Honduras
Demilitarization and Other Challenges
Envío team
The Honduran military, considered the main US regional ally in the last decade, has now become, as US Ambassador to Honduras Crescencio Arcos said recently, one of the biggest obstacles to the country's development. Honduras' military spending, which grew 108% since 1980 to an estimated $47 million, now represents 33% of the total national budget. While this bloat has not caused the outright failure of the two-year-old neoliberal structural adjustment plan, it has meant only limited success in meeting its stated goals despite faithful implementation by government technocrats.
Almost all sectors of Honduran society favor demilitarization. It is also pushed by the international lending agencies and even the US Embassy, which means that the armed forces' recently intensified move to avoid it could trip up Honduras' efforts to get foreign financing. The military as a whole, threatened with losing its power in many different spheres, is staunchly opposed.
But some within the army see the handwriting on the wall and are scrambling to control the more secure officer posts. This internal power struggle threatens to create a division within the army itself.
By pressuring Honduras to reduce the size of its armed forces, the US State Department has now, paradoxically, become the main ally of all those struggling to end military impunity, including the popular forces. Washington, however, is also pushing the Honduran government to reduce the size of the entire state apparatus and eliminate its high levels of corruption. This is creating as much resistance among the country's two main political parties as demilitarization has in the armed forces; the parties do not want to alter Honduras' traditional strongman style of government, with all the power and privilege that it has meant.
Meanwhile, the progressive unions and the union coalition called "Platform of Struggle" are beginning to search for a viable way to oppose or counteract the adjustment plan's inequitable economic effects and achieve greater democracy in Honduran society. In their democratization effort, they, too, have a paradoxical ally in the US government, which, for different reasons, is also pushing for more democracy. The US Agency for International Development (AID), for example, is using the space available in Honduras—already relatively greater than in Guatemala and El Salvador—to promote more press freedom and respect for human rights. As part of this effort, it is creating watchdog institutions and financing projects to professionalize both the media and the military.
The military and civil societyThe new thrust toward demilitarization is regional: limit the size of the armies, professionalize what remains so as to reduce what was-in all cases except Nicaragua and Costa Rica-their previously unbridled repressive function, and redefine their role to that of guaranteeing national sovereignty. In large measure, this responds to the neoliberal goal of shrinking the nations' military budgets and fiscal deficits. But the economic crisis within the United States itself has also made it increasingly untenable for Washington to justify its massive financial support to outsized military apparatuses that violate every social tenet the US claims to defend.
Unlike the other repressive armies of the region, the Honduran military has been characterized by more sophisticated and selective use of repression. This image, however, is only relative, and is bolstered by the fact that more international attention has been given to the other countries. Honduran society has also been less violent than those of neighboring countries. The Callejas government, like those preceding it in the democratic transition of the 1980s, combines repression with political flexibility, negotiation and coopting union leaders.
Nonetheless, Honduras' armed forces are among those feeling the pinch from the drastic switch of emphasis affecting the region. Demilitarization is now being put into practice in Panama (a result of the invasion), El Salvador (a requirement of the peace accord negotiations) and Costa Rica (a continuation of the myth of a nation with no armed forces). This leaves only the armies of Guatemala and Honduras in their traditional role of controlling civilian political activity; both continue to repress the popular and leftist sectors and violate their human rights. In Honduras' case, according to the US State Department's most recent report, the armed forces operate with impunity, as demonstrated by their "institutional and legal autonomy, particularly as this refers to security and military affairs."
In opposing a military budget reduction, the army is defending not only its economic interests, but also its control over the government. It currently holds the majority of seats in the National Security Council and has power over appointments to and promotions within state institutions such as customs, immigration, civil aeronautics, traffic, etc. It also has no desire to give civil society the power to supervise its financial affairs or judge the crimes it commits against popular organizations. The army, or at least its top officers, will thus not submit easily to the dictates of political actors who, even if for different reasons, want to see its apparatus reduced.
