Inspiring and depressing?

Old cars that have little resale value in the United States are being towed in caravans that begin in California, Arizona and Texas and end up in Guatemala. 

The cars are also loaded up with old bicycles, recycled car batteries and clothing that have been jettisoned in the United States.

The vehicles are fixed up in Guatemala and sold across Central America.

The process represents a small but sustainable economy in one particularly impoverished section of Guatemala on that country’s northern border with Mexico.

But the risks travelers face on the week-long trip are severe.

Gulf Cartel. Zetas. Organized crime. Mexican police.

Unwanted U.S. Junk Cars Sustain A Microeconomy In Guatemala by  Lorne Matalon at Fronteras.

Will a Plan for Central American Prosperity Succeed?

The Inter-American Dialogue's Latin American Advisor asks Will a Plan for Central American Prosperity Succeed?

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled this month to Central America to meet with the presidents of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The meetings followed recent confirmation that the Obama administration would include $1 billion in security and economic development assistance for the  region in its 2016 budget under the "Alliance for Prosperity." What did Biden accomplish in Central America? Does the White House's proposed spending target the right areas, and if not, where should the focus be? What do the Central American countries need to do to make the plan work? Will concerns over corruption derail U.S. involvement in the alliance?

I wasn't asked but increased US focus on the region is a welcome development. $1 billion is probably not enough money and the US Congress will probably make it even less. Increased attention and investments need to be sustained beyond what is currently proposed. The devil is in the details of the plan and its implementation. I'm not sure that the region and the US are prepared to scale-up programs that quickly. No, I do not have as much faith in the region's elected and un-elected officials as some do. Many other things need to go right for the investment to pay off.

I still believe that it will help. You can read the varied answers here.

Canoas and Quesara massacres in El Salvador

The Asociación Pro-Búsqueda and the University of Washington's Center for Human Rights has teamed up to produce two videos and a written report on two civil war-ear massacres in commemoration of the March 29th Day of the Disappeared Child in El Salvador.

During El Salvador’s civil war from 1980 and 1992, over 75,000 civilians were killed—the majority at the hands of state forces—and many more were detained, tortured, or disappeared. Thousands of children were forcibly separated from their families, many adopted to other parts of the country or sent abroad under false identities. Approximately 2,354 Salvadoran children were adopted into the U.S. throughout the conflict.

In the 1980 Canoas massacre, the Salvadoran army attacked a house of displaced people who had gathered to distribute food and clothes, resulting in the death of 23 people and at least two cases of disappeared children. During the Quesera massacre in 1981, between 350 and 500 civilians were killed by the Salvadoran military and 24 children were disappeared. Read the report here (PDF).

You can read more about this project and others at Unfinished Sentences.

Terrific work.

Guatemalan gangs profiting from grenade attacks

Tim Rogers has an interesting story on How a Guatemalan gang profits from deadly grenade attacks for Fusion. The starting point for the article is the recent M-18 attack on San Juan de Dios Hospital in which three bystanders were killed and another twenty-five injured.

Whether the M-18 mareros were trying to free or kill the incarcerated gang boss is unknown, but they failed to accomplish either task. More likely the grenade attack was part of the gang’s business-development plan.

“They want to sow terror and show that they are willing to attack authorities,” Guatemalan Security Minister Mauricio López Bonilla told Fusion. “Their message is: ‘I’m not a common thug, so when I talk, when I demand extortion or threaten you, you better take me very seriously’.”

For a gang whose livelihood depends on extorting small businesses and bus companies, launching crazy attacks with no regard for human life is — in a perverse and horrible way— about creating a favorable work environment.

“On many occasions, this is their business plan,” the minister said.

It's interesting but I'm not ready to buy what they are selling. The M-18 might be looking to sow chaos so as to profit from it, but I'm not sure the hospital attack is the best example, at least not yet.

Using grenades because they are more difficult to track than traditional arms makes some sense. The M-18 is directly responding to improvements in the Guatemala's police ability to investigate and prosecute gang-related murders. However, after hearing Mauricio Lopez Bonilla argue that "In fact, I think one of their leaders barely has the minimum I.Q. required to even be a criminal", it seems unusual to highlight their calculated tactical response.

Where are the grenades coming from?

Guatemalan authorities say they are investigating where the grenades are coming from. In a region rattled by revolutionary and counterrevolutionary wars in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, there are still plenty of old weapons floating around Central America.

“There is a high level of availability of these types of weapons in the region,” said López Bonilla. And with the gang’s expanding extortion business, the M-18 has “improved their purchasing capabilities” in recent years, he added.

But that doesn’t explain the whole story. While some of the grenades are leftovers from the guerrilla movements of the past, López Bonilla says some of weapons they’ve confiscated are newer models — perhaps trafficked from other countries where the M-18 has strong affiliate ties.

Guzman, however, says the grenades are most likely coming from somewhere within Guatemala.

“They buy them here. Where they come from we’re still investigating,” he said.

One would expect the retired Lt. Army Colonel and Kaibil to draw attention to the possibility that the grenades came from the guerrillas, the black market, and/or other countries, he does settle on the likelihood that they are coming from Guatemala. I would have liked Tim to have asked if it were possible that these grenades had come from the stash stolen from the Guatemalan army in 2013. Estimates range from 1,500 - 6,500 stolen. It is believed that those grenades ended up in the hands of local drug traffickers and the Zetas. It is possible, however, that they also found their way into the hands of the M-18. However, I can understand why Lopez Bonilla would not want to speculate that the weapons came from the Guatemalan military.  

Never what one wants to hear, but definitely not with national elections six months away.

Campaign against torture - Latin America and 9/11

As coordinator of the Education for Justice office at the University of Scranton, I invited Rev. Ron Stief, the Executive Director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), to campus to speak to our students about his organization's work, specifically as it relates to the recently released Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

As is well-known (?), the US set up a global detention and torture program following the 9/11 attacks on our soil. Many CIA and political officials who had suffered reputational costs, and even their jobs, following Iran-Contra and "revelations" at the end of the Cold War were brought back into the fold to carry out this new program to keep Americans safe (think the CIA's Jose Rodriguez and the State Department's John Negroponte).

The Senate Select Committee carried out a limited truth commission to get to the bottom of the interrogation detention program. However, it was interesting to listen to the trade-offs involved in their work in light of the class I am teaching right now on Human Rights in Latin America. The final product concluded with a report that did not name names, focused only on the CIA, and did not put prosecutions on the table. We would have to settle for limited truth - no accountability, prosecutions, reparations, no intellectual authors.

