political crisis in Honduras. On Monday night, national police in the capital Tegucigalpa, including elite U.S.-trained units, refused to impose a nighttime curfew ordered by the government after days of protests over allegations of fraud in the country’s disputed election for president.
COBRAS ANTI-RIOT SQUAD MEMBER: [translated] This is a message for the violence to end. There is no need for people to be in the streets killing each other for something the politicians can resolve among themselves. It is not our job. We are not acting according to any political ideology. This is our feeling. Most of my colleagues are tired of being in the streets. Our families have been locked at home for more than 15 days. And the problem continues every day. The crisis continues. Our call is that all this ends, because we are not willing to come to the streets and confront the people or engage or repress the people, crack down on the people.
The move by police comes after at least three people were killed as Honduran security forces opened fire on demonstrators Friday night in Tegucigalpa. Protests erupted last week, when the government-controlled electoral commission stopped tallying votes from the November 26th election and after the count showed opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla ahead by more than 5 percentage points. The commission now says President Hernández has pulled ahead of Nasralla by 42.98 percent to 41.39 percent, with 99.96 percent of the votes tallied. Electoral officials say they will not declare a winner in the election yet, in order to allow the filing of challenges and appeals. This comes as international observers are calling on the Honduras electoral commission, which is controlled by President Hernández, to carry out a recount.
Allan Nairn talking:
Honduras has been in the midst of an uprising of the poor, joined by many in the middle class. It’s essentially a democratic electoral uprising against the government and the oligarchy, who are trying to impose Hernández, who is a protégé of White House Chief of Staff General Kelly, for another term.
And then something extraordinary happened last night, where the poor were joined in this revolt by a big chunk of the security forces, the police at the COBRA headquarters. COBRA is an elite unit that is charged with working on things like counterterrorism, narcotics. For hours upon end, police from all over, from many different units, came streaming into the headquarters to support their rebellion, their uprising—a refusal to carry out any more repression. At one point, according to the police there who I spoke to, it appeared that about one-fifth of the entire national police force had gathered inside the COBRA headquarters. And reports from all over the country show that this is happening everywhere, everywhere else.
This was triggered, in important part, by a decision by the U.S. State Department taken on Tuesday, the 28th, to certify that Honduras was honoring human rights and fighting corruption. With that certification, that greenlighted new U.S. aid to Honduras, essentially, in effect, gave a green light to complete the fraud, and also gave a green light for state escalation of what has really become a class war. And on Thursday, the 30th, an election technician working inside the Supreme Electoral Tribunal sent a private chat message to a friend of his. And that message, which I saw, read, ”El fraude ya se hizo.” “The fraud has now been done.”
Jan Schakowsky talking:
this is really an illegal election, according to the laws in Honduras. In fact, it was the cause of the coup, supposedly, in 2009, when President Zelaya just wanted a referendum to see if people wanted to have—make a change and allow for the re-election of the president. What Hernández did was to stack the Supreme Court and change the rules so that he could run again. And now what we’re seeing is that in order to win the popular election, then it looks like extensive fraud has occurred.
And it’s just remarkable to me that the United States of America has continued—two days after this election, which was under a cloud to begin with, would recertify that taxpayer dollars should go to the military, to the training of the armed forces and the police in Honduras, that they’re a great ally of the United States, that they have not violated human rights and democracy in Honduras. So, this is a situation where many of us in the Congress are saying we want to see a full recount, and we want to see the passage of our Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, that says, “No, no money is going to go, unless we make sure that human rights are acknowledged and not abused in Honduras.”
Sarah Kinosian talking:
I’ve gotten various answers to that. Some people are calling for a new election. But a lot of other people I talk to said, you know, “What’s the point of having a new election? They’ll just commit fraud again, because the electoral body, the TSE, is controlled by the ruling party, by Hernández’s party.”
I’ve got a larger amount of people that are calling for the recount of the 5,000 votes that apparently were counted after a computer glitch and which essentially changed the trend of Nasralla winning. That’s probably the biggest account of fraud that people are upset about. You know, the army—excuse me, the police last night called for a recount of the votes from all polling stations, so 18,000. So, you know, we’ll have to see what happens. But right now it seems that a recount of the 5,000 votes is the main issue on the table.
the way that the voting system works is, so people—I think that people cast their ballots on paper. But essentially what happens is, is there’s a table at each polling station, and there’s a sheet that tallies all of the votes from that station. And there’s different representatives from the parties at each of the tables. And the way that it works is, each table sends in the voting sheet to the electoral body, but then each of the representatives at the table also send their sheet to their party home base in Tegucigalpa. So what you’re getting now is—so you essentially have an electoral body count, and you also have each party that has its own count of these voting sheets that have tabulated all votes at a station. So that is why you’re getting discrepancies from what was sent to the electoral body versus what each party says, because they can each run their own counts from the sheets that they received from their representatives at each of the polling stations.
