Mediating The Status Quo

Yesterday John Biehl del Rio, the Chilean diplomat designated by the Organization of American States to be their representative to the National Dialogue in Honduras, with the title of "mediator", called the indignados and LIBRE "pig-headed" and "imbeciles".

That's not how you mediate a dialogue, that's how you end one.

The job of a facilitator or mediator is to listen to both sides of an issue and to try to bring them into conversation about their common ground.  It's not the role of a mediator to publicly insult one side in the process they are mediating.

By his words, Biehl has been showing all along that he isn't really a mediator.

Gentle readers will recall that in June, in response to the marchas de antorchas, with their demand for an international commission against impunity and corruption, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández unilaterally announced a Sistema Integral Contra la Impunidad (SICA, "Integrated System against Impunity") and called for a "National Dialogue" whose participants the government would designate.

The proposal, not immediately available to the Honduran press at the time, called for the establishment of several oversight committees for the Honduran judiciary, all of the committee members appointed by the Executive Branch.  It specified no procedures or reporting mechanisms by which the "National Dialogue" would provide any input or revision to the proposed SICA process or composition.

Hernández presided over the first few meetings himself, meeting with jurists and business, before turning the whole process over to a Congress member to organize and oversee.

Some parts of civil society saw the National Dialogue as a government show, with no stated objective, and refused to participate.

Those not participating include the indignados, who for the last 16 weeks have marched every Friday calling for a Comision Internacional Contra de la Impunidad (CICIH) and for President Hernandez to resign. The two opposition political parties that were first on the ballot this last election (LIBRE and PAC) have refused to participate for much the same reasons: the control of the process by the current government and the lack of any connection between the "dialogue" and possible reforms.

Hernández's proposal "reforms" the Judicial Branch by making it responsible to committees for judicial oversight and review established and appointed by the Executive Branch.  This further erodes judicial independence.

This was the official response of the government to the indignados, and it was hoped that it would weaken support for their calls for a CICIH, and silence their calls for Hernández's resignation.

When that didn't work, Hernández formally asked the OAS and UN for facilitators or mediators to help bring all of Honduran civil society to participate in the National Dialogue.  Enter John Biehl del Rio.

Biehl del Rio has a fairly long history of engagement with Honduras.

As a chief adviser to Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, he was the principal mediator for the San Jose Accords intended to return José Manuel Zelaya to office after the 2009 coup.  Before that he spent 4 years in and around Tocoa in the Bajo Aguan, teaching peasants about cooperatives.

It may be that in Honduras, Biehl del Rio sees similarities to how he described his native Chile in 2010:

"There is a political world that needs to go.  When the national task fundamentally consists in practicing the art of disagreeing to thereby gain power, there prevails a will and ambitions that destabilize the possibility of a good government.  The culture of confrontation which we inherit from the past, severely limits the ways to satisfy the necessities of the people.  To use and supply yourself with stereotypes from another historical epoch to exercise opposition or to govern is to deliberately damage the country....If the opposition looks for the failure of the government to rise to power, it is jointly responsible for restarting one of the worst nightmares of the country."

The nightmare Biehl del Rio was referring to in Chile was the rise of the military which overthrew Salvador Allende. While Biehl del Rio was not a supporter of Allende, he went into exile after Pinochet took power.

In Honduras, however, it seems the place of the military in his critique is taken by the indignados and political parties opposed to the current president. Much of what Biehl del Rio has said about the opposition in Honduras echos the sentiments about Chile quoted above.

Biehl told the Honduran press that

There are many people who have taken this hard time for Honduras as a kind of political pre-campaign, and this crisis as an opportunity to kill their possible rivals.  This I have noted in conversations. With these people it is very difficult to make advances because they only have one thing in mind.  Hondurans are very political, at least in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.  They give the impression that everyone wants to be president and as such their positions are very sharp and cutting because they see that this is a weak moment."

So for Biehl, the indignados are merely pre-campaign presidential politicking.

But Honduras isn't Chile, and there are indications that Biehl del Rio may not completely understand Honduran politics.

Among his other pronouncements he called the Honduran Congress "representative of the people (or Nation) and a transversal cut through society", suggesting it should play a leading role in the National Dialogue.

Now the Honduran Congress is many things, but it does not represent Honduran society, directly or indirectly.  Congress members are loyal and answerable to the political party that ensures their election, and do not represent a local constituency. There is really no way to consider these political insiders a "transversal cut" through society-- nothing in the Honduran political system works that way. This is part of the problem that has brought so many people out on the streets.

Biehl del Rio may see similarities to his Chile in 2010, but in the intervening years, he's lost his ability to say this diplomatically, and is reduced to calling the Honduran opposition names.

That means instead of mediating, he has adopted a side-- with a president elected by a minority of voters in an intensely split election, whose party is wrapped in a scandal over the financing of that very election, and who is trying to insist that he knew nothing of the money moving around. It's a bad side to be on, and it is unfortunate that it has led him to dismiss the largest show of public engagement in governance in modern Honduran history.

Aguan Developments: English vs. Spanish

The confrontation between MUCA-- Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan-- and the Honduran government that has dragged on now for years, most recently focused on attempts to take control over land claimed by Miguel Facussé, appears to be reaching an awkward resolution.

An AP report published in English in media like the Washington Post says MUCA has "agreed to move out" of lands they occupied in the Bajo Aguan. It quotes a spokesperson for MUCA, Vitalino Alvarez, saying MUCA has signed an agreement with the government

"under pressure and under threat...There are tons of lives on the line and due to the continuous threats to forcefully remove us we have given up to avoid bad outcomes."

Honduran papers, however, report no such thing. Nobody is abandoning any land.

Instead, both El Tiempo and El Heraldo report that tomorrow the final formal agreement between MUCA and the Honduran government will be signed.

El Tiempo says the agreement to be signed tomorrow is for 2414 hectares on the right bank of the Rio Aguan (the east side). The Honduran media report that campesinos on the left bank of the river accepted the conditions offered last week, leaving only those on the right bank not in agreement.

Campesinos have claimed land on both sides of the river by establishing settlements, from which residents are periodically evicted, and which are periodically the focus of attacks. The Honduran government has offered to buy out Miguel Facussé, and Dinant Corp, his business, on both banks of the river.

One of the major points of disagreement between the English language and Spanish language press concerns the impact of a judge's eviction order handed down over the weekend. The AP story, citing a spokesperson for the Security Ministry, Hector Mejia, says that

officials were sending hundreds of officers to force 5,000 people from the approximately 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of plantations that remain occupied after a series of earlier evictions.

None of the current Honduran press coverage mentions a new deployment of officers (police or army) to the Bajo Aguan. Of course, there remains in the region a contingent from the armed forces posted there as part of previous government actions.

As La Prensa Grafica of El Salvador explains, the urgency in the present situation comes from the expiration on May 31 of a Honduran government offer to pay Facussé the equivalent of $20 million for the land, to then be sold to MUCA by the government. When that date came and went without payment to Facussé, he

presented eviction orders that unleashed the end of the negotiation, stalled since the beginning of April of 2010. 

La Prensa Grafica quotes Hector Mejia's statement last Friday (June 1) that the eviction could happen "at any moment" because "the order to do so has now been handed down by a judge". In this context, Mejia added that action to remove the campesinos from the right bank of the Aguan would require "hundreds of agents". He didn't say they were sending hundreds more police into the area-- just that any eviction would require that scale of operation.

