A first brief take on the November 24 elections

“Weeping and sweat run in this deep place of wounded America and a taste of tears slips from the sky.” The coup four years ago inspired an unparalleled harvest of poems, of which the above by a young Honduran woman is one example. The coup also filled today’s ballot box with votes for the young LIBRE party, thus breaking with Honduras’ traditional bipartite system. Below is my first brief take on elections aimed at closing this convulsive political stage.

Ismael Moreno, SJ

The November 24 elections were yet another clear sign that the dynamics of the political crisis that came to a head with the coup d’état in Honduras on June 28, 2009, are still intact. And the post-electoral environment confirms that not only was the electoral process impregnated with instability, but the elections themselves were expressions of the acute national conflictiveness.

More participation

The mood of frustration on post-election Monday among the enthusiastic followers of Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, wife of deposed President Manuel Zelaya Rosales and candidate for his two-year-old party, Liberty and Reestablishment (LIBRE), contrasted with the calm that reined at the polling places throughout the previous day, with a record 60-plus percent of the electorate voting. The hope of a LIBRE victory and the participation of young people supporting the Anti-Corruption Party (PAC), founded and led by sportscster and TV host Salvador Nasralla, contributed to the large turnout.

Created only a year and a half ago, the PAC pulled the votes of tens of thousands of young people in the urban centers and the university world of Sula Valley, who were voting for the first time. They were the votes of young people who have come of age disenchanted by politics, or at least far more interested in soccer, fashions or entertainment.

The announcement of the results

Even before the elections, we learned a deal had been cut: the results wouldn’t be announced the day of the elections, but on Monday, the 25th. Nonetheless, late Sunday night Castro declared herself the winner with 29% of the votes. Hours later, National Party candidate Juan Orlando Hernández, did the same, claiming 34%.

Unlike what usually happens in the normal triumphal atmosphere at the closing of Honduran elections, the Nationalists didn’t dare go out into the streets to celebrate. And when three candidates charged that there had been fraud, the US Embassy, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU) pressed for recognition of Hernández’s win in elections they defined as peaceful with a transparent vote count and reliable results.

So was there fraud?

The official results coincided with three of the percentages shown in the previous polls, differing only in one. In the polls LIBRE got 28-29% of the votes, just as Castro claimed and the official count recognized. The official count also confirmed the 20% the polls showed going to the Liberal Party, and the 15% they said would go to the PAC.

Where the official results broke with these three correct forecasts was the ruling National Party’s results. It had appeared in the polls with 26-28%, at least a technical if not necessarily a real tie with LIBRE. In the official electoral results, it shot ahead of all other candidates to pull 34% of the votes deposited in the ballot boxes. The five other tiny parties—the “dregs,” as they’re called in the political corridors—didn’t even get a combined 1%.

Do the polls’ percentages have anything to do with the charges of electoral fraud? To a certain extent, yes. Many eyewitnesses and other indications link the increase in the National Party’s percentage to the alarming drop in votes for the small parties: Democratic Unification and the Broad Political Electoral Front in Resistance, which ran in alliance; Christian Democracy; the Patriotic Alliance Party and the eternal also-ran Innovation and Unity Party.

A chief delegate and alternate delegate for each of the eight presidential candidates running was supposed to be at each of the 16,000 electoral tables functioning on election day. It was widely known that the small parties couldn’t meet that requisite, yet there were delegates for all of them at all the tables. How did that happen? The National Party allegedly paid those parties’ leaders for their extra credentials and gave them to its own followers. It also reportedly bribed the real delegates from the small parties to cast their own ballot for it.

The evidence for this allegation, while circumstantial, has a compelling logic. Each small party’s candidate should have gotten at least two votes in all polling stations, yet a single vote was deposited for any of them in thousands of those stations.

This tactic means that many thousands of votes that should have gone to each of those four candidates actually increased the National Party count. The governing party delegates reportedly also conspired with the delegates of the small parties to favor its candidate at many tables when it came time to count the votes.

