Some Results from non-Presidential elections from 2013 general election Mayors, Councilmen,PARLACEN

Minority Groups Fair Relatively Well in Mayoral Elections

By Wendy Griffin

Although I said that ethnic group members are often not included on “planillas” or lists of candidates to run presented by the major parties, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the elections in areas where ethnic groups are a sizeable part of the population.  For example, Dorn Ebanks, a Black Bay Islander  from Coxen Hole who is a founding member of NABIPLA (Native Bay Islander Professsionals and Laborers Association) and a Baptist minister won as Mayor of Roatan for the Liberal Party. He had in an earlier administration been Governor of the Bay Islands. The Island of Roatan has two municipios Roatan and Santos Guardiola. In Santos Guardiola the Liberal Party candidate Guilberto Carrison Dilbert Green also won the mayor’s office.

The Bay Islands  and the Mosquitia only have one congressman each in the National Congress as opposed to Francisco Morazan where Teguicgalpa is which has 24. But the congressman for the Mosquitia is a Miskito Indian Seth Paisano for the Liberal Party and the Congressman for the Bay Islands is Bay Islander businessman Jerry Hinds for the Liberal Party. There are both Native White and Black English speaking  Bay Islanders in the Bay Islands. However, many Black Bay Islanders live in comparative poverty on the Bay Islands, often out of sight and out of mind of the Hondurans and foreigners who visit there, also out of mind of the government officials who make policy for the Bay Islands, local Bay Islanders noted in public forums, like the Bilingual Intercultural Education forum in Tegucigalpa in August 2013.

Traditionally below mayors there were only regidores or city council men, but for at least the last three elections there have also been the position of Vice-Mayor. People who want to be Mayors have Vice Mayors on their ticket, but you can not vote directly for Vice Mayor.  The Vice-Mayor of Iriona, Colon is a Garifuna for the Liberal Party. Iriona is a deeply split municipio with Ladinos in the interior towards Sico and several  large traditional Garifuna communities on the Coast, and the Ladinos in the interior would like to have  their own municipio based at Sico, but there are criteria regarding urbanization that municipios are required to meet and  Sico does not meet them yet.  The new Ladino community  of Munsing, which alone has been responsible for the deforesting of over 1,300 hectares of forest in the Rio Platano biosphere Reserve according to ICF reports quoted in La Prensa, is located in the municipio of Iriona, but near Sico.  The Pech Indians of Las Marias,  Gracias a Dios in the municipio of Brus Laguna, in the Rio Platano Biosphere’s core area  also identify the people who are cutting wood in Gracias a Dios under  protection of armed men, as coming from the area around Sico.

The struggle between the Garifuna controlled municipal government in Iriona which denied the construction permit to build the road to Sico through the Garifuna’s water catchment basin for the drinking water and the road was built there anyway was the subject of the award winning video available from Witness.org Garifuna Holding Ground.  In the previous election the Garifunas lost control of  4 out of 5 mayor offices where they live in Colon, winning only in Santa Fe, so it is interesting that not only did they regain control of Iriona, but out of 7 regidores or city councilmen, only one is from the Nationalist party.

The Nationalist Party candidate for mayor in Santa Fe Garifuna Agronomist Noel Ruiz was reelected. He has been extremely active, but also has a controversial record regarding the sale of Garifuna lands in that municipio. The Liberal Party did not win one regidor in Santa Fe, with only two regidor positions going to Libre. In the past UD has had regidores in this municipio, but the Nationalist party got all the other regidor positions. After Noel Ruiz was re-elected, the government of Colon which now has an office of Investment Projects, announced the $70 million tourist project in Guadelupe, part of Santa Fe, with condos and an equestrian center funded by Vancouver, BC  Canada investors according to procesodigital.com.

The new sewage treatment project proposed for the Trujillo area and which the Trujillo Mayor plans to build on land titled to the Garifunas of Trujillo is being built to support the tourist industry which will accompany the cruise boats coming to Trujillo and in a televised meeting of Pepe Lobo and Randy Jurgensen, a Canadian developer in the Santa Fe and Trujillo areas, they said they would include not only Trujillo but also Santa Fe in the process of building sewage treatment plants.  Of the at least 5 attempts I know of to build a sewage treatment project in Trujillo, none has been planned or carried out in a way that would have benefitted the Garifunas who live there, and usually they did not meet the legal and environmental criteria that Honduras has established, and they have usually stopped somewhere along the way and the money and the pipes bought for the project through the Mayor’s office  have disappeared.

