Caribbean & Central America - March 2014 (ISSN 1741-4458

On 10 March the national defence and security council (CNDS), headed by President Juan Orlando Hernández, launched an intervention in the public transport sector, citing the need to stamp out massive extortion by organised crime that generates almost US$28m annually.

Bus and taxi companies are the main targets of so called ‘war tax’ (impuesto de guerra). Extortion generates an estimated HNL25m (US$1.29m) a month in the capital Tegucigalpa and its sister Comayagüela alone, according to calculations by the national security secretariat. That amounts to HNL300m (US$15.5m) a year. In the country’s second main city and main business hub, San Pedro Sula, located in the violent and drug-gang afflicted northern part of the country, extortion amounts to an estimated HNL20m (US$1.0m) a month, or HNL240m (US$12.4m) a year. Combining the two cities (where some 15,200 buses operate), that’s a whopping HNL540m (US$27.9m) a year.

In the past four years, some 350 public transport workers, including bus and taxi company owners, drivers and other workers have been murdered, on official estimates. According to the national human rights commissioner, Ramón Custodio, 153 taxi drivers (and 32 passengers) were assassinated in 2012-2013, with impunity in 90% of cases. Last year alone there were 114 fatalities (between taxi drivers and passengers), with firearms used in 87% of cases, making taxi driving a “high risk” job, the commissioner noted. Custodio added that some of the extortion could be linked to corrupt police.

Extortion carries a tough prison sentence of 15-20 years in Honduras, although given the widespread impunity, that’s no deterrent. The new Fuerza Nacional Antievasión (FNA), set up in January at the request of the president, will lead the intervention to combat the crime. President Hernández said that transport and security authorities had been ordered to come up with an integral security plan for the sector “within a week”, to include the use of “appropriate technology” to monitor the circulation of buses, as well as the installation of closed circuit security cameras at all main bus stations and principal taxi ranks. He added that among other things, the procedures for extending operating permits for bus companies provided by the Dirección General de Transporte (DGT) would also be modified (presumably to crack down on corruption there), while all urban and inter-urban bus routes would also be subject to revision, for security reasons.

“I want to send a message to transport workers, to those I listened to on the campaign trail, who called for decentralisation, for transparency, that they could make their payments via banks, this proposal includes all that. And to those that have been delinquenting, we know already and we are going to take actions”, he declared.

A week previously, on 3 March, the proactive new president ordered that the country’s 17 customs posts be intervened “immediately” in a bid to crack down on irregularities. At a press conference the minister of the presidency, Reinaldo Sánchez, expressed full government support for the head of the national tax agency (Dirección Ejecutiva de Ingresos [DEI]), Miriam Guzmán, who also heads up the new FNA. Guzmán was one of the very first appointments announced by Hernández after his election in November 2013 and appears to be a key figure in the new administration. Calling on Hondurans to report “any kind of irregularity”, Sánchez warned that any customs agency staff found to be “confabulating” with tax evasion would be sacked and brought to justice. President Hernández stressed that the government intended to do what was necessary to return “peace, tranquillity and transparency, and Hondurans should know that every cent in tax is going to be used as it should be”.

The previous week the government had ordered airports intervened as part of the fight against drug trafficking and other criminal activity, including money laundering. On 26 February, a newly constituted inter-agency force, Fuerza Interagencial de Seguridad Aeroportuaria (Fisa), took over the country’s four main airports - Toncontín (Tegucigalpa), Ramón Villeda Morales (San Pedro Sula), Golosón (La Ceiba) and Juan Manuel Gálvez (Roatán) - be taken over.

President Hernández ordered the creation of that new unit in early February, after Panamanian airport authorities seized eight suitcases from three Hondurans en route from Toncontín stuffed with almost US$7.2m in hidden cash. The Honduran authorities later suspended 25 police agents, two anti-drug agents and five security staff at Toncontín over the incident.

The Fisa unit comprises some 300 officers drawn from the national police and the army, as well as civil aviation and migration officials. The national police spokesperson, Julián Hernández, told reporters that the unit would be “in charge of luggage inspections, both incoming and outgoing, and any security-related situation”. Rubén Martell, director of the police special investigations unit (Servicios Especiales de Investigación de la Policía), said the Fisa would be stationed “permanently” at Honduran airports so as to “counterattack crime in its various manifestations”. He added that it would carry out “monitoring, controls and inspections” to “identify and combat crime”, which suggests that it has a fairly broad mandate.

Relatedly, on 10 March the head of the Honduran armed forces, General Freddy Díaz, said that the military had destroyed around 75 illegal narco strips to date in 2014, saying the aim is to raze three to five strips a week. The elimination of these clandestine landing strips will help the armed forces ensure that all planes flying across Honduran airspace have a registered and pre-authorised flight plan, Díaz noted. Honduras shortly takes delivery of three radars purchased from Israel, which will provide intelligence on unauthorised flights liable to be intercepted by the air force under the new ‘shootdown’ law that came into effect on 3 February.

In its latest (February 2014) edition, our sister publication, Latin America Security & Strategic Review suggested some differences of opinion between Honduras and the US , its main security cooperation partner, over the latest tactics in the war on drugs, with the US Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs William Brownfield, commenting during a visit to Tegucigalpa (on 11 February) that the authorities ought to focus more on the increased use of sea routes by drug traffickers. Brownfield made the point that an estimated 80% of the illegal drugs (mostly cocaine) entering Honduras does so by sea, with the rest by air and land.

Violence against women continues to worsen

While local and international media jumped on latest homicide figures indicating that 14 people were murdered in Honduras a day on average in 2013, less attention is paid to the fact that Honduran women increasingly are the victims of horrific violence in the country. Seventy women were officially registered as murdered in the first two months of this year alone; the true figure probably higher because of underreporting.  Coinciding with International Women’s Day on 8 March, a local NGO, Centro de Derechos Mujer, released figures according to which an estimated 2,139 women were murdered in the country between 2010 and 2013.  Gilda Rivera of the NGO said that the number of women registered as murdered had gone up 65% in that period, from 385 in 2010 to 636 in 2013. The government tends to argue that more such crimes are being reported and registered, but Rivera was dismissive. Femicide in Honduras carries a prison sentence of 30-40 years under a February 2013 reform to the penal code, but local NGOs say there is insufficient political, police and judicial will to deal with the issue, which is closely linked to domestic violence and the entrenched ‘machista’ attitude in the country. The Honduran problem with femicide is not isolated in the region; in Guatemala 650 women were registered as murdered last year.

• Clawing back precious tax revenues - On official estimates, tax evasion costs the Honduran treasury about US$1.1bn in lost annual revenues. The fiscal deficit in 2013 widened to 7.7% of GDP, from 5.9% in 2012, the ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service suggested in a statement accompanying its latest (27 February) downgrade of the country’s credit rating to B3 (from B2). The cash-strapped Tegucigalpa government is in talks with the International Monetary Fund about a new stand-by loan agreement; a delegation is due in Washington DC on 17-18 March for discussions about conditions. The last US$212m loan expired in March 2012.

• Remittances - Family remittances, originating mostly in the US (home to an estimated 1.0m Hondurans, both legal and illegal), rose 3.76% in the first two months of 2014 to US$454.9m, from US$438.4m in the equivalent year-earlier period, according to the central bank of Honduras (BCH). In calendar 2013, remittances totalled US$3.12bn, up 7.9% on 2012’s US$2.98bn. The BCH expects an inflow of US$3.2bn in 2014, as the US economy (and employment) recovers. Remittances are a key source of foreign exchange for Honduras, which ended 2013 with total international reserves of US$3.0bn, up from only US$2.5bn at end-2012.