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Summary
On March 14th, Hondurans went to the polls to vote in the 2021 primary elections. Host Karen Spring interviews Honduran sociologist and political analyst, Tomás Andino Mencía about the primaries and discusses what they mean in the context of the Honduran narco-state, migration, and the general electoral political reality in the country. If all continues as is, will Honduras see another political crisis this year?
For more information about elections in Honduras, see the National Electoral Council (CNE’s) website: www.cne.hn
For the show notes from today’s episode and links to articles further analyzing the elections, see: hondurasnow.org
For updates and more stories from Honduras, follow us on Instagram: @HondurasNow
Transcript
Tomás Andino Mencía:
In all the political parties, there was no control. The electoral census was not cleaned up. It was manipulated so that the people were not able to vote where they should have normally voted. Instead, they were sent to a voting site far away. People were able to vote several times. Because the census was not cleaned up, there were additional voting lists at each voting location, where people showed up and voted again, after having already voted in a different location. There was a total deformation of the electorate’s will. So the results that have come out of these primary elections are not trustworthy.
Karen Spring:
Today, I’m going to do an in-depth analysis of the Honduran primary elections held on March 14, 2021.
Welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. This podcast shares human rights stories from Honduras and connects them with global issues and North American policy. I’m your host, Karen Spring, a longtime human rights activist that has lived in Honduras for over a decade. Thanks so much for listening.
Like in the United States, the primaries lay the foundation for the general elections, which in Honduras will be held in November of this year. Now, I’m not really one to follow electoral politics very closely. But electoral politics in Honduras helps you to understand political power at all levels of Honduran society, as well as how organized criminal interests, like those of drug cartels, are mixed into electoral politics in the country. Understanding the outcome and inner workings of the elections also places the national context in broader international interests, such as what party may receive more support from the Biden administration, if successful.
To help provide some context, and to analyze the March 14 primaries, I interviewed Honduran political analyst and sociologist Tomás Andino Mencía. Tomás was a congressional representative from 2006 to 2010. And as a very active participant in the social movement group called the Convergence Against Re-election, which, as its name implies, works to avoid the continuation of power of the National Party regime. I sat down with Tomás 10 days after the primaries and asked him how to understand the elections in a dictatorship, like the one that currently exists in Honduras.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
These primary elections have to be examined in the national and historical context. They should instead be viewed as re-elections in the framework of an authoritarian regime that seeks to perpetuate itself in power. A regime that we classify as dictatorial because it has violated all the norms of Honduran democracy and imposed itself in 2017 through electoral fraud.
After violating basic constitutional norms, like overturning the law against re-election in 2015, and to do this carrying out a significant judicial coup that saw the substitution of Supreme Court magistrates in 2012, and, well, afterwards, imposing its power through military force through an electoral fraud. So the regime isn’t just any regime. We aren’t facing a normal democracy, like a common ordinary political system. We are talking about a country that had the first military coup in Latin America, at least in the year 2009. And this regime is a continuation of that coup through electoral coups that occurred in 2013 and 2017, successively.
Karen Spring:
And abnormal democracy tends to produce abnormal results. These primary elections saw the victory of Yani Rosenthal over Luís Zelaya in the race for the Liberal Party. Tomás tells us what this means.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
These elections have been manipulated from the beginning. They were manipulated in part by the central power that’s based on the cooperation of two traditional political forces in the country. These are the Liberal Party, specifically the sector of the Liberal party that is led by Carlos Flores Facussé, we call this florismo, and on the other hand, the National Party headed by the current President Juan Orlando Hernández.
Karen Spring:
A quick explanation about “Florismo“. “Florismo” is a reference to Carlos Flores Facussé, who is a powerful figure inside the Liberal Party. He was president of Honduras from 1998 to 2002, and is known to pull the strings and be a driving force behind the dominant sector of the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party is seriously divided. Mel Zelaya was part of the Liberal Party when he was overthrown in the 2009 coup d’etat. Since then the Liberal Party hasn’t really ever recovered. It’s divided, with some more central right figures like the presidential pre-candidate Luis Zelaya, and the other, Florismo sector, which Yani Rosenthal, another pre-candidate, is part of.
The victory of Rosenthal over Luis Zelaya is viewed as a victory for the dictatorship, as Zelaya was publicly trying to pull the Liberal Party away from its long-term loyal, traditional alliance with the National Party. Luis Zelaya has been particularly publicly critical of Juan Orlando Hernández and all the corruption plaguing government institutions.
