Mison Verdad
Juan Orlando Hernández came to power in Honduras after accusations of fraud and violence against citizens (Photo: Republic)
“He’s our son of a bitch”: Juan Orlando Hernandez is the paradigm of U.S. government for the region
The profile of this U.S.-allied president will reveal that only such condition makes a politician a “statesman,” “democrat,” and “champion of human rights. Even if the facts say otherwise.
A Corrupt Rise to Power
Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) was a congressman who overthrew Manuel Zelaya in 2009 for attempting to hold consultations with citizens on Sunday, June 28, on whether to place a fourth ballot box in the general elections to be held in November 2013. The reason for the consultation was to find out whether the population was in favour of amending the Constitution of the Republic.
Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a military coup that would later be institutionalized by the Honduran Congress (Photo: Reuters)
Later in 2012, as President of the same Congress of the Republic, he instigated the dismissal of four Supreme Court magistrates and replaced them with magistrates from his political party. Those same magistrates endorsed the result of the general elections the following year in which JOH himself became President, with absolute control of the Legislative, Judicial and electoral body.
It is said that there were fraudulent actions that would invalidate those results, including events such as vote buying (up to 25 dollars), sale of polling station credentials, violence and intimidation of voters, media complicity (on the day of the state and private media elections they concealed murders of activists and the detention of election officials) and foreign support (the United States, the European Union and the Organization of American States described the elections as transparent when the process had not yet concluded).
In addition, 18 candidates and activists of the Freedom and Refoundation (Libre) Party, to which Zelaya belongs, were assassinated during the campaign.
JOH’s electoral fraud was accompanied by strong police and military repression that claimed the lives of more than 300 Hondurans (Photo: Reuters)
Contrary to the provisions of the same Political Constitution that JOH “protected” during the 2009 coup, the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice in 2016 declared its aspirations for presidential reelection “legal,” even when the opposition and social movements demanded popular consultation to settle the case.
To Usurp without Cessation and Remove All Obstacles
On November 26, 2017, the first results gave the victory to Salvador Nasralla, candidate of the Opposition Alliance against the Dictatorship, a front formed by the Anti-Corruption Party (PAC, which he founded), the Innovation and Unity Party and the Free Party.
Three days before the elections, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) withheld the final results. On its website the numbers were changing rapidly and the last data already favoured JOH, and alternative media affirmed that the mechanism according to which the fraud would be carried out consisted of counting the official candidate’s minutes while those of Nasralla were left in “monitoring”.
Although Nasralla’s considerable advantage was evident at first, the electronic voting system was later taken off the air. When the system was reactivated, JOH was winning, then was narrowly proclaimed the winner with international observers reporting “strong indications of electoral fraud,” a partial recount gave him victory and what followed were mass protests and militarized streets.
On December 17, the TSE officially proclaimed JOH as president-elect, and the OAS delegation of election observers recommended that the results be discarded and that new elections be held. On December 20, a senior State Department official said that unless additional evidence of fraud is presented, the U.S. government “has seen nothing that would alter the final result”.
As of December 22 of that year, human rights organizations in the country counted more than 30 people killed by security forces, at least four of whom were under the age of 18.
During the years of the JOH government, there have been reports of disappearances, military brutality, torture, assault on workers defending their rights, and allegations of corruption.
Since the 2009 coup, victims of the disappearance include dozens of LGBT defenders, more than 100 land rights activists such as Berta Cáceres, more than 30 journalists, labour activists and at least 20 opposition candidates and organizers.
On March 2, 2016, Honduran social activist Berta Cáceres was murdered (Photo: Mundabat).
The format of its government is no different from the Cold War era of the 1970s and 1980s, when Washington-backed dictators dominated South America and the Caribbean. This is evidenced both by the murders of peasants opposed to turning their properties into palm plantations to create “green” energy and various mining projects, and by the closure of indigenous Garifuna radio stations that have been used to mobilize environmental opposition to mines, dams and hydroelectric projects.
Controlling the Bad Men
The term “bad hombres” was used by Donald Trump, the magnate president of the United States, to link immigrants from Central America with the criminality of a country that, by 2019 alone had lived under the terror of more than one daily shoot-out, not one caused by Latinos.
What is certain is that under JOH’s government the flow of Hondurans fleeing poverty has increased. Although in the 1980s Honduras was one of the most important receiving countries for displaced people who fled armed conflicts and the economic, political and social conditions of its neighbouring countries.
From the 1990s onwards, massive emigration from Honduras increased, not as a result of armed conflicts, but as a result of economic crises and successive neoliberal structural adjustments established by the Washington Consensus.
Today, the country’s economic situation, unemployment, poverty, inequality, lack of opportunities and violence are among the driving forces behind the massive diaspora of the Honduran population. The National Statistics Institute of Honduras (INE) reported that in June 2016, 60.9% of Honduran households lived in poverty and 38.4% in extreme poverty.
U.S. neoliberal packages have buried Honduras in extreme poverty, making it one of the most unequal countries in Latin America (Photo: TN)
In 2012, the percentage of households in poverty was at an even higher level (71.1% according to INE, 2016). With a Gini Coefficient of 0.54 in 2013, zero being ideal, the level of inequality is high in Honduras (World Bank, 2017). Although in June 2016, the unemployment rate was at 7.4% nationally, young people in particular have difficulty accessing jobs, which is reflected in an unemployment rate of 16.2% for Hondurans between the ages of 19 and 24 (INE, 2016).
