Caribbean & Central America - October 2018

The Partido Liberal (PL), one of Honduras’s two traditional parties, has now spent nine years trying and failing to rediscover its moral and political compass after the June 2009 coup ejecting President Manuel Zelaya (PL, 2006-2009). A full dissolution of the party is not beyond the realms of possibility.

On 26 September, the PL withdrew from the United Nations (UN)-brokered dialogue aimed at addressing the post-electoral crisis in the country. The dialogue, which was restarted in late August (having previously stalled in April), aims to find a solution to the political crisis that erupted in the aftermath of the November 2017 general election. President Juan Orlando Hernández was controversially re-elected, along with the ruling Partido Nacional (PN), amid allegations of widespread electoral fraud by the opposition runner-up, Salvador Nasralla.

The PL’s decision to quit the dialogue is linked to a deepening internal crisis inside the party, after the party’s central executive council (CCEPL) expelled 17 of the PL’s 26 national deputies. The 17 were expelled for failing to toe the party line on a vote to intervene in the Honduran national registry office (RNP). Overhaul of the discredited RNP (so as to improve electoral transparency) is one of the topics being discussed by the working tables set up under the UN-brokered dialogue to address the post-electoral crisis.

The PL’s 2017 candidate and now party president, Luis Zelaya, has ruffled feathers inside the traditional party since he took the presidential nomination as an outsider (in November 2016) and has sought to shake up and rebuild the party which fell apart after the June 2009 coup against Manuel Zelaya.

Much weakened, the PL’s congressional bench in recent years has been something of a bloc-for-hire. While nominally an opposition force, some factions (more conservative) have given ad-hoc support to the PN in support of the Hernández’s government’s legislative agenda, thereby neutralising the radical left-wing opposition now led by Manuel Zelaya with his new party, Libertad y Refundación (Libre). At other times, the PL bench has opposed the PN, along with Libre and the rest of the opposition. Much of its behaviour has been opportunistic and lacking in political or policy coherence.

Luis Zelaya, formerly an academic, won the PL’s presidential nomination in November 2016 with a pledge to tackle corruption, renew the party and return it to office. However, his message failed to translate and he came a distant third in the presidential race, with barely 15% of the vote. Since then, his position at the party helm has been questioned from within. PL congressional deputies remain opportunistically inclined to position themselves with the PN when it suits their own political interests, in defiance of Luis Zelaya’s efforts to enforce stronger discipline on the party from the top down.

Meanwhile, on 28 August, the day after the new UN-backed dialogue got underway, the attorney general’s office (AG) ordered the seizure of PN and PL assets, including both parties’ headquarters. The AG’s move is part of the investigation into the ‘Pandora Case’, unveiled in June by the AG and the Organization of American States (OAS)-sponsored Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (Maccih), which has implicated the ruling elite, including President Hernández, in suspected corruption.

Made public in June, investigators allege that some HL282m (US$11.7m) in public funds meant for various agricultural and industrial projects was used instead to finance the political campaigns of both the PN and PL ahead of the 2013 general election (won by Hernández). According to an AG press release, the seized assets included 46 properties and nine businesses. Thus far, 38 people have been charged on suspicion of crimes including the abuse of authority, fraud, embezzlement and money laundering. Those charged include national deputies Rodolfo Irías Navas (former congress president, 1990-1994) and José Celín Discua, both from the PN, as well as the former vice president (2006-2009) and former presidential candidate Elvin Santos, a leading figure in the PL and its congressional bench leader.

This latest incident is another example of these simmering tensions between Luis Zelaya and the party base. Zelaya said the 17 deputies had failed to comply with a party instruction as to which candidate to support as the PL’s representative on the board being set up to intervene in the RNP. Notably included among the 17 is Santos.

Instead of supporting his choices (which included his brother, Roberto Zelaya Medrano), the 17 voted instead for Norman Roy Hernández, a PL-aligned former manager of the national telecommunications commission (Conatel). The other members of the commission, which has three years to sort out the RNP ahead of the next (2021) general election include: Rolando Kattán, an engineer aligned with the ruling PN; and Óscar Rivera, who served as secretary of electoral affairs for Libre. Also appointed as alternates were: Roberto Montenegro, a lawyer aligned with the Partido Alianza Patriótica; and Gonzalo Fuentes, a lawyer and former legislative candidate for the Partido Democracia Cristiana (PDC).

A few days later, on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York, the UN’s resident coordinator for Honduras, Igor Garafulic, expressed hope that the PL’s withdrawal would be temporary only. Highlighting that the UN had worked hard in the previous seven months to bring together the political parties participating in the dialogue, he stressed that dialogue is the only way through the crisis. The talks are centred on four working tables set up to focus on: the controversial 2017 electoral process and its contested results; the pre- and post- electoral violence (in which almost two dozen lost their lives in clashes with the security forces); electoral and constitutional reforms to address the deficiencies in the system alleged by the opposition and external experts and the Honduran State’s continuing poor record on human rights.