With the seriousness of the 2017 electoral crisis that led to mass protests around the country, there were tons of discussions of electoral reform. The Organization of American States, or the OAS, not exactly the biggest defender of democracy in Latin America, like they promote, have concluded and recommended in their reports about the Honduran electoral system needing profound changes to the electoral law. The same applies with the European Union. The EU has insisted and even signed agreements with several Honduran actors, even prior to the 2017 elections, that deep electoral reforms are needed. The same goes with several Honduran non-governmental organizations and groups involved in the social movement. Hondurans want their votes counted, and an electoral system that actually promotes democracy and cracks down on all the fraudulent strategies that have been used in the past two elections. Nevertheless, despite calls for deep reforms, these reforms have not happened.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
So this coalition of these two groups, the Liberal Party and the National Party, have manipulated the electoral process using the same fraudulent rules and laws used in the electoral process in 2017. After the traumatic national experience in 2017, the electoral crisis, different political sectors came to an agreement aimed at keeping power to reform the electoral laws. The purpose of this discussion was to make changes to the electoral system so that the same problems that occurred in 2017 would not happen again. But this was nothing more than a false or demagogic promise aimed at keeping power in their hands. Because there were never electoral reforms.
Karen Spring:
The Honduran National Congress, dominated by the National Party, has not brought deep electoral reforms to vote. Instead, only partial changes have occurred, such as, for example, the creation of two new electoral bodies, the National Electoral Council, or CNE by its Spanish acronym, and the Electoral Justice Tribunal. Both were created in 2018. But still no electoral reforms that actually address the serious concerns with the ways that fraud has been perpetuated in previous elections have been approved. The same electoral laws that permitted the electoral frauds of the past are still in place. I will link to an in-depth analysis about this in the show notes. But let’s go back to Tomás, who explains how the lack of reforms are partly responsible for the fraud we saw in this year’s primary elections.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
The only change that has happened since is the formation of new electoral institutions that don’t really signify a substantial change in the process. The only change is that the opposition party, the LIBRE Party, the main opposition party, has a representative at each of those institutions, but in a minority condition in relation to the other Liberal and National Party fractions. These primary elections were a disaster. There was fraud in all parts. In all the political parties, there was no control. The electoral census was not cleaned up. It was manipulated so that people were not able to vote where they should have normally voted. Instead, they were sent to a voting site far away. People were able to vote several times. Because the census was not cleaned up, there were additional voting lists at each voting location, where people showed up and voted again after having already voted in a different location. There was a total deformation of the electorate’s will. So the results that have come out of these primary elections are not trustworthy.
Karen Spring:
At the voting centers, which are usually set up in public buildings, like public schools, around the country, each political party is responsible for providing their electoral staff at each voting site. This has been very controversial in the past, as the individuals with loyalties to certain political parties are able to manipulate votes and vote counting when the electoral ballot sheets are tallied at the end of the voting day. This was a major source of the electoral fraud in 2017. Dominant political parties were able to intimidate the voting table staff from other smaller parties.
This is obviously even more likely when organized criminal interests need and want specific electoral outcomes on a local and/or national level. In the past, electoral staff were threatened, bought off, or paid to look the other way when votes were tallied, and final voting tally sheets prepared and sent off, along with all the individual ballots to the central electoral authority in Tegucigalpa.
Unfortunately, despite these being internal or primary elections, these types of fraudulent acts occurred this March in the primary elections. In some places dominant streams inside the three individual political parties use these tactics to manipulate the voting outcome within their own parties. This is exactly an issue that electoral reforms can address. And unfortunately, they haven’t, obviously to the benefit of very specific interests.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
An objective of this fraud in my opinion, was to position the candidates that the current powers want to participate in the general elections. These candidates are, first, the Juan Orlando Hernández candidate in the National Party, a man named Nasry “Tito” Asfura. Internally there was a fraud inside the National Party to impose him as a national party’s presidential candidate in the general elections.
Karen Spring:
Tito Asfura is the current mayor of Tegucigalpa. In the National Party primaries, he ran against Mauricio Oliva, the current president of the Honduran National Congress. According to the vote tallies, Tito Asfura won the primaries for the National Party. But again, not without suspicion of vote manipulation. There is speculation that the National Party aimed to inflate the actual numbers of their voters or their base, making it seem that more people voted in the primaries for the National Party than that actually did. It’s also believed by political analysts like Tomás that Tito Asfura is President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s candidate of choice for president.
