Caribbean & Central America - February 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Congress resumes sessions on 9 February with the ruling Partido Nacional (PN) bench primed to examine President Juan Orlando Hernández’s request to constitutionally institutionalise the new military police force.

President Hernández suffered its first major defeat in congress just days before he celebrated his first year in office, when the opposition banded together to defeat the executive’s request to give constitutional rank to the new military police force, Policia Militar de Orden Público (PMOP). The unicameral 128-member legislature (in which the PN has just 48 seats) rejected the move by 67 votes to 61 in a second round of voting, having approved it in a first reading. Voting firmly against were the two main leftist opposition parties, Partido Anti-Corrupción (PAC, with 13 seats) and Libertad y Refundación (Libre, 37 seats), the new political vehicle of the ejected former president Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009); while Zelaya’s former party, the traditional Partido Liberal (PL), split over the issue, with 17 deputies voting against and 10 in favour.

Currently, the PMOP is operating under the law that established it (Decree 168 of 2013) with funding coming from an unpopular ‘special security tax’ levied on the local private sector. As congress president at the time, Hernández pushed the controversial security tax through. The PMOP is vulnerable however, as congress could decide to withdraw its funding through that tax. Hence Hernández’s bid to give it permanent constitutional rank.

The 22 January vote was a significant political defeat for the president, who reacted just days later in his first state of the nation address by declaring that he would put the matter to a public referendum instead, to be held alongside the next general election, due in late November 2017. Hernández said the referendum would ask voters: “Are you in favour of giving the Militarized Police of Public Order a permanent place in the constitution of the Republic?". However, critics were quick to pounce on the draft referendum bill later submitted by the executive to congress, which also suggests that the proposed constitutional changes allow municipalities, as well as the new special economic development zones (ZEDEs) to request that the PMOP, or other parts of the armed forces, provide them with a public security service. The proposed changes would grant the executive branch the ability to declare ZEDEs and regions of the country ‘special security zones’, with security to be provided by the PMOP. This, the critics, contend, oversteps the mark by allowing the executive a lot of discretional power over the use of the military police force.

Moreover, the opposition also argues that as the congress has now rejected the constitutional amendment, the matter is thus closed and it cannot, therefore, be put to a referendum. Ahead of the resumption of sessions on 9 February however, the president of the security commission, PN deputy (and lawyer) Tomás Zambrano, was keen to stress that congress could examine the petition, as it has not issued a specific law on the matter. The PN has now tacitly signalled that it may be willing to ‘negotiate’ upcoming vacancies on the national electoral court (TSE), the national registry of persons (RNP) and the supreme court (where magistrates' positions come up for renewal in 2016) with Libre and the PAC in return for its support of the referendum petition. And to make sure, the executive has asked the PN to launch a major signature drive with the aim of submitting two petitions to congress; one executive-initiated and one citizen-initiated. A petition requires valid signatures equivalent to 2% of the electoral roll, or 110,000. It intends to collect over 300,000 in support of the two.

• Homicides down

In his one-year balance sheet, President Juan Orlando Hernández said that the country’s homicide rate had dropped by “more than 23%” to 66 per 100,000 inhabitants down from 86 per 100,000 registered two years ago under Hernández’s predecessor, Porfirio Lobo (2010-2014). Hernández was clear that the PMOP, which was built upon an initial contingent of 1,000 army reservists trained in policing skills and is a military force under the authority of the defence ministry, played a key role in this reduction.