Dangers of activism in Honduras

A recent report from the Groupo Asesor de Personas Expertas (International Expert Advisory Panel) details collusion between Honduran security forces and business interests that led to the 2016 murder of Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous activist.  Cáceres led the fight against the Agua Zarca Dam, a joint Honduran-Chinese project to dam the Gualcarque River, a site sacred to the Lenca people whose land the river runs through. A member of the Lenca, Cáceres was a co-founder of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). With the support of COPINH, she filed complaints with the Honduran government, brought the case in front of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission,  filed petitions with the projects international funders, and organized peaceful protests against the dam.

Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work fighting the Agua Zarca Dam, and their coverage of the award gives a good summary of the situation. Environmental activists are particularly vulnerable to repression in Honduras. After the 2009 coup, the new government set aside close to one third of the country’s land for mining concessions. Dam projects like Agua Zarca grew from the need to provide power to these new mining projects. When Cáceres organized an peaceful blockade that stopped construction of the dam for over a year, the Honduran government sent in the armed forces. Activists accuse Honduran armed forces personnel and private militarized security forces hired by private business interests of torturing and attacking protestors and murdering Tomas Garcia, a community leader who was shot during a protest at the dam office. Dam construction effectively halted in 2013 as investors started to pull out of the project, but Cáceres continued to receive death threats long after the protests ended. She was killed in her own home in 2016. Police initially reported her death was the result of a robbery.

Insight Crime coverage of the new report on Cáceres’ murder asserts that this investigation into her death adds to a growing mass of evidence of coordination between Honduran government and business elites to commit criminal acts meant to protect their interest. Text messages between state officials and business elites provide particularly damning evidence that high-level executives and state agents played a role in the assassination and the subsequent coverup. Evidence from other cases briefly discussed by Insight Crime also implicate Honduran elites in drug trafficking and other organized crime activities.

Importance of a free press in El Salvador

To continue a series of posts discussing El Salvador, I want to draw attention to the Washington Office on Latin America‘s (WOLA) collection of documents covering the current situation there.

One of the most recent among these is a podcast covering differences between mano dura (iron fist) policies of the early 2000s to the more recent death squads targeting alleged gang members and other young people. It covers the evidence for independently operating death squads within the Salvador state, as well as discussing the independent media coverage of gang violence in El Salvador. It’s a fascinating discussion, and well worth a few minutes of your time.

A truly free press is a linchpin in a well-functioning democracy, and the discussion in the WOLA podcast of the news media in El Salvador is useful in highlighting the role the news plays in politics. El Salvador has a limited media landscape constrained by the monopolization of news media by conservative forces within the country. Up until recently, the right-wing political party ARENA has had a stranglehold on content production. Media holding owned by three families dominate television and newspaper outlets. Despite the rise of the opposition party, the FMLN, to the presidency in 2009 and 2013, alternative voices within the news media are restricted to a daily newspaper with low circulation and two independent online news sources, El Faro and ContraPunto. These independent news sources produce in-depth investigative reporting, but have limited reach inside El Salvador. Despite a need for disseminating news stories such as those uncovering death squads within the Salvadoran police, online news media does not have reach radio and television do, and alternative media outlets have faced marginalization and criticism by both ARENA and the FMLN. Evidence suggests mainstream news organizations exercise self-censorship as journalists attempt to avoid offending powerful advertisers. Thus, only a small subsection of Salvadorans have access to alternative news sources.

My research on the news media and public attitudes toward crime control policy highlights the importance of a balanced, open, and democratic media environment. When a monopolistic media landscape restricts what news outlets can report, or when journalists self-censor due to threats from the politically or criminally powerful, the news gets distorted. Distorted news, in turn, can have a profound political impact.

MS-13 labeled priority target by Trump Administration

The specter of MS-13 continues to be a lucrative political tool for the Trump administration. On October 23, the White House announced MS-13 is a top priority for U.S. law enforcement countering organized crime. In an official statement, Attorney General Jeff Sessions described the street gang as a dangerous threat to domestic security. Sessions included MS-13 among the international organized crime groups and drug cartels the current administration blames for an alarming rise in opioid addiction. Such organizations are the focus of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). This renewed emphasis on treating MS-13 as an transnational organized crime group allows the OCDETF to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as a tool for prosecuting MS-13 members.

