Caribbean & Central America - April 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

President Juan Orlando Hernández has been forced to declare an emergency in the national police (PNH) in response to serious new allegations of criminality in the force. The move underlines the ongoing failure by successive Honduran governments to deal with longstanding allegations of rampant corruption and impunity in the police.

On 11 April, Hernández approved an executive decree to accelerate a new police purge, and reform both the PNH and the national security ministry. Five days earlier, on 6 April, Hernández had sent congress a request for emergency decree powers to clean up the PNH, following allegations that senior officers murdered the country’s top anti-drugs prosecutor, his former advisor and another senior prosecutor between 2009 and 2013.

The decree would allow for the expeditious removal of officers against whom there is evidence of illicit activities. Hernández said that the decree would establish that the relationship between the state and the police force be “exclusively administrative”. The decision could affect an estimated 1,500 officers, local security analysts estimated. The US ambassador to Honduras, James Nealon, said the US supported the latest move.

President Hernández was forced to act in response to the publication by the daily newspaper El Heraldo of an investigative report suggesting that senior officers were responsible for the assassination in December 2009 of the country’s former drugs czar, Julián Arístides González, head of the Dirección de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico (DLCN); followed by the murder two years later (December 2011) of his former advisor, Alfredo Landaverde; and the death in 2013 of a senior anti-corruption prosecutor, Orlan Chávez.

In response to the report, prosecutors raided police buildings in the capital Tegucigalpa, removing large amounts of evidence after eight hours on the premises. Explosively, the El Heraldo report alleged that the former director of special investigations in the PNH was the author of the plot against the DLCN, accusing the official in question of links to drug trafficking (see sidebar).

Purge and reform

The 11 April decree authorised the security minister, Julián Pacheco Tinoco, to proceed immediately with the police purge and reform process. The government has yet to unveil full details of the reform process, but it did say that the process would be accompanied by a special commission of three ‘honorables’ (yet to be named), with input also from civil society sectors. In a press release, the president said the process could take a year, and confirmed the earlier media reports that some 1,400 PNH officers could be removed, of a total force of 12,500.

As well as the purge, Hernández also said that the process of selecting and training officers would be made more rigorous. Officers will also receive more social benefits – such as housing – in an effort to prevent them from being corrupted by criminal elements. And, in a bid to signal the seriousness of its intent, the Hernández government is enlisting external help. According to the minister for the presidency, Reinaldo Sánchez, the national defence and security council and the G-16 group of countries and donors will meet to discuss a roadmap for international support.

While the Hernández administration reacted swiftly to the latest allegations and the national police commander, Leonel Sauceda, issued a public apology, there remains a serious question over the inability of the Honduran State, over successive administrations, to deal with rampant corruption in the police force, and the widespread infiltration by organised crime and transnational drug trafficking gangs of both the security forces and the judiciary. This latest case comes just weeks after the murders of two high profile environmental activists in the country, in which corrupt police elements have also been implicated.

Efforts by Hernández’s predecessor, President Porfirio Lobo (2010-2014), to clean up the force failed, running into legal obstacles. At the time, Hernández was the (hard-line) president of congress, gaining a reputation for himself after he moved in December 2010 against the supreme court’s constitutional chamber, which was minded to block Lobo’s security plans. Nonetheless, the Lobo government’s efforts to tackle the country’s widespread insecurity and improve policing, which included rolling out a new military police force, Policía Militar de Orden Público (PMOP, Public Order Military Police) and the creation of an élite rapid-response police unit specialised in fighting organised crime and terrorism, Tropa de Inteligencia y Grupos de Respuesta Especial de Seguridad (Tigres, Intelligence & Special Response Security Groups), appear to have made little difference, ultimately, to the ongoing institutional corruption problem in the PNH. The country’s security situation has improved, at least as far as officially reported homicide figures are concerned, but citizens and businesses still exist under severe threat from organised crime and/or corrupt official elements.

The Hernández administration will be under serious pressure to demonstrate that it can take control of the situation, not least because President Hernández last year controversially rejected widespread public and political calls for an internationally-sponsored commission against impunity for Honduras, similar to the United Nations (UN)-backed mission in Guatemala (Cicig).  Instead, he negotiated with the main hemispheric Organization of American States (OAS) and OAS-supported Mission for Support against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (Maccih), whose remit is advisory only, much to the disappointment of some, and to the consternation of the president’s fiercest critics, who have dubbed the whole thing a whitewash.

• Maradiaga Panchamé

El Heraldo did not name the senior police official accused of being the author of the deaths of Arístides González, Landaverde and Chávez, but several other local media outlets later identified him as one René Maradiaga Panchamé. He previously had been linked to a notorious police battalion (Battalion 316) accused of responsibility for an estimated 300 forced disappearances in the 1980s. According to Honduran media, Maradiaga Panchamé was brought into the police by the interim president Roberto Micheletti after the June 2009 coup. Reportedly, he was put on leave in October 2012, having failed new police confidence tests.

• Maccih

The Organization of American States (OAS)-supported Mission for Support against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (Maccih) has only just begun to operate, and so only time will tell as to its effectiveness, but relatives of the best known of the killed environmentalists (Berta Cáceres) have already rejected Maccih assistance for their efforts in the case on the grounds that the body “lacks the capacity to fully investigate”. Instead, the Cáceres family has signalled that it will seek assistance from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).