Will Honduras Win The Fight Against Corruption?
Soldiers unload election material for distribution to polling stations ahead of the presidential ... [+] elections in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017. Juan Orlando Hernandez, the leader who brought Honduras back from the brink of being a failed state and oversaw the world's biggest sovereign bond rally, is seeking to become its first president to get re-elected in more than three decades. Photographer: Francesca Volpi/Bloomberg  2017 Bloomberg Finance LP  Over five years have passed since Honduran environmental activist Berta C  ceres was killed on March 3, 2016. Over the last half decade investigations and trials have shone some light on the overlapping ties between Honduras insular group of political and business elites and organized crime groups. In 2021, the U.S. State Department accused former Honduran President Jose Lobo Sosa of accepting bribes from drug trafficking organizations. In March 2021, a judge in New York sentenced the brother of current Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez to life in prison for drug trafficking charges. Prosecutors in the U.S. suspect that President Hernandezs ascent in politics was funded with illicit cash flows. In 2020, Transparency International ranked Honduras among the worlds most corrupt countries, 157 out of 180, slightly ahead of Iraq, Afghanistan and Venezuela, but far worse than Colombia, Panama, and Mexico. Honduras recorded 3,496 murders in 2020. In terms of murder rate, its the second most violent country in Central or South America, trailing only Venezuela. Corruption, poor governance, and violence continue to drive Hondurans to migrate. Over 250,000 Hondurans were detained at the U.S. border in 2019. The topic of political corruption will hang over Honduras upcoming presidential election, which is scheduled for November 28, 2021. Nina Lakhani: I met Berta Cceres in November 2013, on the eve of what were meant to be the first free and fair elections since the June 2009 coup detat - when the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was removed from the country six months before the end of his term, in a plan hatched by the countrys political, economic, religious, and military elites. She was warning international observers about the dire human rights situation in Honduras, and how social leaders were being targeted by the post-coup regime who had sanctioned a wave of environmentally destructive mega-projects like dams, mines, cash monocrops and tourism resorts without consulting communities. At the time she was effectively on the lam to avoid an arrest warrant linked to bogus charges brought by the dam company, Desarrollos Energticos, also referred to as Desa, and enacted by the justice system which we now know from the phone evidence uncovered by the murder investigation was in collusion with company officials. I interviewed her a couple of days later at her family home in La Esperanza, when she spoke passionately about the emblematic nature of the fight against the internationally financed Agua Zarca dam, the threats and intimidation she and colleagues were suffering, and a military hit-list with the names of 16 community leaders including herself. I remember that she told me, no matter what measures I take, when they want to kill me, theyll kill me. And thats what happened two and half years later. Lakhani: Honduras is a criminal state. There is now insurmountable evidence in my view that the National Party, which has ruled the country since the coup, is a criminal syndicate masquerading as a political party. The leaders and their cronies are alleged to have made huge amounts of money from drugs and arms trafficking and systemic corruption while reforming the justice system to guarantee impunity from prosecution. According to the respected nonpartisan group Honduran Social Forum on External Debt, corruption cost Honduras about $10.3 billion between 2014 and 2018, the equivalent of 10% to 12.5% of the countrys Gross Domestic Product. The layers of power are dynamic. But the oligarchs or elites as they are called in Honduras - the clans who dominate every part of the economy including finance, manufacturing, agricultural, energy, extractive industries, media, retail, fast food franchises, coffee, and tourism are the ones at the top of the political hierarchy. Its these economic elites - along with criminal bosses, according to court proceedings in the US - who fund election campaigns, dictate who and which policies get good/bad publicity, benefit from the countrys regressive tax policies, and from above-market-rate contracts with the state energy company signed in secret. Its the same elites who benefit from international financing, private and public, for so-called development projects like dams, mines, cash crops like African palms, and tourism resorts, and can call on their political allies to deploy security forces and the criminal justice system to crush opposition and dissent. Honduras is the deadliest country in the world for environmental and land rights defenders, according to Global Witness. In 2019, a UN Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, concluded: Too often companies and investors benefit from corruption and neglect their responsibility to respect human rights. When people flee north in search of economic security and safety, the elites benefit from that too: remittances hit $5.74 billion in 2020 with more than 90% sent from the US, accounting for more than 20% of GDP. Parish Flannery: Honduras seems to be in the news a lot right now after U.S. prosecutors accused the brother of Honduran President Hernandez of masterminding a state-sponsored drug trafficking conspiracy and the Biden administration struggles to find the best way to address the root causes of migration from Central America. Lakhani: There are no short term fixes for Central America. The toxic mix of extreme poverty, organized crime, gangs, state sponsored violence, corruption and impunity which has forced millions to migrate in search of safety and economic security is rooted in decades - if not centuries of colonialism, structural racism, unequal land and wealth distribution, machismo, and American interference. Biden can not fix these problems in one term, but he could and should at least implement a policy of harm minimization and stop repeating ineffective policies. For example, the administration has pushed Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico to send more troops to their borders in order to physically stop migrants and refugees from reaching the US - even though the armed forces in all three countries are implicated in widespread human rights abuses and criminal activities. This didnt work in 2014 when Biden was vice-president and wont work now. What will almost certainly happen is desperate people will again be forced to take more isolated, dangerous and expensive migration routes by land and sea, and well see an increase in kidnap, forced disappearance and torture. In Honduras, the Biden administration has indicated that it will continue working with President Hernandez despite widespread concerns about the legitimacy of his 2017 election win and despite the fact he has been identified as a co-conspirator of an international drug trafficking network by New York prosecutors in at least three high profile criminal trials. Thats whats proposed in new legislation - the Honduras Human Rights and Anti-Corruption Act - introduced this year in both the Senate and House, which would be an excellent starting point for Biden if hes serious about tackling the root causes of migration.