It is this rhetoric, combined with the judge's eviction order, that seems to be the increased "pressure" and "threat" cited by the MUCA spokesperson.

But contrary to the AP story, no Honduran reports suggest that MUCA will leave the land they have occupied. Rather, what the agreement they will sign tomorrow commits them to is to accept the terms dictated by the Lobo Sosa government to pay for the land they are currently living on and farming. According to La Prensa Grafica, that would be to pay the equivalent of $16 million, obtained as a loan at 6% interest for 15 years.

MUCA representatives had been holding out for a lower interest rate on the financing of the purchase price of the land. They raised concerns about the ability to repay the loan-- concerns the Honduran media say were dismissed by the head of the Instituto Nacional Agraria, Cesar Ham. According to Ham, the campesinos should easily be able to cover the payments by selling the product of African oil palms to the processing businesses-- which are owned by the same wealthy individuals whose land claims are now being settled with funds obtained in part from the loan taken out by MUCA.

In other words, MUCA is being asked to take on a large debt to a private bank, for funds that are being passed on, via the Honduran government, to the private individual who MUCA argues does not have a defensible claim to the land, and then to spend the next fifteen years at the mercy of the processing plants owned by the same individual (and others).

That is bad enough; if they were in fact being asked to leave the land, that would be adding salt to the wounds.

The State Department and Human Rights

The United States State Department released its world wide human rights reports on Thursday with much fanfare.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a series of remarks.  After lauding her teams work on "advancing human rights in a twenty-first century landscape" she noted:

Now, every year that we issue this, we take stock of ourselves. We say: What more can we do? Where have we succeeded or are succeeding? Where are we falling short? And we know we have to recommit to the work of advancing universal rights, building the partnerships that will move us forward, helping every man, woman, and child live up to their God-given potential. And we know we have to be able to speak out and speak up for those unable to use their own voices.

It's that taking stock at the State Department that interests us. There's been a blind eye to certain kinds of human rights abuses in Honduras that happen, but don't seem to warrant action by the Secretary or her employees, including the Ambassador. So, we turned with some trepidation to the country report on Honduras

It emphasizes corruption within the national police force, an institutionally weak judiciary, and discrimination and violence against vulnerable populations as the greatest challenges to human rights in Honduras in 2011.

In the executive summary, which is all many people will read, it states:

Police and government agents committed unlawful killings. Vigilantes and former members of the security forces carried out arbitrary and summary killings. There continued to be reports of killings of agricultural workers, private security guards, and security forces related to a land dispute in the Bajo Aguan region. Other human rights problems included harsh prison conditions, violence against detainees, lengthy pretrial detentions and failure to provide legal due process, child prostitution and abuse, trafficking in persons, ineffective enforcement of labor laws, and child labor.

The government took important steps to strengthen respect for human rights and promote national reconciliation, as well as to prosecute and punish officials who committed abuses. However, corruption and impunity were serious problems that impeded the effectiveness of the National Police.

So that's the State Department's conclusion.  There are very few human rights triumphs recorded in the Honduran report, but they state "there were no acts of anti-semitism" in 2011.

Obviously, we would take issue with their statement that in 2011 the government took important steps to strengthen respect for human rights.

They didn't.

What Honduras did do was create a cabinet level position for a Minister of Justice and Human Rights, and appoint Ana Pineda to the post.  But it is at best a symbolic nod to human rights, without effect in the real world, and at worst-- as here-- serves as a kind of blind to serious assessment of the government's abysmal human rights record.  When Pineda has criticized Congress for proposing laws that tread on human rights, or criticized the police for their handling of protests, she's been ignored.  Congress extended the period in which an arrested person may be held without charges from 24 to 48 hours despite Pineda's criticism of the change, as they have ignored her every time she protests their actions.  Her position lacks any kind of authority to actually compel observance of human rights.

Pineda did manage to get a government statement that Ricky Martin should be admitted to the country and allowed to perform his show, after immigration authorities and the government censorship committee threatened to ban him.  The State Department report also credits her as instrumental in getting an LGBT crimes investigation squad created, though its actual accomplishments are small: according to the State Department, they have filed a couple of cases, although nothing about these has appeared in the Honduran media, and none have come to trial. So we think we can reserve judgment: neither of these are significant antidotes to the wave of killings of LGBT activists, the most recent, the murder of journalist Erick Martinez. 

We won't dwell in detail on the many human rights violations the State Department country report describes because as a reader of this blog, you're familiar with many of them, but we would like to linger on the mention of police harassment through arrests, especially in light of events that happened on Thursday, the same day that the State Department released its human rights reports.

The State Department report on Honduras gives a good summary of Honduras's arrest laws, what police can and cannot do:

The law provides that police can arrest a person only with a court order, unless the arrest is by order of a prosecutor or is made during the commission of a crime, when there is strong suspicion that a person has committed a crime and may try to evade criminal prosecution, or when the person is caught with evidence related to a crime. 

 They add, "but authorities at times failed to observe these prohibitions (against arbitrary arrest)."

That's what happened to yet another group of campesinos involved in the dispute over land in the Bajo Aguan yesterday.

The government still has not paid Miguel Facussé for the land it agreed to compensate him for in the Bajo Aguan. Facussé issued an ultimatum this last week, saying that he would go to court and get the campesinos thrown off the land if he was not paid by June 1.

Thursday, more than eighteen campesinos, both directors and rank-and-file members of Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan (MUCA), were arrested in the Bajo Aguan and El Progreso, Yoro.  Their only apparent crime, being members of MUCA.

In the Department of La Paz, sixteen or more members of Consejo Civico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH) were arrested while out working on their communal lands. Children who were part of this group were forced to perform yard work and clean out the latrines of the police post before being freed.

So, yeah, "authorities at times failed to observe the prohibition" against arbitrary arrest.

And that's just some of the evidence that Honduras has a long way to go, and why it will be interesting to see what changes in US policy towards Honduras come out of the State Department's process of "taking stock" of what's in their own country report on human rights in Honduras.

The Rest of the Story

The Honduran press is charming in what it does not report.

Yesterday the OAS human rights commission, known in Spanish as the CIDH, issued its annual report for 2011 on human rights in the Americas. That report chose to highlight the human rights situations in four countries: Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, and Venezuela. El Heraldo reported on the release, but emphasized the human rights situations in the other three countries, omitting or badly summarizing the Honduran case. Of the 19 paragraphs in the Heraldo article, two are devoted to Honduras, two to Cuba, three to Colombia, and nine to Venezuela.

The article notes that Honduras is again on the list of countries with situations which gravely affect the enjoyment of fundamental rights. It tells us that the CIDH reports that problems in justice, security, marginalization and discrimination have worsened since the coup of June 28, 2009, and that over 2011 the fallout from the coup and its aftermath has continued. El Heraldo summarizes the content of the 33 page report on Honduras in one sentence:

Honduras is generally called out for the death of journalists, the murders of LGBT citizens, and threats against human rights activists.

But the CIDH report covers much more. And these aren't even its main complaints.

So here is some of what El Heraldo left out.

First of all, the CIDH first chose to add Honduras to the Chapter 4 detailed discussions in the 2009 Annual report. During 2011, the Commission reports it continued to observe the human rights situation in Honduras with a special emphasis on the consequences of the 2009 coup.

