Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  When Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in October 1998, 11,000 people were killed and two million were made homeless.[43] Mitch was used as an excuse to change national law, including the Mining Law, in order to improve conditions for foreign direct investment. Though following Mitch the country was allowed to suspend payments on US$4.4 billion in debt (amounting to 46 percent of its annual budget), “this restructuring of Honduras’s debt and the extension of additional loans required the [Carlos Flores Facussé] administration to pursue structural adjustment policies while pledging to reduce poverty.”[44]

  The Honduran Elite and the 2009 Coup

  Deepening economic inequality and social unrest was the backdrop when Manuel “Mel” Zelaya Rosales, a member of the Liberal Party, was elected president in November 2005. He was removed from the presidency on June 28, 2009, via a coup d’état. Throughout most of his presidency, he could have been considered a political moderate, though he did make concessions, including putting a moratorium on controversial new mining deals, proposing a plebiscite on constitutional reform, raising the minimum wage and teachers’ pay, and cutting elementary school tuition. Zelaya is from an elite family, and worked in the logging and agricultural industries and later in government before being elected president. In fact, coup backer Adolfo Facussé told AP after the coup that “Mel Zelaya is one of us and—well—it just got out of his control. But the people think that he is an instrument of [Venezuela’s Hugo] Chávez and that the fight is with Chávez.”[45]

  Zelaya’s presidency came at a time of increased protest and resistance among Honduran social movements, who were unhappy with the policies that impoverished so many people. According to The Economist’s assessment of Zelaya’s first year in office, “Simmering social tensions have resulted in around 200 protests since the government took office, and there is a risk of more of these in the future.”[46] Eventually, Zelaya began ceding more and more ground to popular movements. Dario Euraque, a Honduran historian and author, explained to me that “for the first time in Honduran twentieth-century history and actually nineteenth-century history, you have a president, with all his failures and problems and issues that most of the opposition points to, but the fact is that this president, who himself comes from the elites of Honduras, put out not only a discourse but even many policies that fundamentally questioned the political system of Honduras.”

  Zelaya’s steps toward a constitutional assembly garnered massive opposition from elite factions in Honduras. The significance of the possibility of a Constituyente (constituent assembly, as it is known in Honduras) was not lost on members of the country’s poor majority, many of whom saw changing the constitution as beginning the kind of systemic change necessary to make Honduras more equitable. Zelaya was removed from his home and flown to Costa Rica by the army early in the morning of June 28, the day that a preliminary vote on constitutional reform was planned. Euraque relates that Zelaya drove the already precarious situation of the bipartisan political system toward a crisis by opening up the possibility of a constitutional assembly.

  The Honduran National Business Council (COHEP) sent out a press release the day after the coup, stating, “What occurred today [sic] was not the changing of one president for another; today, framed in national unity, respect for the Constitution, national laws and institutionalism was achieved.”[47] Honduras’s National Industrial Association (ANDI) also sent out a press release in support of the coup, claiming the event marked a return to constitutionality. “President Zelaya provoked with this attitude a rupture in the rule of law, as a consequence, it is the same ex president Zelaya who has provoked a coup d’état by disregarding and disobeying the ruling of the judiciary while invested with presidential powers.”[48] The Honduran Association of Manufacturers (AHM) provided a huge Honduran flag and white T-shirts for people who took to the streets in unprecedented pro-coup marches in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa. In an interview not long after the coup, Euraque explained, “Never in the history of Honduras has there ever been a mobilization along the lines of this white T-shirt [march].… Part of the way to try to see how new that was, was that they didn’t have a culture of resistance, of mobilization, so a lot of their music and placards and the paraphernalia … was not even local. A lot of it was borrowed from Venezuela, Cuban Americans, lots of it was in English, peppered with English phrases, and so forth, and very manufactured, placards and so forth.”

  The 2009 coup is different from previous coups in Honduran history, which were generally either carried out under pressure from the United States, or carried out by the army for its own sake. This time an important section of the Honduran elite, specifically the transnational elite as represented by people like Camilo Atala and Jorge Canahuati and the Facussé family, as well as organizations like ANDI, AHM, and COHEP, encouraged the army (some might say manipulated the army) in removing Zelaya from his private residence. Even though it was clear to observers from all points on the political spectrum that the Honduran armed forces violated the constitution when they removed Zelaya to Costa Rica, Honduran business elites and the Honduran army, along with some members of the judiciary, Congress, and the Catholic Church insisted that the coup did not represent an interruption in the country’s democracy. This again contrasts with previous coups in Honduras, which were blatant military operations whose leaders did not attempt to mobilize the civilian population so as to appear to be fulfilling a democratic mandate.

