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).