Interesting Trends in Honduras’s 2013 Mayoral and City Council Race Results

Author’s note: HondurasWeekly.com published between December 2013 and February 2014 many of my articles about the process of the 2013 general Honduran election, the problems of fraud and the way the Nationalist’s party control of the Junta Directiva of the National Congress which is also its agenda committee made it impossible for any other party to have any impact in the National Congress. They did not publish my articles about the other races, which are included here. I also recommend the Youtube video on Fraude Electoral which shows election table by election table report that the counts in pen done at the election tables and the reports sent to the computer changed the votes  often by a 100 votes per candidate always in favor of adding to the winning Nationalist Party candidate Juan Orlando Hernandez and/or taking away votes from Xiomara Castro of Libre Party and Salvador Nasralla of PAC.  Due to lack of finances Salvador Nasralla’s PAC party was not able to have observers at each election table to ensure his votes were counted correctly, so the issue of campaign finance and where the Nationalist Party candidate got funds to flood Tegucigalpa with signs and to staff the tables, raised by the Catholic priest Padre Fausto Milla was relevant to the election.

 According to El Heraldo money from the far left and the far right came into Honduras to fund some of the election campaigns. According to HondurasWeekly.com articles the US government also spent at least $10 million in support of the 2013 elections, both for the elections themselves and security. This does not seem to include the funding spent on sending 440 US elite military force known as Delta Force to help maintain peace during the Honduran 2013 election and make sure people accepted the results.   The US also required prior to the election a guarantee from Manuel Zelaya, the husband of the Libre candidate Xiomara Castro and former president ousted in the 2009 coup, that he would accept the results of the 2013 election. The US has not done this with Honduran presidential candidates since the 1924 revolution which brought the US Marines to Tegucigalpa. These are some of the reasons that Hondurans said, The US sold out the election or caused the election results.  

Interesting Trends in Honduras’s 2013 Mayoral and City Council Race Results

By Wendy Griffin

In Honduras, when the new president takes office, also all the newly elected Congressmen and Mayors and City Council members take office. For example, on the Saturday prior to the elaborate Presidential swearing in ceremonies, in Tegucigalpa there was the swearing in for the new Tegucigalpa mayor and his city council.  Honduran taxes are only collected at two levels, Municipal taxes and National taxes, and so the main positions to control economic resources are at these two levels. 

Most internationally funded projects are also done either at the national level, through Ministries, such as the Ministry of Education or the now eliminated Secretary of Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans (SEDINAFROH), started during Pepe Lobo’s government, or at the municipal level like sewage projects or roads. The new Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez has completely reorganized his government at the Ministerial level, which will be described in a separate article, and the new Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry Asfuras has promised to do the same at the level of  “municipios” for Tegucigalpa and Comayaguela  and outlaying area governments.

Honduran Governors of Departments, who are appointed by the party that wins the national election, not elected, have so little budget that usually they do not even have travel expense budgets, which in places like the Bay Islands, which has three main islands and several smaller islands, would be a serious handicap if the governor is actually trying to govern there. The only time I have seen a Colon Governor receive a check from the Honduran central government in a public ceremony and it was announced it was to pave 8 miles of roads, she paved the four blocks square in front of her restaurant in Trujillo and felt that was good enough.

Honduran municipios are actually more like US counties with a main town called the pueblo cabecera (head town) and smaller communities called villages (aldeas) and very small villages (caseríos). Some Honduran municipios are huge, such as Catacamas, Olancho is larger than small departments in El Salvador or the department of La Paz in Honduras. The largest municipios often have very poor infrastructure as far as roads, such as in Culmi, Olancho some teachers walked for 24 hours to present their bimonthly reports to the District Supervisor in Dulce Nombre de Culmi. Even on the Coast, one Garifuna teacher said when she was hired to teach in a village in the mountains above Santa Fe, it took 24 hours by mule to get there.

 Large municipios also often have problems that outlying areas have no electricity and mountains or forests can block cellphone coverage.  To say, for example, that the Mayors of Catacamas or Culmi “govern”  or “control” the part of their municipio located near the Patuca River and the National Parks there, such as the Rio Platano Biosphere or the Tawahka Asagni Biosphere Reserve and the Patuca National Park, which on some Honduran maps still say unexplored mountains, is probably not a totally accurate description of the actual situation of governance in Honduras.