  I traveled around Tegucigalpa six months after the coup, and graffiti against “turcos”—a Honduran slang term for the Arab businessmen that are among the most influential in the country—was impossible to ignore. There was also anti-Semitic graffiti, aimed at the handful of Jewish families among Honduras’s elite. COHEP itself has claimed that graffiti and public statements against “turcos” could be taken as direct assaults on the Honduran business community. “Traditionally, the term ‘turco’ has been erroneously associated with people of Palestinian descent and to the service activities and more specifically to the large capital generated by them.”[49] Euraque explained that negative sentiment against this group had never been publicly demonstrated in the past, and that it stemmed from the role of these elites, consisting of some of the families mentioned earlier, including the Facussés, the Ferraris, the Canahuatis, and the Atalas. According to Euraque, “What the elites basically decided to do, and especially that sector of the Arab [elite] which is, you know, the most important sector as I mentioned.… They basically said there is no way out here other than to cajole the military into thinking that what’s at stake is not just the defense of us, it’s the defense of the nation against Hugo Chávez.”

  Since the 2009 military coup removed President Manuel Zelaya from power, the number of people in poverty has increased significantly in the small Central American nation. On another trip to Honduras in 2013, I waited for the country’s former finance minister, Hugo Noé Pino, in the air-conditioned lobby of one of the country’s fancier hotels. He arrived looking fresh, though I knew he’d been pulling long days and long nights, since we met a couple days after the elections, and he was deeply involved with the process. In the course of a long and detailed interview about the state of Honduras’ economy, I asked Noé how he characterized the country’s elite. “It is an elite that has diversified its investments, and whose principal characteristic is the use of the state as a mechanism either of direct accumulation or of the facilitation of accumulation. It is an elite that does not pay taxes, or that pays them at the lowest rates, and that represents such a large profit for them that it isn’t surprising to look at the Gini coefficient and learn that 10 percent of highest earners in Honduras control 42 percent of national income, and the lowest 10 percent of earners only receives 0.17 percent of income nationally.” The Center for Economic and Policy Research released a report in late 2013 showing that Honduras is now the most unequal country in Latin America. Honduras’s tiny elite runs the country’s maquilas, owns the media, and controls the telecommunications, banking,
and energy sectors.

  For months after the coup, activists would gather every day in Tegucigalpa to march against the change of government, and against the faction of the elite perceived as being responsible for it. State repression against anti-coup activists was intense, including ongoing detentions, disappearances, the use of torture, and the beatings and murder of social activists and everyday Hondurans mobilizing against the coup. Between June and December 2009, the Committee for Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) documented 708 human rights violations, including the murder of fifty-four activists. On November 29, 2009, the de facto government presided over the country’s regularly scheduled presidential elections, which led to the election of National Party head Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Almendarez, the doctor who was also once a presidential candidate, called the 2009 elections a second coup. “We are faced with a situation that’s very delicate, where there was a military coup, where a president is named, and then there is a second coup, which was the election, the fraudulent election,” he said. The resistance movement against the coup actively promoted an elections boycott. “There is no doubt that there was fraud, because they were illegitimate elections,” he told me. The Organization of American States didn’t send monitors, and many countries in the region took years to recognize the government of President Lobo. Canada and the United States, however, quickly heralded the elections as a return to democracy.

  The deepening of the neoliberal program and the intensified re-militarization of the country were the hallmarks of Porfirio Lobo’s administration. For example, in 2011, the government passed the Law for the Promotion and Protection of Investment, which provides legal certainties and guarantees for large investors that they will not face tax increases or lawsuits. The law was passed with an English name, under the slogan “Honduras is Open for Business,” and is expected to benefit over 350 foreign investors. Under the law, foreign companies can open a subsidiary in four days, and mega-projects valued at $50 million or more will be able to access a sped-up permitting process, allowing them to gain all of their state and local permits within thirty days.[50] Lobo’s government also passed laws decimating labor rights and allowing foreign companies to purchase nationally owned land and resources.

  Throughout the Lobo administration, legislative and executive initiatives increasingly blurred the lines between the Secretariat of Security, which oversees police, and the Ministry of Defense. First, the use of soldiers in policing, a practice begun during Zelaya’s term, became the norm. Later, the use of soldiers in policing was officially approved. “[Lobo] has deployed the military to carry out joint operations with the police on several occasions, and in late November 2011, the Honduran National Congress approved a decree to temporarily allow military personnel to carry out raids, make arrests, disarm people, and act against police officers that are involved in criminal activities.”[51] Lobo appointed Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, known as “El Tigre,” as head of Honduras’s police in May 2010. Bonilla, who was accused of having participated in death squads, became the “US government’s go-to man in Honduras for the war on drug trafficking.”[52] This is the CARSI-funded war, which flared up again in 2010, as efforts to disrupt drug traffickers became a priority in a country where state institutions and legitimacy are already extremely weak. As elsewhere, the drug war provided a powerful pretext to increase the number of soldiers in the streets. In October 2013, the first contingent of militarized cops, named the Military Police for Public Order, hit the streets. “The new military police are better armed than the civilian police they will replace in this mission. For example, they will be armed with Israeli Galil ACE 21 assault rifles carrying 35-round magazines, capable of firing 700 rounds per minute.”[53] Honduran police and soldiers have been trained by Colombian and Chilean armed forces as security cooperation has increased between South America and Central America.

