July 27, 2008
- Congress agrees to vote on AG’s impeachment, but decides to keep him in the end
- Despite apparent defeat, observers and participants agree that strike made historic strides
More than fifteen years ago, US ambassador Cresencio Arcos famously said that “In Honduras, justice is like a viper – it only bites the shoeless.” Shortly after, the Public Ministry came into being with the explicit mission of making the justice system fairer –and in large part, this meant the institution would take on the country’s pervasive corruption. But in April 2008 four of the country’s leading prosecutors announced that they were going on a hunger strike, arguing that the Ministry was not prosecuting corrupt figures but protecting them. They called for the Attorney General’s impeachment and only called off the strike thirty-eight days later. Although Congress later voted against impeachment, long time observers of Honduras politics say the strike was the first serious blow to the country’s corrupt ruling class in many years.
Great Damage. In September 2005, the Tegucigalpa monthly newspaper El Libertador reported that the newly elected Attorney General, Leonidas Rosa Bautista, had laid out a peculiar judicial philosophy in meetings with prosecutors.
“If a public official robs seven million Lempiras (US$ 370 thousand), it doesn’t do great damage, because spread out over seven million people it amounts to about only one Lempira (US$0.05) a person,” Rosa Bautista reportedly said.
For many of the country’s leading prosecutors, Rosa Bautisa’s presence at the top of the Public Ministry was vexing. The nascent Honduran Prosecutor’s Association (AFH) had just led a successful drive to force the previous Attorney General, Ovidio Navarro, from office, only for him to be replaced by yet another figure seen as an ally of Honduras’ corrupt, seemingly invulnerable political and economic class. The AFH fears were confirmed, it says, when Rosa Bautista allegedly “shelved” almost a hundred corruption cases implicating virtually every major political and economic player in the country.
The AFH set off another campaign, this time targeting Rosa Bautista. But it found civil society and the government to be less receptive than it had hoped, and in March the Public Ministry made motions to fire the AFH’s vice-president, Jari Dixon, for insubordination.
“At that point, we had few options,” the president of AFH, Victor Fernández, told CAR. “We could have resigned from the institution disappointed. Or we could take up a peaceful protest and expose ourselves to danger, to criticism, to ridiculousness – to everything.”
In the end, on April 7 four members of the AFH – Jari Dixon, Victor Fernández, Javier Luis Santos (former head of the Ministry’s anti-corruption office in San Pedro Sula), and Soraya Morales (former head of the anti-corruption office in Tegucigalpa) – camped out below the steps of the National Congress and announced they were on a hunger strike.
By the time the strike ended 38 days later, Dixon had been reinstated, the prosecutors had been joined by more than thirty others – including the head of the Honduran Jesuit order, Ismael Moreno, and the prominent Evangelical leader Evelio Reyes – and the congress had agreed that it would look into the “shelved” cases and vote on Rosa Bautista’s impeachment. On June 6, congress voted 124 to zero, with four abstentions, not to impeach the Attorney General.
The strikers told CAR that they were not frustrated by the result. They said they expected it, and were happily surprised that the strike resonated so strongly with Hondurans. “We had no expectation that this would happen, but ninety percent of the social groups in the country have joined with us,” Santos said. “This is apparently the most united these groups have been. The cause that finally brought people together was corruption.”
Years of Decline. Historian Marvin Barahona says that today corruption is more of a problem than it has ever been. “Now corruption is not just a way of plundering the state’s funds,” he said, “but the way a very small group of people – the traditional oligarchy – has been able to maintain its control over everyone else.”
And according to Judge Edin De Lu O Ramos, who serves on a sentencing court in San Pedro Sula, the Public Ministry abets this situation. “The only people being prosecuted are poor people,” he said. “Meanwhile, there has not been a real response to corruption.”
This represents a sharp fall from the Ministry’s promising start fourteen years ago. Until that point, prosecutor’s worked for the Supreme Court; in 1994 the Public Ministry came into being as an independent institution. Victor Fernández says the Public Ministry’s legal standing at its inception was particularly strong, and its ambitions particularly lofty.