The Salvadoran peace accords eliminate one of the Honduran military's main arguments for maintaining its high budget. President Callejas himself argued last year that the armed forces in his country could not cut back their troop size until there was peace in the region. In addition, the Honduran guerrilla organization "Lorenzo Zelaya Revolutionary Popular Forces" has now joined an earlier decision of the Cinchoneros Liberation Movement to renounce armed struggle and demobilize its military forces, removing yet another of the army's arguments for its hegemony over civil society—"external" subversion.
Derelativizing human rightsInternational human rights organizations now identify military repression more clearly than ever as aimed at popular movements. The Honduran military, for example, identifies the popular organizations as the most serious "danger" in the country. Last year its violence against Honduras' union and peasant sectors was exemplified by the forced removal of striking workers from the merchandise transport company AMPAC, during which one person was killed and 20 others wounded.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has offered evidence that the rape and murder of a 17-year-old student-teacher named Riccy Mabel Martínez in July last year was committed by Colonel Angel Castillo Maradiaga and other Honduran military personnel. Heavy emphasis on the case by the media and the Honduran Human Rights Commission (CODEH) catalyzed public opinion against military impunity. The case has also provided decisive proof that the Honduran judicial system is ineffectual, since civil courts have no jurisdiction over military personnel accused of civil crimes. It has been used as one of the US Embassy's main arguments to pressure the Callejas government to reduce the military budget, professionalize the armed forces and try civil crimes committed by the military in civil courts. In addition, CODEH has charged the army with other human rights violations, such as the killing of activist Marco Tulio López (son of Liduvina Hernández, president of another human rights organization, the Committee of Detained and Disappeared Relatives).
Ganging up on demilitarizationDuring 1991 even Honduran business interests, some politicians, the media and the Catholic Church, as well as the US Embassy and international financing agencies, reached consensus on the need to redefine the role of the Honduras armed forces.
National business interests. Honduran private enterprise, including the Chambers of Commerce in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, has come out in favor of reducing military spending and restructuring the armed forces, calling these necessary steps for "modernizing" the state and sustaining the neoliberal model's economic viability. This sector is also trying to defend its own interests, since various public enterprises being privatized—among them INCEHSA, the state cement company—are passing into the hands of the military.
Political parties. The army continues to count on the firm support of President Rafael Leonardo Callejas and his party, the National Party of Honduras (which is headed by Celín Discua, brother of army chief General Luís Alonso Discua). It has also enjoyed the Liberals' submission, even though they have sought better ties with both the progressive and business sectors, and consider that promoting demilitarization should be part of their 1992 electoral strategy. About the only party so far to confront the army is the Social Democratic PINU; it presented a constitutional reform bill to the National Congress that would replace the armed forces chief with a civilian defense minister. The bill would also prohibit military personnel from opting for responsibilities in the Supreme Court or Congress immediately after retiring from the armed forces. The military rejected the bill in January, arguing that it would "politicize" the armed forces by putting them under the control of a civilian.
The media. The Honduran media, which enjoy more informational freedom and produce higher quality work than those in many other Central American countries, have promoted the demilitarization debate by using their front pages to denounce assassinations, abuse and other human rights violations by the military. During 1991, they focused on military impunity and joined the fight for significant changes in the judicial system.
The Catholic Church. The Bishops' Conference, which has defended the Honduran peasant struggle and led the struggle for justice in general, strongly criticized army repression in an official declaration last October.
The US Embassy. Ambassador Crescencio Arcos, whose harsh criticism of militarism last year was labeled inappropriate by President Callejas, attacked the military again this year by openly demanding demilitarization. He has already announced publicly that US economic aid will be reduced 50% this year. He has also demanded a reduction of the Honduran fiscal deficit (government bureaucracy grew 12% in the 1980s), arguing that the 2% Gross Domestic Product growth registered for 1991 does not contemplate population increase. To keep up with that, Arcos calculated, "Honduras needs a growth rate of at least 4%." (Per-capita growth for 1991 was -2%, according to the Economic Commission on Latin America.) His push to reduce the military budget is obviously backed by other US government agencies such as AID, which designed the structural adjustment plan Honduras has been implementing since March 1990.
