Caribbean & Central America - November 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

‘El Tigre’ aka Police Chief Juan Carlos Bonilla, says he is facing mutiny in over his efforts to clean up the discredited national police force. The alleged mutineers, in turn, accuse him of a personal vendetta against senior predecessors that once accused him in a medical evaluation of requiring hospital care and psychotherapy. On 29 October 155 police officers asked the supreme court’s constitutional chamber to strike out, on constitutional grounds, Bonilla’s move to suspend them (with pay) for failing to pass a recent evaluation, which included polygraph and psychometric tests.

In May the Honduran congress approved an emergency decree (89-2012) giving Bonilla special powers for six months to carry out a major purge of the police force. Since then, according to the daily El Heraldo, there have been 400 polygraph tests administered (with the help of the US), 145 of which were requested by the new directorate for the investigation and evaluation of police careers (DIECP), and the rest by other national police dependencies. Bonilla’s powers expire on 25 November next. To date, just 33 officers have been fired after failing the polygraph tests, though some 250 officers have been fired since the lid was lifted on massive corruption in the force in late 2011. Under the organic law of the national police, another 99 have been informed that their posts have been put at the disposition of the security secretariat for a one year period, likely paving the way for their permanent removal.

Included on the list of 99, which found its way to the Honduran media in mid October, is Bonilla’s immediate predecessor, Ricardo Ramírez del Cid, as well as two other police chiefs, two generals and three high-ranking commissioners. Curiously, three of the people on the suspension list in 2004 signed evaluation reports for Bonilla and other officers seeking promotion, in which Bonilla was ranked last on the list of those eligible for promotion, on grounds of insufficient qualifications. The report also suggested that Bonilla suffered from extreme stress and needed medical help, including psychotherapy. These same officers now complain that Bonilla is promoting officers loyal to him beyond their ranks and is engaged in a personal vendetta against his former rivals. A retired police commissioner general, Santos Simeon Flores, told the Associated Press on 25 October, “This is what happens when politicians reach into police ranks and… bypass the hierarchy of career, seniority, experience and ability…this isn’t a cleanup, it’s a whim”.

Bonilla, appointed by President Porfirio Lobo in May, was always a controversial choice. Soon after he took up the role, a decade old report re-appeared linking him to an alleged police death squad dating to 1998-2002. Bonilla was acquitted of murder charges relating to those allegations in 2004, with the verdict upheld by the supreme court in 2009. In August, however, the US state department admitted that it had put a stay on security cooperation funds for police units operating directly under Bonilla pending an investigation into his past.

Bonilla was dismissive of the suspended officers’ recourse to the supreme court, noting that police reform was “a citizen initiative” taken up by congress. The author of the citizen initiative, Julieta Castellanos, the rector of the national autonomous university of Honduras, in late October publically identified four police officials that she holds responsible for allowing to flee four officers implicated in the murder a year ago (22 October 2011) of her 22- year old student son and his 24-year old friend. The chief suspect in the double homicide, Santos Padilla, turned himself in 25 October, after a private detective hired by Castellanos tracked him down to the Nicaragua border.

The very next day, President Lobo received a set of police reform proposals from the five-person Commission for Public Security Reform (which began work in June). Lobo said he was “300% committed” to the proposals and warned that “nothing would detain” the police clean-up operation.

• Primaries

On 18 November Honduran political parties will hold national primaries to select candidates, including presidential, for the November 2014 general election. The Organization of American States (OAS) will monitor the elections. The ruling Partido Nacional (PN), the other main traditional Partido Liberal (PL) and Libertad y Refundación (Libre), the new party of the ousted former president Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009), will all take part. Each one is riven by internal factions, all competing to get their candidates selected. The president of the national congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, aims to win the PL’s presidential nomination, for which he has the support of President Porfirio Lobo but not necessarily the majority of the party. Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, is already the presumptive Libre candidate.