Foreign Policy In Focus

On the heels of learning that the United States has significantly scaled up its presence in Honduras in recent months, disturbing news emerged this week that suggests the country is suffering a bloody return on Washington’s military investment in the region. Last week, the New York Times reported that “A commando-style squad of Drug Enforcement Administration agents accompanied the Honduran counternarcotics police during two firefights with cocaine smugglers in the jungles of the Central American country this month, according to officials in both countries who were briefed on the matter. One of the fights, which occurred last week, left as many as four people dead and has set off a backlash against the American presence there.”

While it is still unclear just what went down and who was involved, initial reports that the US-Honduran team had killed members of a drug trafficking syndicate were almost immediately countered with claims by local politicians that those killed were all innocent bystanders. The details, if true, are horrifying: “Lucio Baquedano, the mayor of Ahuas, a small town near the incident, told El Tiempo, a Honduran newspaper, that a helicopter-borne unit consisting of both Honduran police officers and D.E.A. agents was pursuing a boatload of drug smugglers when it mistakenly opened fire on another boat carrying villagers. Four people died—including two pregnant women—and four others were wounded, he said.”

And then today, new accounts surfaced which suggests that the botched mission wasn’t the only ugly incident that day. A dispatch from the Associated Press reports that

After the shooting killed four passengers on a riverboat and wounded four more, the masked agents landed their helicopters in this community of wooden shacks on stilts near the river and began breaking down doors, hunting for a drug trafficker they called “El Renco,” villagers told The Associated Press on Monday. Witnesses referred to some of the agents as “gringos” and said they spoke English to each other and into their radios. Hilaria Zavala said six men kicked in her door about 3 a.m., threw her husband on the ground and put a gun to his head. “They kept him that way for two hours,” said Zavala, who owns a market near the main pier in Ahuas. “They asked if he was El Renco, if he worked for El Renco, if the stuff belonged to El Renco. My husband said he had nothing to do with it.”

American involvement in Honduras opens up a can of worms of questions and concerns that drive to the very heart of international relations, in theory and practice–sovereign power, authority and American hegemony, not to mention basic ethics and morality. Dana Frank has offered some good background that situated the current mess in its proper context, including the role of the 2009 Honduran coup that Washington would like to wipe clean from the imagination.

Only in the post-coup context, however, can we understand the very real crisis of drug trafficking in Honduras. A vicious drug culture already existed before the coup, along with gangs and corrupt officials. But the thoroughgoing criminality of the coup regime opened the door for it to flourish on an unprecedented scale. Drug trafficking is now embedded in the state itself—from the cop in the neighborhood all the way up to the very top of the government, according to high-level sources. Prominent critics and even government officials, including Marlon Pascua, the defense minister, talk of “narco-judges” who block prosecutions and “narco-congressmen” who run cartels. Alfredo Landaverde, a former congressman and police commissioner in charge of drug investigations, declared that one out of every ten members of Congress is a drug trafficker and that he had evidence proving “major national and political figures” were involved in drug trafficking. He was assassinated on December 7…

The coup, in turn, unleashed a wave of violence by state security forces that continues unabated. On October 22, an enormous scandal broke when the Tegucigalpa police killed the son of Julieta Castellanos, rector of the country’s largest university and a member of the government’s Truth Commission, along with a friend of his. Top law enforcement officials admitted that the police were responsible for the killings but allowed the suspects to disappear, precipitating an enormous crisis of legitimacy, as prominent figures such as Landaverde stepped forward throughout the autumn to denounce the massive police corruption. The police department, they charged, is riddled with death squads and drug traffickers up to the very highest levels…

The Honduran military is corrupt, too. On November 1, 2010, an airplane used in drug trafficking was “robbed” from a military base in San Pedro Sula. According to La Tribuna, a right-wing newspaper, at least nineteen members of the army were complicit, including top- and intermediate-ranked officers. In August 2011, 300 automatic rifles and 300,000 bullets disappeared from a warehouse of the army’s elite Cobras unit. Despite this record of corruption, a new decree permits the military to accept no-bid contracts—a green light for even more corruption…

This idea that the Honduran government needs US help to fix itself—which critics regard as naïve at best, given the Lobo administration’s manifest unwillingness to reform itself—is how US officials justify support for the Lobo regime. Vice President Joe Biden flew to Honduras on March 6, promising that “the United States is absolutely committed to continuing to work with Honduras to win this battle against the narcotraffickers.” Biden promised increased military and police funds under the Central American Regional Security Initiative, to the tune of $107 million. Obama’s proposed budget for 2013 more than doubles key police and military funds to Honduras…

The military coup made possible what Hondurans call the “second coup”: the deeper economic agenda of transnational investors and Honduran elites, now given almost free rein to use the state as they choose. At the top of their list is privatization of basic state functions. Laws are moving through Congress privatizing the country’s electrical systems, water systems and ports. In an overt attack on Honduras’s powerful and militant teachers unions, Congress in March 2011 passed a law opening the door to privatization of the entire country’s schools.