International lending agencies. World Bank president Lewis Preston said that the country's excessive military spending must be reduced if it wants to receive more credit. During the most recent Central American Presidents' summit, UNICEF requested the demilitarization of Central America's armies to help resolve the problem of the region's extreme poverty.
These multiple pressures and financial stakes have galvanized the army to seek ways to adapt to the criticism and still maintain itself as a "parallel" power. It has already presented changes in its professional standards, using terms like "modernization," "academic excellence" and "readaptation" of its role in society. Within this overall effort, top-ranking officers are also trying to preserve their own impunity and political clout. Arguing their new doctrine of academic excellence, the high command promoted only 15 of the 35 officers due a higher rank. Of those, seven officers from the sixth "promotion" (the military academy's graduating class) were made generals, thus concentrating this group's power in the Armed Forces Superior Council (COSUFA).
The first dangerous reaction to this has emerged from within the army's own ranks; the subalterns fear that they will not be promoted and get their "slice of the pie." After the recent coup attempt in Venezuela by a military splinter group, this discontent among the intermediate ranks could boomerang. While the high command is busy trying to dilute last year's attacks against it from the outside, the possibility of an internal coup within the military itself is now on the agenda.
During 1991, the army won all its battles. This year, one of its first ploys was to keep alive the idea that it is still needed to fight against the now extinct and previously dubious "external threat": its National Directorate of Investigation claims to have "discovered" a "people's jail."
The recently inaugurated National Defense College has joined the search for arguments to avoid demilitarization. For example, the military top brass promised to create "green battalions" to fight environmental destruction. Unemployed workers are being brought into the army and deployed to carry out this and other "socially responsible" tasks, such as assuring that poor neighborhoods have chlorinated their water containers. By so doing, they are not only taking over tasks that properly belong to civil society, but their style leaves a bit of social consciousness and popular education to be desired. If the water does not taste of chlorine, they announce that they will return in a week and smash the container if it still lacks the purifier. It is unlikely that the army will deceive anyone by arguing that its new enemies are poverty, hunger and disease, particularly when it functions as if its real enemies are the poor, the hungry and the diseased.
Structural adjustment: An early evaluationVarious economic analysts consider Honduras a good test case for applying the neoliberal structural adjustment program. One of its most propitious elements is its cheap and "domesticated" labor force, accustomed to seeking negotiated solutions and rejecting confrontation.
As in the other countries of the region, the implementation of the structural adjustment in Honduras showed mixed macroeconomic results in 1991. According to the Economic Commission on Latin America, inflation in 1991 was 33.2%, down slightly from its 1990 rate of 36.4%. As in Nicaragua last year, the government intervened to control some prices, which helped lower inflation, though far less than in Nicaragua. (See charts in "Neoliberalism in Central America," in last month's envío, for additional data.)
The devaluation of the lempira converted the Honduran labor force into the cheapest one in Latin America, according to a 1990 study of the Caribbean Basin. According to Ambassador Arcos, that devaluation and a tax cut made possible last year's 2% GDP growth. But some entrepreneurs have criticized the plan for disproportionately benefiting the export sector.
Coffee prices remained relatively stable in 1991, although the volume of Honduras' coffee production dropped. Small and medium producers, who control most coffee production, benefited from government credit incentives aimed at encouraging cooperative members to sell their coffee as individuals. This attracted new members to their Association of Coffee Producers (APROCAFE), but their newfound strength will be adversely affected by this year's catastrophic drop in international coffee prices.
The more than tenfold increase in international banana prices especially benefited Honduras, which is still the fourth largest banana producer in the world. But this has come at the cost of again becoming a "banana republic," since foreign multinationals are regaining control of production, shipping and marketing.