The massive destruction in the Rio Plátano Biosphere area, reached such epic proportions during Pepe Lobo’s administration that  the La Prensa newspaper dedicated almost entire edition in 2013 to the problems that included a single village of Ladinos with chainsaws had managed to deforest 1,300 hectares in the Iriona municipio, and Honduran cattle ranchers moving into the area were giving up to 40 chainsaws to their workers. Pepe Lobo’s son Jorge, first named Minister of Agriculture and Cattle Ranching (SAG) under Juan Orlando Hernandez,  was named as Commissioner of the Rio Plátano Biosphere, even though Pepe Lobo himself had been linked to illegal logging in the Rio Platano biosphere, prior to his election, as had Manuel Zelaya, before he ran for President.  Jorge Lobo did not last even two months as Minister of SAG, and is now head of the Nationalist Party for Olancho.

The declaratoria or legal document issued by the Supreme Election Tribunal on its website on who won as mayor and as regidores or city councilmen show several interesting trends in the November 2013 election, for which allegations of fraud at the presidential level grabbed most of the headlines about the election.

How close were some of the mayor races?  In one case in the Department of Comayagua in San Luis,  it was total tie, and the “declaratoria” states in detail the two mayoral candidates who were tied got together, agreed that doing a coin toss was the fair way to decide the election, it states which called heads and which called tails and then they flipped a coin and the Liberal Party candidate won the coin toss and will be the new mayor. After the election there was violence in San Luis related to the conflict of who was mayor.

The Trujillo Mayor’s Race and Its Controversial Nationalist Party Mayor

In Trujillo, there were under 200 votes difference between the two leading candidates, but there were also 300 votes for mayor declared blank votes. Were there really 300 Trujillanos who went out in the rain and then stood in line just for the purpose of depositing a blank vote?   Although both leading candidates went to Tegucigalpa to try to settle who would be mayor, there was no coin toss.

The Nationalist Party candidate won in Trujillo, and he was also the mayor whose term had just ended. This is a little surprising as he himself said in a meeting with the Pech in Moradel,  currently all the city’s 5 bank accounts are frozen (embargado), because he has been doing projects without being sure who the land belonged to before he did them and so the city is involved in many lawsuits. It is the city’s lawyer in these law suits who has embargoed the city’s bank accounts, for back pay for needing to defend them from all these law suits.

Mayor Lainez also announced that there would be a 80 million lempira sewage treatment project with the plant being in the Malpaso area of Trujillo Bay (near Casa Kiwi), even though the Garifunas own the land title to Malpaso and a representative of the Comunidad said the city had no land in Malpaso and had not talked to Comunidad about putting a sewage treatment plant there. Malpaso is also where the Freedom Ship wanted to be built, and after 15 years, people in Florida are saying they are trying to resurrect the Freedom Ship or Floating City project.

Mayor Lainez is also involved with the  Model Neighborhood (Barrio modelo) project which was channeled through the Municipality and which tore up the streets in the Garifuna neighborhood of Cristales and neither fixed the streets well nor did the water project well so that some people have no water and others no water 4 days a week, and it is probably just as well they did not finish the sewage project in Cristales as they planned to tear down a popular restaurant Evalyn’s owned by a Garifuna woman and put the sewage treatment plant on the beach in Cristales, according to the president of the Garifuna Comunidad de Cristales y Rio Negro which would not thrill the Garifunas who use this beach a lot to socialize.

In spite of the problems of the project, they come early every month to collect money for the water and insist people of Cristales will have to pay over $200, because they did not donate 23 days of free labor to the project, even though they are not hooked up to the sewer and did not want the project and most of the people who live in Cristales are old women who could not work 23 days if they wanted to. This money is collected by a committee which calls itself the support committee for the water project which includes  Mayor Lainez, but does not include the people on the Water Committtee of Cristales (Junta de Agua) who are legally sworn in to run water projects in Cristales.

In Trujillo, the municipal water system for the center of town does not cover Cristales, the Garifuna neighborhood, and people who had connected to it, were disconnected.  Can you see this happening in the US the Black neighborhoods in the middle of town are without running water and have no garbage pickup and other neighborhoods where most of the residents are not Black do have water and garbage pickup?

