Political Doubt Poses Risk to Honduras, Battered by Coup and Violence
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — When police officers arrived last week after the murder of Felipe Nery Aguilar and his daughter Gladys, they seized on what appeared to be a clue: a childish scribble on a broken television set. A message from local gangs, the officers figured, demanding protection money, known here as a “war tax.” Case closed.
But for the victims’ family, the explanation made no sense. A second daughter, Rosa Alba Aguilar, 35, agonized over why anybody would kill a 73-year-old fruit seller.
“It was just pure evil,” Ms. Aguilar said. Nobody was extorting her father. It was one of his grandchildren who had scrawled over the television screen.
“The police come here asking stupidities,” she said. “What are the laws for?”
That question is at the center of elections on Sunday, when Hondurans will choose a new president four years after a coup expelled a previous one. The rule of law, which was never sturdy to start with, has all but evaporated since then.
The coup upended the political landscape here, and the outcome of the vote in one of Latin America’s poorest and most unequal countries is unpredictable. Honduras’s fraying social fabric may not withstand a new bout of political uncertainty.
Drug traffickers and street gangs act unimpeded as the National Police look the other way, or even run their own criminal rackets. Dozens of human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, and peasant and labor leaders have been killed. The country is believed to have the highest peacetime murder rate in the world.
The combustible mix of drugs, gangs, arms and impunity has created a “very violent element” that will “kill anybody for any reason,” said Leticia Salomón, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. “They don’t care anymore.”
Washington is watching closely, because greater instability could add to the flow of migrants trying to reach the United States and open space to drug traffickers, who have turned Honduras into a way station for South American cocaine flights.
In a Nov. 13 letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and a dozen other senators wrote that the “difficult and dangerous climate” in Honduras raises “serious concerns over the Honduran government’s ability to conduct free and fair elections.”
Against this backdrop, the question is whether politicians will respect the results after what most expect will be a very close race for president and a fractured vote for Congress.
The ousted former president, Manuel Zelaya, known to everyone as Mel, is back. He leads a new left-wing party, Libre, that could seize the presidency from the two parties that have swapped political power and its spoils for decades. His wife, Xiomara Castro, is the party’s candidate, because the Constitution prevents him from running again.
“Trust me,” Ms. Castro said at a noisy closing rally in the market town of Siguatepeque last week. “You trusted Mel, and he never let you down.”
After Mr. Zelaya won the presidency in 2005 as a candidate of the Liberal Party, he broke with the political establishment and tacked left toward Venezuela, embracing its interventionist economic policies.
Now the former presidential couple is running on a promise to rewrite the Constitution to give a greater share of the country’s wealth and power to its dispossessed citizens. “We will break the chains that tie us,” Ms. Castro declared in Siguatepeque.
“Xiomara owes the people,” said Alex Isidro Turcios, 46, who owns a small hardware store. “The other candidates all have debts to the oligarchy, the power groups, the elite bourgeoisie, not to the people.”
Opponents describe the couple as a stalking horse for Latin America’s left. “Somebody who is desperate and who does not have support at home has to appeal to foreigners,” said Mauricio Villeda, the presidential candidate for the Liberal Party.
But even some in the conservative establishment acknowledge that it is time for change. “I see what’s happening here as a flowering of democracy,” said Adolfo Facussé, the head of one of the country’s main business associations and an outspoken supporter of the coup.
There have been no polls for a month, but the front-runners are Ms. Castro and Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of the Congress.
Mr. Hernández, the candidate of the governing National Party, has focused on law and order. At the center of his campaign is the military police, a new force approved by Congress to patrol the streets and fight crime.
But many analysts worry about the growing role of the military in a country that endured years of military dictatorship. The coup “showed that the armed forces were capable of ‘maintaining order,’ ” said Leo Valladares Lanza, a former human rights commissioner and law professor. “Now they have much more control over the political process.”
There are eight presidential candidates, but political analysts believe that only Mr. Villeda, who has a rare reputation for probity and is the son of a popular president, and Salvador Nasralla, a television host campaigning on an anticorruption platform, have enough support to pull off an upset.
Mr. Hernández is widely seen as having accumulated enormous power in Congress, crushing all opposition. When the Supreme Court threw out several new laws he had pushed through, Congress simply replaced four justices late last year.
In his last campaign appearance on Monday, Mr. Hernández led a couple of hundred supporters in a candlelight vigil for a peaceful vote. It was a none-too-subtle reminder that the rival Libre emerged from the protests against the coup.
“If there is political unrest after the election, what will be the role of the military police?” asked Carlos Hernández, the president of the Association for a More Just Society, which works on justice, labor and security issues. (He is not related to the candidate.)
Violence has marred the campaign. A study by the national university released Thursday found that 17 members of Libre — among them candidates, activists and relatives — had been killed since May 2012 and that the party had faced threats and armed attacks. Sixteen people from the two traditional parties have also been killed.
“Almost all the violence has gone unpunished,” said the report’s author, Blas Enrique Barahona.
Politics may be behind the killing of Mr. Aguilar, the fruit seller, who was a Libre activist in his neighborhood of Santa Cecilia. His daughter Gladys was a Liberal supporter.
Campaign financing is opaque, leading many to assume that candidates have taken money from traffickers. “There is drug money in the majority of the big parties,” said Osman Aguilar, a Liberal Party congressman who is a security specialist.
American collaboration with Honduras on fighting drug trafficking has been uneven under the government of President Porfirio Lobo, who cannot seek re-election.
Washington has suspended some security programs over human rights violations, and it has not supported the new military police. “In democracies, police are used to enforce the law and the military is used to protect the borders,” Ambassador Lisa J. Kubiske told a Honduran television station in August.
The United States government also ended financing for a unit set up to purge the Honduran National Police, because it got no results.
“Removing the dirty police officers should not be difficult; everybody knows who they are,” said Mr. Hernández the security expert. “But they are associated with politicians — they know things about politics.”
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