Honduras Human Rights Abuses Worse: One Year After President Lobo Took Office.
In recent remarks on U.S.-Latin American relations
made at the Brookings Institute, Arturo Valenzuela, a State Department official
with responsibility for the region, commented that Honduras, two years
removed from a coup that U.S. officials on the ground called illegal, had “made
significant progress in strengthening democratic governance…[and] promoting
national reconciliation...”
Viewing the situation on the ground here in Honduras, one
can only wonder where the Assistant Secretary is getting his information. In
fact, as President Porfirio Lobo Sosa approaches the anniversary of his first
year in office, the reverse is true. Gross violations of human rights directed
against activists, opposition leaders and journalists reveal a government that
is far removed from democracy and a nation that is far from reconciling.
Only two days after Valenzuela’s remarks, a resistance
leader named Juan Chinchilla was abducted at gunpoint by masked men in police
and military uniforms. After suffering two days of being burned, beaten
and interrogated he was able to escape in the night. In an interview
after his kidnapping, Chinchilla stated that his interrogators had numerous
surveillance photos of himself and other resistance leaders.
Indeed, reports of political murders, kidnappings
and torture are common here and resistance leaders report constant
surveillance. While there are no official counts, we have learned of 36
activists and leaders murdered since Lobo took office. At least 50 other
people were killed in political violence for simply in the wrong place at the
wrong time. In addition, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
reports it received information that the children of anti-coup forces were
being kidnapped, attacked and threatened as a strategy to silence the
resistance.
Unprecedented violence against journalists is not an
indicator of democratic governance and reconciliation. According to the
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), eight journalists were killed in the
first half of Lobo’s first year in office, prompting Reporters Without Borders
to name Honduras the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.
Another disturbing development in the wake of the coup
has been an increase of violence directed against LGBT activists, many of whom
are associated with the opposition to the coup and have played a vital
organizing role in the resistance. The pattern is continuing in 2011. The
International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission reported that since the
beginning of January three transgendered people were murdered. Since Pam has
been in Honduras two more murders of members of the LGBT community have been
reported.
In the midst of this escalating political violence,
Assistant Secretary Valenzuela’s blithe comment is disturbingly
dissonant. Rather than provide cover for the regime the State Department
should use its influence to consistently and publically denounce politically
motivated violence and the systematic violation of human rights and, as thirty
members of Congress requested of the administration last October, they must cut
off U.S. assistance to Honduran authorities, particularly the police and
military. Then, maybe, we can talk about “progress” in Honduras.