Communications: From Campaign to Government

Miguel Angel Bonilla, sworn in by Porfirio Lobo Sosa to deal with "Comunicaciones y Estrategía", found himself almost immediately dealing with crisis communications when a zealous immigration official refused the Brazilian consul entry into Honduras last week. Along with the minister of Gobernación, he was quoted in initial reporting of the dismissal of the Micheletti regime's head of immigration.

At the time of the firing, and before the official was restored to his position on the grounds that his actions had been simply based on a misunderstanding, Bonilla was quoted as firmly rejecting anything that would alienate the international community, saying the intention of the Lobo administration is to

work very hard and succeed in re-establishing ties with brother countries

and that it was unfortunate that the immigration authority hadn't considered that

at this moment we are a government that is, better, opening the doors to return to re-establish ties with different countries.

Bonilla was prepared for his role, having functioned as Lobo Sosa's campaign director of communications. In that capacity, he was remarkably visible in everything from pronouncements about the negotiation of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord, to denouncing claims that were being made in October by the Liberal Party against Lobo Sosa, as candidate for the Nationalist Party:

The position of our candidate has always been firm and will continue to be so. 'Pepe' Lobo is on the side of the Honduran people. 'Pepe' is supporting the institutionality of the country, and here what matters are not names but what matters is Honduras, and its institutions, and that is what the candidate respects.

The messages of our candidate have been thoughtful, calling on the parties that they sit down to dialogue, that we should all think of the Honduran family. We say it constantly, those who are suffering this political crisis are the people with low economic resources, those that live from day to day.

Shortly after José Manuel Zelaya Rosales made his way back to Honduras in September, 2009, it was Bonilla who spoke for Lobo Sosa, working hard to make the coup a personal confrontation with Roberto Micheletti:

They can’t ignore that Zelaya is in the country...Micheletti needs to sit face-to-face with Zelaya and end this crisis.

So far, Bonilla appears to be making a seamless transition from from campaign communications director to presidential spokesman.

It is worth noting that the prominence of the campaign spokesman in 2009 contrasts vividly with previous campaigns. The 2005 election pitted Porfirio Lobo Sosa against José Manuel Zelaya Rosales in a campaign with such vicious political speech that Cardinal Rodriguez of Tegucigalpa spoke out publicly against the influence of public affairs advisors. But in 2005, these were individuals from the US, and the actual mud was slung by the candidates themselves.

How much progress in one election cycle, if by "progress" we mean further steps down the road towards the disfunctional political system enjoyed by the US.

Cultural diversity and the Ministry of Culture

Bernard Martinez Valerio, former presidential candidate for the PINU-SD party, was selected by Porfirio Lobo Sosa to be the new Minister of Culture in Honduras.

Martinez, a self-identified Afrohonduran and Garifuna, began his career as an environmental health worker and quickly rose to head a section of the medical workers union, first in Trujillo, then in La Ceiba. He has held positions in the Organización de Desarrollo Étnico Comunitario (ODECO), a non-profit that works for social, political, economic, and cultural development of Afrohondurans, traditionally marginalized in Honduran society and politics. ODECO was among the many organizations in Honduras that denounced the June 28 coup d'etat.

Following a history of exclusion of Afrohondurans from politics, Martinez is somewhat exceptional. In 1996, the same year he began working for ODECO, he became an activist in the PINU-SD party. The Partido de Innovación y Unidad Social Democratica defines itself as dedicated to making each individual the "owner of his own destiny", with a platform that calls for national unity, respect for private property, and development of the agricultural and agro-industrial sector, and for the unity of the population based on the family.

In 2004 Martinez became PINU party president, with a term lasting through 2006. In 2009 he was selected as the PINU-SD party's candidate for president, and came in third in the November election, with less than 2 percent of the total vote.

Pofirio Lobo Sosa had already announced that he would appoint all the former presidential candidates to positions in his "reconciliation" government when ODECO requested Lobo Sosa appoint some Afrohondurans to high ranking positions in his government, claiming previous governments had ignored them. The appointment of Martinez thus fulfills two goals for the Lobo Sosa administration.