Under the JOH government, Honduras has the highest rate of intentional homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in the world (75 in 2014, 93 in 2012) (World Bank, 2016), as well as the highest rate of femicides per 100,000 women (13.3 in 2014) in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In recent years, large flows of Honduran migrants, mostly forced, have also been noted. In 2016, the last year of Obama’s administration, 21,994 Hondurans were deported from the U.S. and 50,964 from Mexico (more than twice as many as in 2010).
In addition to constituting violations of human rights, such operations contribute to worsening personal security, given that in order to avoid the authorities many decide to take increasingly dangerous routes and face high environmental and personal risks that result in homicides, injuries, kidnappings, extortion, forced disappearances, robberies and other crimes.
All of this triggered a crisis in October 2018 when a group of people under the Migrant Caravan, many of them Hondurans, left San Pedro Sula with the intention of reaching Mexico’s northern border. Its members, some 2,000 adult men and women, as well as teenagers and children, sought asylum in the United States.
U.S. government spokespersons blamed Venezuela without proof for being responsible for the so-called Migrant Caravan (Photo: Reuters)
Trump tweet that “the United States has informed the president of Honduras that if the large caravan of people going to the United States does not stop and return to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, with immediate effect!” Hours later, while other leaders adopted an attitude of rejection of these words, but without reference to the tweet, JOH asked the Hondurans who were part of the caravan to desist from their plans.
Keep the “bad men” close… very close.
In January 2015, Devis Rivera, leader of the Honduran Los Cachiros cartel, was among those captured and extradited for trial in the Southern District of New York. In his confession, he singled out Fabio Lobo, the son of Porfirio Lobo (JOH’s former party president), who was later arrested in Haiti and sentenced to 24 years in Manhattan. His criminal militia, that facilitated drug trafficking, were arrested in Honduras and also tried in the United States along with important bankers. It seemed that the “bad men” left Honduras for U.S. prisons.
JOH’s brother, Juan Antonio, alias “Tony,” was called to Washington to answer for his alleged relationship with a prominent trafficker while, in a different case, a Mexican trafficker ratted out JOH’s then security minister, Julian Pacheco, a former U.S. Army ally, a graduate of the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, to the DEA. The informant also said it was Lobo’s son who introduced him to Pacheco.
According to federal prosecutors, in 2014 Tony pledged to help Rivera, with whom he worked for more than a decade, persuade government agencies to pay the money owed to Rivera’s laundering companies. Rivera said he paid Tony $50,000 as a “thank you”.
After the rise to power of JOH, drug trafficking has increased its presence in the already punished Honduran society (Photo: Reuters)
Tony was finally arrested in Miami in 2018, two years after he was found to be a “person of interest” in a U.S. investigation. He and his colleagues are reported to be connected to the Maras Salvatrucha (“MS-13”) and Barrio 18, both based in Los Angeles.
Rivera admitted orchestrating 78 murders over the course of more than 10 years, among the dead were people he described as thugs, rapists and gang members, a lawyer, two journalists, a Honduran refugee in Canada, an official who became the Honduran drug czar and a politician who was his advisor; and even two children who were killed in a gunfight.
El Capo contacted the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and offered to help them frame corrupt politicians and other elites who turned Honduras into a massive cocaine corridor to the United States, the world’s first consumer, through Mexico.
The offer was made when Honduras, a loyal U.S. ally on whose territory a U.S. military base is located, was on the verge of internal chaos. The country was riddled with drug traffickers and Maras had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. According to the State Department, it was the first stop for approximately 80% of flights suspected of transporting drugs from South America.
According to one of the prosecutors at a hearing held on September 5, 2017, the evidence reveals a network of “state-sponsored drug trafficking”. Investigators had evidence that former President Lobo took bribes to protect the traffickers, and they suspect that JOH’s campaign may have been financed with narco-dollars.
Honduras has become a strategic step for cocaine from Colombia to the United States (Photo: Once Noticias)
It was also discovered that, in 2013, Rivera secretly recorded a conversation with another Honduran drug trafficker who claimed to have made a payment of $250,000 supposedly for JOH, although he does not indicate whether he received that money. His government attributed the accusation to drug traffickers who have been the object of its anti-drug campaign and the president stated that “it is logical, and even predictable, that the criminals who have been affected by our government’s actions have feelings of hatred and resentment against those who have made those decisions”.
As long as it’s ours, there’s no problem
Honduras has long been a carrier for the United States in Central America: the Northern Triangle nation served as a base to counter Soviet influence in Latin America during the 1980s. Other nations, however, are considered failed states for far less than what the Honduran bourgeoisie provokes with its voracious accumulation of land, resources, and income, allowing for intervention by powers in favour of these same elites to prevail.
JOH’s profile is the same one Washington hopes to achieve with Juan Guaidó, an operative financed and protected in his disaffections by a powerful network that imposes conditions whenever anything escapes from their grasp.
Kissinger’s phrase applies here: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
