Glacial Pace of Police Cleanup

More than a month ago, we discussed the lack of progress on cleaning up corruption in the Honduran Police.

Here's a (lack of) progress report.

The committee to oversee the police cleanup, formally known as the Comisión de Reforma de la Seguridad Pública, has only been partly appointed.

On March 12, Porfirio Lobo Sosa named the three Honduran members of the commission. They will be Matias Funes, Victor Meza, and Jorge Omar Casco. Victor Meza was Interior Minister in the Zelaya administration. Jorge Omar Casco is former rector of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras, and is a member of the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Matias Funes is a university professor and former presidential candidate.

However, the two international members of the Commission remain unappointed. Lobo Sosa has previously announced that the international members would come from Canada and Chile, and asked both governments for nominations, but only Chile has supplied a name, to date.

Ramon Custodio, the Honduran Human Rights Ombudsperson, told the press that the Honduran government is creating uncertainty in the minds of Hondurans by its slow pace at identifying and removing corrupt police officers. He said:

In Honduras there are good and bad police, but in the actual hierarchy, apparently the bad ones have more power than the good police.

Custodio compared the speed of this administration's response to police corruption to the reaction of the Callejas administration in 1993:

When the crisis in the police happened in 1993 they acted practically immediately and in a few days the ad-hoc commission determined to dissolve the Dirección Nacional de Investigaciones (DNI) and to create the Public Prosecutor and a new investigative police.

Compare that with the speed of response of the Lobo Sosa administration.

In the five and a half months since two university students, including the son of Julieta Castellanos, were killed, the Lobo Sosa administration created but failed to fund a police oversight commission, the Dirección de Investigación y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIEP). The DIEP was created in December, and its members appointed that month. However, since then, the committee has done nothing, awaiting a budget. This spring its chairman quit over the lack of funding.

The Lobo Sosa administration announced it would create a security commission to oversee the cleanup of the police, the public prosecutor's office, and the judiciary, but it took until February for them to solicit nominations for the Honduran members, and it took until mid-March to appoint those members. It has not yet managed to appoint the two international members.

On March 24, the Security Minister, Pompeyo Bonilla turned over to the Public Prosecutor's office the investigative files on 18 police officers. Eighteen, when more than 100 police officers have been dismissed for alleged corruption since October. The Public Prosecutor's office has repeatedly called for all the files to be turned over, but as of now, only those 18 have left the Ministry of Security.

Here we are five and a half months after the promises began, waiting for something other than talk to happen.

Honduran Members of Truth Commission Previewed

Radio America reported this afternoon, as did El Heraldo and La Prensa, that the Lobo Sosa government confirmed today the names of Hondurans who would be members of the truth commission.

Two of the announced members are the current and former rectors of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH in Spanish), Julietta Castellanos and Jorge Omar Casco. Casco has been working with Stein on setting forth the ground rules for the commission.

The third Honduran member of the commission will be Sergio Membreño, also an academic, who will be the technical secretary of the commission. Membreño was Deputy Chief of the Honduran diplomatic mission in Washington starting in 2003, having previously served the Honduran UN Development Program as an economist. Perhaps more intriguing, in 2007 he was the Executive Director of the Honduran National Anticorruption Council (CNA), and was quoted then as saying

Corruption [in Honduras] is closely related to a system of political favoritism, bi-partisan favoritism, and the way in which the operators of justice are named...There is a shortage of values in Honduras and it makes me sad to admit it, especially in front of the international community, but if we don't acknowledge this, it will be very difficult to find a solution [to corruption in politics]

Porfirio Lobo Sosa has already announced that Eduardo Stein will stay on as one of the three international representatives on the commission, but as yet, has not confirmed who the other two international members will be, only that the commission will be fully formed by the 25th of February. Stein said the process of organizing the commission is taking longer than he anticipated, and that it is no longer sure that the commission will be fully formed by February 25.

In reaction to the announcement of the Honduran members, the Unión Cívica Democrática (UCD), or at least one of its organizers, businessman Jimmy Dacarett, continues to call for a public consensus on who should be truth commission members. Dacarett said Porfirio Lobo

is placing his people how he wants, with people who are not qualified to be part of the truth commission.

Dacarett told La Tribuna that Julietta Castellanos, the rector of the University, has been singled out by businessmen as supporting the resistance. Stein, they allege, published articles in which he referred to events in Honduras as a military coup. In his view, this disqualifies both:

These are people who have deep beliefs about a position in this sense. As people, they are not qualified to be part of the commission. The commission has already failed because no one will accept their report as either true or false because they are not complying with the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord under a national consensus. Just like Manuel Zelaya did in his time, what Pepe Lobo is doing is going against the interests of the majority of Hondurans.

Meanwhile, the rabidly pro-coup El Heraldo spun it that Julieta Castellanos was pro-resistance because she has hired some of Zelaya's former cabinet members to be faculty and administrators at the University, and some of them had even supported the cuarta urna! They stopped short of actually saying that this disqualified her to serve on the commission, but that certainly would have been their position if they were voicing one.

La Prensa adds that Lobo responded to a question from a student later in the day, commenting on more than 3000 reports of human rights abuses in the country since June 28, saying

yes we are going to pay attention to those 3000 cases that you point out because....we want to respect those rights.

So perhaps human rights abuses might actually be on the agenda after all. Stay tuned.

Finally, Proceso Digital noted today that Lobo and Eduardo Stein would meet with the members of the committees that negotiated the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord for Micheletti and Zelaya on Thursday. The meeting is to understand what both parties intended a truth commission to do in including it as part of the Accord.