When Martinez assumed the post he became the highest ranking Afrohonduran ever to serve in the national government, a distinction previously held by Lic. Salvador Suazo, Viceminister of Culture under the Zelaya administration. Salvador Suazo is the author of the book De Saint Vincent a Roatan: Un resumen etnohistorica Garifuna, among others, and at the time of his removal from office by the de facto regime in 2009, he was working on a Garifuna dictionary.

It will be interesting to see what steps Martinez, who the Honduran press represented as the "Barack Obama" of Honduras after he won the PINU presidential nomination-- an identification he disclaimed-- takes in his new-found role as Minister of Culture, where he succeeds the historian Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle.

A government of reconciliation or a cabinet of rivals?

Porfirio Lobo Sosa assumed the presidency of Honduras facing expectations from the United States that he follow through on the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord, despite the fact that it had been declared a failure by the two sides that originally negotiated it.

The amnesty law that Congress passed-- the complete details of which still need to be examined-- was one of these steps.

As reported by the Washington Post, Arturo Valenzuela was quite explicit about the next required steps. He is quoted as saying that Lobo

has put together a broad Cabinet, including even candidates who ran against him. What is pending is the last step, which is the truth commission.

What does putting together a "broad Cabinet" have to do with the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord? Simple: it is what the US has decided will "fulfill" the proposal in that abrogated agreement that Roberto Micheletti form a government of national reconciliation.

But why interpret this as "reconciliation"? The processes involved in negotiating agreement between widely separated parties start with the identification of the parties. In the original San Jose Accord and its zombie resuscitation as the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord, the two parties were the government of José Manuel Zelaya and the faction led by Roberto Micheletti that usurped their offices.

So it made some kind of sense in the San Jose and later Tegucigalpa Accords to combine some people nominated by President Zelaya and some nominated by Roberto Micheletti to initiate "reconcilitation".

But how does the supposedly legally elected president naming people from other political parties to his cabinet qualify as "reconciliation"? Who is reconciling with whom, and what conflict stands between them?

The original San Jose Accord draft did call for representation of the different political parties in the proposed reconciliation government, even though the two main factions at odds were both offshoots of the Liberal Party. At the time, I wondered if somehow Oscar Arias was unaware of that fact.

Now the same formulation is being perpetuated in evaluating the appointment of a post-coup presidential cabinet. Somehow, instead of reconciling adherents of a political faction that perpetuated a coup with the members of the overthrown government, reconciliation is now being equated with multi-party representation in the cabinet.

Since the political conflicts leading to the coup were not about inter-party disputes, Lobo Sosa cannot possibly be choosing his cabinet for their roles in any "reconciliation".

Which means it should be interesting to take a closer look at what Lobo Sosa is accomplishing, in terms of Honduran politics, via the assembly of a cabinet that has already been judged by the US to fulfill the requirements of "reconciliation".

If these people do not represent different stakeholders in the coup and its aftermath, exactly who are they, and why are they part of this government?

The series of posts needed to address this will take some time to complete, so we hope you will stick with us as we contextualize this latest cabinet. If you want to keep score, here's the posts and their announced appointees, many already sworn in on January 27, as listed in El Heraldo and Tiempo:

To head the following ministries:

Comunicaciónes: Miguel Ángel Bonilla

Cultura Artes y Deportes: Bernard Martínez (presidential candidate of PINU)

Educación: Alejandro Ventura

Industria y Comercio: Óscar Escalante

Gobernación: Áfrico Madrid

Finanzas: William Chong Wong

Obras Públicas, Transporte y Vivienda: Miguel Rodrigo Pastor

Relaciones Exteriores: Mario Canahuati

Salud: Arturo Bendaña

Seguridad: Óscar Álvarez

Trabajo: Felícito Ávila (presidential candidate of the Christian Democrat party)

Turismo: Nelly Jerez


Instituto Nacional Agrario: César Ham (presidential candidate for the UD party)

Instituto de la Mujer: María Antonieta Botto-Ministra

Ministra de la Presidencia: María Antonieta de Guillén

Programa de Asignación Familiar: María Elena Zepeda

Other cabinet posts, notably, Minister of Defense, are still unannounced. We will add them to our list when they come out in public. But the next step is to begin examining the history, current political position, and possible role in Lobo's political calculation of each member of the newly named cabinet.