Militarization and the Failed State: Honduras: the Failings of Neoliberalism

[Judi Lynn]

January 21, 2015

Militarization and the Failed State

Honduras: the Failings of Neoliberalism

by GREG McCAIN


Robando is Spanish for stealing. “Juan Robando” is the not-at-all-affectionate moniker given to the President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH). January 27th marks the end of the first year of his presidency. His theft of the elections of November 2013 ensured the continuance of Honduras’ neoliberal trajectory. A trajectory previously boosted by the Agricultural Modernization Law of 1992. This law jettisoned any agrarian reforms attempted beforehand. Neoliberalism took a further leap in 2009. That’s when the ruling elite instigated the coup d’état which ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Thirteen oligarchic families led the coup with the assistance of the US State Department, at the time headed by Hilary Clinton. The Honduran Military kidnapped Zelaya using the private plane of Miguel Facussé Barjum, President of the Dinant Corporation and the richest man in Honduras. They refueled at the US’s Palmerola Military Base before whisking the deposed President to Panama.

Even though Zelaya’s administration ratified and supported CAFTA-DR in 2006 (“free” trade agreements being the neo-liberals’ favorite bludgeoning tool for maintaining the wealth of the ruling elite) he was seen as an impediment to the neoliberal agenda. This was due in part to his making several pragmatic economic decisions. For example, he raised the minimum wage and entered into agreements with peasant farmers to help them obtain land titles (which enraged Facussé). Mostly, though, it was because he was friendly to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and worked for Honduras’ entry into ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America).

The sham election of 2013 was simply an extension of the coup. Overwhelming evidence showed that JOH and his National Party (NP) stole the elections. His party engaged in various means of vote tampering, outright threats, and murders of opposition candidates and supporters. Nevertheless, his presidency was legitimized.

JOH’s campaign promised a “mano duro,” or iron fist approach, to ending the crime that ranks Honduras as the murder capital of the world. His plan to put Military Police (MP) on every street corner across the country has thus far been implemented in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula and incrementally elsewhere. But, homicides continue unabated along with the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. Despite JOH’s and the US State Dept.’s attempts to fudge the numbers, the World Health Organization reports that homicides have increased in the past year to 103.9/100,000 people. In addition, the MP have been involved in numerous cases of intimidation, brutality, kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/21/honduras-the-failings-of-neoliberalism/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Honduras' right-wing intends to allow their right-wing Pres. to run again, forget about Zelaya!

More info. from the article on how the P.O.S. is doing:

~ snip ~

The sham election of 2013 was simply an extension of the coup. Overwhelming evidence showed that JOH and his National Party (NP) stole the elections. His party engaged in various means of vote tampering, outright threats, and murders of opposition candidates and supporters. Nevertheless, his presidency was legitimized.

~ snip ~

Since the beginning of his presidency there has been increasing talk of amending the constitution so that JOH can be reelected. This was the very issue that the coup instigators used to justify their kidnapping of Zelaya, accusing him of conspiring to install himself as “President for life.” The difference being that JOH wants his NP controlled Congress to amend the Constitution without public input. Zelaya wanted a National Referendum so that the voice of the people could be heard on this and other constitutional matters. It is actually unconstitutional for the Congress to even discuss a change to the reelection law. The JOH controlled judiciary branch is maneuvering to get that changed. Advisors inside JOH’s administration are saying that reelection of the President is already a done deal. Justice in Honduras is not blind since it is able to look the other way when palms are being greased.

The Honduran justice system is maintained with funding from USAID as an inefficient, opaque, and dysfunctional system to protect the ruling elite from being prosecuted. It is also kept as is to criminalize those who seek justice such as the peasant farmers who struggle for legal access to land. 4000 campesinos have judicial proceedings against them, an increase of almost 1000 just in 2014. They must sign in at a courthouse every 15 days or risk arrest and this could go on indefinitely. Judges at the municipal level and in the Supreme Court, as well as Public Defenders and Prosecutors in the Public Ministry are at the service of the ruling elite either through influence peddling or threats made against their lives. Miguel Facussé Barjum has succeeded in using the justice system to his own benefit, both in his literally getting away with murder and in his swindles of national and international banks as well as other corporations.

Facussé has avoided prosecution for the numerous assassinations against environmentalists and campesino human rights advocates that he has ordered stemming as far back as the 1980s when he helped finance the death squads responsible for the disappearances of students and human rights activists. These political hits continued into this decade with the murder of Antonio Trejo the lawyer for the MARCA campesino movement who was assassinated in November of 2012. Trejo succeeded in challenging land grabs by Facussé and others. After Trejo’s murder, Facussé used his influence peddling to get a judgment in favor of the campesinos overturned in the Supreme Court.

~ snip ~

As JOH’s first year in office comes to an end, he may very well have succeeded in laying down the foundation for a dictatorship. Facussé and the other ruling elite as well as the US State Department will continue to pull his strings. And the US and Honduran militaries are poised to crush any popular resistance to the ruling elites continued plundering. Daniel Facussé, President of the Honduras Maquiladora Association, and a family member of Miguel’s, tellingly stated when appealing to the Congress, “It is in your hands to raise the Military Police to constitutional status so that no person, no one from the Executive class, has to withdraw from the streets, and that in the end, if we can bring investments we will bring jobs.”

Finally, hating the poor in Honduras is such a deeply inbred preoccupation, they even have their own filthy name they have assigned these people who weren't born to wealthy parents. This one would make a maggot gag. From the article:

Further, Alfaro, while he was commander of Xatruch, appeared on local TV broadcasts in Tocoa on at least a weekly basis speaking incessantly about “terrorists and leftists trained in Nicaragua and by Colombian FARC rebels destabilizing the region.” He smeared the campesino movements as “outsiders coming here to destroy the country.” Several TV and print journalists in Tocoa and Trujillo have stated, insisting on anonymity, that Alfaro has approached them and offered bribes to report negative stories about the campesino movements. Some of them even boast about accepting the money. “Of course I took the money!” One TV reporter stated. “Look, Dinant owns the Aguán Vally, Facussé owns Honduras. Los tacamiches son jodidos,” The tacamiches are fucked! Tacamiches is a derogatory term equivalent to the “n” word in English, used in Honduras by the middle and upper classes, the police, and the military to denigrate and dehumanize the lower classes. This exemplifies how the culture of corruption sown by Facussé, Dinant, and JOH takes root and propagates through out Honduran society.

[Mika]

2. Hil-a-ry. Hil-a-ry. Hil-a-ry

She'll fix this.