Caribbean & Central America - April 2013 (ISSN 1741-4458)

With the violence in Honduras remaining at endemic levels, the executive and congress are anxious to be seen to be doing something ahead of the scheduled November general election.

Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla will be replaced as of 1 May by Foreign Minister, Arturo Corrales, the presidential secretary Reinaldo Sánchez announced on 15 April. The ministerial changes coincide with moves by the unicameral national congress, controlled by President Porfirio Lobo’s ruling Partido Nacional (PN), to remove the attorney general, Luis Rubí, and the head of the new police purification directorate (DIECP), Eduardo Villanueva, for “deficiency” in their roles. The president of the congress and the PN’s official 2013 presidential candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández, has nominated a parliamentary commission to study proposals put forward by a committee of legislators that recommended that several top officials, including Rubí, be temporarily suspended or removed from their posts. 

Bonilla will move to become President Porfirio Lobo’s new private secretary, replacing Sánchez. There was no word as to whether Corrales will cede his foreign ministry portfolio or whether he will double up with the two roles. Sánchez said that the move was designed to strengthen public security. Bonilla was appointed in September 2011, replacing Oscar Alvarez, who stepped down alleging a lack of economic support for the security ministry and intimating some pressure from the national police leadership over his efforts to clean up the force.

Rubí has been in office since 2009 and has clashed fairly regularly with the Lobo government. He was also controversial for lending the institutional support of his office to the June 2009 coup d’état against the former president, Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009). The presidential candidate for the other traditional Partido Liberal (PL), Mauricio Villeda, warned that the removal of Rubí by congress would amount to another assault on democracy orchestrated by Hernández; just months after Hernández/congress removed five supreme courts justices after they objected to the government’s police reform efforts. Those effort are still not bearing much fruit, it seems. Some 230 of the 3,200 officers evaluated to date as part of the reform have failed part of their test, but just seven have been removed from their posts, Villanueva told the congress in testimony on 9 April. Yet the security ministry itself claims that 652 officers have been removed.

On 10 April President Lobo said he would send down a special decree to congress to expedite the police clean-up process, and allow for “more direct actions”. Just over 10,400 people were murdered in Honduras in 2012, according to the national autonomous university’s observatory of violence, up 6.24% year-on-year. The homicide rate in 2012 was about 85.5 per 100,000 inhabitants, nearly 10 times the global average (8.8).

• Ecuador and Honduras set to normalise ties

President Porfirio Lobo will attend the 24 May investiture ceremony for Ecuador’s recently re-elected president Rafael Correa, marking the culmination of efforts to normalise relations between the two countries, which have been on ice since the June 2009 coup in Honduras. Of all the radical left-wing regional leaders, President Correa was one of the most vociferous in his condemnation of the coup and of the subsequent (scheduled) elections won by Lobo. Correa’s regional left-wing ally, Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), was more pragmatic, negotiating along with his Colombian counterpart Juan Manuel Santos the May 2011 ‘Cartagena Agreement’ that allowed for the return from exile of the ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, effectively drawing a line under the Honduran crisis. Ecuador is the last country in the region to restore ties with Honduras.