There was push-back from the Executive Branch and the CIA against those in Congress who dared to threaten the dominant narrative that they did what was necessary to keep our country safe from those who would do us harm. They could rest comfortably knowing that the current administration has no interest in prosecuting those who broke US and international law.

But that was the same in Latin America. Only the generals in Argentina were targets of prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the transition from military to civilian rule. However, twenty and thirty years after the separation of the military from governance, prosecutions against military and/or civilians tied to crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide, have occurred in Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and Guatemala. It might take awhile, but amnesties do not last forever.

At the same time that the Bush administration brought back people who had broken the law in the 1980s to once again do so in the 2000s, many religious organizations that had formed or cut their teeth during the conflict over Central America of the 1980s re-mobilized to hold our government accountable for illegal acts of the last decade-plus. Ron Stief is the executive director of NRCAT, an interfaith organization of more than 325 religious organizations committed to ending U.S.-sponsored torture.

Like the Madres, Abuelas, and HIJOS of Argentina, CALDH in Guatemala, and SERPAJ, NRCAT will continue to struggle to pressure our elected officials to uncover the truth and hold accountable those who have broken the law.

Honduras' Jesuit-run Radio Progreso

La Voz Del Pueblo

The most violent country on the planet isn’t halfway across the globe; it is a 2.5 hour flight from Houston. Most U.S. citizens are at best dimly aware of the bloodshed that is the defining feature of present-day Honduras. Last summer, 2014, Honduran children surfaced on the southern U.S. border by the tens of thousands, prompting a Texas congressman to decry this “invasion of our nation.” Likewise, protesters in California met the young immigrants with angry slogans like “return to sender!” But did protesters have any understanding of the situation these youth were escaping? The violence they’d be thrown back into if they were indeed “returned to sender”?

La Voz Del Pueblo is an 18-minute documentary that explores the difficult and violent Honduran reality through the perspective of journalists at the Jesuit-run radio station, Radio Progreso.

Oscar Romero: A faith that does justice

Thirty-five years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by right-wing death squads in El Salvador. The failure of the first junta that came to power in the October 1979 coup and the murder of Archbishop Romero marked the "official" beginning of the country's civil war. Romero had supported the October coup but withdrew his support when the new government could not, or would not, get control over the military and its repressive campaign.

The US believed that extending military assistance to the Salvadoran military and government would help it to gain leverage over its more repressive elements. Romero thought that was naive and partly a consequence of US personnel who had little knowledge of the country. Instead, he wrote President Jimmy Carter and encouraged him not to increase US military to the country. Increased US assistance would only make matters worse. Romero criticized the Left who saw revolutionary violence as a potential solution to the violence of the government. The Archbishop also condemned the actions of the military and told its soldiers that they should not obey an unjust law or order that goes against the laws of God. While some on the left also seemed to have considered killing the Archbishop, Roberto D'Aubuisson and the right-wing pulled the trigger, as they did on most advocates for justice at the time.

Archbishop Romero was at the forefront of what those of us who teach in the Jesuit tradition call a faith that does justice. His understanding of the Bible led him to become actively engaged in the world around him. He didn't just speak from the pulpit to call for an end to the violence.

He worked with the women of Co-Madres and actually encouraged their organization as a group, individuals across the political spectrum in El Salvador searching for a solution to the country's violence and poverty, and diplomatic representatives from other countries interested in the country's developments, including US Ambassador Robert White.

In case you are in the area, the Education for Justice program that I direct will be screening Monseñor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero tonight at 7pm in Brennan 228 on the University of Scranton campus.

The Politics of Modern Central America: Civil War, Democratization, and Underdevelopment

I have a review of Fabrice Lehoucq's The Politics of Modern Central America: Civil War, Democratization, and Underdevelopment in the newest edition of Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice.

While public attention has turned away from Central America since the end of the Cold War, scholars have been busy trying to make sense of its civil wars, transitions to democracy, and postwar economic development. Scholars have utilized a variety of different methods from different disciplinary perspectives in order to better explain the causes, course, termination, and aftermath of civil war. Given the amount of research accumulated over the last few decades on the Central American states, individually and comparatively, and the number of cross-national studies on the causes and consequences of civil war, democracy, and economic development, Fabrice Lehoucq has embarked on quite an ambitious journey to tie them all together in a much needed contribution with The Politics of Modern Central America.

I wasn't the biggest fan of the book but you can find the review here. It wasn't mean to replace it, but I still prefer Understanding Central America.

***Update*** Might as well add the conclusion:

Fabrice Lehoucq surveys a vast literature on civil wars, democratization, and  underdevelopment in The Politics of Modern Central America. Much of my disappointment from the book comes from the fact that there is such rich literature on each topic and a good deal of itwas excluded. Even with these criticisms, however, the text still provides a solid introduction to Central America for those interested in learning about the political and economic development of the region over the last several decades and how those experiences compare to the rest of the world.

US assistance allows Northern Triangle to invest in other areas

Voices on the Border has a good, thoughtful piece on More Neoliberal Economic Policies Will Not Stop Unaccompanied Minors From Seeking Refuge.

While the Plan arguably contains some constructive approaches towards decreasing violence, the emphasis is on implementing neoliberal economic policies. The proposal reads more like CAFTA-DR 2.0 or a World Bank structural adjustment plan, than an effort to stem the flow of emigration. The Northern Triangle and U.S. governments are proposing that foreign investment, more integrated economies, and free trade – and a gas pipeline – will provide the jobs and opportunities necessary to keep youth from seeking refuge in the U.S.

Income inequality and violence are the driving forces behind youth seeking refuge in the U.S., but its hard to imagine how more neoliberal economic policies, which many cite as the reason for inequality over the past 25 years, will do anything except ensure the region’s rich will remain so. A skeptic might even argue that the U.S. and Northern Triangle governments are using the “crisis” of violence and emigration in order to implement policies that further their own economic interests.

It's a helpful piece. One concern is that they frame the last twenty years as times of increasing poverty and inequality in El Salvador as a result of neoliberal economic reforms. However, while unevenly, poverty and inequality statistics improved under both ARENA and FMLN administrations. Don't just assert that poverty and inequality have worsened when the objective indicators tell a different story.