In beginning a discussion of 2011, it writes

290. As you can see all through the present report, respect and the state guarantee of the right to life, liberty, and personal safety during 2011, the CIDH received worrying information about the condition of journalists, human rights defenders, campesinos in the Bajo Aguan, indigenous people, and LGBT people, all in a context of a a high rate of murder and impunity.

291. During the present year (2011) we have continued to receive information that indicates that the Police and the military have used disproportional force against opposition protesters, which has resulted in serious episodes of violence and repression against the protesters.

A footnote indicates that Ramon Custodio told the CIDH that fewer than 19% of the human rights cases reported through his office are investigated and returned by the Dirección Nacional de Investigacíon (DNIC) with 81% of the cases either remaining perpetually under investigation or not acted upon, a situation which Custodio calls "absolute impunity".

On November 22, 2011 the CIDH sent a preliminary copy of this report to Honduras for a reply. The Honduran government replied twice, on December 16 and 21, 2011. The CIDH incorporated the Honduran government's responses to the material points the report makes to create a final version of the chapter for Honduras in the 2011 Annual Report.

Footnotes indicate that Honduras's reply was in part something like (paraphrasing here, see footnotes 442 and 443 for a discussion of the Honduran response) 'you've already discussed the issues surrounding the coup in your 2010 and 2011 reports; we hope that in 2012 this will not be included'. That is consistent with the Lobo Sosa government's refrain that they are the product of "reconciliation". The pointed refusal of the CIDH to ignore the link between the coup and the continuing erosion of human rights and hardening of impunity makes it clear that whatever "reconciliation" means to the government of Honduras, the rule of law, respect for constitutional, civil, and human rights, and institutional rejection of the exercise of raw power have not recovered since that episode.

The report looks at a large number of topics, some stemming from the 2009 coup, like "amnesty", and others that have nothing directly to do with the events of 2009, like "children's rights". Overall, it paints a bleak picture of Honduras's response to what CIDH recognizes as violations of human rights.

In fairness, the report also contains a several page section on what Honduras is doing right, from a legal and institutional framework. It cites no actual concrete positive actions, echoing other observers who note that setting up human rights offices without giving them support to follow through does not actually work.

Among many topics, the report looks in depth at the human rights situation in the Bajo Aguan. Since September 2009, 42 people affiliated with campesino movements, plus a journalist and his wife, have been killed there. Another campesino activist was "disappeared" in 2011. A further 162 campesinos have been changed with crimes in connection with the agricultural conflict in the region. The CIDH notes that right after the military were deployed to the Bajo Aguan as part of Operation Xatruch II, 7 campesinos, including two movement leaders, were assassinated, 5 were wounded, and two tortured by the troops.

The Honduran government replied, noting that its not just campesinos, but also 12 guards, 4 workers, and 5 others died in violence in the Bajo Aguan in 2010, along with 20 campesinos or (in their words) "supposed campesinos". Of those, the Public Prosecutor reported that they have investigative advances on 4 cases.

The Honduran government has not investigated any of the allegations against its troops.

The CIDH also reviewed the official Truth Commission report and highlighted its recommendations regarding human rights.

It went through the cases of 14 journalists killed in 2010 and 2011 in Honduras as well. The Honduran government reply reported that it has opened 4 legal cases in these murders and issued arrest warrants. In Honduras, the police do not seek those for whom arrest warrants have been issued, so this is a largely symbolic move.

There's a lot more, documenting problems specific to 2011, and it would be well worth reading, especially for those who make policy about US relations to Honduras.

The report on Honduras ends with ten specific recommendations for the government of Honduras:

1. Assure that the justice system provides effective access to justice for all people.

2. Investigate, judge, and discipline those responsible for human rights violations.

3. Stop the illegal groups that act with impunity outside of the law. The state has the responsibility to dismantle the armed civilian groups that function outside the law and to punish the illegal actions they commit to prevent the recurrence of violence in the future.

4. To prevent the murders, threats, and intimidation against human rights defenders, journalists, radio reporters, and social leaders and to implement the protections authorized by the CIDH.

5. To carry out, urgently, investigations by independent groups to clarify and determine if the murder of human rights activists, social leaders, journalists, radio broadcasters and members of the Resistance are related to the exercise of their profession or in the context of the 2009 coup. Also to judge and condemn those responsible for those murders.

6. To make amends to the victims of human rights violations.

7. Guarantee conditions so that human rights defenders and labor rights defenders can freely carry out their duties, and to abstain from adopting legislation that limits or places obstacles on their work.

8. Improve the security of the citizens and order that the military and military intelligence do not participate in actions of citizen security, and when there are exceptional circumstances, that they subordinate themselves to civilian authority.

9. Make available the necessary measures so that women who are victims of violence have access to adequate judicial protection and adopt legal and judicial mechanisms to investigate, punish, and aid those reporting violence against women.

10. Make available the necessary measures to protect sectors of the Honduran population historically marginalized and highly vulnerable such as children, the LGBT community and the indigenous and Garifuna communities.

Most of these are points that should not need to be made; they are basic to human rights; yet the CIDH found it necessary to repeat them to the Honduran government.

The Honduran government wants credit for reforming the institutions of human rights, and the CIDH gives them credit for beginning institutional reforms that normally would lead to improved human rights if operationalized.

Unfortunately for Honduras, so far, these are only institutional reforms which have brought about no changes in the lived experience of everyday Hondurans.

That's why the CIDH report is important.

US Media and Honduras: Violence and Elections

US news media coverage of other countries tends to be spotty and idiosyncratic.

For example, when CNN picked up the news about members of Congress calling on the Obama administration to put pressure on Porfirio Lobo Sosa over impunity for violence against Honduran citizens, the article reduces the issue to one thing: the horrific record of murders of journalists. Lost in translation: the actual well-informed breadth of the Congressional letter, whose first sentence reads "We are concerned with the grave human rights situation in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras and ask the State Department to take effective steps to address it". Where CNN selectively emphasizes the deaths of journalists, the Congress members actually present a comprehensive, shocking overview of the unchecked human rights situation:

human rights violations in Honduras where human rights defenders, journalists, community leaders and opposition activists are subject to death threats, attacks and extrajudicial executions....

In the Bajo Aguán region, forty-five people associated with peasant organizations working to resolve ongoing land disputes have been killed since September 2009, as well as seven security guards, a policeman, a journalist and his partner, and three other persons....

These cases have yet to be investigated and prosecuted, resulting in a climate of impunity. In September 2011, Human Rights Watch reported that while some arrest warrants have been issued, no one has been arrested or charged for these killings. While the legal system has failed to effectively prosecute perpetrators of extrajudicial executions, legal proceedings have been initiated against at least 162 small farmers and more than 80 were temporarily arrested, largely on charges of trespassing and theft of farm produce, between January 2010 and July 2011.

And then the US media moved on to the next story. What attracted their attention? The official recognition of a new political party in Honduras, Libre, led by Mel Zelaya.

Not that this isn't important news; anything that shakes up the political landscape in Honduras is worth attention. The trigger for the coverage is the certification of 62,000 signatures on the petitions to establish the new party. Honduran electoral regulations required 42,290 signatures.

Also drawing attention in US media coverage of Libre's official establishment is the fact that Xiomara Castro, wife of Zelaya, will be the party's presidential candidate in the next election in 2013. The Chicago Tribune article cites unnamed "opinion polls" that they say "have shown her running first or second". But like most US reporting on Honduran politics, what is missing here is all the context that would make sense of this isolated statement.