However, Tito Asfura may ultimately be forced to step aside, given a somewhat suspicious judicial process against him, accusing him of embezzling $1.2 million while in his position as mayor of the capital city. It’s thought that this corruption case could be a pretext for Asfura to hand the candidacy back over to President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is not by any means, despite public declarations, interested in losing power, considering the strong drug trafficking charges against him. Some social movement groups believe that Juan Orlando Hernández may even run for reelection yet again, considering, of course, that there’s no judicial framework or electoral reforms that limit re-election.
What’s particularly concerning is the number of questionable figures running for office. Inside the National Party, there are several candidates that have been mentioned in not just corruption cases in Honduras, but also drug trafficking cases in US courts.
For example, Oscar Nájera, a congressional representative from the northern department of Colón, has been mentioned as being involved in drug trafficking in the Southern District Court of New York. According to the most recent results, Nájera won congressional re-election, and will be able to run in the generals in November.
Another, but definitely not the last, is Cristian Fuentes, who also won his primary in the department of Cortés for a congressional candidate. Cristian Fuentes is the brother of the recently convicted Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez. Cristian Fuentes was also mentioned in his brother’s drug trafficking case in New York.
These are just a few examples of how drug trafficking and organized criminal interests are very much intertwined in the electoral process. And this is not just limited to the National Party.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
In the Liberal Party, the fraud was in favor of Yani Rosenthal, who represents the alliances between the sectors linked with drug trafficking. Yani Rosenthal just returned to Honduras from the United States after spending three years in prison for a crime he committed in Honduras related to drug trafficking, along with other Honduran drug traffickers. Yani still has not paid for his crime in Honduras.
Karen Spring:
Yani Rosenthal pleaded guilty to money laundering in the Southern District Court of New York in 2017. His money laundering was conducted in coordination with the Los Cachiros drug cartel. Both of Los Cachiros representatives [leaders] are also in jail in the US. Rosenthal and the Cachiros were part of drug trafficking activities linked to the same cartel as Juan Orlando Hernández, Tony Hernández, and other convicted drug traffickers in the United States.
According to the Southern District Court, “during the course of the money-laundering scheme, Rosenthal was Minister of the Presidency to a former president of Honduras between 2006 and 2007, a Honduran congressmen between 2010 and 2014, and a candidate for president of Honduras in the 2009 and 2013 elections.”
Upon returning to Honduras, after spending three years in a US prison, Yani Rosenthal launched his candidacy for president. Such is the state of electoral politics in Honduras. The Liberal Party presidential candidate and many in the ranks of both the National party and the Liberal party are known to have serious and strong ties to drug trafficking.
In regards to Yani Rosenthal and the Liberal Party fraction that won the primaries, there have been public suggestions that Rosenthal and the LIBRE Party may form an alliance for the general elections. And once again in these elections, the support for Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the spouse of overthrown president Manuel Zelaya, remained very strong inside the LIBRE Party in these primaries. Xiomara will be LIBRE’s presidential candidate for the third time in these upcoming elections in November.
There have been several concerns about how ballots were tallied at LIBRE’s voting tables and these concerns are still playing out as the ballot boxes are being recounted and LIBRE candidates are publicly contesting the results.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
In the LIBRE Party there was also a certain degree of fraud, on a smaller scale compared to the vote inflation that there was in the National Party, but there was a fraud similar to what the traditional parties have committed. So I think that these elections did not serve the interests of the people, and didn’t serve as a test of the sovereign will, but instead to serve the powers that be in order to allow for the continuation of the same actual dominant national scheme.
Karen Spring:
I asked Tomás what these experiences with this particular primary election can tell us about what we can expect for the 2021 general elections in November of this year.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
Well, for me, what occurred in these primary elections is a warning about what can occur, or what will surely occur, in the general elections. The general elections are going to have the same characteristics. In the first place, candidates that don’t represent the popular will will participate and, as a result, the next elections will be fraudulent. It’s not an election that will reflect a democratic election. Secondly, the primary elections have divided the opposition, and this means that in the general election, the biggest danger is that the current party in power, that has the economic and military power and all of the government institutions in its favor, will be able to continue in power because the opposition is divided into three or four fragments.
Karen Spring:
Tomás is referring to the fragments of the opposition within the Liberal Party and the LIBRE Party that have been divided as a result of political differences, but also concerns about internal fraud inside their parties in the primary elections. Considering the deeply flawed process in the primaries, the likelihood that the general elections will be free and fair is extremely low. This does not augur well for the millions of Hondurans who want to see the end of the National Party regime in their country.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
And also, another consequence of the primary results is what the current president Juan Orlando Hernández could achieve with this next election. If he achieves his objective of remaining in power, he could escape from justice or the accusations made against him through the trials in the Southern District Court of New York. This would set a dangerous precedent on an international level. It would be the first drug trafficking government to take power, in the Americas at least, and remain there despite it being recognized as one. Even Pablo Escobar, who participated as a congressional representative in Colombia, did not reach the same level as the current Honduran president.