While I am concerned that the benefits of the $1 billion aid package to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras will be marginal at best, it is also important to remember that it is not the only money to be invested in the region. As Voices rightfully points out, the Salvadoran government has proposed another $2 billion worth of progressive programs to also tackle violence. There have also been notable improvements in education and health care delivery. As long as investments keep up in those areas, the money from the US might help in areas not currently being funded to the extent that they should.

US assistance frees up our Central American partners to spend money in other areas. How much they spend and how effectively they do so, are just as important to the success of our partnership.

Historians save the world...one human rights violator at a time

Time magazine has interesting background on some of the people who work for the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit in Meet the Historians Who Track Down War Criminals for the U.S. Government. This group works with the FBI and the Justice Department to track down human rights perpetrators living in the US so that they can be prosecuted and deported for immigration violations. They just finished contributing to the recent case against El Salvador's former general Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova.

Historians have the background in the culture, language and politics of particular regions of the world; they know where to look for the sources that might prove who was responsible for particular crimes. This kind of research relies on personal testimony, written records, photographs — and today, social media.

An important part of their work is creating the narrative, the story that the U.S. Attorney can present in court. This means putting together the threads that link pieces of evidence, building a full picture of a person’s role in human rights abuses. A particular challenge is state-sponsored abuses, where historians must contend with (in some cases) decades of cover-ups and silencing.

For perpetrators from some countries, the U.S. immigration trial will be the only trial they face. That decision, in a U.S. court, may be the only legal acknowledgment their victims ever receive. The ICE team knows this, and they want to make very case count. “Our historians are absolutely critical to getting these cases moving forward,” Shaffer told me.

It's great that the unit has three historians who are looking into human rights violators from Africa, the Balkans, and Latin America who might have relocated to the US. On the one hand, I see the skills that they possess as those that make a liberal arts education at the undergraduate level so valuable. Perhaps there's nothing special about history however.

At the graduate level, historians seem to have the skills that are needed. Anthropologists probably certainly do as well. Political Science? I don't know. When I was finishing graduate school ten years ago, I can't say that there would have been many people capable of carrying out the tasks required of people in the ICE unit. However, I'd like to think that has since changed. My general impression is that the discipline values scholars with a strong understanding of research methods (both qualitative and quantitative) and theory and in-depth knowledge of content and language more so than it did when I was in school. Maybe not as much as it should but still more than it used to in the recent past.

Over the last four years, the war crimes unit has "issued more than 67,000 lookouts for people from more than 111 countries and stopped 140 human rights violators or war-crime suspects from entering the United States." They have also helped to deport 650 known or suspected human rights violators since 2003.

Barriers to Maya Mobilization in Post-Conflict Guatemala

Manuel Vogt has a new article on The Disarticulated Movement: Barriers to Maya Mobilization in Post-Conflict Guatemala in the new edition of Latin American Politics & Society.  It's an interesting article that looks at what happened to the Guatemalan Maya movement over the last fifteen years. The mobilization of Guatemala's indigenous occurred in earnest with the return to more open political rule in the 1980s and the freedom accorded through the peace process. However, that movement has stalled.

Over the last decades, indigenous movements have propelled the political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in Latin America. The Maya struggle for ethnic equality in Guatemala, however, since its reawakening during the peace process, has reached an impasse. Based on field research consisting of dozens of elite interviews, this article analyzes the patterns of and obstacles to present-day Maya mobilization. It combines movement-internal and -external factors in an overarching theoretical argument about indigenous movements' capacity to construct strong collective voices.

In the Guatemalan case, organizational sectorization, the lack of elite consensus on key substantive issues, and unclear alliance strategies compromise the effectiveness of horizontal voice among Maya organizations. These problems are exacerbated by the lasting effects of the country's unique history of violence and state strategies of divide and rule, preventing the emergence of a strong vertical voice capable of challenging the Guatemalan state.

Vogt's interviews were carried out in spring 2011 and is only being published now. That's how academia works. Therefore, it would have been interesting to better understand how things have changed in terms of indigenous mobilization from the Colom to Perez Molina administration. I'm not sure that it has (there's a new cabinet position) but there has been so much activity in terms of mobilization against land projects and in support of general indigenous rights that I am looking forward to a follow up study.

There's also nothing in the piece about mobilization in terms of the Efrain Rios Montt genocide case. While there was some support among the country's indigenous for the trial, looking back, one doesn't get the impression that it was overly widespread. Is this another area where there was disagreement among different indigenous groups in Guatemala?

Vogt's study on indigenous mobilization is a good companion to Kevin Pallister's Why No Mayan Party? Indigenous Movements and National Politics in Guatemala that was also published in LAPS. Pallister notes a relatively strong Mayan movement which has been unable (unwilling) to transform itself into a viable political party (here' my summary). Institutional incentives to mobilize locally and outside of parties and a history of state repression were key variables for explaining the absence of a political party. 

Normally we get bad news about US-based multinationals but...HanesBrands celebrated

Normally we get bad news about US-based multinationals but...

HanesBrands has been honored by the Great Place to Work Institute for its workplace practices in its El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic manufacturing plants.

The Great Place to Work Institute named Hanes the third best multinational company to work for in Central America and the Caribbean where the company has nearly 30,000 employees. The company was ranked the second best place to work in both El Salvador and Honduras – the first ranking ever for an apparel manufacturer in Central America.

Great Place to Work gathers data from employee surveys that provide a clear picture of the state of the company's culture benchmarked against other companies. The rankings are predominantly based on employees' responses to the Trust Index Survey, which measures employee perception of the workplace, as well as institute's culture audit, which is completed by management and evaluated by an independent Great Place to Work team.

"We are excited that our own employees were surveyed and recognized as a great place to work," said Maria Elena Sikaffy, vice president of human resources, Hanes Central America and the Caribbean. "These awards reflect the passion of our employees, our commitment to responsible employment practices, and our company's worldwide leadership in ethics. This has allowed us to be a growing responsible community member in these countries."

NACLA's war by other means in El Salvador

Kevin Young has published "War by Other Means in El Salvador" in NACLA. It's an interesting piece, though I don't necessarily agree with the framing of the article and a lot of the specifics.

The “Partnership” exemplifies a more general U.S. strategy in Latin America. Since 1998 the region has elected roughly a dozen left-of-center presidents who explicitly reject U.S. intervention and neoliberal economics. In response, the United States has tried to institutionalize neoliberal policies that can constrain future governments regardless of political affiliation. In effect, Washington has sought to mitigate the danger of elections by insulating economic policy from democratic input. As the FMLN’s experience in El Salvador suggests, these left-of-center governments are heavily constrained by forces opposed to progressive change. However, both government choices and popular struggle also help to shape policies on the ground.