Designation MS-13 as a transnational organized crime group and placing it among the ranks of international drug cartels flies in the face of empirical evidence (as I’ve written about here, and as an Insight Crime analysis also details). As Insight Crime points out, the 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment places MS-13 far from the center of the drug trade. Despite an increase in the use of Mexican heroin by individuals who have shifted from prescription painkillers to a cheaper alternative, the opioid crisis in the U.S. is a homegrown problem. As Insight Crime emphasizes, there is no evidence MS-13 is involved in opioid trafficking beyond dealing small quantities of heroin or fentanyl on the street.

MS-13 is, however, implicated in a number of violent homicides along the east coast of the U.S. And it is this violence that triggers strong reactions. A renewed focus on MS-13 as a transnational organized crime group gives prosecutors more legal avenues in which to pursue cases against gang members. Yet, as Insight Crime maintains, the rhetoric surrounding the street gang under the Trump administration suggests that labeling the street gang as a brutal and powerful transnational threat to domestic security is a way to distract public discourse away from the domestic causes of the opioid epidemic. MS-13’s infamous hyper-violence makes the gang a good scapegoat for concerns about perceived rises in levels of crime and violence, and politicians have been able to harness this fear to their advantage (see, for example, the current race for governor of Virginia).

MS-13 and U.S. politics

A researcher at the Drug Policy Programme at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) Región Centro in Aguascalientes, Mexico, Sonja Wolf, posted a great piece at NACLA.org recently. An expert on public security and street gangs in Central America, she writes about the misrepresentation of the threat to public security in the U.S. posed by MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha), a notorious street gang often associated with El Salvador. I won’t summarize the entire article here, as it is well worth an in-depth read if you’re interested in Central America, crime control policy, or immigration. What I find the most interesting here is how public policy based on particular images of the “reality” of how this street gang operates creates unintended and often perverse consequences.

Wolf’s analysis rests on the argument that current policies regarding MS-13 in both the U.S. and Central America are ineffective, misguided, and provoke unintended consequences. Anchored on the policies of deportation, mass incarceration, and the militarization of policing, crime control strategies targeting street gangs such as MS-13 have led to the further consolidation and strengthening of the organizations they are intended to combat. According to Wolf, these policies fail in large part due to fundamental misunderstandings of two key aspects of what MS-13 is. Policy makers, particularly in the U.S., refer to the gang as (1) transnational, and (2) linked to organized crime. While MS-13 certainly crosses borders — MS-13 cliques are present in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. — it’s difficult to ascertain whether it actually operates as a transnational organization. A dearth of empirical evidence on how the gang cliques operate makes it difficult to understand whether they maintain strong transnational connections with other affiliated groups. In turn, while both policy makers and the news media link MS-13  to organized crime (or claim it should be considered organized crime itself), the apparent disorganization of the cliques that make up the gang, the non-professional character of its membership, and its only tenuous links to drug trafficking organizations suggest that this is not the case.

Misunderstanding and misrepresentation of MS-13 by both law enforcement and popular media not only have an effect on crime control policy. Politicians in the U.S. have also used the specter of violent street gang members with ties to Central America to push more hard-line immigration policies. President Trump has referred to MS-13 when painting Central American and Mexican immigrants with the broad brush of criminality, a strategy Wolf calls “the rhetorical criminalization of immigrants.” This criminalizing rhetoric is one of the most visible foundations of stronger deportation policies backed by recent executive orders. It also fuels momentum towards more strict policies regarding refugee admissions, particularly for juveniles from Central America. Young people fleeing violence Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, particularly those who arrive as unaccompanied minors, face being misidentified as gang members and deported back to their home countries based on this classification.

