No more "El Tigre" in Honduras

I spoke with several journalists about the situation in Honduras over the last few months. They were trying to figure out exactly what was going on with regards to Juan Carlos Bonilla, aka El Tigre. He is the chief of police in Honduras who allegedly oversaw death squads in the early 2000s.

The (Senator) Leahy Law pretty much said that the US should have cut off aid given his background and his police's ongoing involvement in human rights abuses. However, the US did not cut off aid.

In an October 10th email I wrote

I don't have any inside information. My best guess is that the US is simply waiting until next month's elections to see what happens with the expectation that Bonilla will be gone sometime afterwards.

For some reason, my comments never made it into their news stories. However, guess who was fired today?

President Porfirio Lobo on Thursday fired Honduras' national police chief, who has long faced accusations he ran death squads when he was a lower-level officer and whose force has been hit with frequent abuse claims.

Lobo said he made the decision to remove Gen. Juan Carlos Bonilla in consultations with President-elect Juan Orlando Hernandez, who takes office Jan. 27.

The US interrupted much of its assistance to Honduras after the 2009 coup. That did not work out well as drug trafficking and overall levels of violence increased. I speculated that the US feared a similar outcome in 2013 should it cut off military and police aid and that it was more than likely that the US was simply waiting to see what was going to happen following November's presidential election. It did not make sense to cut off assistance for a few months if the incoming president was going to replace Bonilla and then the US would have to jump through all sorts of hoops just to reinstate the aid.

Well, I can't say that I am always right. However, I pretty much called this one. Now there's no smoking gun (yet) that directly links Bonilla's firing to US pressure but, hey, it's close enough. And it's not as if removing Bonilla solves the many challenges that Honduras confronts. However, we can deal with that tomorrow.