There is a joke in poor taste that says, “When is a minority not a minority? When it is a ruling elite. “ When Dr.Dario Euraque began studying the history of San Pedro Sula he was surprised that no one mentioned most of the leading figures in the San Pedro economy were of Palestian Arab descent. For example if you look at the list of the 20 leading investors in Honduras in Jorge Amaya’s book Los Judios de Honduras (the Jews of Honduras), there are three people with Spanish last name-ex-president Ricardo Maduro, ex-president Rafael Callejas and the president of Banco de Occidente. There are 2 Hondurans with Jewish last names on the list-Rosenthal and Goldstein, and everyone else is of Palestian Arab descent.

The center of this community is in San Pedro Sula where the leading social club is  Club Hondureño-Arabe where many elegant events that end up in the society pages in Honduran newspapers are held. There is some social division between the Hondurans who have lived in Honduras than these immigrants who came in the 20^th century to sell things to people in the banana camps, then set up stores, and some expanded into construction or owning factories. Because the earliest immigrants came with Ottoman Empire passports, which was based in what is now Turkey, but included Palestine before World War I ended, these Hondurans are known as “turcos”.  A good book with comments on how many Hondurans see these Arab businessmen is Cesar Interiano’s Hijos del infortunio (Sons of Misfortune), available through both libreroonline.com and Literatura de Vientos Tropicales. Cesar Interiano, a well-known Honduran writer and playwright, has lived in Tegucigalpa since high school.

So it is a little surprising the new Nationalist Party Mayor of Tegucigalpa Nasry Juan Asfura Zablah is from one of these families. As Mayor of Tegucigalpa and all of the Distrito Central which includes Comayaguela, Valle de Angeles, Santa Lucia, among other outlying areas, he is responsible for supervising contracts for all the public works in Distrito Central and as well as filling all the appointed positions in the municipal government, which have traditionally included 36 significant management positions, but he is planning to make do with fewer people.

Some previous Nationalist Party Mayors of Tegucigalpa have tried to use the Tegucigalpa Mayor position to launch bids as pre-candidates for President of Honduras. Prior to coming to the Mayor’s office in Tegucigalpa, he was for 19 months the head of FIHS (the Honduran Fund for Social Investment), which was the position Manuel Zelaya had before becoming President. Most of the people he has identified as being possible candidates for management positions in his government he said he got to know them when he was the head of FIHS.

 

Results from Some of the More Controversial Lower Level Races

By Wendy Griffin

Honduran politicians presented “impugnaciones” or statements contesting results for only 7 mayor, regidor, or Congressmen positions after the “declaratoria” or declaration of the official Honduran elections at the lower levels.  The only one that they made public the name of was against Francisco Morazon Congressman for the Nationalist Party Osvaldo Ramos Soto. 

While it might seem that Oswaldo Ramos Soto  must be a humble Congressman to be number 22 on the ballot, in fact his name appears  as author of some of the more controversial legistlation approved while Juan Orlando Hernandez was President of the Congress. He has run for President. He is a lawyer graduated from the UHAH, where he was active in conservative university politics becoming president of the FUUD, and has been Supreme Court Judge. One reporter said, “Some people do not want Osvaldo Ramos Soto even imposed,” which gives you some idea why people would go through the motions to contest an election in front of an Election Tribunal which just throws out all the cases, and a Supreme court hand picked to vote yes for what the newly elected President Juan Orlando Hernandez wants approved. 

In addition to having been a Congressman prior to becoming President, Juan Orlando Hernandez who has a degree in Law from the UNAH and a Master’s degree in Public Administration, specializing in legistlation from a New York  university, he was also a Professor of Constitutional Law at the UNAH and had his own law practice particularly in the area of Constitutional Law, according to El Heraldo’s amazing mulitmedia report done on the occasion of the  Presidential inauguration. He was also active in conservative student politics at the UNAH and became head of the student association of students at the Law School. At that time students at the UNAH had parity and voted on most of the policies affecting the UNAH, and both the right and the left courted student political leaders. 

While at the UNAH, Juan Orlando Hernandez met his wife Ana, who confirmed that her second last name is Carias because she is a descendant of former Nationalist President Tiburcio Carias who was her great-uncle, the brother of the father of her grandfather. The grandchildren or nieces and nephews of former Honduran presidents or their spouses often end up in the UNAH as professors, because they had access to either money to pay to study or political connections to get degrees by getting scholarships to go abroad for advanced degrees, and it is a prestigious position, and like most things in Honduras easier to get if you have political connections.