Efforts at understanding where street gangs come from, why young men and women join street gangs, and what drives gang-related violence and extortion exist, particularly within academic circles. But laws enforcement and public policy towards street gangs such as MS-13 are often not informed by anthropological, sociological, or political science research on the subject. Wolf writes:

The official portrait of MS-13 depicts the gang as a malignant cancer that expands through undocumented immigration and criminal intent and can be eliminated through incarceration and deportation. Street gangs, however, form in conditions of marginality, and the structures of repression and exclusion need to be dismantled if gang violence is to be reduced sustainably.

This is not to say that gangs like MS-13 don’t pose any threat to the neighborhoods where they operate. But it is imperative to understand how popular images of gangs rather than empirical research underpin public policy, and how these public policies, in turn, further exacerbate the problem.

Moving towards peace in Colombia?

Following in the footsteps of many rebel military organizations before it, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebranded themselves as a political party in the wake of the 2016 peace accord with the Colombian government. The peace deal guarantees some political power for the newly renamed Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común (FARC – Alternative Communal Revolutionary Force), reserving 10 seats in the Colombian Congress for the former guerrillas. The peace process appears to be moving along — demobilization of FARC militants officially ended in September of this year, and during that same month, the Colombian government reached a cease-fire with the next largest guerrilla organization still active, the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (ELN – National Liberation Army).  Yet hostilities between guerrilla factions and the Colombian government continue in other regions.

In December 2016, five FARC commanders were expelled from the former guerrilla group for rejecting the peace agreement. These commanders lead dissident groups of former FARC fighters in a region that sits at the heart of Colombia’s cocaine trade. The Colombia government has promised to treat these factions harshly, and just last week the Colombia military killed one of the dissident commanders. An Insight Crime analysis of the situation suggests several ways to understand the ongoing conflict with the remaining FARC dissidents. The Colombian government sees them as a threat to the peace agreement, not only because the dissidents refuse to lay down their weapons, but also because many who rejected the peace agreement joined organized crime networks. Factions of the FARC became involved with the cocaine trade well before the peace agreement, but the continued involvement of dissident members bolsters arguments made by some critics who see the FARC as an criminal organization. The Colombian government’s emphasis on armed efforts to subdue dissident factions of the FARC also offers the Colombian military a chance to delay potential cuts to post-conflict military budgets. While the military has become increasingly involved with the fight against organized crime in Colombia, civilian law enforcement officials are in command of counter-narcotic operations.

The Insight Crime analysis echoes sentiments expressed by the former head of the FARC, Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, alias “Timochenko,” by stressing the importance of reintegration programs for former FARC fighters. Such programs could stave off rejections of the peace agreement in favor of joining dissident organizations or organized crime networks. However, some experts warn that the reintegration program set up in the peace agreement may leave room for future remilitarization of the former guerrilla fighters. An analysis of the reintegration program found here offers a useful explanation of the potential challenges facing the current reintegration programs, and offers many useful insights into FARC’s demobilization process.

Continued Corruption in Guatemala

Guatemala has seen a number of important milestones in the fight against corruption over the past few years. The 2015 downfall of Otto Pérez Molina, then president of the country, along with his vice-president and many other government ministers, marked a high point in a long battle against corruption and impunity waged by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). CICIG’s investigation into high-placed government officials’ involvement in a customs scam triggered massive demonstrations across Guatemala, which in turn led to Pérez Molina’s resignation, arrest, and prosecution. This victory over deeply entrenched criminal networks within the Guatemalan state renewed the legitimacy of CICIG both within Guatemala and as a model for confronting organized crime across Central America. 

 Now, two years later, the pattern appears to be repeating. The current President of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, faces a new corruption scandal amid rising public protests against impunity. Several government ministers have resigned in protest against the Morales’ administration, who they claim has made it impossible for them to do their jobs as public servants. Although Morales ran as an anti-corruption candidate, campaigning on the slogan “ni corrupto, ni ladrón (neither corrupt, nor a thief),” he now stands in opposition to the CICIG and their work investigating organized crime in Guatemala. Protests against the administration began in earnest when the Guatemalan Congress passed what has been labeled an “anti-impunity” law that would have hobbled campaign finance rules and made it easier for elites to bypass punishment when charged with corruption. The rule was suspended by the Constitutional Court, and many in Congress have since withdrawn their support for the reforms. The Guatemalan Congress also recently voted to uphold Morales’ presidential immunity, which makes him ineligible for prosecution, in light of the CICIG investigation, which claims to have evidence of illicit contributions to Morales’ campaign in 2015. While Congress claims it will be revisiting this decision, Morales currently remains untouchable. The question now is whether we will see a repeat of the massive protests and the surge of anti-corruption sentiment within the ruling elite of Guatemala that led to Pérez Molina’s arrest, or whether Morales will handle the scandal, investigation, and subsequent political crisis differently than his predecessor.