“The victims of corruption, environmental crimes, human rights violations and so on – they now had their own lawyer, and this was the Public Ministry,” he said. “It would have a position superior to the three branches of government. It would have the power to investigate the president, congressional representatives, and judges – and make charges against them. In theory, this Ministry would be marvelous.”
Eventually the realities of Honduran politics and power overwhelmed this high-minded beginning. Nonetheless, many people said that it took years for the Public Ministry to completely forsake its mandate. According to Luis Javier Santos, the Public Ministry had a relatively free reign at first for a simple reason: the nation’s powers had an iron grip on the courts. Under law, prosecutors had to make their charges in writing, he said, allowing judges to discreetly dispose of cases that were inconvenient for powerful interests. “Then in 2002 congress made some procedural changes,” he said. “And we started making our arguments in public. Judges were really forced to let cases go to trial. We weren’t necessarily convicting powerful people, but it could get embarrassing for them.”
Santos said this marked the beginning of an era of severe outside interference with the Public Ministry’s work. “Under pressure from powerful people, Attorney General Roy Medina began calling prosecutors personally and telling them to lay off,” he said. “Ovidio Navarro (who replaced Medina in 2004) was more discreet – he had other people do it for him.”
Despite his discretion, Navarro was widely perceived to be a clear partisan of the National Party. Moreover, he had personally defended former president Rafael Callejas (1990-1994) in corruption cases (Inforpress, 1549) and, indeed, by the end of his first year declared that investigations into Callejas were to be closed.
This ignited the first major revolt within the Public Ministry. The Honduran Prosecutors Association, having only just formed (under the leadership of future hunger striker Jari Dixon), began openly agitating against Navarro, calling for his resignation and launching a campaign called “You Embarrass Us.” Shortly after, on December 7 2004, the US embassy revoked the visa of Assistant Attorney General Yuri Melara. The pressure against Melara and Navarro intensified for six months, until they finally resigned.
Leonidas Rosa Bautista then came to power – despite the fact that as Minister of Foreign Affairs he was legally ineligible for the post. Luis Santos, then head of the San Pedro Sula anti-corruption office, said it was only during Rosa Bautista’s administration that he was personally pressured by top Public Ministry officials to back off from pursuing certain cases. On July 6, 2007, the day before Santos was to bring charges against the former mayor of San Pedro Sula and two nephews of the National Congress President Roberto Micheletti, Santos was abruptly removed from his position.
Other prosecutor’s from across the country experienced similar frustrations, until Public Ministry officials finally attempted to fire Jari Dixon. The four prosecutors decided to go on a hunger strike.
Beginnings of a Movement. Within days of beginning the strike, the media began questioning the prosecutors’ credibility. La Prensa, published in San Pedro Sula by Jorge Canahuati (a businessman who the AFH says has a “shelved” corruption case against him), ran the headline “Professional performance of Soraya (Morales) remains in doubt.”
Meanwhile, Luis Santos says, Congressional President Roberto Micheletti began making offers. “He said ‘you can ask for anything – salaries increases, better posts – anything. Just don’t ask the Attorney General and his assistant to resign,'” Santos claims.
Despite these efforts to undermine the strike, the prosecutor’s seem to have touched off a popular groundswell, even within the judiciary. Judge De Lu O Ramos believes that most judges supported them, despite fear of reprisals.
Finally, Victor Fernández said, he and his colleagues decided to end the strike for political reasons.
“We had two options: we could become a kind of routine, a sort of spectacle, or we could die of hunger. We decided that neither of those options was politically intelligent. And by that point we had ignited a national movement, which itself was asking us to end it.”
And despite some damage to his health, Rosa Bautista’s continuing service as Attorney General – and rumors that someone has offered many millions of Lempiras to kill him – Fernández says the hunger strike ended fortuitously.
“We showed that the political class is weak,” he said. “In 38 days the population forced the congress to make two votes that weren’t on the agenda. Whether the outcome of the votes was good or bad – they had to do it. We demonstrated that the forces that dominate this country can be defeated.”
Matthew Brooke 