Early political polling in Honduras does suggest shifts in the electorate. In January, Dick Emanuelsson wrote about a poll on party preference by CESPAD (Centro de Estudios Para la Democracia). Honduran news media at the time (September 2011) found support for Xiomara Castro at 85% among supporters of the resistance. The apparent source of the Chicago Tribune's claim that Xiomara is "running first or second" likely is the poll's finding that among likely presidential candidates, Salvador Nasralla had support from 27.9% of respondents while Xiomara had 18% support

The main findings of CESPAD's 2011 polling, though, show a lack of enthusiasm about electoral politics. They note barely 7% of the population reported being very interested in participating in politics.

The main deterrent: unhappiness with the two traditional parties. CESPAD found that 66% of those they polled were prepared to change their traditional voting pattern, indicating a great shift away from the tradition of two party domination of Honduran elections. The high popularity of Nasralla and Xiomara reflects this: neither is a candidate of a traditional party.

Describing a "crisis of legitimacy", CESPAD found that most political figures, and those religious figures who had become involved in politics during and after the coup, had high negative assessments. Here, the report says that the highest any major political figure can manage is Porfirio Lobo Sosa (with an approval rating of 16), Xiomara (at 13.9), and Manuel Zelaya himself (at 12.1).

Remarkably, among the contenders for the presidential nomination of the Partido Nacional, only Oscar Alvarez (ex-Security Minister, and architect of mano dura in Honduras) was in positive territory, with a meager 6.5 approval rating. But the Partido Nacional was actually better off than the Liberal Party, whose declared candidates at the time were suffering from high negatives (-37.9 for Yani Rosenthal, and -55.9 for Edmundo Orellana). CESPAD notes that a majority (59%) of Liberal Party affiliates polled still recognize Manuel Zelaya as the leader of the party.

And that brings us to the real punchline of the Honduran political polling, which is lost in US media coverage that emphasizes Xiomara's candidacy and the founding of Libre solely in terms of the personal political career of Mel Zelaya. Libre's success in gaining legitimacy is part of a strong trend away from traditional two-party politics documented by CESPAD.

At the time-- before Libre had filed its signatures-- the Partido Nacional had the highest prospective support, but nowhere near a majority. In response to the question, "If the election were held today, for which of the following parties would you vote?" the PN polled 29.9%.

The Partido Liberal registered 24.1% in response to the same question, while the traditional small parties-- UD, DC, and PINU, all scarred by their stance during the coup and de facto regime, and all collaborating with Lobo Sosa in the current government to some extent-- together didn't manage to reach even 4% support.

Where are the rest of the voters? With the Partido Anticorrupción of Nasralla, described by the Chicago Tribune as a "sports commentator" who "quickly gained popularity thanks to his appearances on game shows, where he often appears with scantily clad models". The new PA polled 18.7% in the CESPAD tally.

Then there was the Frente Amplio de Resistencia, precursor to Libre, which, before being established, already was polling at 15.5%.

Oh, and one last point: in a footnote on these results, CESPAD wrote

The poll reveals that 93% of the sympathizers of the Partido Nacional would vote, today, for that party. Nonetheless, the "hardness" of this vote seems relative: 60% of those that today subscribe to the Partido Nacional could vote for another candidate or political party, if it had a better program or proposal.

Doesn't that seem like news? What if polling in the current Republican campaign showed that 60% of its voters said they would switch parties if someone else had a better platform? Do you suppose the news coverage would be solely about Mitt Romney being the heir apparent of his father's political legacy?

Oh wait. That is how the US media report US elections. Never mind.

Aguan Agreement Endangered

The agreement between the Movimiento Unificado de Campesinos del Aguán (MUCA) and the Honduran government to buy land in the Bajo Aguan from Miguel Facussé is endangered. MUCA alleges the government is not keeping their part of the bargain.

Decree 161-2011 was signed on October 4, 2011, and gave a 90 day window for MUCA and the government to agree on financing of the purchase through private funding, with the government acting as a guarantor of the loan. MUCA would be responsible for paying off the loan.

According to Vitalino Alvarez, spokesperson for MUCA, the government only got one response to their request for proposals from private banks. That response, from BANHPROVI (the Banco Nacional Hondureña de Producción y Vivienda) agreed to finance the purchase, at 14% interest with full repayment in 7 years, and a two year grace period.

However, according to MUCA, the terms required them to assume all the costs of acquiring the loan (legal, environmental, registrations, etc.) which combined with the interest rate and repayment period, made the loan impossible for them to assume, according to Vitalino Alvarez.

Further MUCA said the government negotiated the loan terms without consulting them, whereas their interpretation of the agreement calls for a mutual discussion of the loan terms.

In any case, MUCA is right; the loan terms are too onerous for them to assume. They've earned about 150 million lempiras since they took over the land in April, 2010, or roughly 75 million lempiras a year. They put about 30 million lempiras of that back into land improvement. The balance they divided among the 3000 families of MUCA. That works out to be about 20,000 lempiras per family, or $1055 a year. Simple math shows they could never earn enough, at that rate, from the African Palms to ever come close to paying off the loan, even assuming the 3000 families that belong to MUCA needed no income for those nine years.

Did the government (or the bank for that matter) bother to even do the math? Apparently not since they presented this deal to MUCA. It turns out MUCA is smarter than the members of the Secretaria de Finanzas that negotiated this deal.

MUCA did the math, and it didn't add up. It would be insane for them to sign the proposed deal. It would have hurt the Honduran government as loan guarantor when MUCA inevitably defaulted.

Back to the drawing board.

Cover Up in the Bajo Aguan?

Competing stories have developed about what happened in the Bajo Aguan last Friday, when a combined military-police patrol alleges it was ambushed by foreign guerrillas at La Consentida plantation, near Sonaguera.

The official story today, as told by Secretary of Defense Marlon Pascua, is that foreigners ambushed the patrol in the La Consentida orange plantation. Found at the scene were rifle bullet casings (other reports specify AK-47 casings) and fragments of an exploded grenade. Pascua is quoted as saying

"The intent of these bands is that we not patrol this sector, that the patrols not do their job..."

Well, that's one theory... Its not clear how Pascua knows the intent of the attackers with such certainty, nor why he knows with the same certainty that the attackers were foreigners. Surely by now his troops have had enough time to identify all the foreigners in the zone. Yet as of yesterday, none of the identified foreigners were doing anything suspicious, according to the military.

Pascua went on the radio to tell everyone he's given the patrols permission to return fire if fired upon.

Meanwhile, the campesinos of MUCA tell a much different story about what happened on Friday.

The MUCA spokesperson, Vitalino Alvarez, told La Tribuna that the site of the supposed ambush is not one where ambush is possible. The road is straight, and there is no forest nor bushes to hide in.

According to him, a drunken soldier detonated a grenade inside his patrol vehicle. There are no guerrillas in the Bajo Aguan, he told La Tribuna, only people dedicated to their work.

Vitalino Alvarez was quoted El Heraldo as saying:

"It was a grenade that exploded in the cabin of the car. Also I was at the hospital when they arrived; there was a boy wounded only in the lower legs below the knee; ....how could they shoot him only below the knee.... Another had a wound only on his nose produced by a grenade fragment. If it had been a rife shot, he'd be dead."