Allan Nairn talking:
historically, Honduras has been essentially an extension of the U.S. Pentagon and State Department. The current regime really dates back to the ’80s, when the U.S. was mounting the Contra attack against Nicaragua, established massive military bases in Honduras as the point of attack to go after what U.S. General Galvin described as “soft targets” in Nicaragua—namely, civilians. John Negroponte, who was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras at the time, presided over the standup of Battalion 3-16, which was essentially an army death squad, which did mass assassinations of Honduran dissidents and clergy, of activists, etc. After the 2009 coup, which at the time got de facto support from Hillary Clinton and President Obama, the death squads made a reappearance. And again, in the years since the ’09 coup, activists in the countryside have been in danger of assassination. The case of Berta Cáceres, the environmental activist, is the most famous, but there have been dozens and dozens of these.
I’ve talked, by now, to, oh, I’d say more than 70 soldiers and police in the past five days. And the majority of them had been trained in the U.S. And also, interestingly, significantly, I only found one, of all those I talked to, who is a real supporter of Hernández. The army is not allowed to vote. But if you ask them, “Well, how did your family back home vote?” the overwhelming majority say their families voted for Nasralla. And these are from troops and members of the police. And if that’s any indication, it gives a great credibility to the claim by the Nasralla opposition that they indeed would win in an accurate count.
The electoral commission, the other day, which is controlled by the government, came out and made a statement that essentially echoed the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 19—in the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, where they said—essentially said it would take too long to count the votes accurately. The people aren’t—people aren’t standing for that. And now the police are refusing, as well.
Jan Schakowsky talking:
the Progressive Caucus has really taken the lead on this and has been very outspoken. And we are concerned about the fact that this administration has been such a friend of Honduras and has been so welcoming to Honduras and the Hernández government. We do need some Republican support and Republican interest. You know, there’s kind of short bandwidth right here in the Congress right now, not so much focusing on these critical issues of democracy in our Central American neighbors. So we’re going to be working on that.
But in the meantime, we’re really trying to raise this issue up so people understand that people are being—were being murdered in Honduras, not just over the election, but be a journalist, be a human rights defender, be a labor union activist, and your life is in danger in Honduras under this administration. And it is true that even in 2009, for about five minutes, the United States said that a coup had taken place, an illegal coup. And it didn’t take long then for that to be turned around and Honduras once again to be an ally of the United States, narcotrafficking, etc. And yet we have this very, very corrupt, anti-democratic president right now, and a chance perhaps, now with the police taking a different stance, to help restore true democracy in Honduras.
we are clearly against. When I say “we,” those of us who are co-sponsoring the legislation for human rights in Honduras. Our demands are that we do not continue funding until there is some evidence that there’s actually an end to the human rights violations. We have put money into the military in Honduras, into the police, as well, into their training. The elite forces have been trained in the United States of America. How dare the secretary endorse Honduras and continued funding two days after an election that he knew at the time—he had to have known—was very controversial?
So we’re in great protest of what is happening. And so, you know, we’ve been involved in this for a long time, in the murder of the highest-profile human rights and indigenous people—person, activist Berta Cáceres. And we’re going to continue this fight and say, “No, this is not some kind of great guy,” as John Kelly calls him. This is someone, as president of Honduras, who is trying to actually collapse democracy there and take over that country in a very autocratic way.
Sarah Kinosian talking:
In its simplest form, Salvador Nasralla had a party, the Anti-Corruption Party. He has paired with Mel Zelaya of the Liberal Party—or, LIBRE party, excuse me. And they formed together, and Salvador really needed the votes of Mel Zelaya. What I am hearing is that alliance, while it did give Salvador Nasralla the support that he needed to get this far with his support, it’s also presented problems because a lot of people are not distinguishing between Nasralla and Mel Zelaya. So what you’ll hear from a lot of Hernández supporters is two things: One, we’re going to have this—you know, either way, if it’s Zelaya or Juan Orlando, they’re going to try to keep staying in power because of 2009, or you hear this repeated line that the Hernández government is really trying to push out, which is Mel Zelaya is allied with Venezuela. And so you hear that concern a lot. If Nasralla wins, then Mel Zelaya will really be the one in power, and we’re going to end up like Venezuela.
Allan Nairn talking:
it’s possible that the revolt of the security forces will spread. On Sunday night—Sunday afternoon and Sunday night, I spoke to many soldiers, and a number of them were suggesting that they might defy orders. And I found it hard to believe at the time. In his street rally on Sunday, Nasralla made a direct call to the security forces to refuse to continue repression, to lay down their arms. It was reminiscent of what Archbishop Romero did in Salvador before he was assassinated. We’ll see how the army reacts now. And I think more people will take to the streets. This is really in the hands of the U.S. If the U.S. tells the Salvadoran army to cut it out, if they tell Hernández to allow an honest count, they will comply, because they are clients of Washington. And this goes back, directly back, to the White House, to General Kelly, as Representative Schakowsky said. It’s in Kelly’s hands. He can bring this to a peaceful, democratic conclusion, if he chooses.
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Allan Nairn
award-winning investigative journalist.
Sarah Kinosian
Honduras-based reporter.
Jan Schakowsky
Democratic congressmember representing the 9th District of Illinois.
— source democracynow.org