Karen Spring:
There is still no electoral law that regulates re-election. Because of this, Juan Orlando Hernández could very well remain in power, one way or another. One theory is that Juan Orlando Hernández will ensure that a candidate to his liking takes over the presidency through a massive fraud, in order to protect him from extradition to the United States. After all, Juan Orlando Hernández is not just protecting his political power, or the political power of his party. He’s worried about his own future, and avoiding, at all costs, the possibilities of ending up in prison for his drug trafficking activities.
So, on the one hand, you have a president who’s terrified of losing power due to fear that it will lead to his arrest. And then, on the other hand, you have a population that simply cannot tolerate yet another four years of rule by the National Party. If the status quo continues, as it’s been for 12 years, under National Party rule, you can be sure that the Central American exodus will not stop anytime soon.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
If similar things happen in the general elections like have occurred in the primaries this year, it’s quite possible that another political crisis, similar to the one we saw in 2017, will occur. For example, after that crisis, the first migrant caravans began traveling to the US. The poorly named migrant caravans, poorly named because they’re not really caravans, but rather a mass exodus of refugees, or people seeking refuge, not just migrants. The cause of the exodus isn’t just because of the economic or social situation, like poverty and violence that we know exists, but also because of a political cause. And that is the despair that exists in the population, a lack of hope that the country’s conditions will improve. That’s also why the population flees.
And you can actually see this more, because there are people from the middle class, people that aren’t poor, that are leaving the country. They don’t want a future in Honduras with a government of drug traffickers. They don’t want a country where the laws imposed by whoever’s in power, that brings about situations of massive theft of public funds that have occurred during the pandemic, for example, or the negligence that occurred during the hurricane. The population ended up in social disaster, and the government doesn’t care. But what the government only really worries about is stealing, and stealing, and stealing some more. So the population flees the country for this reason, for this lack of hope. It’s like a massive psychological reaction of the masses. And it’s the first time I’ve seen it. This has never happened before in Honduras.
Karen Spring:
I asked Tomás to elaborate more on the human rights situation in the country. If protests break out in a manner similar to what happened after the 2017 general elections, what will the human rights situation be for Hondurans that try or want to stay in the country and that just can’t flee?
Tomás Andino Mencía:
There will also be grave violations of human rights because political crises like this, such as the one in 2017, meant murders of protesters, arrests, arbitrary acts, and abuses of power, as a population rebelled against the fraud of the dictatorship.
So we can expect violations of human rights, and also the deepening of poverty, because scenarios of that kind generate capital flight. That means that foreign investment declines in the country. This is what occurred in 2017 after the crisis. In 2017, the levels of foreign direct investment fell more than 20 points on an international level. The national economy entered a recession.
If this happens again in this moment, with the conditions brought about by the pandemic and the conditions that the two hurricanes have left us, this could mean a situation much worse than what we saw happen in 2017. And this could generate a humanitarian disaster on a national level.
On the other hand, another consequence is that the powerful elite will feel encouraged to commit more abuses in the territories where groups are defending their natural resources. This powerful elite will take over and illegally appropriate the properties of communities. The destruction of natural resources that we are seeing now, for example, since the 2017 electoral crisis, there has been a more accelerated predatory actions of natural resources like forests and watersheds by the government. And these measures favor the predatory sectors of the government. So we believe that these tendencies will deepen.
Karen Spring:
Analyzing the future of Honduras is not exactly an encouraging endeavor. It’s really hard to see how a situation that has gotten so bad can actually change and what that change would look like. I asked Tomás what he thought would be the best way out of the current situation. What can Hondurans, and more specifically the social movements, do?
Tomás Andino Mencía:
I think that the best thing that can happen for the Honduran people, the best way out of this crisis, is that the political and social opposition put aside their particular interests, and unite in one single political social opposition against the dictatorship. And not just in the electoral area, but to mobilize and organize people to resist the unpopular policies of this government. This includes mobilizing against the electoral process so that the same practices in the primaries we have seen will not occur again.
