Ebal Diaz: "We've already contained the corruption"

Large Torchlight Marches (Marchas de las Antorchas) have been going on every night in different cities in Honduras for at least the last three weeks.

Participants have called for three things: an end to impunity, the establishment of an International Commission against Impunity, and the resignation of Juan Orlando Hernández, President of Honduras, due to corruption in his election campaign.

The Partido Nacional has admitted that the election of Hernández was funded in part by resources diverted from the IHSS. Nonetheless, both the party, and the government it controls, are against Honduras calling for an International Commission against Impunity.

That's the word from Ebal Diaz, a Honduran presidential advisor.

These commissions, organized by the UN, have been effective in other countries where they've been formed, such as Guatemala.

Honduras doesn't need one because, according to Diaz, "We've already contained the corruption." 

Diaz goes further, calling the Guatemala commission ineffective. He relates that it has cost $150 million over its seven year life, and successfully brought and prosecuted only four cases of corruption or impunity. 

Diaz said:

"Is this an alternative for the country?  There are the numbers; they're not something we invented.  So the Honduran people need justice...When?  In three years?  In 5 years? or now?  We're looking for solutions now by strengthening our [government] institutions."

Diaz suggests the government might accelerate its pace of cleaning up corruption and implementing training.

These actions, however, do nothing to capture and prosecute those who perpetrated the crimes, something Diaz fails to address.

The recent Congressional Commission which reviewed a series of corruption cases involving the IHSS, INPREMA, and the IP, and the assassinations of notable government officials like Alfredo Landaverde, was relatively useless.

It served only to confirm what everyone already knows: the Public Prosecutor's office is barely investigating these cases of corruption and impunity, some of which have stretched on for more than seven years in the investigative state. While it might eventually bring charges against those immediately responsible, it likely will not pursue those who planned and directed the crimes. From that perspective, then, even with the "numbers" Diaz cites, a commission like that in Guatemala would be an improvement.

The level of corruption and impunity in Honduras is hard to believe. In fact, even as the Congressional report was being released, the lead on the congressional committee, Mario Perez, was being identified in the Honduran press as a drug trafficker, based on Honduran government documents from 2012.

Impunity reigns in Honduras not because the Public Prosecutor's office is incapable of pursing these crimes. It has been endlessly trained under US and European foreign aid programs in investigation and prosecution of organized crime. 

To pursue these crimes is neither politically expedient, nor good for a prosecutor's longevity.  No government program will address either of these risks.

The previous Prosecutor against corruption, Roberto Ramirez Aldana, who had headed the IHSS investigation from the start, recently took an extended leave to assume a government post as Honduras's Ambassador to UNESCO.  He did so because the Honduran Military Intelligence agency informed him of credible death threats against him and suggested he leave the country.

One of the trails of corruption leads directly to the currently ruling Partido Nacional. But the current Public Prosecutor, Oscar Chinchilla, was appointed by that party, while Juan Orlando Hernandez was the President of Congress, during the presidential term of Porfirio Lobo Sosa.  Chinchilla sets the priorities for the office. He's focusing the department on corruption during José Manuel Zelaya's term as president, largely ignoring more recent corruption that can be linked to his own party.

Arturo Corrales, Honduras' Foreign Minister, has said Honduras will not ask for an International Commission against Corruption from the UN.

Rigoberto Chang Castillo, currently Minister of Justice, the Interior, and Decentralization, went further: he made up a criterion for when such a commission is necessary: "Only when there's a high degree of ingovernability". Chang Castillo claims that "Honduras isn't worthy" of such a designation.  These kinds of commissions, he continued,

"uniquely can be asked for by the government of the Republic when the country is in a state of ingovernability and there is no confidence in the institutions of the State....This is requested when the Judicial system has collapsed."

The irony is, Chang Castillo precisely describes the Honduras that the Torchlight Marchers see.

"If" Makes All the Difference: Hernández on the Corruption Scandal

Honduras president: graft-linked companies helped fund my campaign

That's how Reuters titled their story, datelined Tegucigalpa today.

Which would be an incredible step forward in taking responsibility for the corruption scandal that has led to torchlit protests uniting supporters of two of the opposition parties in Honduras.

