Caribbean & Central America - November 2011 (ISSN 1741-4458)

On 19 October Supreme Court Chief Justice Jorge Rivera Aviles dismissed a case taken by the public prosecutor against the former heads of the Honduran military for abuse of authority and violation of the 1982 constitution for forcibly spiriting Manuel Zelaya out of the country on 28 June 2009. The supreme court had ordered Zelaya’s ‘detention’ over his efforts, against the wishes of the other institutions of state, to hold a non-binding national ‘survey’ to gauge public support for a constituent assembly. The court (backed by congress) had ruled that survey illegal. In July 2011, a Truth Commission found that Zelaya’s removal amounted to a coup d’état.

The public prosecutor’s office took its case against the now former military chiefs: General (rtd) Romeo Vásquez Velasquez (chief of staff), Venancio Cervantes (deputy chief of staff), Carlos Antonio Cuéllar (army general), Miguel Ángel García (air force commander); Luis Javier Prince (naval commander) and Juan Pablo Rodríguez (armed forces inspector).

In their defence, Vásquez Velasquez and the others did not deny that they took Zelaya out of the country of their own volition, but they claimed that it was out of necessity. Vásquez Velasquez has always argued that as head of the armed forces, he took the fateful decision so as to prevent violence and bloodshed in the country. The conservative magistrate Rivera Aviles, who was also supreme court president at the time of Zelaya’s ouster, accepted that argument and moved to dismiss the charges.

The public prosecutor appealed to the supreme court’s constitutional chamber, which voted 4 to 1 to uphold Rivera Aviles's decision. As that was not unanimous, the prosecutor appealed again, this time to the full supreme court. According to local press reports, the chamber voted 12 to 3 to uphold the original decision. That final decision cannot be appealed.

Aviles later said that his move to drop the charges was based on the fact that the decision to fly Zelaya to Costa Rica had “prevented many deaths”. He argued that not only was Zelaya’s life in danger, but also those of others, given that there had been violent (pro and anti Zelaya) protests in the run-up to the president’s proposed ‘survey’.

Vásquez Velasquez was shuffled out of his position in March 2010 by President Porfirio Lobo, who made him president of the state telecoms firm Hondutel by way of compensation. The former general has indicated his interest in running for president in the next scheduled general election in November 2013, under the banner of the Alianza Patriótica Hondureña (APH), which describes itself as a “military-civic” organisation.

Zelaya said he wasn’t in the least surprised by the ruling. He noted that the full court session that heard the final appeal was presided over by Judge Tomás Arita, who, Zelaya suggested, had handed down the original detention order against him in June 2009. “We Hondurans knew that the ruling was going to go that way, but it’s irritating that those that carried out that coup are protected. We don’t want revenge because I forgive them and wish them the best of luck”

Constitutional court

The Lobo government, which has tried and failed on several occasions to put pressure on the hardline supreme court, is now touting the idea of creating a separate constitutional court to deal solely with constitutional matters. The project is being drafted by the president of the congress and Lobo’s preferred nominee to succeed him in 2014, Juan Orlando Hernández, along with a deputy, Oswaldo Ramos Soto, of the ruling Partido Nacional (PN).

However, there is some opposition to the initiative, with the likes of Teodoro Bonillo, the head of the Honduran Association of Judges and Magistrates, suggesting that the government wants to undermine the supreme court and is threatening the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers.

Constitutional courts are not unusual – there is one in Guatemala, for instance, with five members elected for five year terms and a rotating president. However, the selection of the slate of candidates for the court is often tinged with suspicions of political interference. In other countries, like Spain, members sit for life terms.

The PN has a comfortable majority of 71 in the 128-seat congress, although it has really splintered into two rival factions led by Hernández and his main rival for the PN’s nomination in 2014, Ricardo Alvarez, the PN party president and mayor of the capital, Tegucigalpa.

• Salvador Nasralla

On 24 October the local celebrity, TV sports presenter and 2013 presidential aspirant, Salvador Nasralla submitted a petition to the national electoral court to register his Partido Anticorrupción (PAC). Nasralla claimed to have collected 60,000 signatures, well above the required 43,000, from 296 of the country’s 298 municipalities. Nasralla said the PAC statutes call for “an assault on corruption at every level”.

• Airport shoot-out another PR disaster

A fatal shoot-out between two rival drug gangs in a car park at the Ramón Villeda Morales international airport in the country’s second city and business hub San Pedro Sula on 14 October was a new PR disaster for Honduras, which is already gaining international notoriety for its shocking murder rate, running at 20 a day on latest official figures. The target of the airport attack was Olvin Francisco Castro Guevara, a gang member who had just arrived from Miami with his wife and two children. Apparently, 10 masked gunmen carried out the attack in just two minutes, opening fire on four luxury SUVs as they left the car park. The gangster’s wife and children survived.