Bent over backwards wouldn't be the right phrase, but the Obama administration sure seems to have gone out of its way to help the Salvadoran people even though there are many in State and other levels of government that are not entirely comfortable working with the FMLN.

Given that many people in the US did not want El Salvador to receive a second MCC, qualify for the Partnership for Growth, or get any special treatment following decisions to prohibit mining, it's hard to characterize Obama policy towards El Salvador as part of any coherent US strategy. I also wonder whether people would support moving some decisions out of government hands if ARENA were still in the executive branch.

Then there's the truce - Funes and his government negotiated the pact in secret from the Salvadoran people and the US. The US criticized the truce all along even though publicly the criticisms were somewhat muted. The US has complained about drug trafficking in El Salvador and, for the most part, the Funes government responded, "you must be misinformed. There are no drugs here."

The Obama administration has most likely overlooked ALBA-related corruption, or simply brought it up quietly, behind the scenes, as previous US administrations seem to have done with ARENA previously. As a FMLN friend once said, "ARENA has its ANEP, why can't we have our ALBA?"

Again, it's an interesting characterization of US-Salvadoran relations but one that does not entirely take enough complexity into consideration in my opinion.

Guatemala's lack of press freedom

The attention should rightfully be on the murdered journalists and the conditions under which all journalists in Guatemala, and the region more generally, operate. However, the Nic Wirtz piece for Americas Quarterly mentions something that might be important to this case and is terribly important as the US considers investing upwards of a billion dollars in the Northern Triangle.

According to local cable television presenter Marvin Israel Túnchez, who was taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds to his arm and leg, López was the target of the assassination. López’s investigations in 2013 into public works in the department of Suchitepéquez had revealed 2.8 million quetzales ($368,000) worth of non-existent work.

“Journalism is one of the most dangerous jobs in Guatemala,” said Túnchez, who works for Canal 30, the same channel as Carlos Orellana, a journalist who was murdered in 2013.

Public works projects are where some of the region's real corruption takes place. It's why CICIG is needed and its responsibility amplified.

While Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador share certain characteristics, the violence carried out against journalists in Guatemala and Honduras seem to be much less, though no less troubling, in El Salvador.

Some links around El Salvador

The Center for Justice & Accountability has posted a Summary of March 11, 2015 Board of Immigration Appeals Decision Regarding the Deportation of General Vides Casanova.

The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the highest administrative review authority for the US Immigration Courts, has upheld the removal order for Vides Casanova in a case published as a precedent decision. As precedent, it now controls future rulings by Immigration Judges on similar issues nationwide. 

Pamela Constable at the Washington Post has some background on the case, specifically Juan Romagoza.

Kevin Clarke has Death Comes For the Archbishop for America.

The night before his murder, the archbishop made a personal appeal in a desperate attempt to place some sort of moral obstacle before the escalating pace of the killing in El Salvador. He spoke directly to those soldiers of the night who were most responsible for the growing horror. “I would like to appeal in a special way to the men of the army,” he said, “and in particular to the troops of the National Guard, the police and the garrisons. Brothers, you belong to our own people. You kill your own brother peasants; and in the face of an order to kill that is given by a man, the law of God that says ‘Do not kill!’ should prevail. No soldier is obliged to obey an order counter to the law of God. No one has to comply with an immoral law. It is time now that you recover your conscience and obey its dictates rather than the command of sin.... Therefore, in the name of God, and in the name of this long-suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven every day more tumultuous, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you! In the name of God: ‘Cease the repression!’”

The applause was so thunderous the radio station’s beleaguered audio technicians at first took it for some sort of short circuit or feedback in the system that had knocked the good archbishop off the air.

Fernando Luiz Lara takes a look at Contested Cities: Latin America’s Urban Challenges in the World Politics Review.

Latin America’s contemporary urban struggles are characterized by three main issues: public safety; mobility and accessibility; and resources and climate change. These topics are inextricably linked, as this article will show.

Imprisoned gang leaders are on a hunger strike to protest prison conditions in El Salvador.

Tim's got a round up as well.

Date Chosen for Beatification of Murdered Archbishop Romero at The Latin Americanist.

El Salvador hopes to produce final electoral results this week. They are in hanging chad territory.

It's spring break here at the University of Scranton so now back to housework. Normally we might see some people out gardening this week but we still have a few inches of snow on the ground.

TBT: What ever happened to the Indian burial ground under the Embassy?

"Embassy of the United States of America in San Salvador, El Salvador" by Jesse Michael Nix from Salt Lake City, United States - El Salvador 2008-03-13 @ 16-28-38. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I first visited El Salvador in 1997. At the time, the US Embassy really stood out as a monstrosity given that there was very little else nearby. Things have changed quite a bit since then. However, I love telling my students that the US sought to build a new embassy in El Salvador (the previous one was not well protected and had been severely damaged in an earthquake) in order to fight the Cold War that was still raging in Central and, to a certain extent, South America. However, by the time that they were done with the building, the war was over.

The Ambassador was cut off from much of the country and really didn't seem to have a grasp of what the country was like. The Marines liked their quarters and the amenities on the compound but did not seem to be a big fan of the distance to everything (Zona Rosa in particular). They wanted off base when they were not on duty but that was difficult at the time (probably more so today).

Here's a news article from the Los Angeles Times from 1992 entitled U.S. Salvador Embassy a Monument to Yesterday's War : Central America: Designed during civil conflict, the lavish new complex in a distant suburb seems overdone, out of place.

When Ambassador William Walker moved into the giant new U.S. Embassy here shortly after a cease-fire ended El Salvador's 12-year civil war, one of his first guests was Joaquin Villalobos, a powerful leader of the anti-government guerrilla movement, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

As they toured the fortress-like complex on the city's western outskirts, Walker turned to Villalobos, whose forces had attacked the old embassy more than once, and said: "Welcome to a monument to you."

Villalobos, a recently recanted Marxist and head of the largest and best of the FMLN armies, looked around at the forbidding complex, turned to Walker, smiled and said: "No, it is a reflection of your shortsightedness."

