The Thugocracy Next Door
The Thugocracy Next Door
By DANA FRANK
February 27, 2014
Early on the morning of Oct. 23, more than 50 members of Honduras’s new military police force surrounded Edwin Espinal’s house in the capital, Tegucigalpa, using trucks and police cars to block off access to his home. The officers were clad in riot gear, with black balaclavas pulled over their faces and assault rifles at the ready. Supposedly looking for arms or other contraband, they searched and trashed Espinal’s house, breaking at least 15 doors inside and out. They found no arms. They found no drugs. Espinal went into hiding.
Espinal, a Honduran opposition activist, had been captured once before and tortured by the police in 2010, targeted for his ongoing opposition to the June 2009 military coup that deposed Manuel Zelaya, Honduras’s democratically elected president. At the request of the Organization of American States’ human rights commission, Espinal had for a time received protective security from the Honduran government. But he remained active in the opposition, and the police kept harassing him. After the raid, the chilling effect was clear.
This is daily life for Hondurans since the coup, as their government runs roughshod over the rule of law and terrorizes the opposition, all the while apparently allowing drug traffickers to insinuate themselves into the highest levels of the national congress and even the presidential administration. In the months after Zelaya’s overthrow, Porfirio Lobo, a former lawmaker from the country’s conservative National Party, assumed the presidency through an election that was boycotted by almost all the Honduran opposition and dismissed as illegitimate by major international observers. He then swiftly reappointed to top government positions military figures who had carried out the coup in the first place.
Over the objections of much of the rest of Latin America, the United States recognized the election as legitimate even before the polls had closed, appearing to push back against the Zelaya administration’s alliances with left-leaning Latin American governments that had come to power in the previous decade. Since then, Washington has continued to legitimize and support the coup-regime government, which has been a spectacular human rights disaster: The United Nations has said Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, and Reporters Without Borders has named the country one of the most dangerous for journalists. Even the Honduran government acknowledges that its police and military have ties to drug traffickers and organized crime. But U.S. funding for the forces, under the auspices of fighting crime and drug trafficking, has nonetheless increased annually since a brief, partial hiatus in 2009—reaching approximately $27 million in 2012, and at least that in 2013. (The United States also has an air base in the country, at Soto Cano, for which it paid $25 million in 2011 to upgrade the facilities, on top of $89 million for military operations in the country.)
More:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/honduras-the-thugocracy-ext-door-103883.html#ixzz31C62r5Rb