Unfortunately, the story appears to be slightly less than the headline promises. The basic points it reports are easy to summarize:

Facing a wave of protests calling for his resignation, Honduran President Juan Hernandez said on Wednesday that his 2013 presidential campaign took money from companies linked to one of the worst corruption scandals in the country's history.

But he said he and his National Party were unaware of where the money came from and hoped that an investigation would find and punish those responsible for breaking any laws.
...
Hernandez said the probe found 3 million lempiras (about $148,000) in campaign financing was tied to those companies, without giving more details.   

That would be considerably less funding channeled to the campaign than the $90 million that sources other than the PN have reported went to the party's coffers.

And while Hernández begrudgingly admitted some funds came to his campaign from the companies set up to loot the IHSS, he insisted he personally had nothing to do with it:

Hernandez told reporters that "me, myself, Juan Orlando, I have nothing to do" with the scandal.

Needless to say,  leaders of the protests against JOH were not placated. Salvador Nasralla of the Partido Anti-Corrupción underlined that corruption is corruption, saying:

"It's like saying that a thief who steals a little is less guilty than one who steals a lot".

The Honduran press, meanwhile, took quite a different tack in its coverage, leaving a much more ambiguous impression about what the president has or has not admitted.

El Heraldo's article was headlined "JOH: Partido Nacional should return funds to the IHSS", but the statement attributed to Hernández is conditional:

Hernández insisted that if it were proven that businesses connected to the embezzlement at IHSS issued checks in favor of the Partido Nacional, the funds should be returned...

That "if" disappeared in the Reuters story. But it, and similar hedged language, is all over Honduran reporting.

JOH, while seeming to call for his party to admit guilt, actually used the opportunity to undermine one of his political rivals, ex-mayor of Tegucigalpa Ricardo Alvarez, stating

"I am not the president of the party, but this was my suggestion more than eight months ago; I said that once the Fiscalía and the Judicial branch demonstrate that those resources came from something unseemly, the Partido Nacional is under an obligation to return those resources.

The head of the Partido Nacional who, this passage implies, did not take JOH's good advice, while unnamed in this article is Alvarez, who would have been likely to be the strongest candidate for president from the PN, before the Supreme Court decision allowing re-election.

In reporting by La Prensa, Hernández is quoted as explicitly saying "some of the checks were in the period when Ricardo Alvarez was president of the Party", continuing

"I don't know right now if he has given his statement or not, but everyone has to give a statement, everyone has to give his version and afterward, the court has to make its
finding".

It is no accident that El Heraldo ended its article with Hernández' response to a question about re-election:

In regard to my electoral participation, it seems to me that I should leave space for all political actors, but if they are in agreement, I have no problem in participating.

El Tiempo, reporting the response almost word for word as El Heraldo, added "Nonetheless, [Hernández] said that he had not spoken of re-election".

So-- no admission of guilt at all, contrary to what Reuters reported, is found in the Honduran coverage.  La Prensa de Honduras actually headlined its story  "I have nothing to do with the corruption of the Seguro": Juan Orlando Hernández.

Curiously absent from the Reuters story is what Hernández had to say about those protesting about the scandal. In Tiempo he is quoted as saying

"Why have the people come out? just like me, I was angered when I realized the depth of the problem, of the avarice of the human being who could act at the moment of being an administrator"..."I am certain that the majority of the people, like all of us, are angry about what has happened and many people legitimately come out and march, but also there are people who come out and march because they do not want other cases to be known ..."

So in JOH's view, he is on the side of the just protesters, while some others are nefariously participating in protests to prevent the disclosure of their own corruption, or for other, undisclosed, purposes, as El Heraldo quotes him saying

"It could be that some would like to use this movement for other purposes..."

And in case the innuendo is lost on readers, Proceso Digital ran its story under the headline Marchas tienen un componente legítimo pero tambíen intereses oscuros: Presidente Hernández. Where other Honduran media stopped quoting JOH's comments on the protests after he expressed his support for the "legitimate" outrage (in which he included himself), in Proceso Digital the statement took a more disturbing turn:

"but there is another group that is asking that I should not be in the government ever since I took office, the people that were against extradition, it is all one sequence, these are different sentiments, these are people that want to stop the fight against organized crime.