Restarting

After some time lying dormant, this blog is getting a new lease on life. Join me here for a weekly discussion of the latest news about crime and politics in Latin America as seen through the eyes of a political science professor.

Comparing Homicide Statistics in Central America

News coverage of homicides in Central America tends to focus on the alarming trends in some cases – such as El Salvador – where levels of violence are rapidly rising. Even the relatively low murder rates in Costa Rica are making headlines. We should remember, however, that social violence is not on the rise across Central America. In fact, things are getting better even in the infamous Northern Triangle. Guatemalan political scientist Carlos Mendoza tweeted a number of fantastic graphs earlier this month depicting these trends that are worth a closer look. I am including a few here for further inspection. (Full disclosure: Carlos is a friend and fellow Notre Dame alum, as well as a great resource on issues related to Central American politics. You should follow him on twitter!)

Let’s look at homicide trends in the Northern Triangle of Central America:

Despite a disastrous climb in homicide rates starting around 2007, Honduras’ levels of violence seemed to have peaked in 2012. An interesting and important question now is why homicide rates have started to fall. Does this have to do with public policy?

#ViolenciaHomicidaCA Guatemala vs. Honduras 2000-14 pic.twitter.com/uXH9wPNAIL

— Carlos Mendoza Alvarado 🌱 (@camendoza72) January 10, 2016

El Salvador, of course, is a different story. As my previous post suggests, much of the change represents the fallout from the ultimately ineffective gang truce put in place in 2012. You can see the sharp fall and subsequent sharp rise denoting the truce and its aftermath in the graph below.

#ViolenciaHomicidaCA Guatemala vs. El Salvador 2000-14 pic.twitter.com/mCVoEF8Bkb

— Carlos Mendoza Alvarado 🌱 (@camendoza72) January 10, 2016

Finally, what is going on in Guatemala? The final graph, below, shows trends in terms of political administrations. We can see that things started to get better a few years in to Colom’s presidency and continued to improve under Perez Molina – despite their (at least rhetorical) differences on public security policy. Hopefully things will continue to improve under the new Morales administration.

¿Cuántos homicidios dolosos habrá en Guatemala durante la Admon. de Gobierno de Jimmy Morales @jimmymoralesgt? Meta? pic.twitter.com/rJ6EZIj4xq

— Carlos Mendoza Alvarado 🌱 (@camendoza72) January 10, 2016

El Salvador’s Homicides

Since the breakdown of the 2012 gang truce, homicide rates in El Salvador have risen to unprecedented levels. The truce, negotiated between MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang by representatives of the Catholic Church and the Salvadoran government, effectively cut homicide rates in half. Gang leaders promised to stop killing members of rival organizations in return for more human prison conditions and rehabilitation and reinsertion policies. But the cease-fire between gangs lasted only 15 months. Disappearances rose, as did attacks against the police, and the government has moved gang leaders back to high-security prisons. Predictions based on current trends estimate that the homicide rate in El Salvador will surpass 90 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. This translates, on some days, to more than 40 murders a day, up drastically from the average of 5 murders a day during the truce.

I spent time in San Salvador in 2009 and 2010, when homicide rates hovered around between 65 and 70 per 100,000. And yet it is difficult to imagine how this spike in violence has affected day-to-day life for the average citizen.  My current research addresses public support for human rights violations as a method of crime control – the idea that the protection of the human rights of suspected criminals only serves to perpetuate violence. Anecdotal evidence from news reports of the current situation in El Salvador offer evidence for these kinds of attitudes. An article from August 2015 in The Guardian  (also linked to above), for example, demonstrates citizens’ support for harsher policies:

Sebastian Sanchez, a 53-year-old security guard, said he wanted the government to take even tougher measures. “The hard-hand is too soft. The violence is getting worse. Human rights are helping the gangs,” he said.