  Political Resistance via LIBRE

  In the four and a half years following the coup, through the presidency of Porfirio Lobo, Hondurans saw the birth of a new political party: LIBRE, which stands for Libertad y Refundación (Freedom and Refoundation), was born in 2011 through an agreement between broad segments of the resistance movement and Liberal party members who opposed the coup. Deposed president Zelaya, who had just returned from exile, became head of the party and his wife, Xiomara Castro, was selected as their candidate for president. LIBRE is a democratic socialist party, which promised voters a break with the past and a focus on education and health. In addition, the social-movement forces within the party proposed a “refoundational project,” which would include the writing of a new constitution.

  Five years after the coup, election day in Tegucigalpa kicked off with the feel of a carnival, a rare sensation in a city where the vast majority of residents are faced with grinding poverty, regular gang extortions, and a murder rate that is among the world’s highest. In front of each voting station, tents from the various political parties provided shade, blaring music at each other from huge speakers as groups of youth and volunteers hung around. Police, army, and masked military police oversaw the crowds, cars honked, and people waved Honduran and political party flags as their vehicles crawled through the fray. But for Marta de Jesús Raudales Varela, who lives in a small house on a steep unpaved street, it was a heart-wrenching day. In January, her son Ángel Francisco Durón Raudales, an activist with the LIBRE Party, was murdered along with five others around the corner from the family home in the Las Ayestas neighborhood.

  I interviewed Raudales on a stoop under the shade of a tree in front of her house. The three local activists that took us to meet her insisted on staying nearby, saying that my photographer and I could be in danger were we to be left alone in the area. “[The killers] told them to lie face down, so they lay face down, and they emptied their pockets so that they could pretend it was a robbery. [The killers] had their faces covered, but everyone could see what happened,” said Raudales. The killers shot all six in their backs and heads as they lay with their faces to the sidewalk. Two days after the massacre, street gangs posted signs and handed out pamphlets warning residents they were imposing a 7 p.m. curfew. Almost a year after the massacre, no one dares to mention gang involvement in the killings for fear of reprisals. A tough-as-nails grandmother, Raudales Varela was robbed at gunpoint four times in a single year while she walked home from selling lottery tickets a few blocks from her house. She cried quietly during our interview, wiping her eyes with her apron. Durón Raudales was a construction worker who organized a local base committee and made flags in support of the LIBRE Party. His mother thinks he may have been targeted because of his political activity. “I’m going to go vote this evening, but I really don’t feel like going,” she said. “I feel bad today.” The murder of Durón Raudales was one of at least thirty-eight killings of people actively involved in electoral campaigns leading up to November’s election. Among the parties, the hardest hit by the violence has been LIBRE. The intense political violence reflects an overall trend in Honduras, where according to the United Nations Development Program, the murder rate climbed from 37 per 100,000 in 2004 to 77.5 in 2010—the highest in Latin America by over ten points. By 2013, it was the highest in the world.

  Official results posted by electoral authorities gave LIBRE 29 percent of the vote, and with it, almost a third of the seats in Congress. The National Party claimed 37 percent, the Liberals claimed 20 percent and almost 14 percent went to the new Anti-Corruption Party. “This has no precedent,” said Noé, referring to the break with bipartisan rule. The afternoon after election day, several hundred red-flag-waving protesters marched through the streets of Tegucigalpa in support of Xiomara Castro, the woman they claimed was the rightful president of the country. The next day, hundreds of students took to the streets against election fraud, staving off police and teargas. And the following morning, even more students poured into the streets, adding their voices to the crescendo of outrage that has roiled the country amid allegations of vote buying b
y the winning party, election fraud, and ongoing murders of opposition supporters. Honduras’s November 24, 2013 election was supposed to have been a signal moment, the first time since the US–backed military coup that citizens had a meaningful opportunity to express their political will.

  All signs point to a deepening of the war on drugs in order for the state to maintain control over the people and their movements. During his inauguration speech in January 2014, Honduras’s new president, Juan Orlando Hernández, said that approximately 70 percent of homicides in the country are linked to drug trafficking. The reality, however, is otherwise. According to a recent report put out by human rights organizations, only 1 percent of crimes in Honduras are followed up by a police investigation.[54] What Juan Orlando doesn’t want to admit is that an important number of killings in Honduras are politically or ideologically motivated attacks on peasants, poor people, political activists, journalists, and queer and trans people. Outside an opulent conference room in the Hotel Maya, the most prestigious accommodation in Tegucigalpa, I spoke with Rossana Guevara, one of Honduras’s three new vice presidents, on the day she was elected. Her argument in favor of the presence of US troops in Honduras was blunt in a way that would be considered unacceptable in sovereign countries in most of the world. “They have to fight it; why should we be victims when we aren’t even considered a large market for drugs; the main market is North America, so I think they are the ones with a historical responsibility to help fight drug trafficking, and really help, not just with little things,” she said. The Pentagon is heeding the call, with new US military bases under construction in various locations in the country.