Another Failed Reunion: No Free Lunch for Lobo Sosa

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom agreed to recognize Porfirio Lobo Sosa as President of Honduras and work for Honduras's reintegration into SICA after Lobo Sosa agreed to give Manuel Zelaya Rosales safe conduct out of the Brazilian embassy on January 27, 2010.

Since that time Colom as been trying to get the Central American Presidents together to discuss how and when to reincorporate Honduras in the Central American Integration System (Sistema de Integración Centroamericano, or SICA .

Honduras was suspended from SICA after the coup last June. SICA, composed of the Central American countries, with China and Mexico as observers, seeks to fortify its member countries' democracy and institutions, deal with regional security interests, and provide for economic integration among its member countries, among other guiding principles. SICA is currently engaged in negotiations with the European Union to establish better trade relations between the two regions.

On May 7, President Colom issued an urgent call for a meeting in Guatemala attended by all the Central American Presidents for next Wednesday. This invitation was almost immediately canceled because all the Central American Presidents were confirmed to attend the inauguration of Costa Rica's new President, Laura Chinchilla, yesterday, and were expected to be staying on to attend a lunch yesterday hosted by President Chinchilla, where the discussions could take place.

That lunch meeting never happened.

President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador announced on arrival in Costa Rica yesterday that he would have to return to El Salvador because one of the members of his delegation had developed a health problem. Then, Presidents Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and Ricardo Martinelli of Panama, decided not to stay for the lunch and returned to their home countries right after the inauguration.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the press the summit in Costa Rica had been canceled, so they all gathered together, cameramen and photographers waiting for statements.

Porfirio Lobo appeared first and told them "We hadn't exactly settled on a meeting for today, but there was the idea that it would be here, or in Guatemala on Wednesday."

Because President Ortega left right after the inauguration, as did President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who doesn't recognize Lobo as President of Honduras, this started rumors that there was discord among the Central American Presidents.

Costa Rica's Foreign Minister, René Castro, appeared before the press two hours later to reassure them that there was no discord, that it had simply proved impossible to get all the Presidents together to discuss reincorporating Honduras in SICA.

Putting the best face on things, Castro said it was a positive step that all of the Presidents came to Chinchilla's inauguration. "All Central Americans are happy to be together again," he said. "We had been thinking about substituting the meeting that we could not have here today for a quick meeting on Wednesday among the Presidents in Guatemala, which has a problem in that there is already planned another meeting of the [Central American negotiators of the agreement with the EU] and it would be almost parallel".

The reference, of course, is to the negotiation for a Central America economic agreement with the EU in Spain, to which Lobo Sosa was invited and then uninvited.

As long as the Lobo Sosa administration insists on touting every minor international contact as "recognition", though, it seems that the continued inability of Mauricio Funes to make it to planned "summits", and the polite but determined attempt by Daniel Ortega to avoid sitting down at a table with Porfirio Lobo Sosa for anything other than urgent bilateral negotiations, cannot really be chalked up in the win column.

On to Spain!

Misrecognition

As we previously noted, supporters of the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the government itself are desperate to find any indication of "recognition" that they can. So pro-coup Honduran news media claimed that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had "recognized" Honduras by signing an accord to reauthorize a border dispute commission.

Now, Danilo Valladares writing for IPS notes that Nicaragua officially disclaimed such an interpretation:

In a statement issued by Managua after their meeting, representatives of leftist parties, including the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) headed by Ortega, said they had decided "not to recognise the de facto government of Honduras."

The IPS article also includes comments from Ángel Edmundo Orellana Mercado, who resigned his post in the Zelaya cabinet days before the coup, then refused to participate in the post-coup Congress in protest against its illegal actions on June 28. Orellana was the author of a series of important editorials contesting the innovative attempts by the de facto regime to retroactively cleanse the coup of the stain of illegality.

IPS notes that Orellana argued against too-easy agreement to reintegrate Honduras in regional organizations like SICA and the OAS. Commenting on the Truth Commission set up by the Lobo Sosa government as part of its attempt to gain re-admission into OAS, Orellana said

"A bad precedent could be set if the commitments outlined there are not fulfilled and everything that happened is simply pardoned".

This is, of course, precisely what has been set in motion by the Honduran Congress passing a decree granting amnesty for "political crimes", which has been criticized by legal experts.

The IPS story repeats the claim seen in most recent articles that only 30 countries world-wide have recognized the Honduran government. This is far less than the number of countries claimed by the Lobo Sosa administration.

Among the Central American countries, as it properly points out, only Nicaragua has so far refused to recognize Lobo Sosa's government. The newly elected president of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, has gone even further than Oscar Arias, saying

"We will be advocating, as we have up to now, the full and total reincorporation of our beloved sister republic of Honduras in all of the region's bodies".

Mauricio Funes, president of El Salvador, is reported to have stated that "Honduras will be fully integrated in SICA" by its scheduled July 20 meeting.

Renzo Rosal, described as assistant director of the Central American Institute for Political Studies, is quoted in the IPS article as saying that before Honduras is re-admitted to SICA,

"Issues that should be discussed are the role of the Honduran army in a democratic society; the historical two-party system in Honduras; the reconstruction of the social fabric; and the role that the OAS and SICA should play to help solve conflicts like the one in Honduras".

That would seem a very ambitious agenda to complete before July 20. Notably, it is not within the charge of the Truth Commission, which has been explicitly warned off such fundamental areas of Honduran political life.

The closest approximation to this agenda is, in fact, the manifesto issued by the Frente Popular de Resistencia following the meeting it convened in La Esperanza earlier this spring, which also called for reconsidering the role of the army, the place of the historical two party system, and the reconstruction of the social fabric. Good ideas; maybe someone should invite the authors to the table for real dialogue.