For JOH, protests against generalized "corruption" are fine, because he has nothing to do with it. But when the call is for him to step down-- well, that's quite another thing: you must be on the side of organized crime.

Reuters reported the part of Hernández statements that speaks to the over-arching narrative being constructed about corruption and protest in Central America, in which Guatemala and Honduras are merged. But each country has its own issues, and what gets left out from original coverage is where we find the traces of real politics.

It may be reassuring to suggest that the president of Honduras has admitted his party did something wrong, and has directed it be corrected. But that doesn't seem to actually be what has happened; holding himself above the fray, Juan Orlando Hernández minimized the depth of corruption, and managed to use the opportunity to continue to undermine political rivals within and outside his own party.

Protests, Claims of Conspiracy Against Juan Orlando Hernández

Juan Orlando Hernández, elected President of Honduras in November 2013 with about 37% of the popular vote, has ruled as if he had an electoral mandate.

For the last couple of weeks, however, things have been a little rougher in JOH's Honduras. Rough enough that English language media have taken notice.  

The International Business Times covered the story with a headline "Juan Orlando Hernandez Resignation Scandal", summarizing the issues concisely:

Hondurans demanded the resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernandez Wednesday during demonstrations across the violence plagued capital city of Tegucigalpa. Protesters outside the National Congress questioned Hernandez's involvement in a social security scam involving some of the nation's most influential businesspeople and politicians...

The Honduran Institute of Social Security funding scam allegedly involved officials transferring large sums of money from the nation's federal coffers to the ruling National Party during the 2013 presidential elections.

The Tico Times adds that the Partido Nacional is accused

of having accepted approximately $90 million from IHSS to finance Hernández’s campaign in 2013, a cut of more than $300 million in diverted funds from the IHSS.

The investigation of corruption at the IHSS is ongoing. What has been alleged, citing the Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción, is that funds were paid to false-front businesses that provided no services. Some of these businesses then wrote checks to the central committee of the Partido Nacional, which used the proceeds to fund the presidential campaign, according to Salvador Nasralla, leader of the Partido Anti-Corrupción.

Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción (CNA

Leer más en: http://www.elheraldo.hn/pais/710497-214/entre-320-personas-se-repartieronel-multimillonario-desfalco-al-ihss
Síganos en: www.facebook.com/diarioelheraldo y @diarioelheraldo en Twitter

The allegation that a large part of the money diverted financed Hernández' presidential campaign has fueled demands that he step down.

Which leads to the strangest part of this story: the pushback, which has tried to recast this all as plotting to undermine the president, even to carry out a military coup.

As the IHSS scandal was unfolding Marvin Ponce, a former member of the Honduran Congress, and current advisor to the president, claimed that there was a "conspiracy" to spread rumors about JOH involving the US government:

I am glimpsing a dangerous thing. There is a high profile TV company in the country that has had meetings in the Department of State and with the Department of Justice. They have initiated a very strong campaign against the president. What we are seeing is that there is a campaign through two routes, David Romero [a prominent Honduran broadcaster] with accusations, and on the other side a strong strategy by other powerful sectors of the country to force him to yield and to avoid his seeking re-election."

Ponce's claims of US involvement are, to be charitable, questionable. They would require us to credit that preventing presidential re-election (recently authorized by the Honduran Supreme Court) is more important to US foreign policy than supporting a government doing precisely what the US calls for in security, immigration, and economic policy.

But even these claims do not hold a candle to other rumors about supposed plotting against JOH.

These came from Hugo Maldonado, the current head of Honduras' Human Rights Commission, who claimed that political opponents of the Honduran president were conspiring to remove him in a coup d'etat.

The ex-head of the Honduran Armed Forces, Romeo Vasquez Velasquez-- who actually was responsible for the execution of the 2009 Honduran coup-- denied the charge vigorously, and colorfully:

He shouldn't go making things up, unless my wife and I alone are going to carry out a coup d'Etat. I'm not in the Armed Forces-- who am I supposed to commit a coup with?

That wasn't the only reporting that waded into dubious waters.