If all this sounds ripe for disaster, that’s because it is. American involvement in Honduras is unfortunately predicated on wrong lessons learned from the Colombian war on drugs and the insistence, also wrong, that governments can extinguish black markets through use of force. The vast majority of available evidence points to the contrary, and is currently being reinforced by the Mexican morass unfolding as we speak. And it looks as if Washington could be set to double down on its commitment. This past weekend, Honduran President Lobo paid a “secret” visit to the White House, where it is widely believed he asked the Obama administration for more money, and possibly an increased military presence, in his country. Were Washington to cede to Lobo’s request, stories like the one emerging this past week could become increasingly common.

Cross-posted from Dissent.

Honduras has become a human rights disaster. The country now has the world’s highest murder rate. And impunity for political violence is the norm.

For all this, the United States deserves a good deal of the blame.

I was pleased to see the New York Times recently publish a hard-hitting op-ed by Dana Frank that makes this case. Lest anyone in this country think that things in Honduras have settled into a peaceable, post-coup normality, Frank describes the post-June 2009

chain of events—a coup that the United States didn’t stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted—[that] has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns. At least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup, according to the leading human rights organization Cofadeh. At least 13 journalists have been killed since [President Porfirio] Lobo took office, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The police in Tegucigalpa, the capital, are believed to have killed the son of Julieta Castellanos, the rector of the country’s biggest university, along with a friend of his, on Oct. 22, 2011. Top police officials quickly admitted their suspects were police officers, but failed to immediately detain them. When prominent figures came forward to charge that the police are riddled with death squads and drug traffickers, the most famous accuser was a former police commissioner, Alfredo Landaverde. He was assassinated on Dec. 7. Only now has the government begun to make significant arrests of police officers.

State-sponsored repression continues. According to Cofadeh, at least 43 campesino activists participating in land struggles in the Aguán Valley have been killed in the past two and a half years at the hands of the police, the military and the private security army of Miguel Facussé. Mr. Facussé is mentioned in United States Embassy cables made public by WikiLeaks as the richest man in the country, a big supporter of the post-coup regime and owner of land used to transfer cocaine.

This past Tuesday, a comical response to Frank’s piece appeared at Foreign Policy, written by former Bush administration official José Cárdenas. It was humorous in that it included an understated disclaimer at the end. Cárdenas wrote, “Full disclosure: In July 2009, I helped to advise a Honduran business delegation that came to Washington during their presidential crisis to defend Manuel Zelaya’s removal from power.”

Not surprisingly, given his qualifications, Cárdenas frames Honduras’s current problems as solely the product of drug trafficking, and he encourages the United States to recognize that “Honduras’s war on drugs is ours too.”

Frank did a good job preemptively responding to this notion. She wrote, “Much of the press in the United States has attributed this violence solely to drug trafficking and gangs. But the coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression.”

Backing up Frank’s point, Human Rights Watch notes in its World Report 2012: Honduras that the country

failed in 2011 to hold accountable those responsible for human rights violations under the de facto government that took power after the 2009 military coup. … Violence and threats against journalists, human rights defenders, political activists, and transgender people continued. Those responsible for these abuses are rarely held to account.

Whether or not you recognize political violence as part of the problem (Cárdenas neglects to mention it) goes far in determining your view of appropriate policy remedies. Cárdenas recommends working closely with the Honduran government and supporting its military with continued aid. Frank, in contrast, quotes the rector whose son was murdered: “Stop feeding the beast,” Julieta Castellanos says. “She, like other human rights advocates, insists that the Lobo government cannot reform itself,” Frank adds.

Cárdenas complains that Lobo is not a strong enough anti-drug leader. Yet, in a final sad statement, he reveals that his model of an appropriately serious drug warrior is Colombia’s former president Álvaro Uribe. Of course, Colombia is an excellent case of a country in which political violence and the drug trade have long gone hand in hand. On that topic, Human Rights Watch’s Daniel Wilkinson, writing in the New York Review of Books, offers a recommended read on the not-pretty connections between Uribe and narco-trafficking paramilitaries. Armed right-wing groups, Wilkinson reports,

continue to kill trade unionists and, increasingly, leaders of displaced communities seeking to reclaim their lands. These groups no longer present themselves as a national counterinsurgency movement, but they do continue to traffic illegal drugs and terrorize civilians the way the AUC [the paramilitary group that Uribe’s government ostensibly disbanded] once did. They are the legacy of Uribe’s approach to “justice and peace.”