The office for the water project in Cristales was not built, even though it was part of the project, and so there is not a central place for the files, like where does the money go, noted the vice president of the Water Committee in Cristales. This poorly thought out and executed project was funded through the Spanish government, which has its own economic problems. The President of the Comunidad of Cristales and  Rio Negro said, “I do not think this project will come to a happy end.”

So while it must be admitted that Mayor Lainez has been a very active mayor such as paving streets and opening a park, he is not necessarily the most popular mayor. He is the developer of the Costa Azul housing project next to the Pech in Moradel and is advertising on the tourist map designed for the cruise boat tourists that houses or lots are available in Costa Azul, so his support for that project does not win him a lot of votes in some sectors of Trujillo, too, since the building of the cruise boat dock caused the destruction of the Garifuna neighborhood of Rio Negro. The cruise boats have begun arriving in Trujillo this fall again.

While the Nationalist Party won the mayor’s position in most big cities like San Pedro, Tegucigalpa, La Ceiba, and Trujillo, they did not win in Tocoa, Colon, the city where much of the the Cachiro drug kingpin family activity was based. The Liberal Party won the Mayor’s post in Tocoa.

Another interesting town was Gualala, Santa Barbara where the Nationalist Party did not win even one regidor. This may be because of the conflict of the outgoing administration Pepe Lobo’s support for development projects in Lenca communities which the Lencas of Santa Barbara and Intibuca were opposed to. 

During his inaugural speech newly elected President Juan Orlando Hernandez  celebrated the fact that he is a Lenca of the Department of Lempira, a modern descendant of the Lenca Indian hero Lempira, and young girl dressed up as someone imagined Lenca Indians might have looked like in the past, sang a song to him at his inauguration which made him cry. At the end of the song, she asked for something, and while the song and the crying were given a lot of publicity, the request was not made known.  The week before his inauguration HondurasWeekly.com had a video of Lencas of Rio Blanco telling about the police coming with hoods and threatening them with a “matacina” ( a massacre).

One of the jobs of Honduran mayors is to approve construction permits, and construction permits are not supposed to be issued until there is an approved environmental impact study done by SERNA (the Minisitry of Natural Resources),which, according to the ILO Convention 169, requires that the government take into account the local Indians in the planning, execution, and evaluation of development projects in their area and they are not supposed to take their land or cause it to be lost, as happened to the bean field of the six children in the video about Rio Blanco on Vimeo.com, without consultation,and if it is absolutely necessary, they must be given adequate  compensation.

That is why the mayor in the video about the Lencas of Rio Blanco on HondurasWeekly.com said,  “On my mother’s grave, I have not issued a construction permit (to the Chinese company building the dam in the Rio Blanco area SINAHYDRO)”. This type of construction is almost always done with international funds, and these agencies like the World Bank which is indirectly funding the Rio Blanco dam through its one third equity position in FICOHSA have policies that the money is not supposed to be disembursed without the environmental impact statement approved and the construction permit issued, so they are in violation of their own policies, as well as Honduran environmental and municipal laws.

 In the case of the Rio Blanco Dam, where the protesting Lenca Indians have been threatened with being killed by police who arrived in the village,  the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) was found to be involved through their equity investment in FICOHSA, a Honduran bank which was funding the development of the Dam, and the situation is being monitored by the World Bank’s Omnibudsman who has also denounced World Bank loans to Honduran Miguel Facusse. The US Congress which authorizes US government agency funding, has recently prohibited such funding given to international agencies for being used to finance hydroelectric dams, which in the US  and in Canada as well as overseas have often significantly adversely affected native peoples.  FICOHSA is also the funder of the Patuca III dam south of the Tawahka area on the Patuca River in Olancho where local people have stopped construction by the Chinese company building that dam also.

If this is the treatment of newly elected Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was born the 15^th of 17 children in the village of Rio Grande outside of Gracias, Lempira, an overwhelming poor Department which had no high school in the whole department (similar in size to Conneticut)  when he was growing up which is why he had to study in San Pedro Sula in a military academy that had a boarding school program,  of the Lenca people he called his own in his inauguration in front of international representatives and press representatives, such as the videos on El Heraldo’s  or nacerenhonduras websites,  what will be the future of those he seems to sees even less favorably like the Garifuna?