In turn, as gang vs gang and state vs gang violence rises, so too do rumors of death squads and other forms of vigilantism. Security forces have publicly declared war on street gangs, and the government began to use anti-terrorism laws to prosecute gang members in August. The current government has expressed no interest in revisiting the possibility of another gang truce. So what other options are available to deal with the rising tide of violence? I’ll take this question up in my next post…

El peligro de ser piloto – The Danger of Driving a Bus in Guatemala

Attacks against urban and inter-urban buses are not a new phenomena in Guatemala (although the nature of attacks started to change in the late ’00s). Guatemalan newspapers voiced concerns over violence on public buses in Guatemala City in the early 2000s, and the issue gained international attention following a particularly deadly year in 2009. Violence on buses can often take the form of armed robbery, where assailants steal money collected by the ayudante (fare collector) and threaten passengers to hand over their money, cellphones, and jewelry. But this isn’t the kind of violence that drives public attention to the issue. When you talk about attacks against public buses in Guatemala, you are most likely referring to the assassination of bus drivers.

Camioneta Urbana (City Bus) in Guatemala City
Source: Emisoras Unidas

I use the term “assassination” rather than murder because the bus drivers who are killed in the line of duty in Guatemala are not the victims of stray bullets or armed robbers. They are specifically targeted by sicarios, assassins working for street gangs, other groups of extortionists, or rival bus companies. Extortionists target bus drivers who don’t pay protection fees and, in some cases, rival companies go after each others’ drivers. Owning a bus company is a lucrative business in Guatemala, where bus companies receive government subsidies to operate, making the market both very competitive and conducive to extortion. No one is really sure who is behind each killing, despite the common idea that streets gangs like MS-13 and the Dieciocho control most extortion rackets. According to a recent report from Insight Crime, only 10% of extortions in Guatemala can be linked back to street gangs. Other groups of extortionists operate across the country, and competing companies sometimes resort to violence to solve disputes over territory.

Attacks against bus drivers reached its peak in 2009 and 2010. According to official statistics, more than 70 city bus drivers were killed in 2009; in 2010 the death toll went above 80. More recently, levels have hovered near 50. It would not be an exaggeration to say that driving a bus is one of the most dangerous jobs in Guatemala. The homicide rate for bus drivers in 2013 was double that of the homicide rate of the entire population (in 2009-2010, it was triple). Extortionists also target business owners, farmers, and moto-taxi drivers. Insight Crime reports that extortion victims represent roughly 20% of homicide victims in Guatemala in the first half of 2014. In an opinion piece in Plaza Pública from last year, Carlos Mendoza echoes a common explanation for these assassinations – that they serve as a graphic warning to those who are considering not paying extortion fees – and suggests that less publicity/news coverage of these deaths could help curb the violence.

My first lengthy stay in Guatemala stretched across 2009 and 2010, and I remember friends admonishing me for my cheapskate insistence on riding the old school buses, painted red, that traverse Guatemala City (at the time, the Q2 for the bus vs. Q80 for a taxi to cross town mattered to me – I’ve since changed my mind). They warned me to be sure not to sit too near the front, for fear of stray bullets. In 2009, the government passed a ban on taking passengers on motorcycles, an effort to discourage drive-by shootings where sicarios riding on the back of motorcycles drive up beside a bus to shoot the driver through the open door. Various other attempts at curbing the violence have been made since then, including the construction of a rapid transit line of buses, the Transmetro, with fixed stops and dedicated lanes. For a time (at least for a few weeks while I was living there in 2010), armed police officers rode on some bus routes as added security. But this has done little to halt the violence. Reports from local news media sources suggest that several bus strikes protesting dangerous working conditions in Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango (Xela) have made bus travel unpredictable for the first few months of 2015.