If this is the model for Honduras, the country is sure to remain a Washington-abetted human rights catastrophe for a long time to come.

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the ninth in the series.

(Pictured: Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya)

Whoever’s behind the strategy of what WikiLeaks documents to drop, and when, has a keen sense of marketing. The information released thus far has provided nothing short of a fascinating, if sometimes downright trashy, tour through the nuts and bolts of American foreign policy practice. While very serious matters of international relations have been revealed so far, much of the dump seems designed to appeal to the Jersey Shore dimension of our imagination—which leaders have the most scandalous personal lives, which embassies generate the most consistently cutting, clever and humiliating analysis of foreign politicians, and the like. 

Beyond all the sensationalist gossip that has come to dominate the headlines and is undoubtedly causing headaches within the White House, however, a number of leaked cables detail not only the professionalism and good judgment of American foreign service staff abroad, but offer real cliff-hangers that leave readers licking their chops for more. 

One such document is a brilliant cable sent to Washington by the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The cable is dated July 24, 2009, right in the thick of the constitutional crisis that led to then-President Manuel Zelaya’s ouster by the Honduran military. As I argued repeatedly throughout the summer of last year, far from the leftist hero many—who had never followed Honduran politics before the coup—made him out to be, Zelaya is a despicable opportunist whose political loyalties extend only so far as himself. Still, while Zelaya undoubtedly pushed the envelope by seeking to reform the country’s constitution with no clear legal mandate, his removal by an even more contemptible cast of goons marked nothing less the lowest moment of Honduran politics in over a generation.

The embassy wire more or less confirms this analysis, acknowledging that all sides behaved badly. But what makes this a standout piece of diplomatic intelligence is its insistence on getting to the bottom of the legal dimensions of the situation—conclusions upon which to chart a responsible American foreign policy moving forward.      

The cable lays out at length and with great care the various legal arguments put forth by coup supporters, including but not limited to accusations that Zelaya had failed to present the Congress with a budget, proposed illegal constitutional amendments of unreformable articles, illegally dismissed the head of the armed forces, and defied the judgment of an appeals court that demanded an end to Zelaya’s constitutional reform efforts. All of which may have been true. Only problem was, as the cable points out, “there was never any formal, public weighing of the evidence nor any semblance of due process.”

What follows is a breathlessly efficient rejection of the arguments put forward to justify Zelaya’s removal from office on the grounds that they are, well, nonsense and canards. 

Article 239, which coup supporters began citing after the fact to justify Zelaya's removal (it is nowhere mentioned in the voluminous judicial dossier against Zelaya), states that any official proposing to reform the constitutional prohibition against reelection of the president shall immediately cease to carry out their functions and be ineligible to hold public office for 10 years. Coup defenders have asserted that Zelaya therefore automatically ceased to be President when he proposed a constituent assembly to rewrite the Constitution. ..

The Article 239 argument is flawed on multiple grounds:

-- Although it was widely assumed that Zelaya's reason for seeking to convoke a constituent assembly was to amend the constitution to allow for reelection, we are not aware that he ever actually stated so publicly;

-- Article 239 does not stipulate who determines whether it has been violated or how, but it is reasonable to assume that it does not abrogate other guarantees of due process and the presumption of innocence;

-- Article 94 states that no penalty shall be imposed without the accused having been heard and found guilty in a competent court;

-- Many other Honduran officials, including presidents, going back to the first elected government under the 1982 Constitution, have proposed allowing presidential reelection, and they were never deemed to have been automatically removed from their positions as a result.

And here’s the real kicker:

It further warrants mention that Micheletti himself should be forced to resign following the logic of the 239 argument, since as President of Congress he considered legislation to have a fourth ballot box ("cuarta urna") at the November elections to seek voter approval for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. Any member of Congress who discussed the proposal should also be required to resign, and National Party presidential candidate Pepe Lobo, who endorsed the idea, should be ineligible to hold public office for 10 years.

But the cable’s obliteration of arguments in defense of the coup gets better still.

Regardless of the merits of Zelaya's alleged constitutional violations, it is clear from even a cursory reading that his removal by military means was illegal, and even the most zealous of coup defenders have been unable to make convincing arguments to bridge the intellectual gulf between "Zelaya broke the law" to "therefore, he was packed off to Costa Rica by the military without a trial."