The embassy--eight massive structures, including 210,000 square feet of office and residential space covering 26 acres of what once was an Indian burial ground--is a bit of both. Its size and resemblance to a fort were dictated by the civil war in this country after 1980, when the FMLN began its campaign to turn El Salvador into a Marxist-Leninist state and to oust any presence of the United States.

I haven't been back to the Embassy since 1997 but I can totally understand Ambassador Walker getting lost and leading a group into a utility closet by accident.

Fixing ‘Broken Windows’ Policing to Make It Work for Latin America

Michael Jenkins (@MichaelJJenkins) and I have a brief look at the applicability of broken windows policing to Latin America as private and public sectors groups in El Salvador and Guatemala currently consider implementing their own versions of the model to deal with high levels of crime.

Here's a tease of Fixing ‘Broken Windows’ Policing to Make It Work for Latin America which you can find in today's World Politics Review. (Click here if having trouble with the original link.)

Giuliani, and even more so Bratton, are known for their application of the “broken windows” model of policing that many credit with helping to reduce crime across much of the United States over the past 20 years. If done properly and in combination with other reforms—such as purging corrupt police officers and members of the judiciary and adopting management models of accountability like CompStat, the computerized system developed in New York to track crime and officers’ beats—the broken windows model of policing can contribute to improving the security situation in Latin America.

Mike Jenkins, my co-author on this briefing, is assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Scranton and co-author of a book on urban policing titled Police Leaders in the New Community Problem-Solving Era.

May 23rd beatification of Monsenor Oscar Romero

According to Jesuits in Britain,

The Vatican has announced the date for the beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop who was martyred in 1980. Speaking in El Salvador, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, said that Romero will be beatified in San Salvador on 23 May, the eve of Pentecost.

Archbishop Paglia is the postulator of Archbishop Romero’s cause. The beatification ceremony will be presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato, the prefect of the Congregation of the Causes of Saints, according to the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire.

Pope Francis officially declared on 3 February 2015 that Archbishop Oscar Romero died a martyr's death, 'killed in hatred of the Faith', and the announcement of his beatification was widely expected. During the press conference confirming Romero’s martyrdom, it was also announced that the cause for canonisation of his friend, the Jesuit Rutillio Grande SJ, who was assassinated on his way to celebrate Mass in El Paisnal in the Aguilares parish, has been opened.

Good news indeed.

Two journalists killed and an attack on a hospital in Guatemala

Not the greatest news day for Guatemala. Three journalists were shot and two died while walking in a Mazatenango park. From the AP

Danilo Lopez, the local correspondent for Prensa Libre, and Federico Salazar, of Radio Nuevo Mundo, were killed in a park in Mazatenango municipality.

The men were the vice-president and secretary, respectively, of the recently created Suchitepequez Press Association, according to Centro Civitas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to journalists' human rights.

Prensa Libre editor Miguel Angel Mendez Zetina said Lopez had worked at the paper for more than a decade and recently filed a complaint against Jose Linares Rojas, the mayor of San Lorenzo, for making death threats against him. Lopez had written stories about the lack of transparency surrounding public funds in Linares' administration, the editor added.

"Two mayors from Mazatenango municipality had threatened him for his stories," Mendez said. "Danilo was a very ethical reporter, very transparent and he was very good at accounting for public funds and how this impacted communities."

Marvin Robledo, director of Radio Nuevo Mundo, said Salazar had not mentioned any problems or threats and was not working on anything special when he was killed.

The murders of the two journalists bring the total killed in 2015 to four. (Sorry, mis-read a Tweet. Four journalists have been killed in Suchitepéquez during Otto Perez Molina's term.) One man is in custody.

And from Reuters

At least one woman was killed and 22 people were injured Tuesday after a drive-by grenade attack outside Guatemala’s second-largest hospital aimed at a jailed gang leader who was having a checkup, the country’s interior minister said.

Marlon Ochoa, the brother of the founder of Guatemala’s “Calle 18” gang, had been taken from prison for a checkup at the San Juan de Dios hospital in Guatemala City when the morning attack took place, Mauricio López told reporters.

Ochoa was already inside the building and was unscathed, he added.

Might have to update 2013: A democratic setback in Guatemala.

Burden of Peace: Claudia Paz y Paz

From Burden of Peace

The documentary ‘Burden of Peace' tells the impressive story of Claudia Paz y Paz, the first woman to lead the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Guatemala. The country that has been ravaged for years by a devastating civil war, in which nearly 200,000 Mayan Indians were systematically massacred, is today one of the most violent countries in the world. Claudia starts a frontal attack against corruption, drug gangs and impunity and does what everyone had hitherto held to be impossible: she arrests former dictator Efraín Rios Montt on charges of genocide. His conviction becomes the first conviction for genocide in a national court in the world history.

Since her first year in office, Claudia gave acces to filmmakers of Framewerk, Joey Boink and Sander Wirken. It resulted in an intimate glimpse into the life of a woman who wants to change her country and therefore brings immense sacrifices. The documentary is scheduled for release during the Movies that Matter Film Festival, March 2015, The Hague.

I try to be optimistic that Guatemala will be able to overcome the loss of Claudia Paz y Paz and Yasmin Barrios as advocates for justice. That optimism will be tested once with the question as to whether to extend CICIG's mandate and the outcome of the 2015 national election. 

As I have said before, I am in favor of extending CICIG's mandate. I also understand that CICIG has been in Guatemala for nearly a decade and at some point Guatemala's judicial institutions are going to have to stand on their own. I don't think that they are there yet. 

However, is that what President Otto Perez Molina is calling for? The country's judicial institutions must now stand on their own and reduce their dependency on outside forces. Or has President Perez Molina given any indication that he simply wants an alternative to CICIG from the international community? My understanding is that it is the former but I am wondering if there is any discussion of the latter.

Normalization of vote counting process in El Salvador

Election authorities from the Salvadoran Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) have announced "the normalization of the vote counting process" and are now completing the final vote count which could take up to seven days. TSE authorities have claimed that faulty software interrupted the vote counting process; however, the company tasked with that job denies it was at fault.

You should also take a look at the Center for Democracy in the Ameicas' March 4th update which provides a good overview at the time.

More to come.

While we are debating Honduras, what's its President up to?

While we are debating the security situation in Honduras, what is President Juan Orlando Hernandez up to? Dana Frank says a whole lot of no good in Just Like Old Times in Central America for Foreign Policy.