The Honduran paper La Tribuna published an article-- really more like a political speech by a very enthusiastic supporter of the Partido Nacional-- on May 14. In between boasting about the strength of the PN and of JOH, it sketches out a supposed plot fueled by methamphetamine use, backdated to March, in which political advisors to José Manuel Zelaya supposedly outlined a campaign to undermine Hernández, amazingly, through public protests in May about corruption.

The conspiracy allegedly involved David Romero, and Salvador Nasralla of the Partido Anti-Corrupción as well, thus tidily blackening the reputations of all three.

The one thing in this lurid story that has some truth to it is that both PAC and LIBRE are calling for JOH to resign due to the IHSS scandal.

Meanwhile, the Tico Times estimated 5000 people took part in the latest march in Tegucigalpa, a night-time torchlit rally that was supported by both LIBRE and the Partido Anti-Corrupción.

Investigations of the IHSS continue; and for his part, JOH is trying to stay above the fray, while his party launches counter-accusations, smearing opponents and suing Salvador Nasralla for "defamation".

Trading Commodities for Chicken Progress

The United States Department of Agriculture, under its "Food for Progress" program, is donating agricultural products worth $17 million to the Honduran Ministry of Cattle and Agriculture (Secretaria de Agricultura y Ganadería, SAG in Spanish).

According to a USDA press release, SAG is supposed to sell these products (yellow corn and soybean meal) in commodities markets, then use the proceeds

to implement projects aimed at improving agricultural productivity, enhancing farmers' access to information and market skills, building government capacity, and strengthening local, regional and international trade in agricultural products. 

The USDA press release later adds:

The projects supported by this new agreement will focus on the creation of jobs and income opportunities for some of Honduras' most vulnerable citizens. The beneficiaries will include small farmers, as well as small businesses and producer organizations, particularly those that support rural women and youth. 

John Donaghy's blog post triggered our interest in this story. He wondered who in Honduras would be buying these agricultural products, which are not used in local cooking practices, and asked

Why doesn’t the US just sell the food and give the money to Honduras?...how will this yellow corn sale really help hungry Hondurans? 

Donaghy relayed remarks made in response to his question by a skeptic who doubted these commodity donations would be particularly beneficial for the Honduran poor, but more likely would benefit agribusiness interests. Donaghy responded:

I think you are probably right. Yellow corn and soybean meal are cattle feed. But who owns most of the cattle here in Honduras and may buy the feed? A few rich large land owners who use their land for cattle grazing - which not only takes away some of the best flat land but also is environmentally poor in its misuse of hills. Again, the poor suffer.

We had a similar reaction when we read the story; "improving agricultural productivity, enhancing farmers' access to information and market skills, building government capacity, and strengthening local, regional and international trade in agricultural products" all seems to us to be about Honduran agribusiness interests; how do we get from there to helping the "most vulnerable citizens... rural women and youth"?

Part of the problem in addressing this question is that we have very little real information about what programs will be supported by this new agreement.

There is no real reporting from Honduras; news media simply seem to be reprinting the press release in Spanish. El Tiempo provides a hint of what the substance of the Honduran proposal might be:

the USDA will use the earnings produced through the sales of yellow maize and soy meal in the nation of North America over 42 months for the execution of projects in 8 departments of the national [Honduran] territory.  

 An article in El Economista instead says that the agreement

intends for Honduras to obtain income through the resale of these products in order to finance a project of improvements in agricultural productivity and access by agriculturalists to the market.

Who's right? And how exactly could this new agreement help "vulnerable" (poor) Hondurans?

Under the "Food For Progress" program, the USDA maintains a list of "priority" countries and solicits proposals from governments and NGOs.  Honduras has not received support under this program since 2012. We only have the USDA press release and program website to judge what the Honduran Government might have proposed to do this time.

The "Food For Progress"  website says

Food for Progress has two principal objectives: to improve agricultural productivity and to expand trade of agricultural products

and describes having supported projects around the world that

have trained farmers in animal and plant health, improved farming methods, developed road and utility systems, established producer cooperatives, provided microcredit, and developed agricultural value chains.