-- Although coup supporters allege the court issued an arrest warrant for Zelaya for disobeying its order to desist from the opinion poll, the warrant, made public days later, was for him to be arrested and brought before the competent authority, not removed from the county;

-- Even if the court had ordered Zelaya to be removed from the country, that order would have been unconstitutional; Article 81 states that all Hondurans have the right to remain in the national territory, subject to certain narrow exceptions spelled out in Article 187, which may be invoked only by the President of the Republic with the agreement of the Council of Ministers; Article 102 states that no Honduran may be expatriated;

-- The armed forces have no/no competency to execute judicial orders; originally, Article 272 said the armed forces had the responsibility to "maintain peace, public order and the 'dominion' of the constitution," but that language was excised in 1998; under the current text, only the police are authorized to uphold the law and execute court orders (Art. 293);

-- Accounts of Zelaya's abduction by the military indicate he was never legally "served" with a warrant; the soldiers forced their way in by shooting out the locks and essentially kidnapped the President.  

The Armed Forces' ranking legal advisor, Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, acknowledged in an interview published in the Honduran press July 5 that the Honduran Armed Forces had broken the law in removing Zelaya from the country. That same day it was reported that the Public Ministry was investigating the actions of the Armed Forces in arresting and deporting Zelaya June 28 and that the Supreme Court had asked the Armed Forces to explain the circumstances that motivated his forcible exile.

As reported reftel, the legal adviser to the Supreme Court told Poloff that at least some justices on the Court consider Zelaya's arrest and deportation by the military to have been illegal.

In sum? Zelaya may indeed have been the dangerous, self-interested jackass many suspected him to be all along, but the coup constituted nothing less than a naked, illegal power grab by the conservative Honduran elite.

And yet despite this incisive analysis, the United States hemmed and hawed throughout the summer as the crisis intensified, innocent people were murdered, and Honduran politics seemingly returned to the bad old days of death squads and dictators.

The biggest as yet unanswered mystery in all this is why Washington retreated from its initial, admirable condemnation of the coup in its immediate aftermath, to a wish-washy acceptance by the fall of last year that the preservation of Honduran democracy necessitated toleration of its own egregious violation. It’s not as if the State Department, the White House, and the CIA—all of whom received the embassy cable—were unaware of the facts on the ground. And still, as Robert Naiman argues, even a month after this cable was sent

The State Department, in its public pronouncements, pretended that the events of June 28 –in particular, "who did what to whom" and the constitutionality of these actions—were murky and needed further study by State Department lawyers, despite the fact that the State Department's top lawyer, Harold Koh, knew exactly "who did what to whom" and that these actions were unconstitutional at least one month earlier. The State Department, to justify its delay in carrying out US law, invented a legal distinction between a "coup" and a "military coup," claiming that the State Department's lawyers had to determine whether a "military coup" took place, because only that determination would meet the legal threshold for the aid cutoff.

So what happened? Was the changing face of American policy on the crisis the result of Republican congressional pressure on the Obama White House, as some claim? Or did the State Department sacrifice its commitment to democracy on the altar of larger, regional stability considerations, as some others have suggested? Let’s hope that more documents emerge that shed light on these questions, and fill in the timeline gaps of perhaps the most important event in recent US-Latin American relations. 

Michael Busch, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, teaches international relations at the City College of New York and serves as research associate at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He is currently working on a doctorate in political science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

A police riot over an austerity bill, or a failed attempt to oust leftist Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa from office? In the aftermath of the Sept. 30 attack on Correa by police in Quito, it is looking more and more like this was an orchestrated coup. And while there is no evidence that the U.S. was directly involved, the Obama administration’s strong support for the current Honduran government may well have encouraged the plotters to expect similar treatment by Washington. 

The police attack on Correa was co-coordinated with similar takeovers in several other cities, the seizure of Ecuador’s two largest airports by army troops, and the occupation of the National Assembly. In the end the Ecuadorian Army supported the President, freed him from the police hospital where he was being held, and whisked him to safety, but only after a firefight killed one soldier and a student who had turned out to support Correa. The President’s car was struck by five bullets. According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, eight people died and 274 were wounded in incidents nationwide. 

Suspicion has fallen on former president and army colonel Lucio Gutierrez, who led a 2000 coup and has called for Correa’s ouster. Gutierrez currently lives in Brazil and denies any link to the attempted coup. Correa also charges that Gutierrez’s brother Gilmar, a member of the National Assembly, supported the coup. 

Last year’s coup in Honduras that ousted Manuel Zelaya has cast a shadow across the region, raising up the ghosts of a previous era when military takeovers routinely toppled governments in Latin America, including those in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador. According to The Guardian, Correa said in the aftermath of the Honduran coup, “We have intelligence reports that say after Zelaya, I’m next.” 

