIECP press release points out that this is disobedience of a superior's order, punishable with dismissal according to the police charter.

The files on these 24 police officers will be turned over to the police chief, Juan Carlos Bonilla, for disposition.

Proceso Digital reports that the DIECP has attempted to review 169 police officials, most of them members of the highest levels of command.  Of these, 145 have submitted to the exam, and 24 refused.  That is a rate of resistance to the campaign to excise corruption of about 14%.

The DIECP has not released the results of the confidence test on any of the 145 who have taken it so far, so the actual proportion of police officers who do not meet the requirements is not (yet) known.

The DIECP hopes to have conducted over 400 confidence tests by the end of 2012, and over 5000 in the next three years. 

War of Words Between Police Chiefs

Late yesterday Juan Carlos Bonilla, the police chief, revealed on Honduran TV that the police were linked both to the 2009 murder of General Julian Aristides Gonzalez and the 2011 murder of Alfredo Landaverde.

The former police chief, Ricardo Ramirez del Cid, seems to have taken that as a personal attack.   Ramirez del Cid told a local radio program:

If anyone has evidence against me they should present it but not send me subliminal messages in the media trying to blemish the image of retired officials, attacking from the inside will not resolve anything.

Del Cid also said:

He left us guessing; he didn't mention anyone's name but he left us guessing.  That's not good because the same thing could happen to him (Bonilla) tomorrow.

He went on to complain that Bonilla knows that there are many police stations in such precarious conditions that they could not possibly be used to commit crimes!

Ramirez del Cid seems to have been referring to finances when he said "precarious conditions".  The only way I can make sense of this statement is as a reference to the motorcycle used to kill General Gonzalez, which Bonilla said left from, and returned to, a Tegucigalpa police station. The implication seems to be, hey, our motorcycles wouldn't be in good enough condition for a drive-by shooting.

Ramirez del Cid also denied that any acts of police corruption occurred during his six months as police chief.

We will simply point to the killing of Julieta Castellanos's son, which happened during Del Cid's time as police chief. It was his handling of the event for which he was ultimately fired. Thw implicated police officers were allowed to escape. This was the case that led to police corruption becoming a focus in Honduras.

There is nothing in Bonilla's comments that we can see to lead Ramirez del Cid to take then as a personal attack.

It may be a guilty conscience.

Ramirez del Cid is one of 11 high ranking police who failed to show up for their appointment for the process being employed to identify sources of corruption in the Honduran police. The group not complying with the law includes pretty much everyone in the police command before Bonilla was appointed. Ramirez del Cid was the man in charge.

Del Cid is still an active duty police officer despite having no duties.  He still receives a salary, and therefore must submit to the tests under the law passed by Congress. The process he is ducking involves drug tests, psychological tests, financial investigation, and answering standardized questions while connected to a lie detector. 

Instead, he says he's asked to retire. But that isn't stopping him from launching a war of words with his successor.

Police Suspected in Key Murders

Late yesterday Juan Carlos Bonilla, the Police Chief in Honduras, told the press that police were suspected in the killing of Alfredo Landaverde, an advisor to then Security Minister Oscar Alvarez.

La Tribuna quotes Bonilla:

I am saying that the suspects indicate that members of the National Police participated in these cases.

But that's not all. 

Bonilla also admitted that the police were suspected in the killing of the head of the anti-drug program in Honduras, Julian Aristides Gonzalez. 

Bonilla reportedly told the TV program Frente a Frente

The only thing I want to say to you is that there are suspects who have some connection with the police in this case, and that will be demonstrated in its time because we are checking the information and if there isn't a direct or indirect connection with the case, it will be discarded, but now there are suspects (police) that are linked by omission and if the investigation turns out that way we will proceed.

La Tribuna goes on to report that the motorcycle used in the Gonzalez killing left from and returned to the main police station in Tegucigalpa.

Julian Aristides Gonzalez, then Anti-Drug advisor to the Public Prosecutor, was murdered by armed men on a motorcycle in Tegucigalpa in 2009. 

Afredo Landaverde was a senior advisor to then Security Minister Oscar Alvarez when he was murdered by men on motorcycles in December, 2011, also in Tegucigalpa.