The website also provides a link to the legal regulations that govern the program. These make it clear that the US donates commodities (so Tiempo got it wrong when it said the USDA will be selling commodities for the benefit of Honduras).

The foreign party to an agreement in the program can either directly use the US commodities offered, or resell them and use the proceeds for specific projects. That seems to be what the Honduran agreement is about: to sell commodities donated by the US.

While we still have no idea where the detail came from, the coverage by Tiempo could be right in saying that eight departments of Honduras will see specific projects implemented using the proceeds from sales of commodities. The program regulations provide an outline of what is needed in a proposal, so we know Honduras had to provide specific information including:

the targeted geographic area, anticipated beneficiaries, and methods that the applicant would use to choose such beneficiaries, including obtaining and considering statistics on poverty levels, food deficits, and any other required items...

Previous projects supported in Honduras are listed in the "Food for Progress" website. They might help us understand USDA's specific goals in its donations for Honduras.

In addition to the Honduran government (about whose past projects we have found only generalities), previous participants have included CARE, Finca, and TechnoServe. That gives us an opportunity to see what kinds of projects Food for Progress has supported under other agreements.

Finca's Honduras projects are in microfinance, including agricultural loans. A study of Finca's loans to Honduran rural women reported mixed results: women were able to improve food security, but not to significantly change their economic condition due to what the author identified as an "entrenched socioeconomic hierarchy".

CARE also is involved in microfinance in Honduras. Its website links to a report on Honduras and Guatemala that describes efforts to encourage small holder farmers to produce high value cash crops for export (in this case, papayas). Decades-long research on the effects of conversion to high value export crops in Honduras, from anthropologists such as Susan Stonich, stresses the environmental and social costs that follow.

It is with TechnoServe, the third NGO with past projects in Honduras funded through Food for Progress, that it becomes clearest that the goal of the USDA in Honduras, overall, is to integrate people who would have been subsistence farmers into production for international commodity markets.

TechnoServe describes its goals as supporting agribusiness development and entrepreneurial enterprises. Its website highlight efforts to increase Honduran producers' participation in coffee and cacao production, and features positive coverage of palm oil production in Honduras. All three of these agricultural commodities are the focus of critical academic studies that raise question about integration in international markets.

The route from the Food for Progress program's objectives to the stated outcome of improving life for the "most vulnerable" in Honduras requires a belief in the transformative potential for the rural poor of becoming part of international markets. As anthropologists, we think past history suggests skepticism is in order.

That leaves us with one last question, the one we started with: who benefits from the sale of the commodities donated by USDA?

The "Food for Progress" website says commodities donated by the USDA are to be "sold on the local market".

And indeed, the USDA website describes Honduras as a growing market for agricultural exports purchased from the US:

Honduras is among the fastest-growing markets in the Central American region, accounting for $613.4 million in U.S. agricultural exports in FY 2014. Top U.S. exports include corn, wheat, and soybean meal.

Corn and soy meal, the commodities donated by the USDA under the Food for Progress program, are important primarily for agribusiness, as John Donaghy's blog post inferred. But the beneficiaries are not so much cattle as chickens.

A 2003 FAO study noted growing imports of yellow maize in Honduras to be used for burgeoning chicken feedlots that took chicken from an expensive luxury to a staple for those residents of Honduran cities with sufficient cash income. A 2005 report on food security from the UN World Food Programme stated that yellow maize was imported primarily for feed concentrates for chicken and pigs. Soy cake was mentioned as poultry feed in the 2003 report. A US soy industry website reported on advising about use of soy meal in poultry and livestock feed in Honduras in 2014.

So we can probably assume the commodities provided by the USDA will be sold in Honduras to animal feedlots. Chickens, the main focus, are consumed in Honduras, but chicken is also exported, with a sharp rise starting around 2005. In 2014, it was reported that Honduran chicken was nearing approval for export to the US.

And that concludes the great circle of using US agricultural surplus to encourage Hondurans to produce agricultural products to be sold to external markets-- including the US.

Honduran farmers benefit, in theory, by being more firmly embedded in a world agricultural economy. Whether you think this will be effective in alleviating poverty probably depends on how you understand the complicated web of environmental, social, and economic forces involved.