If the vicious, anti-democratic record of Hernández’s regime is so clearly documented, then why is the Obama administration celebrating the regime and looking the other way at its militarization and human rights abuses? The White House, it appears, is aggressively locking in support for the current Honduran government in order to solidify and expand the U.S. military presence in Central America, while serving transnational corporate interests in the region.

After the 2009 military coup, the United States moved aggressively to stabilize and consolidate the post-coup regime, in order to ensure a regime loyal to the United States and to corporate interests, and to send a message to the democratically elected center-left and left governments that had come to power in Latin America in the previous 15 years that they could be next. U.S. police and military funding for Honduras increased in the years that followed, under the pretext of fighting drug traffickers — who have flourished in the post-coup free-for-all of criminality.

Ok, there's maybe a sentence or two in what I quoted that I agree with, but go read the post for yourself.

If the US got to choose, we wouldn't have to work with Perez Molina, Sanchez Ceren, or Hernandez. However, that's who the people of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras elected.

To a certain extent, I like the policy suggestions at the end of the op-ed.

The administration should immediately and publicly distance itself from Hernández and his regime. It should stop celebrating Hernández, demand the removal of the military from domestic policing, and cut all U.S. police and military funding. It should challenge IMF and IDB funding for Honduras, and re-examine the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), which, as the AFL-CIO underscores, has been destructive to the Honduran economy.

More positively, the United States should vigorously support a U.N.-sponsored commission on impunity modeled on the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, and ensure that the commission remains free of Hernández’s influence. The Obama administration’s model for economic development should emphasize labor rights, promote a diverse industrial sector generating good, skilled, well-paying jobs, and support diverse, sustainable agriculture development that supports the land rights of campesinos and indigenous peoples. Above all, the United States should reframe its role in Honduras as one in defense of human rights and social justice, rather than against them.

I would probably argue that Frank's suggestions in paragraph one are very unlikely. The US is not going to cut all police and military funding. Right or wrong, the US generally sees such assistance, in all its imperfections, as serving US interests and as leverage to get the Honduran government to act in a way that we prefer.

I don't imagine that the US would have too many problems with the second paragraph. The US government would probably say that that is actually our current approach to dealing with Honduras. Well, maybe except for a Honduran CICIG which I have argued for in the past.

If you are going to update the Honduras travel warning, at least update it

Last week I noted that the US' updated travel warning for Honduras seemed rather strange in its description of what is generally considered the world's most violent country outside of a war zone. Obviously, that's not some sort of sophisticated analysis. Fortunately, Boz and John noticed the same thing and went it to greater detail.

Boz notes how the warnings for 2012, 2014, and 2015 all report that the country is in the early stages of substantial reforms to its criminal justice system. He's "looking forward to the day when Honduras has moved beyond the early stages and actually implemented the promised substantial reforms."

John, who has been living in Honduras for the last few years, also notes how this documents seems to have been entirely cut and pasted from previous warnings, not just the "early stages of substantial reform" section.

We US citizens are privileged.

The travel warning is bogus.

I do not deny that there is violence – especially in the big cities and along the north coast. I do not deny the presence of crime – both petty crime and large scale crime related to drug trafficking and gangs (and corrupt police, military, and economic elites). I do not deny the violence in our area – often due to long-held resentments, family feuds, and alcohol abuse.

But much of the violence continues because the system does not respond to the people. Impunity runs rampant.

The US warning does not address this – and I think throwing a billion dollars into the region won’t help. That's another post.

If the travel warnings are written like the Freedom House reports I help prepare, there is a somewhat bureaucratic reasons why there are so many similarities from one report to another. In writing the FH reports, we are asked to use the previous year's report as the template for the next year's report. When we have new information, for example on homicides or threats against the press, we update it.

When there is no new information but we addressed the issued in the previous report, perhaps an investigation into a criminal case or the rights of the indigenous are not respected are detailed, we either include the same information in the new report even with no new information (because that is important in itself) or delete that information from the next report. It depends if something else important occurs and space is needed for that (there's always a word count).

What of El Salvador's indigenous rights law?

Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

In June 2014, a constitutional reform went into effect in El Salvador recognizing the rights of the country's indigenous peoples. The law was a dramatic departure from previous ARENA governments. Up until the 2015 election, ARENA liked to open its electoral campaigns in the area where some of the worst indigenous massacres from 1932 occurred. That's a statement some would usually prefer to avoid, but no, not ARENA.

Edgardo Ayala and Claudia Ávalos take a look at what has happened since the law's initial passage in April 2012 in Newly Recognised Indigenous Rights a Dead Letter? The law had to be approved by two successive assemblies, hence the April 2012 and June 2014 dates.

There have been changes full of good intentions, but the good intentions need a little orientation,” Betty Pérez, the head of the Salvadoran National Indigenous Coordinating Council (CCNIS), told Tierramérica.

The reform of article 63 of the constitution states that “El Salvador recognises indigenous peoples and will adopt policies aimed at maintaining and developing their ethnic and cultural identity, worldview, values and spirituality.”

These cover a wide range of areas, such as respect for indigenous peoples’ medicinal practices and their collective rights to land. And according to lawmakers of different stripes, the constitutional amendment pays a historic debt to the country’s native people and helps pull them out of the invisibility to which they had been condemned.

Pérez said a process of dialogue is underway between indigenous organisations and communities and the different government ministries involved, with a view to designing public policies, but that little headway has been made because “there is no unified vision and each group is following its own logic.”

It's a step in the right direction but the practical applications of the law on the rights of indigenous peoples, and others connected to it, will take significant time and effort to realize.

How exactly are you a good partner, Otto?

Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina said that his country will not accept the "imposition" of CICIG as a condition of US funding for the Alliance for Prosperity. In a sense, that is not surprising. The Guatemalan military has always been a proud institution that does not like to take orders, let alone suggestions, from anyone. As is well known, the US asked the Guatemalan military and government to respect human rights in their battle against rebels during the 1970s as a condition for continuing US funding. They said no thanks. The Guatemalan military said that they didn't need any counterinsurgency training from the US because we had just lost the Korean and Vietnamese wars. What did they have to learn from US? The next time that they sent their soldiers to the School of the Americas, it would be as instructors, not students.

At the end of the war, the US and international community conditioned postwar assistance on numerous conditions, including that they raise taxes as a percentage of GDP from the lowest in the region. Crickets, anyone?

Otto Perez and his administration and much of the country's economic elite are people that the US has to work with for a variety of reasons. However, they should not be described as partners in any accurate way.

Here is what I wrote in June prior to VP Biden's meeting with Otto Perez.