El Heraldo's coverage today makes it clear that both the Police and Military agree with the MUCA spokesperson that grenade fragments were in the passenger compartment of the truck, and that it was the driver and passenger in the truck that died, from the explosion of a grenade on the floor of the truck.

Yet the spokesperson for the Xatruch II batallion, Roger Martinez, claims to have bullet casings from Falk rifles, AK-47s, and .22 calibre rifles. He also claims the area where the ambush occurred is forested. He denied there were grenade fragments in the cabin of the car. A grenade would have dismembered the occupants, according to Martinez.

The only Falke rifles I can find are all air rifles; probably the patrol was not ambushed by pellet guns! Perhaps he meant FN-FAL rifles, which are in abundant use by the Army in Honduras according to Janes, and take the very same caliber ammunition as the AK-47, 7.62 mm. NATO standard ammo.

A .22 rifle would be an insane thing to use to attack an armed military patrol. It is 1850s military technology.

It is good for rabbit and squirrel hunting, though.

Guerrillas in the Mist

So Friday someone shot up a combined military and police patrol, part of the Xatruch II operation, in the Bajo Aguan, just as it was about to turn into the La Consentida orange plantation of Rene Morales. One police officer and one soldier were killed, and three others wounded.

The initial description was that the attack was made with shotguns, but later it was characterized as employing large caliber weapons, e.g., military rifles.

Interestingly, there's no indication from press accounts that those "ambushed" either returned fire, or came under fire beyond the initial salvo that killed two and wounded three others. The encounter is not described as a firefight. No suspects were either found or detained in the region.

The military has concluded the attack was not the work of campesinos, because of the strategy used. Police reached the same conclusion, according to spokesperson Juan Martinez. They point to the use of surprise and violence as un-campesino-like behavior. Like the media, the security forces characterize the event as an ambush.

The reaction by security forces was to stop and question all foreigners coming through the district, although to no avail:

"None of them could be tied to anything illicit,"

said Martinez.

But that, of course, did not stop the military from reaching conclusions.

"It's a dedicated band of guerrillas,"

said Joint Chiefs Chair General Rene Osorio on Sunday.

There is another, unexamined, group in the Bajo Aguan that has both licensed and unlicensed weapons of the type used in the attack, and military training.

During the 2009 coup, landowners there hired paramilitary mercenaries from Colombia and Paraguay to be the "guards" on African palm plantations.

According to the UN Working group on Mercenaries in 2010, more than 120 paramilitaries from various Latin American countries are present in the Bajo Aguan.

The military, as part of Xatruch II, has not apparently thought to inspect, regulate or interdict the arms used by these paramilitary guards, only those campesinos were suspected of using.

Until the paramilitary guards employed by land owners in the Bajo Aguan are subject to the same scrutiny as the campesinos, the military surely cannot conclude that there is a band of foreign or foreign-trained guerrillas operating in the Bajo Aguan.

Pompeyo Bonilla

So who is Honduras's new Minister of Security, Pompeyo Bonilla? What's his recent resumé like?

Pompeyo Bonilla Reyes was a National Party Congressman from La Paz in June 2009 when he voted to remove President Manuel Zelaya Rosales from office.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa appointed him to head the Instituto de Propiedad (IP), the government department that issues land titles in March, 2010. In December 2010 he served on the intervention committee that investigated INA's actions in the Bajo Aguan for improprieties.

Lobo Sosa then appointed him to head the Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (CONATEL) in 2011.

Shortly after he assumed control of CONATEL, it issued a resolution suspending the issuing of low power FM broadcasting licenses for community radio stations. CONATEL argued that the frequencies were saturated in almost all departments in Honduras, and that it wanted to return these frequencies for use by the big broadcasters (so called high power FM broadcasters) to use as repeater frequencies. Low power FM broadcast licenses had first been authorized in 2005 as a way to democratize telecommunications in Honduras. Another of Bonilla's acts at CONATEL was to foster legislation authorizing wiretapping.

Pompeyo Bonilla Reyes is clearly someone Porfirio Lobo Sosa trusts. His government service is sure to be emphasized in coverage of the new office he is assuming.

Honduran sources, however, are reminding people of another episode in his long public career.

Bonilla started out in the military, and was an aide to General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano, who became head of state twice through military interventions (1963-71, and 1972-1975). During Lopez Arellano's second term as president, Honduras was given a moon rock by US president Richard Nixon. When that moon rock turned up for sale in Florida in the late 1990s, Bonilla was one of a group of individuals identified by La Prensa as possible suspects in the theft of the moon rock, which was government property. The moon rock had been kept in the Honduran presidential palace. It disappeared around 1994, and was tracked down in 1998 by federal investigators.

The US court convicted a different person, retired colonel Roberto Agurcia Ugarte, as responsible for selling the moon rock to a US collector, a retired member of the US military named Allen Rosen, who testified that he bought it from a member of the Honduran Armed Forces. But it is telling that in Honduras, Pompeyo Bonilla was considered capable of taking national property and selling it for personal gain.

On the murders of campesinos and popular leaders in the Bajo Aguán

The original in Spanish; English translation by Adrienne Pine used by permission.

To the national community, the government of the Republic and the international community

On the murders of campesinos and popular leaders in the Bajo Aguán region and the accelerated deterioration of human rights in the country

This is the moment in which silence becomes a crime. Froylan Turcios
He who witnesses a crime and remains silent, commits it. José Martí
To remain silent is to share in the crime. José Adán Castelar

The regimes that arose from the June 2009 Coup d'État, annointed by the U.S. government, the business lobby that has ransacked the country, and the fundamentalist churches, have brought about a resurgence of the repression that in the decade of the 1980s, plunged Honduras into suffering.

If yesterday it was a fanatical, fascist and brutal militarism that trained and formed groups of assassins to selectively and clandestinely kidnap, kill and disappear popular leaders and politicians, today, that militarism that for many years lay dormant, now enhanced with better equipment and greater antidemocratic enthusiasm, has returned to undertake the task of extermination wherever it is directed.

In the country and city, in the protests of citizens outraged by the crisis and the coup, in the students' and teachers' marches, wherever free people gather to protest, the apparatus of death is brought in with armored cars, rifles, teargas canisters, and pistols under the fallacious argument that it is through the rule of law and silent acquiescence forged by arms that progress, democracy and coexistence flourish.

Just when the situation was supposed to improve based on the Cartagena Accords and when the presidents of Honduras and Colombia had declared that the promise to respect human rights is being kept, the bloody acts of recent days have revealed a regression, in particular because the campesino movement has been criminalized through allegations of ties with guerrilla forces trained and financed by foreign governments.

While the situation is dire throughout the country, in the agricultural sector and particularly in the Bajo Aguán region it is unsustainable. The death count has now surpassed 50.

Sending military forces is an attempt to distract from or blur the responsibility of the Armed Forces for the presence of death squads and in the protection of the repressive forces stationed in the region, known for their particularly provocative and homicidal vocation. Likewise, the manner in which the problem is being addressed allows us to deduce that what is being sought is to exhaust the campesinos' ability to fight in order to impose a predetermined solution privileging the interests of large agribusiness owners in the region.

But the blindness of the government, its commitment to big business and failure to recognize civil rights laws prevents it from seeing that, in the campesino struggle, the ability to fight will not be exhausted and that, in the absence of a just and democratic solution to the agrarian problem in the near future, the Aguán region could open the floodgates for actions of greater magnitude that would threaten the future of the entire country.