Brazen vote-buying

Vote-buying has been a tradition in Honduran electoral races, and was reportedly in full swing this time as well. The brazen buying of votes or threatening of many people to vote for the National Party or lose the benefits of the “10,000 voucher,” a handout the governing party officially gives real and potential followers, assured it enough votes to break Hernández’s technical tie with Castro, giving him a greater edge over Castro in one poll the last month before the elections. That uncertainty had raised expectations among a lot of people and helped encourage more people to go vote.

envío gathered testimonies in electoral centers of various cities around the country that agree that National Party activists gave voters money in exchange for their vote. One independent observer explained to me how it worked: “I saw a National Party activist hand a cell phone to someone who was going in to vote. I realized that when that person came out he showed the activist the photo he had taken of his vote. With that, the activist gave him a roll of bills, like closing an agreed-to transaction.”

Several similar testimonies confirmed for envío that such cases weren’t exceptional. The National Party activists and predictably those of other small parties working for it offered between 500 and 1,000 lempiras (some $25 to $50) per vote. Before going inside, those who agreed received half the money and the phone to record where they had marked their ballot. On coming out, the activist got the phone back and delivered the other half of the money after verifying that the person had indeed voted for the National Party candidate,.

A historical achievement

Although the National Party candidate won with bought votes and other traps, it can’t hide the frontal blow these elections delivered to the traditional bipartite structure that has dominated our country for over three decades of representative democracy. Independent of whether Hernández won or rebelled against Castro’s victory, Honduras’ political life will never be the same again; it will no longer be controlled by a Liberal-Nationalist co-government.

In all electoral campaigns between 1981 and 2009, there were only two possibilities: the Liberal Party candidate or the National Party candidate. The other parties—two between 1982 and 1994 and three as of 1997, never stood a chance, pulling no more than 4% of the eligible voters among them.

A pact must follow

Likewise, whatever the results, the political moment opened by the elections will have to be sustained by a political governability pact among the four forces that capitalized the electoral process. With Juan Orlando Hernández in the presidency with only 34% of the votes, it’s unthinkable that his party will be able to run public administration single-handedly in Honduras’ unstable, violent and insecure reality.

No one would have the ability to govern without alliances and ignoring serious negotiations with the other political sectors in the country. What we voted for in these elections wasn’t so much someone who will be able to govern Honduras over the next four years, but someone who will head up the political governability pact in co-responsibility with the other political forces. To repeat, November 24 ended the old Liberal-Nationalist co-government.

A stage has ended

We’re entering a new stage. These elections ended the period that began on May 22, 2011, with the signing of the Cartagena de Indias Agreement defining the governability pact the political forces responsible for the coup would head up. With Hernández’s victory, this new period will need a new governability pact, even though the country will continue to be led by the business and political elites who were in charge of the previous period and even though the bipartite model has broken down. A new political map is being drawn up, without our yet knowing its coordinates.

Zelaya, the great negotiator

This new stage already has its leader. Even though Xiomara Castro didn’t win the presidency, the man kidnapped by the military in the pre-dawn hours of June 28, 2009 and expelled from the country in his pajamas is emerging from these elections as the great personal victor. Manuel Zelaya Rosales has become the leader with the greatest charisma and the greatest skill and capacity to negotiate that new pact from his seat in the National Congress that will be inaugurated next January 25. He will surely be the LIBRE legislative bench’s indisputable leader. The power base from which he’ll negotiate with his adversaries will depend on the final line-up of the 128 congressional representatives and elected authorities of the 298 municipal corporations.

Zelaya is a great negotiator. In the Congress he’ll negotiate with the Liberal bench, headed up by politician-businessman Yani Rosenthal, the finance minister in Zelaya’s truncated administration. He’ll also hammer out alliances or specific agreements with the PAC bench to pull together a National Congress majority that can successfully pressure the executive branch, boycott bills proffered by the National bench and the extreme right wing of the Liberals and present and push through its own bills. in the Honduran model, Congress defines more than the executive branch.