I mean, the 2021 electoral process is an opportunity, an opportunity for the government to continue in power. But if this government uses the same practices that it did in these primary elections, this will be another opportunity for the Honduran population to wake up and rebel, just as they did in 2017. But we won’t be able to win this rebellion if the organized social and political forces aren’t united. If each takes their own separate path, the government will easily crush any attempt to rebel. I think unity and social electoral unity is what will get us out of the current situation.
Karen Spring:
It’s really hard to understand Honduras without understanding the international situation, as we’ve explored extensively in this podcast. Invariably, foreign actors play a role in the country’s politics and sometimes with unintended consequences.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
I feel like another problem we are facing in this current situation that is affecting social movements, like the pandemic and poverty, for example, is something that is quite contradictory. The trials in New York are creating the sensation in the Honduran population, that it’s not worth risking their lives if everything’s going to be fixed in and by the United States. And that is something very hard to fight against. Because Hondurans are hopeful that the United States will resolve this problem for us. That can act against the need to mobilize and protest.
I think another important obstacle is the role of multilateral international cooperation. The complicit role of the Central American Bank of Economic Integration, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank is such an embarrassment, giving credit and multimillion dollar loans to this tyrannical government, a government recognized as having ties to drug trafficking, that has used the resources to buy the consciences of poor people, to use their funds for their political campaigns, for their own means, not for the benefit of the people. So you cannot expect anything good from a regime of this type. The international institutions and governments that support the regime pretend like they don’t notice what’s going on. Like they don’t realize, or they just look away, as they give this government money that they know is stained with the blood of Honduran people. The attitude of the international financial institutions is really unfortunate. It’s unfortunate that they are collaborating with a dictatorship, knowing it’s a dictatorship, knowing that it’s a narco-dictatorship.
Karen Spring:
US president Biden recently announced that his vice president Kamala Harris will be the point person on migration. Although she says her experience as attorney general in California, a border state, will prove to be an asset, her career strongly backing law enforcement suggests she will ultimately push for a militarized approach to the crisis on the US southern border, when what is really needed is a humanitarian approach that actually addresses the root causes of the crisis, the US support for the dictatorship. There are, however, some US politicians working to end the US support for the dictatorship. Recently, bills were introduced in both the House and the Senate, calling for an end to the financial and military aid to Honduras. Tomás explains what he thinks about these initiatives in the US Congress and Senate.
Tomás Andino Mencía:
I think those types of initiatives, for us, are positive because they weaken the authoritarian power of this government, and expose them at an international level. This help, in a way, weakens the government, and anything that weakens our oppressor, for us, is welcomed. But also we think that there is a lot of hypocrisy in these types of international policies, in these types of initiatives, because the same US government is the one that has been imposing this government on us.
And now it’s saying that they finally realize, based on what they see in the New York Southern District Court, that this government is a narco government, or is linked to drug trafficking. It seems like there is a lack of coherence in their position. It’s 2021, six years since the regime became a dictatorship, four years since there was a massacre in this country in order for this government to electorally impose itself. And finally now the US government is proposing these types of weak initiatives. It says a lot. They aren’t really taking their role of being vigilant very seriously, or critical of authoritarian regimes.
So the issue is, the US should pull their support immediately, not just to individuals, but end their support for the Honduran military, politicians, and police, so that this government doesn’t have the ability to continue destroying this country.
I think that the international community that is ready to support the well-being of the Honduran people has to be attentive to the abuses committed by the Juan Orlando Hernández regime. They must be in solidarity with the struggles of the Honduran people that have been developing for many years. They must be in solidarity with those speaking out against the violation of human rights. Above all, to work to isolate this regime from other countries. In different spaces where this government tries to say that it represents the people, in these spaces the government must be isolated.
Solidarity helps keep the people’s morale high. It’s important to express the solidarity, even if, let’s say, activities in solidarity with us aren’t huge, even if they are small, whatever message of encouragement that comes from outside the country raises the morale of the population and gives us energy. So I think the international solidarity is vital. There’s no worse thing than to feel isolated and feel like no one cares about your struggle.
So I put a call out to interested international sectors to contribute to the struggle for democracy in Honduras, so that human rights are respected, to be in solidarity, and to express that solidarity, to condemn the policies of this government. This serves to multiply the international condemnation of this regime.
Karen Spring:
Thank you for listening. Your support for this podcast helps Hondurans feel like they’re not alone, and helps draw more interest to solidarity efforts with people trying to change the situation on the ground.
Please check out this episode’s show notes at HondurasNow.org, and consider giving a donation to the podcast if you haven’t already. Thank you to those that are donating. Your support is greatly appreciated.
This is your host, Karen Spring, signing off for today. Until next time, hasta pronto.