The escalation of violence has reached a key stage; a dramatic and bloody moment that obligates us, as academic and intellectuals, artists and creative workers of the most diverse affiliations, to denounce the vile behavior of the forces that attempt to resolve the latent structural conflicts in our society through political crimes, cold-blooded murder and intimidation of grassroots organizations.

Additionally, we are shocked that, despite all the evidence, the majority of the media, identified with the coup d'état and dedicated to repeating the official propaganda line, ignores the symptoms of social and political decay and goes on pretending that nothing is happening. As such, femicides are blamed, in accordance with police claims, on the victims; crimes against leaders of popular movements are unquestioningly attributed to common crime, drug trafficking or internal battles. They have even reached the extreme of brushing aside and distorting the facts behind the murder of an adolescent student who was participating in a peaceful protest at the entrance to his school.

These crimes continue to be met with total impunity and are carried out with greater and greater viciousness and cruelty, within the framework of a strategy to instill fear and neutralize our nation's will to fight.

We do not aim to dictate a political economic or social course of action, but rather to call attention to the savagery being used to stifle fair and just social demands. Violence indicates a State incapable of governing, maintaining order and protecting our coexistence, attributes that are the sine qua non of sovereignty and legitimacy.

In view of the above, we urge the national and international community to take a stand against the permanent bloodshed happening in the Bajo Aguán. Each life cut short for the sake of satisfying the interests of the national oligarchy and its transnational economic and political ties, is one more crime against humanity that distances us further from the possibility of rebuilding our coexistence.

Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, historian
Darío A. Euraque, historian
Teresa de Maria Campos; anthropologist and artist
Helen Umaña, writer
Isadora Paz, sociologist and artist/dancer
Aníbal Delgado Fiallos, sociologist
Mario Gallardo, writer
Mario Ardón Mejía, anthropologist
Adrienne Pine, anthropologist
Armando García, writer and photographer
Geraldina Tercero, anthropologist
Manuel de Jesús Pineda, writer
Roxana Pastor Fasquelle, educator
Guillermo Mejía, journalist
Eduardo Bähr, writer
Débora Ramos, writer
J Antonio Fúnez, writer and diplomat
Dana Frank, historian
Julio Escoto, writer
Patricia Murillo, journalist
Gustavo Larach, historian
María de los Ángeles Mendoza, historian
A. Flores, publicist
Allan Fajardo, sociologist and businessman
Anarella Vélez, historian
Héctor Martínez Mortiño, economist
Emilio Guerrero, writer and businessman
Héctor Castillo, artist
Jorge Martinez, writer
Sergio Raúl Rodríguez, musician
Víctor Manuel Ramos, medical doctor and writer
Mayra J. Mejía del Cid, lawyer
Héctor Valerio, medical doctor and businessman
Marcio Valenzuela, engineer and businessman
Gustavo Zelaya, philosopher and historian
Rosa María Messen Ghidinelli, sociologist
Jorge A. Amaya Banegas, historian
Daniel Reichman, anthropologist
Oscar A. Puerto Posas, economist
Russell Sheptak, historian and computer engineer
Rosemary Joyce, anthropologist
Mauricio de Maria Campos, economist and diplomat
Iris Mecía, poet and journalist
Joaquín Portillo historian
Isbela Orellana, sociologist
Omar Pinto, artist
Edgar Soriano, historian
Tito Estrada, playwright
Natalie Roque, historian
Cesar Lazo, journalist and writer
Fabricio Estrada, poet
Ricardo Salgado, policital scientist
Soledad Altamirano, poet
Rodolfo Pastor Campos, political scientist and diplomat
Lety Elvir, writer

September 1, 2011

Bad Press: Violence in Honduras

CNN's headline on its coverage reads: Troops deployed to northern Honduras after clashes leave 11 dead.

There is, indeed, violence in Honduras. But you won't understand much about it from CNN, nor from other English-language press relying on official statements.

CNN characterizes the government ministry of agriculture as "a national land reform organization", thus managing to use the spokesman for a government agency as if he were speaking for the campesino activists who are being accused of escalating violence.

So we are treated to Marco Ramiro Lobo speaking for INA being framed as the campesino position:

"What is happening at this moment has nothing to do with these organizations ... It is the result of individuals who have committed criminal acts and must be held accountable and punished."

This is contrasted in CNN's narrow-band reporting of different government voices with Miguel Angel Bonilla, minister of communications, who says

"Effectively there are people who are taking advantage of the situation... They want it to look like they are peasants."

CNN accurately reports that 11 people were killed in the Aguan, five on Sunday, 6 on Monday. But it leaves out some critical details, like who died, when, and how. And where it gives "details", it is relying on less than objective sources.

The Honduran paper La Tribuna reports that the conflict Sunday was an armed ambush of security guards on one of the African palm plantations, which have been the focus of contention between campesino groups and large corporate farm owners.

The violence reported on Monday claimed the lives of four employees of a bottling plant and a fifth person traveling with them, shot as they drove on the highway between Sinaloa and Sabá, Colón. Univision quotes regional police authority Roberto Benítez as saying that the victims were mistaken by someone-- he doesn't know who-- as parties to one side of the conflict-- he doesn't say which. Still, that is better than CNN manages.

Honduran press reports, never particularly sympathetic to campesino activists, nonetheless clarify that the government is at pains to try to distinguish between the people they think are responsible for the ambush on Sunday, and campesino groups involved in negotiations with the government designed to confirm title to lands in the region, such as the Movimiento Unificado del Aguán (MUCA).

You wouldn't understand that from the CNN report, which instead links the Sunday and Monday incidents-- one, remember, the shooting of bottling plant employees on the road-- to the long confrontation between campesinos and landowners:

The region in northern Honduras is the site of longstanding disputes over palm plantations between local peasants and corporate landowners.

Of course, CNN got that from a Honduran government statement that said the deployment of 600 troops-- bringing the total number of troops stationed there to 1000-- is aimed at

reinforcing operations to stop more disturbances and confrontations between peasants and private security groups.

CNN then develops its storyline further, relying on the most dubious unverified source possible: Dinant Corporation company treasurer Roger Pineda, who claimed that "hundreds" of armed attackers were involved in the Sunday attack.

Dinant, of course, is the corporation owned by Miguel Facussé, one of the main landowners losing land in the government-brokered settlement with MUCA. Dinant's comments were reported in El Nuevo Diario of Nicaragua on Sunday, where he is quoted as saying

"This morning some 200 campesinos attacked us, wanting to take over a finca, and they wounded 11 guards of ours and killed four of them."

Do I know who is responsible for these latest incidents, which are serving as the pretext for increased militarization of the Bajo Aguan? No. But I know more, even though I have to rely on the biased media of Honduras, than anyone would whose only insight into Honduras came from CNN and other English language media.

Oh, and another thing about the CNN article. The accompanying photo is not of the violence in the Bajo Agua. The caption starts "Students confront soldiers in a protest in Tegucigalpa on Tuesday".

But that's another blog post.

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?

Kidnapped Campesino Leader Escapes

The good news came through late yesterday: Juan Chinchilla, kidnapped leader of the peasant movement under attack in the Bajo Aguan, was free.

Now the details are coming out, and it is critical that they not be passed over lightly.

