Caribbean & Central America - July 2017 (ISSN 1741-4458)

“Honduras has found its way again”, President Juan Orlando Hernández declared on 10 July, announcing that on current projections the homicide rate was set to drop by 10 percentage points by year-end. Ahead of his bid for re-election in November, Hernández took full credit for the improvement. Yet other public officials acknowledge that the reality on the ground remains quite difficult, not least for Honduran women.

In a statement, the office of the presidency noted that Honduras had registered the strongest improvement of the Northern Triangle countries in the 2017 Global Peace Index, compiled since 2007 by the Australia-headquartered Institute for Economics & Peace. While the Northern Triangle (comprising El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), along with Mexico, is rated as an area with ‘Significant Societal Safety and Security Concerns’, the latest Global Peace report notes that Honduras registered the strongest improvement (and in the region as a whole) thanks to improvements in indicators feeding into the index such as ‘political terror’, ‘financial contributions to United Nations peacekeeping missions’ and ‘impact of terrorism’. “The country has benefitted from government efforts to combat crime”, the report notes, although it also comments that scores for indicators such as ‘homicide rate’ are still among the highest in the world.

According to the Violence Observatory (OV) at the Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), on the basis of first half data the national homicide rate could end 2017 at a rate of 50.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. The homicide rate peaked at 90.4 per 100,000 in 2012, making Honduras the world's most murderous country, inclusive of war zones. By 2015, the rate was down to 60.0 per 100,000 residents, and that remained largely stable at 59 in 2016.

By any standards, that is still a shockingly high civilian murder rate. The OV recorded an eye-watering 1,997 homicides in the first half of 2017, based on national police statistics, compared with 2,574 in the year-earlier period, meaning 577 fewer deaths. For most countries, 577 murders a year would be considered an epidemic of violence. Honduras averages 333 a month.

Hernández, who upon taking office in late January 2014 declared war on crime, has taken a hard-line (mano dura) approach to security, with heavy use of the military, which with he has strong ties. The Honduran military, in turn, has a cooperative relationship with the US military, which has long maintained a regional forward operating base in Honduras and provides assistance with anti-drug trafficking operations and also with military training, for example. With efforts to clean up and reform the long discredited (and deeply corrupted) national police force making only fitful progress, this reliance on the military has only intensified since 2014, prompting some complaints about the militarisation of the country under the stoutly conservative right-wing Hernández administration. And while the headline homicide rate has come down, violence and crime (organised and gang-related) remains rife, and citizen insecurity high.

In particular, violence against human rights and environmental defenders has increased rather than decreased in recent years, while journalists also still work in very dangerous circumstances. The most recent ‘State of the World’ human rights report by Amnesty International, published on 21 February, noted that Honduras remained one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America for human rights defenders, especially for environmental and land activists. And an earlier report published on 31 January by the UK-based NGO Global Witness claimed that Honduras had the highest number per capita of killings of environmental and land activists in the world, with more than 120 killed since 2010. In similar vein, some 60 journalists were murdered from the Honduran coup in June 2009 to 2015, leading to major international pressure on the Tegucigalpa government.

Femicides are also a very big problem. According to latest data from the Honduran human rights commissioner and public ombudsman, Roberto Herrera Cáceres, 5,000 women were killed in Honduras between 2006 and June 2017, with a 90% impunity rate. Of those 5,000 deaths, 1,660, or a full third, were recorded since 2014, which makes for a rather strong indictment of the Hernández government. Indeed, Herrera himself questioned the lack of preventative strategies in place, and noted that it was of additional concern that these women were dying in very violent and bloody circumstances. While Herrera did not say what percentage of the deaths were explicitly categorised as femicides, he stressed that femicide was “a flagrant violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women” and “an evident manifestation of the persistent inequality and gender discrimination in the country”.

He added that the increase in violent deaths of women, and the brutality with which they are being killed, “puts under serious question the strengthening of the state of law, especially with regard to the non-application of the principal of equality of human rights, and in respect of continuing impunity”.

“We are concerned about the persistence of non-diligent and insufficient state action, in which there are no strategies of a preventative and investigative nature, which contributes to the predominance of impunity”, he noted. Herrera called on those responsible for security for “more effectiveness in their actions”, including to “deal with those responsible and put them before the courts”. In 2016, Herrera noted, his office received 12 reports a day, on average, of violence against women. “We are trying to see how the State can improve its policies of prevention and investigation, and how also to deliver structural change, starting from childhood, in how to create respect for women”, he stated.

• Gender violence

In 2015, according to the human rights commissioner, 478 Honduran women died in violent circumstances, followed by 466 in 2016, with a further 4,529 subjected to violations of their human rights. Of those, 2,796 were the victims of domestic or inter-family violence, sexual violence and death threats. The other 1,733 denounced violations of their labour, health and education rights and their right to access justice.

• Edwin Rivera Paz

The prosecutor's office in the Mexican state of Veracruz confirmed that a Honduran video journalist, Edwin Rivera Paz, was shot to death in the town of Acayucan on 9 July. Rivera Paz apparently had fled Honduras after his colleague and well-known journalist Igor Padilla was killed in January. Padilla was shot by four men in police uniforms in San Pedro Sula, still one of the most violent cities in the world. Padilla specialised in reporting on organised crime and also hosted a TV show (‘Los Verduleros’). Rivera was his cameraman. Veracruz is known as the most deadly state for journalists in Mexico. Acayucan is a transit town for Central American migrants fleeing north. It was unclear how long Rivera Paz had been in the area.