You've dragged your feet on cooperating with the joint UN-Guatemala venture International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), forced out two commissioners, and have made it clear that you will not support extending its mandate even though it is widely believed to have contributed to strengthening the rule of in Guatemala.

You and other members of the political and economic elite have forced Claudia Paz y Paz from the attorney general position, sanctioned Yasmin Barrios, and weakened the rule of law with the shenanigans surrounding the overturn of the Rios Montt conviction.

You put our ambassador on a hit list during the trial or, at best, did nothing to challenge those who did.

You are pursuing drug reforms which we are against.

You've failed to improve workers rights and have forced the USTR to take you to task under CAFTA-DR

We're not perfect but how again have you been a good partner that we should go out of our way to help?

Yes, we know you are not Honduras but that's not good enough.

Unfortunately, nothing has changed.

Salvadorans wait patiently, but they shouldn't have to

I woke up this morning to write a post on the aftermath of El Salvador's legislative and municipal elections but it looks like Tim already did with #EpicFail or Sabotage?

I think if there were a hashtag to describe the work of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in El Salvador since Sunday's elections it would be #EpicFail.  Three days after the elections, no results have been announced, and a "final scrutiny" of the vote tally sheets is just beginning.  It might take as long as two weeks before there are results.

Click on over to get some coverage of the Tico Times and Reuters on Tim's site. I think it is dangerous that the TSE president is throwing around terms like "sabotage." There have been few accusations of fraud in El Salvador's postwar elections, FMLN in 2004 and ARENA in 2014, but the country is not that far removed from its pre-transition history of fraudulent elections.

Unfortunately, "we shall see" shouldn't be what I should have to say four days after El Salvador's national elections. While the TSE has done a pretty good job in the past, in this case, it appears that the country's main political parties are behaving exceptionally.

US updates Honduras Travel Warning

The US Government recently updated its travel warning for Honduras.

The Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens that the level of crime and violence in Honduras remains critically high, although it has declined in the past two years. This Travel Warning supersedes the Travel Warning dated June 2014 and includes additional information on crime and security in Honduras, as well as updated contact information.

Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens visit Honduras each year for study, tourism, business, and volunteer work without incident. However, crime and violence are serious problems throughout the country. The Government of Honduras lacks sufficient resources to properly investigate and prosecute cases, and police often lack vehicles or fuel to respond to calls for assistance. The police may take hours to arrive at the scene of a violent crime or may not respond at all. Members of the Honduran National Police have been arrested, tried, and convicted for criminal activities. Many more are under investigation. As a result, criminals operate with a high degree of impunity throughout Honduras. The Honduran government is still in the early stages of substantial reforms to its criminal justice institutions.

Honduras has had one of the highest murder rates in the world for the last five years. The U.S. Embassy has recorded more than 100 murders of U.S. citizens since 2002. Many cases over the last 14 years are still awaiting trial. The vast majority of serious crimes in Honduras, including those against U.S. citizens, are never solved. In 2014, there were ten murders of U.S. citizens reported to the U.S. Embassy with seven of the ten resulting in arrests or prosecutions.

Honduras comes across rather well in the beginning and then it sort of goes down hill from there. It actually sounds rather subdued, like they were smokin something, but maybe that's just me.

The warning sounds pretty mild, especially compared to how I remember various warnings for Guatemala and El Salvador.

You can read the rest of the travel warning here.

Rigoberta Menchu welcomes the savior Alfonso Portillo home to Guatemala

Louis Reynolds looks at how Alfonso Portillo's return to Guatemala following his prison sentence in the US might shake up the upcoming September elections for Americas Quarterly. I mentioned on Twitter the surprising welcome that Rigoberta Menchu gave to Portillo upon his return.

Well, that's just embarrassing - let's blame the jet lag: Rigoberta Mechú welcomes Alfonso Portillo home to Guatemala http://t.co/BGNibt7WAL
— Mike Allison (@CentAmPolMike) February 27, 2015

However, her embrace of Portillo shouldn't exactly be that surprising.

Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchú stunned her supporters last week by expressing sympathy for Portillo and asserting that he was targeted for political reasons, meaning that his trial for embezzlement in a Guatemalan court in 2011 was motivated by the private sector’s opposition to his social policies. After Portillo’s controversial acquittal, the U.S. requested his extradition to face money laundering charges.

Menchú also said that Portillo had paid his dues, leading to speculation about a seemingly unlikely alliance between Portillo and the country’s most famous Indigenous leader. “I welcome him [back to the country], like many other Guatemalans,” she told the Guatevision TV channel. Menchú ran for president in 2007 with the center-left party Encuentro por Guatemala, and again in 2011 as the candidate for the Indigenous Winaq party. However, on both occasions, she captured just over 3 percent of the vote, mainly as a result of sectarian divisions within the Guatemalan left and left-wing parties’ chronic underfunding.

For the last few decades, the Guatemalan left has been divided between those who want to establish a truly leftist alternative for voters (little tent) and those on the left who believe that it is more important to establish a democratic alternative to the status quo, one that brought the left, center, and maybe even the right together (big tent). Fifteen years ago, some big tent leftists viewed Portillo as an ally because he seemed to be pro-democratic, but more importantly, he was anti-oligarchic. Actually, being anti-oligarchy was almost by definition, pro-democratic.

That obviously gets complicated. Portillo was a member of the FRG, Rios Montt's party. Some leftists saw an alliance with the FRG as acceptable because of the party's anti-oligarchy positions. Others rejected an alliance because of the party's complicity in genocide.

These divisions were part of what led to the break up of the URNG/ANN between 2000 and 2002.

Farmer cooperatives supply El Salvador with seed

Nathan Weller of EcoViva penned an op-ed entitled Farmer Cooperatives, Not Monsanto, Supply El Salvador With Seed. Weller argues that recent changes to how the Salvadoran government procures seeds for its national Family Agriculture Program has been a win-win all around for Salvadorans.

In 2015, rural cooperatives and national associations will produce nearly 50% of the government’s corn seed supply, with 8% coming from native seed—a record high. In the Lower Lempa, where seven farmer organizations have produced corn seed since 2012, this means over 4,000 jobs and income for rural households, primarily employing women and young adults. The public procurement of seed—or the government’s purchasing power through contracts—signifies over $25 million for a rural economy still struggling to diversify and gain traction.