The article in today's Tiempo is headlined Director of MUCA escapes from his captors.

"Escapes" is the key word here. Despite massive mobilization intended to apply pressure on the Lobo Sosa government to seek his release, there is no reason to give credit to them, as Adrienne Pine suggests is happening in email communications.

Chinchilla was kidnapped on Saturday. His motorbike was found, riddled with bullet holes, near Tocoa.

According to Tiempo, he was found after his escape on the highway near Trujillo, the major city on the north coast of Honduras nearest to the Bajo Aguan settlements. Tiempo says Chinchilla has declined to talk to the police and has yet to take part in a press conference.

So for more detailed coverage, readers need to turn to the website of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, of which Chinchilla is also a leader.

There, Wilfredo Paz, another leader of the FNRP, is quoted as saying Chinchilla

"is in good condition, although very worn for the beating and torture they applied.”

Paz is quoted as saying Chinchilla is being kept safe in an undisclosed location. He went on to explain that Chinchilla untied himself while his guards were asleep.

Perhaps most troubling is that Paz reported that Chinchilla's guards were not all Honduran:

"Some spoke English, while others spoke a language he could not understand."

I originally wrote the following paragraph as the conclusion for this piece:

Watch for the Honduran police to dismiss this crime as unrelated to the political circumstances in the Aguan; to blame Chinchilla and to try to imply that he was engaged in drug trafficking; or to blame it on a generalized climate of violence. And don't be fooled.

Then, before posting, I checked for more Honduran news stories. Turns out I could not even imagine how bad the spin would be. This is from El Heraldo's story:

In relation to this act of delinquency, the legal advisor of the Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA), Marco Ramiro Lobo, asserted that what those who grabbed Chinchilla were attempting was to 'boycott' the negotiations [with Miguel Facussé, in which he was a participant].

“We are concerned that this act will provoke distortion in the negotiations", said Lobo.

Confused about who these people were, who might have been motivated to promote a breakdown in the negotiations? Read on:

Ramiro Lobo did not directly accuse the businessman Miguel Facussé for the disappearance of the campesino leader, although he stated that “the primary suspects probably come from this sector”.

Maybe there is another way to read this, but I doubt it: the INA representative is subtly implying that this was an inside job-- by MUCA. Think I am reading too much into the way Heraldo presented the story? read the first (and at the moment, only) comment on the story:

I don't know why this sounds like a sham to me, an invented kidnapping that didn't yield the outcomes that they wanted...

Well, I know why it sounded like a sham to you. Because that's how Heraldo wants you to react, and they carefully chose their words to give the impression that it wasn't really a kidnapping.

Don't be fooled.

Welcome to the 1980s

Daily life in Honduras is increasingly much like it was under the military dictatorship of the early 1980s. In the name of security, the country is gradually being militarized.

Yesterday came word that the Department of Copan, along the border with Guatemala, is the latest place to become fully militarized.

Without warning on Wednesday, Operation Fuerza Cabañas, an indefinite deployment of 8 combined military and police units, a total of 350 troops, to the northern part of the Department of Copan, took control of the towns of La Entrada, Florida, San Antonio, El Paraíso, Cabañas, Santa Rita y Copán Ruinas. Police and military began combined patrols, stopping and identifying people walking and driving, and set up 24 hour checkpoints at various points along roadways.

The official policy of joint policing involves placing roadblocks and checkpoints where military and police review the identity papers of everyone who passes that point, by car, bus, truck, or on foot. They inspect everything in and on any vehicles. They pat people down, looking for weapons.

The policy also involves combined patrols walking through neighborhoods, entering houses rounding up people they suspect of being criminals, without warrants.

Most troubling are getting reports from correspondents throughout the country of more disturbing checkpoints set up at night, where the people stopping vehicles are masked, do not wear uniforms, and are heavily armed.

This is precisely what daily life was like in the early 1980s under the last military dictatorship. Travel through the country meant being stopped by army and police units, having everything in your car inspected and potentially queried, up to and including books based on their covers. It meant having buses stopped, young men removed, some taken to military bases for further investigation-- something that happened not just to Honduras we now, but to RNS as well.

First to be militarized in the current campaigns were parts of Colón and Olancho, allegedly to take over security. The military immediately established checkpoints, took over and still control the INA regional headquarters, and began rousting the campesinos of the Movimiento Unido de Campesinos del Aguan (MUCA) who have occupied African palm lands they argue were improperly taken from them by large landowners such as Miguel Facussé. The occupation of this region is indefinite.

In the case of the Copan campaign, the publicly stated purpose is to bring security to the residents of the area. The department of Copan is one of the places where Mexican drug cartels are reported to have established safe houses.

Press accounts of the rationale of this latest deployment is mixed. SDP reported it was strictly an anti-drug campaign. Honduran domestic sources called it a response to the assassination of a congressman from Copan by supposed gang members from Guatemala.

If there were any doubt that militarization is meant to intimidate local populations, Oscar Alvarez, the Security Minister for the current government, has dispelled that with numerous threatening statements.

He said of the campaign in the Bajo Aguan,

"we have the names of a few of the leaders who incite the humble campesinos to take the roads; they will be captured and placed at the order of the prosecutors....We cannot permit that they muddy the name of Honduras and bring water to their mill, which is not the water of honest campesinos, but of persons that wish to discredit the rule of law and the actions of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa."

Is the fascism of the 1980s the future of Honduras?

Only Nightmares After All

It seems that Oscar Alvarez, Honduras's Security Minister, only dreamed he had intelligence that Nicaragua was training campesinos in the Bajo Aguan to be insurgent guerrillas, and that Nicaragua was arming said campesinos with thousands of AK-47s.

At least, that should be the only conclusion possible after Porfirio Lobo Sosa flatly denied that the Government of Nicaragua was participating in a scheme to train and arm Honduran campesinos as insurgents.

Lobo Sosa made his comments to the press after officiating at the graduation of the current class from Zamorano, the Agriculture school near Tegucigalpa, saying

"there is no evidence of any participation by the government of Nicaragua in training rebels to act in land disputes between campesinos and landlords in Honduras."

Oscar Alvarez's fantasy of Nicaraguan trained peasant insurgents began in the cabinet minister's meeting on November 22 when he told Lobo Sosa that he had intelligence that indicated there were armed campesinos in the Bajo Aguan and that Nicaraguans were training them.

Alvarez included a telling detail: there was a large arms cache of 1000 AK-47s, and he knew where it was.

Lobo Sosa went public with Alvarez's accusation on November 22, backing it as something known by police intelligence.

On November 24, Alvarez himself made press statements that repeated all the same elements, but backpedaled on claiming that the government of Nicaragua was behind it:

"The information that we have is that people coming out of Honduras have been moving to Nicaragua, supposedly to train....We've been informed that they've entered from Nicaragua, that they've entered, also, in shipping containers."

Alvarez said.

Unfortunately for the security minister, his claims did not gain wide support from his colleagues in the cabinet.

In fact, one of the security minister's targets actually was another cabinet ministry: the National Agrarian Institute (INA), headed by his colleague in Lobo Sosa's "government of reconciliation", Cesar Ham.

The local INA office was the target of a raid as part of the "security" operation seeking the non-existent arms caches in the Bajo Aguan, as we previously noted, without finding the promised fire arms.