Our skepticism comes from the history of Honduras' "entrenched socioeconomic hierarchy" maintaining and deepening inequality, leaving producers with the risks that come with environmental degradation, vulnerability of monocrops to plagues, and shifts in world prices, while letting those who control the means of export minimize their risk by setting prices to purchase from producers based on world markets, leaving people who could fulfill at least some of their subsistence needs by farming dependent on internal markets subject to shortages and price manipulation.

But if all goes well with the commodities sales, at least Honduras might have more chicken. The poultry producers argue this will improve nutrition and food security. At least for those who can afford to buy it...

Re-Election a Done Deal

Former Presidents may now seek re-election in Honduras.

That is the effect of the Constitutional Branch decision having been published at 5 pm on Friday in La Gaceta, the official publication of the Honduran government.

How the publication of this decision happened is informative: someone fast-tracked the process.

As we previously noted, last Wednesday afternoon the Constitutional Branch debated and passed a resolution unanimously declaring that the portions of the Honduran constitution and penal code that prohibit re-election of Presidents were unconstitutional. All 5 justices signed that decision, which was then leaked to the press by someone employed by the court, an "official" leak. 

Overnight between Wednesday and Thursday the political clamor on both sides of the issue was intense.

Officially, only the National Party is in support of the decision, and it was a National Party ex-president and National Party Congressmen that had challenged the constitutional provision.

This fact becomes important when you realize that the Supreme Court, as constituted, was also selected while the National Party controlled the government, and that the Constitutional Branch contains current president Juan Orlando Hernández's hand picked candidates.  While president of Congress and campaigning for President, Hernández carried out a political purge of dubious legality, removing four of the five justices in the Constitutional Branch, replacing them with his own choices.  He has since replaced that fifth justice, promoting him to the position of Public Prosecutor.

The three other major parties-- the Liberal Party, Libre, and PAC-- have all come out against re-election.  After all, the post-hoc justification offered for the 2009 coup was that somehow through the opinion survey of the Cuarta Urna, Manuel Zelaya Rosales would be able to be re-elected.

Since joining Congress as a Libre Party member, Zelaya Rosales himself has come out against presidential re-election, as has the leader of PAC, Salvador Nasralla.

Thursday morning at 8 am, Justice Lizardo of the Constitutional Branch tried to rescind his signature on the decision.  Such an act, if upheld, would have made the decision not unanimous and would have forced the entire 15 justices of the court to hear the case and issue an opinion.  Lizardo based his recanting on the precarious legal theory that because the Constitutional Branch had not notified the legal representatives of the parties of a decision, he had room to act. This was where matters stood when we last blogged about this.

However, the Secretary of the Constitutional Branch chose to ignore Lizardo's letter notifying him of the change, and went ahead to disseminate the decision to the legal parties.

He also forwarded the decision to the Secretary of Congress, who then quickly forwarded it to ENAG, the government division that prints La Gaceta. Publishing congressional and executive decrees in La Gaceta is what puts them into effect.

The Honduran Congress and Supreme Court have a long-standing dispute about when judicial decisions are effective, with those opposed to some Supreme Court decisions refusing to publish them, to try to ignore them. The Honduran Congress has historically tried to assert control over the constitutional effects of Supreme Court decisions, normally reviews and can even publicly discuss decisions before deciding to forward them to ENAG for publication. No such review was allowed to happen this time, a decision taken by the National Party leaders of Congress.

Everyone agrees that once a judicial decision is published in La Gaceta it is in effect. Normally the publication process takes weeks. ENAG normally publishes things in the order they are received, and it usually has a large backlog of things to publish, so that bills can take a month or more to be published.

Yesterday at 5 pm this decision was officially published in La Gaceta. Someone clearly rushed this one into print.

The upshot: on Thursday Rafael Callejas, who brought the case, convened his campaign to regain the Presidency which he held as a National Party member from 1990 to 1994.

Being An Environmentalist Can Kill You

Global Witness, an NGO that exposes corruption and environmental abuse, released a report this week that called Honduras the most dangerous country to be an environmentalist. 

The numbers are heartbreaking.

