News » February 4, 2010 » Web Only

A Lobo in Sheep’s Clothing? (cont’d)

Livin’ la vida Lobo

Many in Honduras believe the Lobo administration to be little more than an extension of the military-backed regime of Roberto Micheletti, which swept Zelaya from power, rolled back his social programs and imposed martial law for weeks at a time in order to smother dissent. Lobo, who is 61 and backed the coup last June, is widely seen as politically identical to the far-right oligarchs who traditionally hold power here.

“Lobo has inherited a political climate marked by very strong and vibrant social movements that organized in opposition to the coup, and that show no sign of slowing down,” wrote Honduran expert Beeton. “They question the new government’s legitimacy, since it was elected in a process completely overseen and controlled by the coup regime, and of course so far most of the international community has not recognized Lobo’s government.”

The Lobo administration refused several requests for interviews for this article.

Lobo is a wealthy rancher with strong ties to the timber trade. As head of the Honduran Forestry Department (COHDEFOR) in the early 1990s, Lobo was accused by the Public Ministry of abusing his authority and misusing public funds. Lobo lost to Zelaya in the presidential race in 2005, running on a far-right platform that included the death penalty.

“More than half the people in the country did not recognize the November elections. And neither do we recognize the man who assumed the presidency on January 27,” resistance leader Barahona said. “Why don’t we recognize him? Because he was elected under an illegal coup regime, and so he cannot be a legal or legitimate president. Even worse, he was elected under brutally repressive conditions. How can we recognize a president like that?”

The United States–which maintains close economic ties with Honduras and has been one of the few governments in the world to unequivocally recognize the elections–sent a large delegation to attend Lobo’s swearing in. On Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens met with Lobo and afterwards declared that Honduras-U.S. relations had been “normalized.”

But the EU, as well as regional powerhouses like Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil, have yet to recognize the Lobo government. Bolivia even went so far as to officially label the new regime a “dictatorship.”

There are also pressing internal problems, as the military coup has left Honduras’ economy in tatters; the day after being sworn in, Lobo was forced to declare national bankruptcy.

But the most pressing and dire challenge to reconciliation in Honduras seems to be accusations of ongoing human rights abuses leveled at the government.

“The burden of proof is really on Lobo to communicate to the military and the police that human rights abuses, as have occurred over the past seven months, will no longer be tolerated,” Beeton wrote. “But Lobo…will probably receive little pressure to do anything about this from the Obama administration – which otherwise could be very important – since the U.S. said almost nothing about the murders, rapes and disappearances that occurred under the coup regime.”

In fact, it seems unlikely that those responsible for the civil abuses over the last seven months will ever be brought to justice. In addition to the amnesty that Lobo signed last week, the highly-corrupt Honduran Congress also voted to award lifetime appointments to more than 50 government workers, making permanent what were once elected positions. Among those so honored was de facto president Roberto Michelletti, who became an official congressman for life.

“[His appointment] is an offense to the intelligence of every Honduran, and makes a joke of democracy,” Barahona said. “But that attitude is typical in dictatorships.”

(Story continues below.)

Honduras special forces stand at attention during the swearing-in ceremony for Pepe Lobo, the disputed president, in the national soccer stadium in downtown Tegucigalpa on Wednesday, January 27.

Death squads or ‘random violence’?

On Wednesday, January 27, at 10:30 a.m., as Lobo was preparing to deliver his speech about loving peace and freedom, trucks carrying heavily-armed police officers and privately-contracted paramilitaries opened fire on a group of peaceful, anti-coup activists in the Department of Colon, several hours away from the capital. The demonstrators were poor farmers to whom Zelaya had promised land reform; the Micheletti regime instead sold their land to an outside corporation. The farmers had been living on the land for weeks in primitive conditions, but when In These Times visited with them a few weeks before the attack, they were cheerful and said they did not intend to resist violently if the police came for them.

Three unarmed farmers were wounded in the police crossfire last week, one of them shot critically in the face. When In These Times visited the First Metropolitan Precinct in Tegucigalpa to hear the police version of events, Inspector Carlos Delcid, the chief officer there said, “What happened in Colon was that the farmers were on private land, and that is prohibited… We have the instruments to use in the necessary cases. If everything is calm, we don’t use our instruments. But if they want a revolution, they will get a revolution.”

Not surprisingly, Delcid denied the existence of death squads or political killings. “Yes, there is random violence,” he said, shrugging. “But there is always much random violence in Honduras.”

But Victoria Cervantes, of La Voz de los Abajos, disagrees: “These victims are all resistance people… This is not random violence. They have tried to make some of the deaths look like suicide, but the problem is that they’ve beaten the people so badly before they [fake] the suicide that it’s not very convincing.”

“They are targeting the resistance leaders,” said COFADEH’s Agurci, “holding them in special, clandestine locations, and interrogating them brutally. They are after information. They torture the prisoners, and treat them as if they were not human.” Her organization has documented a number of cases of police beating, suffocating, starving, dehydrating and sleep depriving various prisoners, she said.

Agurci said the most common questions asked during torture sessions are about the whereabouts of other resistance leaders, and whether or not the resistance is armed.

But the resistance has no plans to change its peaceful methodology. “We are mobilizing the country,” said Barahona, “in the hopes of organizing to participate in the next election. [The putschists] need weapons, but we do not need weapons. Because we are the majority in Honduras.”