  Juan Orlando Hernandez’s father called Juan Hernandez, too,  was active in Nationalist Party politics for many years before the new president was, and it was Juan Orlando’s brother who was part of the Executive committee or Junta Directive of the Honduran congress that got him involved in high level Honduran politics by having him be his executive assistant in the Honduran Congress. So there are many ways the political and personal lives of the current Honduran president of the Nationalist Party and the Nationalist Congressman Osvaldo Ramos Soto have paralleled or crossed, and so they may find themselves frequently supporting each other.  In Honduras people who belong to the same political party call each other “co-religionarios” (belonging to the same religion), which does not refer to belonging to the Catholic or Evangelical church, but rather whether you are a Liberal or a Nationalist politician.

None of the appeals about the election process were permitted to change the results. The fact that the US, the EU, and everyone has already accepted the election, even though not all the petitions were through the Honduran legal system yet, gives you an idea why some people in Tegucigalpa say, “The US sold the election” and  a blog out of La Ceiba echoes the idea that if  all those world powers have said these are the results, what can the Hondurans do? No one is going to help them.

El Paraiso Mayoral and City Council Election

If you have read the HondurasWeekly.com article on the election for El Paraiso, Copan you are probably wondering,  how did the mayor’s race go for that municipio or county.  First of all, the previous Mayor of El Paraiso, Copan won on the Nationalist Party ticket, even though he was suspected of being linked to the Sinaloa drug cartel.

But the really amazing things about the election in El Paraiso, Copan is that every single city councilman or regidor in El Paraiso is from the Nationalist Party. There are over 270 municipios in Honduras, and El Paraiso is the only one in which the Nationalist Party got all the regidores.  The Libre Party alone got 500 regidores nationwide. In fact in almost every other municipio of Honduras regidores of parties other than the Nationalist Party make up the majority.

I was not totally sure how the Regidores were going to be chosen. It is not by direct election, but rather by a complicated system of what percentage of the popular direct vote for Mayor that party received. For example,  Hector Mendoza ran as Mayor on the PINU ticket in Trujillo, and because he did not have enough votes to win as mayor, but PINU did well over  all in the mayor election, he is Regidor for PINU in Trujillo.

Many people said, “I don’t know why these small parties exist. I don’t know why they were on the ballot”. This is why. They are running at all levels which is required by law to try to get some regidores on the city council. Nationally PINU only won one congressman, the minimum number by law to continue to exist, and only a few regidores in the whole country. This party and DC have existed for many years, but many people commented that most voters have not in the past and still do not see them as a real response, while Libre and PAC both did very well at the Congressman and regidor level.

The exception to the rule for how Regidores are chosen is First Regidor. The “declaratoria” in another unusual example of transparency   gave the law of how First Regidor is chosen. There are certain powers and priveleges given to the First Regidor different from other Regidores so it does matter. According to the “declaratoria” published in La Gaceta the official Honduran government newspaper and also on the TSE website, the person who was running for mayor for the other party and got the second number of votes in the election becomes First Regidor.

In one controversial election for Mayor, that of San Pedro Sula, this rule was followed just as it said in the Declaratoria. The person who won the Mayor’s position was from the Nationalist Party. The second person who got the most votes for mayor, according to the flawed TSE results, was a San Pedro Architect Ing.Milla who had his own architectural and engineering company and was running on the Partido Anti-Corrupción (PAC) ticket whose presidential candidate was Salvador Nasralla and who had complained loudly and legally about the fraud in the election in general and the San Pedro Sula mayor election in particular. Ing.Milla did become First Regidor. PAC did very well at the level of Congressmen from Cortes department, too where San Pedro is, including the first Congressman’s position for Cortes.

If this is the law, then the election results of the La Ceiba and El Paraiso elections for First Regidor do not make sense. If the Nationalist candidate  for mayor won, as happened in both of these controversial elections,then he can not also win the second number of votes unless no one else is running. Margie Dip, who appeared on TSE’s report without her husband’s last name but rather as  Margarita Dabboub-Sikaffy,      was Libre’s candidate for mayor of La Ceiba, and got the second number of votes, but was named second regidor with the first regidor position going to the Nationalist Party.  

Margie Dip had been mayor of La Ceiba before, just finished a term as Congresswoman for Atlantida and has her own Foundation called Fundación Margie, which has a webpage, which helps people who are poor in the area. While most Christian Arabs in Honduras are,especially from around the Bethlehem area in what was Palestine and is now the West Bank, according to Nancie Gonzales’s study The Dollar and the Dove, Margie Dip’s family was originally a Christian Lebanese Arab family, and her husband worked for Dole in shipping for over 20 years. The country now called Lebanon also used to part of Palestine. While many Honduran mayors are business people, Dip Shipping in La Ceiba which ships cargo to the US, is not her company, but rather belongs to her son. That Company also has a website.