Despite the windfall profit in bananas, overall exports were down nearly 5% in 1991, and the proclaimed "year of economic takeoff," announced by President Callejas as the second phase of the structural adjustment plan, did not happen. Making matters worse, corruption among officials responsible for implementing the plan grew so much that a fiscal audit commission was recently created to investigate corruption cases. It remains to be seen if this commission is a smokescreen to hide corruption or will make a serious effort to clean up the state bureaucracy.
Another major problem is that Honduras has been unable to stabilize its balance of payments. According to independent economic analyses, half of its public debt will have to be pardoned in order to make more positive results possible.
Nevertheless, the multilateral lending agencies view the government as having satisfactorily implemented the adjustment plan they imposed. In January, Honduras received another loan from the International Development Bank, for $215 million, to modernize the state energy enterprise, make it more efficient and thus ready it for privatization—a scheme in line with the neoliberal plan for the whole continent.
The coin's other sideThe results of Honduras' adjustment plan so far are similar to other experiences in the region: some relatively good macroeconomic results, but with a significant deterioration in the population's living standards. The popular sectors continue resisting the plan in response to increasing evidence of the widening gap between rich and poor. There is growing recognition that the only beneficiaries are big capital, mainly exporters.
The "adjustment" of the population at large has resulted in the growth of the informal sector, made up mainly of unemployed workers but also of diverse middle-level professionals. Six maquila industry parks have attracted women textile workers away from this sector, but working conditions have deteriorated drastically since the maquilas first opened a few years ago.
Another escape valve from the government's economic policy has been remittances from relatives in the United States. Honduras' stream of migrants is turning into a river, as the country's poor increasingly join other regional adventurers who risk everything to become part of the "American dream."
The main impact on the popular sectors will be the blow to agrarian reform recently passed into law. The new Agricultural Modernization and Development Law gives free rein to the privatization and transnationalization of land by permitting the sale of agrarian reform cooperatives. Such "privatization" of national lands is, by itself, the law's most far-reaching measure. The bill was designed by AID and the World Bank to restructure the agricultural sector under the parameters of neoliberalism, weakening and shrinking the cooperative movement.
The transnational banana companies' campaign to buy lands from the agrarian reform sector accelerated during 1991, given the dazzling international price increase for this fruit. Nine cooperatives on top-quality land, burdened with unpayable debts to the National Agricultural Development Bank (BANADESA), were forced to sell out to the transnationals or enter into co-investment agreements with them. In both cases, they lost control of their lands. Various factors had contributed to their financial difficulties, including denial of credits and the privatization of technical assistance. In some cases, BANADESA later pardoned the new owners' acquired mortgage.
Lacking support from Congress to block the sale of agrarian reform lands, Juan Ramón Martínez, former director of the National Agrarian Institute, appealed directly to the banana companies, persuading them to limit future purchases to virgin lands or those dedicated to crops other than bananas (such as cotton, which has virtually disappeared). This "gentlemen's agreement" was broken in October, however, when a transnational bought the Guanchias banana cooperative for $37 million.
This situation has motivated several peasant protests. In October, a thousand peasants from the National Farm Workers Federation in Santa Barbara participated in one such protest. Peasant groups in the Coordinating Council of Peasant Organizations (COCOCH) held protests in September and October, which included taking over highways to prevent the passage of the Agricultural Development and Modernization bill. Nevertheless, the government managed to break COCOCH's unity in December, when various peasant organizations signed the "Concertación Act," agreeing to a reformed bill. The new version suffered no significant changes when it was debated and passed by the National Congress in February.
The avarice of the multinational banana companies, which extracted juicy earnings last year, could lead to serious confrontations with the peasantry once lands begin to be scarce and the money the peasants received for selling their lands disappears. The passage of the agrarian problem from state hands to private national and multinational enterprises could even lead to massacres similar to the 1970s. The Agricultural Modernization and Development Law could thus ultimately dynamize the peasant and agricultural worker movement in the medium run, and even possibly breathe more life into efforts to build a broad movement leading toward the creation of a popular party. Few concrete advances occurred in this area in 1991, but popular protests continued on the rise. The main missing ingredient is the lack of a left alternative.