Global Witness looked at the period 2002 - 2014 to accumulate statistics on the death of environmental activists around the world.  Brazil had the highest number of deaths, at 477, while Honduras had 111. Almost all of those deaths happened since 2010.  If you look at the rate of death of environmentalists over the last 5 years, it turns out Honduras leads, with 101 deaths.

Here's how the numbers work. 

From 2002 to 2009, Honduras had 0, 1, 2, or 3 deaths per year of environmentalists.  Starting with 2010, those numbers skyrocketed:  21 deaths in 2010, 33 deaths in 2011, 25 deaths in 2012, 10 deaths in 2013, and 12 deaths in 2014.  90% of the Honduran environmentalist deaths occurred in the last 5 years!

Global Witness found that mining and other extractive industries caused the largest number of deaths in 2014, with a tie for the second spot between Water and Dams, and Agribusiness.  These three accounted for 84% of the environmentalist deaths in 2014.

This violence has come down particularly hard on indigenous environmentalists.  Three Tolupan leaders were shot and killed during an anti-mining protest in 2014. 

The Global Witness report came out the same day that another Honduran indigenous environmentalist, Berta Cáceres, won the Goldman Prize:

The Goldman Environmental Prize honors grassroots environmental heroes from the world’s six inhabited continental regions....The Prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk.

Cáceres was honored for her grassroots organizing of opposition to the Agua Zarca dam project.  Agua Zarca was a joint project of the Honduran company Desarrollos Energeticos S. A. (DESA) and SinoHydro, the Chinese government owned company recognized as the largest dam builder in the world.  DESA received a $24 million loan from the Banco Centroamericano de Integración Economico for the project. 

As the Goldman page for Cáceres notes, the project was promoted and approved in a corrupt and fraudulent fashion, failing to do the required consultation with the local Lenca communities that lived within the region slated for the reservoir, a violation of ILO 169 and other treaties to which Honduras is a signatory.

DESA was founded in 2008 and claims to be a Honduran pro-environment company:

DESA has always been concerned for the protection of the environment and because of this all its business practices and maintenance follow strict guidelines to be in harmony with nature.

Nature maybe, but not in harmony with the Honduran people, who they seems to despise. 
 DESA guards killed Tomas Garcia while he was protesting against the dam.  They attacked protesters with guns, clubs, and machetes over and over again during the protest, with impunity for all the wounds and the death inflicted.

DESA doesn't list its ownership or any company officers. DESA was able to employ and command Honduran military troops in the protection of of the dam site and equipment. DESA also arranged for trumped up arms charges to be filed against Berta Caceres, to try and jail her to stop the protests.

Ultimately they've failed.  SinoHydro has left Honduras and the dam project is halted.

And Berta Caceres has been honored with the Goldman Prize, which we can hope will help protect her from the fate of too many other Honduran environmental activists.

Presidential Re-Election?!

Yesterday afternoon, the Honduran Supreme Court's Constitutional branch, consisting of 5 justices, reported that they had reached a unanimous decision invalidating part of Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.  Such a decision would effectively permit Presidential re-election.  This morning at 8:34 am, Justice Lizardo of that branch rescinded his signature and vote of approval for the decision.  That should make the ruling invalid, and because the decision is no longer unanimous, throw the case to the full 15 Justices for a decision.

The decision, announced yesterday and scheduled to be released today, was in a court case brought by former president Rafael Callejas and several National Party Congressmen, who sought to invalidate part of Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.  Longtime readers will remember that Article 239 was used, after the fact, to justify the coup against President Manuel Zelaya Rosales in 2009.  Roberto Micheletti Bain claimed that the Cuarta Urna vote was to enable Zelaya Rosales to run again for President.

This morning, in a letter addressed to the Secretary of the Constitutional branch of the Supreme Court, Carlos Almedaren, Justice José Elmer Lizardo Carranza rescinded his vote of approval:

"By this letter I make known to you that I rescind my signature on the accumulated case 1343-2014 and 243-2015....Because there's been no official notification of the plaintiff's lawyers by the secretary at this hour, 8:40 AM, this makes the decision not final"

So, while it was announced that Presidential re-election was about to be come legal through a Supreme Court decision, the future is a bit more murky now.  Stay tuned.