After Zelaya was ousted, the coup-led government of Roberto Micheletti organized elections—boycotted by most the population—and put Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo into power. Most countries in the region refuse to recognize the Lobo government, including the region’s major players, Brazil and Argentina.

In spite of the fact that the Lobo government has overseen a wave of terror directed at journalists, trade unionists, gays and lesbians, and opposition activists, Washington is pushing hard for countries to end Honduras’s regional isolation and its suspension from the Organization of American States (OAS).

“Now is the time for the hemisphere as a whole to move forward and welcome Honduras back into the inter-American community,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the OAS.

But most countries are wary of anything that might give the appearance of endorsing a government brought in via a coup. There is also concern about the ongoing human rights crisis in Honduras. Reporters Without Borders has labeled Honduras the most dangerous country in the world for journalists—eight have been murdered in the past year—and human rights groups, including Amnesty International, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have all condemned the ongoing reign of terror directed at members of the Honduran opposition, the National Front of Popular Resistance.

While most nations in the region are reluctant to bed down with the Honduran government, the U.S. has opened the military aid spigot, donating $812,000 worth of heavy trucks to the Honduran Army. In the meantime, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is handing out $75 million for development projects, and $20 million for the “Merida” security program.

“Washington’s support for the coup government in Honduras over the past year has encouraged and increased the likelihood of rightwing coups against democratic left governments in the region,” writes The Guardian’s Latin American correspondent Mark Weisbrot. “This attempt in Ecuador has failed, but there will likely be more threats in the months and years ahead.”

Two obvious candidates are Bolivia and Paraguay. In the case of the former, organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—both of which gave active support to organizations behind the Honduran coup—are active. 

In Honduras, NED and USAID helped finance the Peace and Democracy Movement and the Civil Democratic Union, both dominated by the country’s tiny elite, and which strongly supported the coup. Many of the Honduran Army’s officers, including coup leaders Gen. Vasquez Velasquez and Gen. Prince Suazo, have been trained by the U.S. Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation, the former “School for the Americas” that has trained coup makers and human rights violators from throughout Latin America.

According to !Presente!, a publication critical of the School for the Americas, the commander of the police barracks where Ecuadoran President Correa was attacked, Col Manuel Rivadeneira Tello, is a graduate of the school’s combat arms training course.

Bolivian President Evo Morales recently threatened to expel USAID for its role in financing opposition separatist groups based in the country’s wealthy eastern provinces. Along with the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD)—an organization long associated with the Central Intelligence Agency—USAID and NED have underwritten separatist media and organizations based in the wealthy province of Santa Cruz, where most of the country’s natural gas deposits lie.   

The possibility of Eastern Bolivia declaring independence is very real and, if it happens, U.S. organizations will have played a major role in encouraging it. 

In May of this year, Fernando Lugo, the progressive president of Paraguay, reported to the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) meeting in Buenos Aires that he had evidence of a coup aimed at overthrowing his government. Lugo had a closed-door meeting with the UNASUR members, following which UNASUR reaffirmed its full support for the Paraguayan government. 

Paraguay is one of the poorest and most unequal countries on the continent, and it was long dominated by a military dictatorship. Lugo, who took office in August 2008 for a five-year term, put together a coalition that broke the 60-year stranglehold the conservative Colorado Party had over the country. 

Lugo has weathered some personal scandals—he is a former Catholic Bishop who fathered a number of children—and is currently suffering from lymphoma. He is locked in a battle with his more conservative vice-president, Federico Franco, and at loggerheads with a fractious congress that has made getting legislation through a trial. Those are the kind of difficulties that might well encourage Paraguay’s rightwing military and the Coloradoans to consider a coup, particularly if they think that Washington will eventually take a position similar to the one it took on Honduras.  

Of course not all coups are successful these days. An outpour of popular support for Hugo Chavez reversed the 2001 Venezuela coup, and Correa’s 67 percent positive rating—he has doubled healthcare spending, increased social services, and stiffed a phony $3.2 billion foreign debt—certainly played a role in spiking the Ecuador coup.

But U.S. organizations like NED and AIFLD, active throughout the hemisphere, were closely associated with the Venezuelan coup makers.

The Obama Administration promised a new deal in Latin America and a break from the policies of the Bush Administration. Instead it has beefed up its military presence in Colombia, sharpened its attacks on Venezuela, refused to back away from its blockade of Cuba, and played footsie with the Honduran government.

If countries in the region are paranoid, maybe they have reasons for it. 

More of Conn Hallinan’s work can be found at Dispatches from the Edge.