Then an even more important cabinet colleague, Mario Canahauti, Honduras' Foreign Minister, asked for documentation of the claims of Nicaraguan government involvement:

"I need the documentation which permits me to guarantee we have the evidence, so as not to create a serious international problem for Honduras."

Nicaragua, of course, strongly denied training or arming any Hondurans.

Lobo Sosa backpedaled and said he never mentioned Nicaragua. And in fact, his remarks just said it was an adjacent country:

"we have all this located, including the places where they are training outside of Honduras; its a large quantity of arms that they have and we have to chase this down."

Now Lobo Sosa says there's no evidence of participation by the Nicaraguan government.

No weapons, no proof of Nicaragua's participation. But a Security Minister can dream......

Political economy of Honduras: 1950s to 1970s (Part 2 of 4)

Economist Miguel Cáceres Rivera and historian Sucelinda Zelaya continue their analysis of the development of the modern Honduran political economy, which started with a discussion of the early twentieth century and continues with an exploration of the specific factors in the period 1990-2010 that contributed to the coup d'Etat of 2009.

The roots of the alliance of military and business class are to be found in the 1960s-1970s:

Second crisis

As in the first case, the second crisis these scholars analyze took place among the campesino population. The recovery of population under Carías led to increase in population density, setting the stage for this second demographic/economic crisis.

Starting at the end of the 1950s, difficulties in access to land formed obstacles for campesinos. Ownership of land was concentrated in the hands of large-scale cattle ranchers, "the remnants of the mining-ranching model" of the 19th century, the banana companies, and other large-scale agricultural enterprises.

The authors note that two solutions presented themselves to this situation.

Migration from the rural landscape to the cities, which grew tremendously during this period, was one. Thus farmers converted themselves to workers in industries, and to service workers, simultaneously the reserve of workers for industry. This, they noted, benefited industry, both by providing a labor pool and a new body of consumers of products. Industry surpassed agriculture in generating new jobs in the early 1960s. The state encouraged these developments with industrial subsidies for the business owners. Products made by rural farmers were no longer able to compete in the urban market with the subsidized products of industry. (Think of the replacement of traditional pottery by plastic for a somewhat more recent analogy: this only works because the real costs of the plastic containers are underwritten by such things as provision of cheap electricity.) As Cáceres and Zelaya note, "The policy of industrial development is of a classist nature", encouraging the replacement of an agricultural working class by an urban, industrial labor pool.

There was a second route out of the crisis that started in the 1950s. This was migration to different rural areas, initially pushing agriculture into previously unfarmed land, later organizing to occupy "land held by large-scale cattle ranchers and large agrobusinesses", especially in the major valleys of the banana growing region on the north coast. This route was directed to maintain an identity as rural farmers, and represented "anti-institutional questioning of private property in land...and, on the other hand, the illegitimate possession of national lands" by the large landowners. Again, they see this in class terms, as a challenge to the cattle-ranching class.

While they see this crisis playing out throughout the country, they note it was especially intense in the area that previously had been home to the mining-ranching enterprise, especially along the border with El Salvador.

This rural to rural migration they credit with leading to reform of the Law of Agrarian Reform (Ley de Reforma Agraria):

The reform of [land] tenure is the vertebral column of the reformist project of the first half of the 1970s and consequently the migrant campesinos without land came to be the central social class of this project.

The newly landed campesino groups had increased purchase capacity for the products of urban industries. This especially affected former banana lands, prime targets of seizure and land reform; this is when the Aguán first became a site of struggle. Meanwhile, the increased demand helped the consolidation of the business class, with new government programs providing financing and training of workers under the same reform movement.

These reforms were led by the military juntas that ruled Honduras throughout the 1960s and 1970s, who forged links with the newly growing industrial class.

Meanwhile, the traditional parties remained distant, in part, Cáceres and Zelaya suggest, because of links to the large cattle ranchers who opposed land reform and because of lack of affinities for the industrial managers and owners.

The demotion of the "five or six families" forming the cattle-ranching wealth elite who had dominated the two major parties, and the political elevation of the industrial/business elite was a consequence.

Notes on murder rates in Honduras and deaths of journalists

In a recent comment attempting to downplay the clearly disproportionate level of murders of journalists in Honduras since the coup d'Etat of June 28, 2009, a hostile reader of this blog and constant critic made a number of different arguments.

One of these was the claim that journalist's murders were rising because the crime rate was going up so dramatically overall.

First, let us stop to note that this does not, in fact, as the critic wished, disprove our basic point: the coup ushered in an atmosphere of impunity (freedom from responsibility for crimes) for certain factions, and unleashed lawlessness and violence (by the armed forces and the police).

But, as I said in a comment, I know of no credible statistics that suggest the overall rise in murder rates-- which surely have gone up after the coup, and I would argue, as a direct result of the coup-- are anywhere near the increase seen in deaths of journalists: from two recorded in the two years prior to the coup; to ten recorded in the eleven months since the coup.

It took some effort, but we now have numbers for the murder rates in question. The US State Department, relying on UNDP data, reported a murder rate of 4,473 in a population of 7.3 million in 2008, the year before the coup d'etat. Standardizing, this would be 61.3 homicides per 100,000 population.

The murder rate over the past year is reportedly 66.8 homicides per 100,000. That represents a rise in the murder rate of just under 9%.

That is, indeed, a huge increase and a very troubling sign. But if the rate of increase in murders of journalists had increased proportionately, we would have expected one or at most two journalists to be killed in the past year. The actual number killed, of course, is ten.

Our constant critic made a second argument, also based on a false use of the language of rationality.

This was that it was "logical" to assume that journalists were targeted, not for the few stories they might have written critical of the coup, but for the much larger number of stories that they wrote about other topics. I have previously noted that there is nothing logical about this argument. A reporter might cover uncontroversial stories his or her entire life, then write one story that picks at a scab the powerful and lawless do not wish to have touched.

Those scabs, in some of the cases of recently murdered journalists, seem clearly to be related directly to anti-coup sentiments and reporting, based on military intimidation and death threats. But I also count as legacies of the coup deaths of journalists engaged in covering the events in the Bajo Aguan, where peasant cooperatives are under severe pressure for actions of civil disobedience through which they are demanding land rights.

One might argue that these stories have nothing to do with the coup. But they touch on the rich and powerful who initiated the coup.

Despite the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa attempting to reach a deal to clear the peasants out of the way of powerful landowners, compensating them with promises down the road, that apparently was not enough. Yesterday another armed attack on the Bajo Aguan cooperatives happened, killing one person, in one of the farms that the government authorized them to occupy. The claim made by the attacking forces-- the national military Cobras-- was that the peasants are "arming themselves".

This is the kind of claim that can never be disproved without independent media research, as the bought-and-sold newspapers of Honduras routinely print as fact stories about the Bajo Aguan that are transparently false-- in at least one case, so much so that the government had to repudiate the reports.

And here is where the coup is relevant to the deaths of journalists today. One lesson that the powerful in Honduras learned by carrying out the coup and occupying the government throughout a de facto regime rejected by the entire world is that they can get their way by force. Shutting down the media throughout the months of the de facto regime was a major initiative: by direct physical attacks, by electronic attacks, by illegal decrees, and by death threats.

So like the international human rights organizations, and organizations dedicated to the safety of a free press, we will continue to report on the unprecedented wave of violence against journalists. Because it is not just the way things are in Honduras. It is an outrage and it is motivated by impunity, a lasting legacy of the coup d'Etat.