The popular movement: An ambivalent responseIn addition to the peasant protests, other demonstrations were organized by progressive sectors and by the "Platform of Struggle for the Democratization of Honduras," but none of this has yet endangered the application of the neoliberal strategy.
The "Platform of Struggle" presents itself as an expression of unity and a projection of the organized movement in this new period, but has not been able to constitute itself as a real alternative. It is, in fact, an expression of a broad and loose alliance, still stuck at the level of generalities.
The Platform's link with the unorganized sectors is still weak, and it continues to accept the government's rules of the game. Some critics charge that it has only served to legitimate the government's project of negotiations and concertación between business and unions. For example, such negotiations led to a 28% minimum wage increase in July, for which President Callejas took credit. (Even this fell short of matching the increased cost of living due to inflation.)
These limitations are partly due to continuing ideological differences and differing ideas about what union strategy to follow, despite counseling on the effects of the neoliberal economic policy from the College of Economists. The popular movement in general still does not know whether to reject the adjustment plan and try to design an alternative or simply accept it as a reality and fight for adjustments that would ameliorate its disastrous effects on the poorer sectors. As a broad alliance, the Platform cannot reasonably be expected to transcend that fundamental ambivalence in the movement as a whole.
The Honduran government has always put special effort into isolating and selectively repressing the small revolutionary left, even though it has not rooted itself among the popular sectors or been able to prepare an authentic popular project. The government's goal is to avoid just such a thing happening. As an example, it offered no strong response to the general amnesty decreed by the National Congress in July, even though in 1990 the popular movement had designated as one of its major issues the fight to prevent that amnesty from including military personnel involved in civil crimes.
The government is continuing its policy of coopting union leaders, reducing the political arena to a debate among elites of the left or the right and eliminating "radical" options for this decade. But although the organized left is in the minority, there is hope for the Honduran popular movement. It has achieved at least minimal unity against the neoliberal project.
The strike by STENEE, the National Energy Enterprise union, was an exceptional case. From its beginning last April, this strike was both a specific protest against the firing of 800 workers and a confrontation with the neoliberal project over the 65% rise in consumer rates. Unlike other union battles, which were strictly economic and only benefited the workers in one workplace, the STENEE strike was clearly seen as one in which consumers, particularly the poorest ones, would be the beneficiaries. STENEE proposed to the government that big consumers absorb the energy rate hike prescribed by the International Monetary Fund. Even though the government—with the IMF's own blessing—conceded to this demand, STENEE got the spotlight as the defender of the poor, and its action was very popular.
The new valuing of land has also politicized the ecological issue, particularly after the government announced that it had signed a contract with the Stone Container Company allowing it to exploit 15,000 square kilometers of forests in the Honduran Mosquitia (the departments of Gracias a Dios, Olancho and Yoro). In exchange for the 40-year concession of what amounts to 15% of national territory, the government would get 5,000 jobs and $18 million annually in tax payments.
Since this zone is considered one of the world's richest ecosystems, its possible destruction to enrich a US transnational set off national and international protest. Domestic environmental organizations were even threatened with losing their legal status if they continued building public opposition to the contract. The issue became still more polemical when two high-level government officials were accused of soliciting payoffs from Stone to assure it would get the contract.
In the end the government was forced to retreat in a manner similar to the Nicaraguan government in the Taiwan case. First, it said it had only signed a letter of intent, not a contract, then announced that no agreement has been reached at all. Both governments, it appears, want to have clean hands for the big international environmental conference to be held in Brazil in June. The protest around this issue served as yet another catalyst for protests against the neoliberal project.
The discontent within the army, the fight for demilitarization, the elimination of the agrarian reform and the handing over of natural resources to the transnationals, as well as the advances made toward building a popular movement that would join the organized forces with the unorganized majority make up the panorama of serious confrontations in 1991. They are also the main elements of the conflict between a government that rules by selective repression and cooptation of union elites and a popular movement that is now beginning to search for an alternative to the neoliberal project.
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