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.

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.

Political Conspiracies

A friend recently pointed out a connection between the current scandal in Argentina surrounding the death of an Argentine state prosecutor and the death of a Guatemalan lawyer in 2009. Earlier this month, Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment, one week after accusing President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman of orchestrating a cover-up of Iranian involvement in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. Nisman’s death has been called a suicide by the Argentine government. Reports suggest that many doubt this version of events, pointing to the long history of political “suicides” in Argentina linked to various military dictatorships and political conspiracies. The Guatemalan case also concerns charges of corruption made against a president. In the spring of 2009, a video appeared on youtube in which Rodrigo Rosenberg told the world that he had been murdered at the behest of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom, his (then) wife Sandra Torres, and Colom’s personal secretary, Gustavo Alejos. The video incited a political scandal and a investigation headed by the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Critics on all sides of the political spectrum in Guatemala sarcastically predicted that Rosenberg’s death would be deemed a suicide, despite the fact that he was shot by assassins while riding his bicycle near his home. Yet this is exactly what the CICIG report concluded — that Rosenberg had hired his own assassins.

The connection between these two cases stems not from some kind of long-distance physical link between Argentina and Guatemala. Instead, it comes from the shadowy, conspiratorial circumstances surrounding the deaths and the popular prediction that investigators will conclude that each incident was a suicide. I am not convinced that the evidence will show that Nisman committed suicide, and it is unlikely that the Nisman case will be investigated in the same way the CICIG was able to investigate the Rosenberg case. That said, both of these cases highlight the current state of justice and impunity in Latin America in general. An expert cited in an Insight Crime report points to Peronist political culture as a breeding ground for political murder. But if we use the Rosenberg case as an anecdotal example, and if we look to political violence in other Latin American countries, we will find that Argentina is not the only place where such mysterious deaths occur. There is growing academic literature on the rule of law in Latin America, some of which takes up the problem of impunity. But there is still a need for not just judicial and journalistic investigations but academic inquiry into contemporary political murder in Latin America.