The success of locally-bred seed varieties, compounded with their low production costs, allowed the Family Agriculture Program to contribute to historically high yields nationwide for corn and beans. Last year, more farmers produced more corn and beans at the most efficient yield per acreage than any other year over the last decade. This has also led to a significant adjustment in El Salvador’s trade balance on corn: Imports of white corn in 2014 were a full 94% less than 2011.

If Salvadoran producers can provide better seeds at a lower cost, that's great. That's what competition and capitalism is all about. The US government just wanted its corporations given a fair shake under CAFTA-DR, which now seems to be the case.

FWIW, I did a little consulting work connected to Eco Viva a few years ago.

Joint Statement regarding The Plan for the Alliance for Prosperity of the Northern Triangle

The Presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and the US Vice President States released a Joint Statement regarding The Plan for the Alliance for Prosperity of the Northern Triangle today in Guatemala City.

The Presidents of El Salvador, Salvador Sánchez Cerén; Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina; Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández; and, the Vice President of the United States, Joseph Biden, met in Guatemala City on March 2-3, 2015, with the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, Luis Alberto Moreno, to discuss the important commitments which will accelerate the implementation of the Plan for the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle of Central America.

The senior representatives also agreed to conduct joint high-level dialogues on security issues with relevant authorities, to discuss social issues with civil society, and to review trade and investment issues through meetings between the U.S. private sector and the private sectors of the Northern Triangle of Central America. All these meetings will be held in the first half of this year.

The leaders stressed that their governments agreed to continue the development of the Plan for the Alliance for Prosperity of the North Triangle in an expedited and comprehensive manner, through coordinated efforts among the three countries of the Northern Triangle and with the technical support of the Inter-American Development Bank. They will continue this work throughout 2015. The draft implementation plan and roadmap for each of the above-mentioned topics will be presented in Washington on March 16. For its part, the Government of the United States reiterated its commitment to support these efforts.

The leaders agreed that the joint regional plan and its continued implementation represent significant milestones for the collaboration among the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The statement is too long to reproduce here so just click through to read it in its entirety. It looks like a pretty extensive list of what each country is going to do on its own and in collaboration (No mention of CICIG however). But the devil is still going to be in the details and depend upon how much, if any, additional funding the US Congress approves.

Not ideal but...Honduran army races gangs to reach child trash-pickers

AFP

Noe Leiva investigates how the Honduran army races gangs to reach child trash-pickers. 

Fourteen-year-old Cristian competes with stray dogs, scavenging birds and hundreds of other trash-pickers for food at a Honduran dump, but when the army offers him a square meal, he warily declines.

Colonel Elvin Corea, whose uniform stands out against the rotting piles of garbage at the Tegucigalpa dump, says the teenager is probably scared of being targeted by one of Honduras's notoriously violent gangs if he takes part in "Guardians of the Nation," a controversial army program to steer at-risk youth away from drugs and crime.

"Signing them up is getting difficult. The youngsters don't want to participate because the gangsters threaten them," said Corea, who heads the program in the capital.

"The gangs feel threatened because the program cuts into their recruitment."

When the program first launched at the dump, where the gangs have a tight grip, police had to provide protection for families that enrolled their children, Corea said.

The gangs are not the only ones who dislike the program. Rights groups say the army should not be trying to fill social policy gaps left by the government.

Nothing about the conditions under which these young people work at the dumps or the military program that seeks to help them escape seems optimal. I get that. However, we are often looking for less than ideal solutions/programs and this one might help.

Unfortunately, there's not really a great deal of information in the article about the "Guardians" program to weigh in on its effectiveness.

Given credibility of Salvadoran TSE, the waiting is bearable

Salvadorans are still waiting on the results of this past Sunday's elections. Apparently the new computer system that they adopted to tabulate individual votes from each of the country's voting tables had failed. Some of it was foreseen beforehand but not to the extent of the problems that they actually witnessed. In some ways it does throw into doubt the effectiveness of El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal, but I, personally, wouldn't go that far. The TSE has become one of the most respected institutions in the country since the end to the civil war and only emerged stronger from last year's presidential election.

Tim has a nice round-up of what we know so far. We don't know the certified vote tallies from the TSE but ARENA and the FMLN have been counting votes as well and begun to announce results from individual mayoral races. The FMLN captured San Salvador from ARENA and San Miguel from GANA.

ARENA captured sitting Vice President Oscar Ortiz's Santa Tecla. That's somewhat of a surprise given that the FMLN and Ortiz had controlled Santa Tecla for forever, but not so much since they lost the city during last year's presidential election as well. They also lost it quit substantially in 2014 - 43,513 to 34,327. I wouldn't read too much into the fact that Roberto D'Aubuisson, Jr. won the race, at least not that it connects to his dad. At least that's my initial take.

Fortunately, no more elections until 2018.

And so we wait.

US criticizes Honduran labor violations

While the US already has taken Guatemala to task for failing to develop and enforce adequate regulations to protect its workers, a new US report looks like it has just laid out an argument why the US should start moving in a similar direction in Honduras.

The U.S. government said in a report released Friday it found evidence of illegal use of child labor in Honduras as well as systemic problems with the country's ability to enforce its labor laws.

The findings from its investigation were issued three years after the AFL-CIO and 26 other Honduran unions and other groups filed complaints of violations of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement.

The labor protections are intended to raise living standards in other countries but also protect U.S. workers from unfair competition. U.S. companies were involved in Honduran workplaces cited in the report and farms and factories cited exports to the U.S.

The Office of Trade and Labor Affairs (OTLA), a division of the Department of Labor, said its detailed review turned up labor law violations in almost all of the still operating businesses that the unions and groups complained about. OTLA said its review left it with "serious concerns regarding the government of Honduras' enforcement of its labor laws in response to evidence of such violations."

However, after browsing the report's introduction, it looks like the investigations are at a much earlier point than Guatemala. In addition, the government of Honduras responded in a manner that might give it some time and allow for the US and its Honduran partners to work out their differences short of arbitration.

Throughout the review process, the Government of Honduras has demonstrated a willingness to engage the U.S. government concerning the issues raised in the Submission and the actions needed to remedy the problems identified. In addition to this engagement and open communication with the OTLA, the Government of Honduras took the important step of launching a dialogue and holding regular meetings with representatives from unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) interested in the Submission. While the OTLA welcomes the Honduran government’s efforts and engagement with civil society, there has not yet been measureable systemic improvement in Honduras to address the concerns raised.

You can read the final report here.