Garafulic said he hoped that the PL would return to the table before its scheduled conclusion in October. “We launched a dialogue in August, it’s not eternal, there are two months to work, two months to show results, this is not a dialogue to lose time or gain time,” he stressed, in what might be interpreted as an aside at the PL. “One month from the start, over 40 issues have been analysed, there has been much progress, and there is room now to find consensus,” he underlined. As regards the intervention in the national registry, Garafulic stressed the need “to be optimistic” with the committee appointed by the Honduran congress.

However, Garafulic’s optimism may be misplaced. The crisis in the PL looks set to intensify; the 17 expelled deputies immediately lodged a complaint against the CCEPL’s decision with the electoral court (TSE). On 28 September, the CCEPL itself appeared to backtrack, saying that while it had received a verbal complaint by party president Luis Zelaya, the 17 had not been expelled and the party’s disciplinary committee would be the ultimate arbiter. That announcement was made by the CCEPL’s vice president, Mariel Espinoza. Given that Zelaya himself is president of the CCEPL, this announcement by Espinoza amounts to an open gesture of defiance and suggests that PL party support for him is rapidly faltering, from top to bottom. Against this backdrop, it is very unclear whether the PL will be in any position to re-join the UN-backed dialogue.

Hydroelectric projects

Two years after the murder of leading environmental and indigenous activist Berta Cáceres, hydroelectric investment continues. Ongoing investment in hydroelectric projects in Honduras will total US$155m this year, Salomón Ordóñez, president of the national Association of Energy Producers and energy advisor to the influential Honduran Private Investment Council (Cohep), told the daily La Tribuna on 29 September.

Located mostly in the north of the country, most of the projects are mixed ventures between national and foreign investors. In total, these projects will put around 100MW of clean energy into production in coming years, Ordóñez noted.

Most of this capital is going into two flagship projects. One is the US$400m 200MW Tornillito project on the Ulúa river. This scheme is sited in Villanueva municipality, Cortés department, with work due to get underway in the second half of this year. In a separate interview with La Tribuna earlier in the year Ordóñez said the Tornillito project – which is being part-financed by regional development banks – would create work for between 2,000 and 3,000 people, with the scheme due to be operative by 2021.

The other is the 60MW El Yaguala-Arenal I-II hydroelectric scheme, under construction in the Bajo Aguán (the lower valley of the Aguán river), between the municipalities of Arenal and Olanchito in Yoro department. The project consists of a 93m-high dam. The project is due for completion in or around 2020.

According to the 29 September report in La Tribuna, hydro companies claim that social conflicts relating to various projects have resulted in the delay or paralysis of US$450m in investment in recent years, something the business-friendly and pro-investment Hernández government is keen to resolve.

The timing of Ordóñez’s comments risk being interpreted as very insensitive, coming as they did just days after the long-awaited Cáceres murder trial was thrown into disarray after the trial judges were formally accused of abuse of authority and a cover-up.

The trial of eight men accused of Cáceres’s murder in March 2016 was postponed after the legal team representing Cáceres’s family requested that the three judges be recused and replaced. Cáceres, a recipient in 2015 of the prestigious Goldman Prize for her environmental conservation efforts, had spearheaded a long running protest against the Agua Zarca hydro project in Río Blanco, straddling the departments of Intibucá and Santa Bárbara in western Honduras.

The 22MW Agua Zarca on the Gualcarque river was being built by a Honduran corporation, DESA. On 2 May 2016, DESA’s manager for social and environmental affairs was arrested as part of the investigation into the Cáceres murder and is among the eight on trial. Two of the principal international financiers, the Dutch development bank FMO and the Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation (Finnfund), subsequently quit the project. Two German manufacturers, Voith and Siemens, also withdrew as component suppliers in 2017. In May this year, the Cáceres family and the organisation founded by Cáceres, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (Copinh), announced joint legal action against FMO for its support of the Agua Zarca project.

Notwithstanding the major international disrepute heaped upon country over the Cáceres case, it is questionable whether much has changed on the ground. The government’s apparent continued lack of engagement with local communities remains the subject of intense criticism, not only by the communities themselves but also by local and international NGOs and human rights groups. And the protracted legal difficulties with the Cáceres trial do little to assuage concerns about the rampant impunity in the country for even the most appalling of violent crimes. Against this backdrop, and despite the infrastructure opportunities being touted by the government, foreign investors will need to approach Honduran concessions with particular care.

• RNP director resigns

In response to the congressional vote to intervene, the RNP director, José Miguel Villeda Villela, resigned, effective as of 1 October, on the grounds that the intervention was unconstitutional. He asserted that the national congress had no legal mandate for such a measure. Villeda had been appointed to the post in May 2014 and was due to finish his term in May 2019.