At least there they let people from other parties on the city council in La Ceiba. In El Paraiso, Copan all the regidores are from the Nationalist Party which according to this law could only happen if no one else is running. There were other candidates on the ballot there by law.

Some Stories Behind those 40 New  PARLACEN Congressmen

By Wendy Griffin

In the “Declaratoria” or Election Result report of the Honduran Supreme Election Tribunal (TSE), the first category the TSE  list in their second declaration which also included congressmen,mayors and city council men, were the Deputies to PARLACEN.  Just as Regidores are not elected directly, but are rather dependent on the vote for the Mayor, the Congressmen or Diputados to PARLACEN the Central American Parlament are not elected directly in Honduran elections, but rather are dependent on the vote for the Honduran President. 

The “declaratoria”said that Diputados to PARLACEN were based on how many votes that party received in the presidential election. There were 20 full Diputados or Congressmen named to PARLACEN as a result of the votes their parties received in the presidential election, plus 20 “suplente” or supplemental Congressmen  were named to PARLACEN also based on how many votes their party got for President. In addition the outgoing President (Pepe Lobo) and one of his vice Presidents gets named to PARLACEN with salary and immunity, according to PARLACEN’s internal rules found on their webpage.

There are several things interesting about these results. First of all, the official website of PARLACEN as well as the WIKIPEDIA page about it say clearly—the election of PARLACEN Congressmen is direct. But in Honduras, it was not direct. There were no photos of who was running, no one knew their names. There was no ballot to vote for PARLACEN Congressmen.

Second the Honduran system says it is based on the number of votes that party received for president. The candidate for FAPER was so unpopular that he received .1% of the votes while blank and null votes got at least 3% of the votes. None of the above was more popular than he was, so how did  FAPER get enough votes to qualify for a Congressmen’s position at PARLACEN? 

People were asking, “Why were these people running?”, and now you know, that although their names were up for president, they were actually running for PARLACEN whose salaries are so high and no one can figure what in fact they do to earn them, that Costa Rica refuses to join PARLACEN and Panama which is a member, but wants out, but the other countries tell them they have to belong, there is no mechanism to leave.

 The other reason that Costa Rica does not want to join is they say the fact that Presidents and Vice Presidents of each country automatically become members and get immunity which encourages people who want to do bad things to run for these positions. The issue of Honduran presidents in PARLACEN has been the main reason it has been in the news in Honduras. Pepe Lobo who is named as a narcotraficanteor drug trafficker in a comment in La Tribuna (search google.hn for Pepe Lobo narco) is now by law a deputy to PARLACEN and as such has immunity for prosecution.  His Wikipedia article in Spanish makes interesting reading.

After Rafael Callejas left office as president, some Hondurans tried to file suit against him because he gave expensive construction equipment which was property of the Honduran government to a private construction firm for a song. First they had to try get his immunity lifted.  After Carlos Roberto Flores Facusse was President, he was named automatically to PARLACEN, and he did not go, so the Honduran newspapers complained, and he actually resigned.

Originally PARLACEN was created to get the Central American governments at the same table to try to encourage peace in the region after all the civil wars of the 1980’s.  Someone thought it was a good idea to have Central American integration,  and a system of Central American Intergration (SICA) was created, thinking maybe something along the lines of the European Union..  The idea of Central American union failed under Central American Federation’s first president Francisco Morazón in the early 1800’s,and he was actually shot in front of a firing squad in Costa Rica his policies were so unpopular.

That Honduras’s new president  Juan Orlando Hernandez, a native of the Lenca area of Gracias, Lempira, chose to call his security operation “Operación Morazón”, started on the day of his inauguration,  is interesting as Morazon is famous among Lenca Indians for trying to confiscate Lenca cofradia lands and their community funds by law and by force,  and among the Jicaque Indians for selling mahoghany in the Departments of Yoro and Atlántida to the Belizean merchant Marshall Bennett for export for which Morazon was supposed to receive personally the money  in lieu of payment for as his work as a general and a president even though the Honduran government did not yet control the North Coast areas now included  in Yoro and Atlántida departments.

 Just the fact that PARLACEN meets in Guatemala and SICA (Central American System of Integration) meets in El Salvador gives you an idea of how much integration actually goes on. Panama wanted out because they said it was not worth the money, in this time of scarcity of funds, to send  20 full congressmen and 20 “soplente” (supplemental) Congressmen for 4 years to meet with PARLACEN, which I think is a very valid argument. I knew a Honduran congressman who was in PARLACEN and asked him what he did, and he could not or would not answer me.  SICA has Commissions and Garifunas also  comment that people who are on the commissions to represent them, such as the Commissioner for Ethnic Groups,  do not appear to have done anything except charge hefty salaries.

The only policy I know PARLACEN caused to happen was the very poorly thought out process to give a single tourist visas for 3 months for anywhere in CA-4 (the members of PARLACEN) and this means that after those three months, the tourist who is bringing foreign exchange dollars on which to live, must leave Central America (CA-4 which is why you can go to Belize and Costa Rica who are not members). A number of Europeans used to come and spend the whole winter travelling around Central America ,it is so far, most will probably only come once in a lifetime.

Volunteers also came, too. But instead of welcoming volunteers, or working out a not very expensive system to get a volunteer visa or residency, they cut the time allowed on the visa from six months to three months and  made it so that you have to leave Central America and eliminated volunteer as a possible category under residency. In Honduras they also raised the monthly income needed to get residency under another category to $1,500 a month, up from $600. 

Maybe PARLACEN was designed to promote Central American Integration, but  then why  is the Dominican Republic now a member? Not only are they member, but a Dominican Republic representative has been the president of PARLACEN over all the Central Americans. Since when do people in the Dominican Republic have any voice in how Central America is run?  Should Central Americans have any voice on how the Dominican Republic is run? Since the US had the Dominican Republic join CAFTA (Central American Fair Trade Agreement), so that it is now CAFTA-DR, they also had the Dominican Republic join PARLACEN.

There is totally no need to intergrate the Dominican Republic into anything in Central America, neither the politics nor the economies.  It is not even possible to get from Central America to there without going through Miami.  Apparantly PARLACEN has changed its role to being where they listen to the US together with the Dominican Republic, and some big issues the US wants them to listen about are drug trafficking which they say they are concerned about and protecting intellectual property rights like drug patents and genetically modified corn.

Newly elected Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez actually talked a lot about drug trafficking in his inaugural speech, at least a third of which was related to issues of the lack of security in Honduras, including mentioning the famous “impuesto de Guerra” (the war tax) as protection money paid to gangs in Honduras is called.  He said the drugs are produced to the South of Honduras and the drugs are consumed North of Honduras, but in the transiting of Honduras 70% of all murders in Honduras are drug related.

While in the US the issue of drugs is seen as a health issue, he said, in Honduras it is a matter of life and death and Honduras is being asked to put up the people who are dying because of this trade, which is seen as recreation in the North, meaning in the US and Canada.  There is something very unfair about this noted the new Honduran president in his speech which was attended by 60 foreign delegations and can be seen on the nacerenhonduras website. I think the Honduran president has a valid point as the US military has been linked to both helping move drugs through Honduras, where 70% of the drugs destined to the US go through, helping to set up drug distribution networks with Black gangs in the US and helping to move guns, so that guns of a special type given to the Contras, shortly thereafter showed up among gangs in Seattle, Washington.

 If Hondurans had their choice on what to spend $36 million dollars on, do you really think 3 radars from Isreal at $12 million a piece, would really at the top of the list, as opposed to say medicines for the hospitals and doctor salaries to deal with the all the people wounded by gunshot wounds, which just for the department of Cortes absorb up to 80% of the public health budget?  

The Honduras government has needed to raise taxes which they chose to do by taxing  on fuel and raise electricity prices and the cost of cement (which is made with bunker oil) and raise the cost of food to pay to borrow money for radars and fast speed boats and to pay for schools and highways Honduras built with World Bank loans to service the maquila industry for example in Choloma, Cortes which is leaving because of the security issues in the area and the issue that there is not steady electricity, both problems not unrelated to the many  maquila industries in the area which raised the demand for electricity in Honduras and their policies to hire principally young women of child bearing age, while there being few jobs that paid a livable wage for young men in the area.

In a small study by UPN students most of the young men who got involved with gangs were first looking for work, and not finding honest work, someone said to them, “Look, I can help you out. I can introduce you to people and get you a “chamba” (a small job)”, and they get work—they sell drugs, they run guns or transport drugs, they rob people, but at least they are eating and sometimes bringing money home and they have gang friends who will protect them in a dangerous situation.