The international community

For the US and European Union governments, the elections represent the closing of the stage that opened with the coup, in which they got closely involved. Hence the attention and the resources they invested in finally assuring that closure. For other sectors, particularly the grassroots ones, the elections also represented a closing, but of a different kind. They feel and are proclaiming that the elections were the culmination of the “whitewashing” of the coup d’état.

The agreements signed by President Porfirio Lobo and Manuel Zelaya in 2011, endorsed by both Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—symbols of Latin America’s two opposing political-ideological models—allowed Zelaya’s return to Honduras, the country’s reentry into the OAS, recognition of the Resistance to the coup as a belligerent force and acceptance by all forces on both sides in the coup that elections are a legitimate scenario for settling any political conflict.

The first political dynamic after the coup triggered massive opposition demands for restitution of the overthrown President and continued through to the November 29, 2009, elections that brought National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo to office. Assuming that office on January 27, 2010, Lobo was given a mandate from the US and EU governments: move from the pact of the upper echelons responsible for the coup to a political governability pact involving the obligation to politically include the Resistance sector headed up by Zelaya. President Lobo had no choice but to comply.

Euphoria and frustration

Euphoria, devotion to its leader and the static, extremely short-sighted approach of a sector of the traditional Honduran Left made them blind to the fraud being planned and organized with patience and Machiavellian calculations by those elites who first headed up the pre-coup pact among the elites and then the governability pact between the coup and now. As the popular saying goes, a bone can only be yanked out of a mean dog’s mouth with a force stronger than the canine teeth gripping it.

The enthusiastic slogans of those dazzled by the new and attractive electoral stage on which LIBRE was moving were no match for the eyeteeth of the Honduran oligarchy’s smaller but more ferocious political and business elite. The exuberance of seeing LIBRE with a chance to win in the polls was matched in intensity by the hard fall into reality the night of November 24. The resulting deep frustration of the grassroots sectors who had pinned their hopes on the LIBRE banner has prevented them from calmly and clearly seeing the successes and errors of their process. Certain sectors of the Honduran Left are taking refuge in sloganeering euphoria to hide their weaknesses and shield themselves from critical voices.

The frustration that invaded many people who had clung to the idea of Xiomara’s certain victory has left them without a solid base. Xiomara Castro didn’t make it to the presidency because of a meticulous, flawlessly organized fraud. But even if none of the delegates of the smaller parties had voted for the National Party candidate and nobody had sold their vote, the results would probably have been the technical tie the polls had shown. With no second round in Honduras’s system, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal would then have had to award the victory to one of the two, a decision that would have been followed by a dangerously conflictive scenario.

LIBRE: A historical
political phenomenon

We need to look at the positive side. We can still see shocked faces among people so accustomed to the country’s political traditionalism that they can’t assimilate the fact that the indestructible Liberal Party, party of “the eternally young militias,” always the largest, has fallen apart, reduced to a distant third place.

LIBRE’s real victory is that it’s now the country’s second political force barely two years after forming as a party. This feat exceeds any feeling of frustration. It’s a stimulating and indisputably objective fact that’s being forged into a work tool. If consolidated, it will represent a rupture with Honduras’ traditional bipartite model.

While it’s true that this rupture was possible because thousands of Liberals migrated to LIBRE’s ranks, it’s also true that LIBRE grew impressively from the beginning, as reflected in opinion soundings we in the Jesuit Reflection, Investigation and Communication Team (ERIC) have done over the past two years. It went from 2.8% recognition by the population in December 2011 to 14% a year later to nearly 29% now. This growth makes LIBRE the most significant and far-reaching political phenomenon in Honduran history. That alone should pull the thousands of party sympathizers who anticipated reaching the stars on their first appearance on Honduras’ complex electoral stage out of the frustration overwhelming them.

LIBRE’s challenge

One of the primordial tasks of LIBRE’s activists and leaders is to turn this great achievement into work and effort, moving beyond the strong feelings generated to focus on constructing strategies of struggle. It’s a task that must be intimately linked to recovering the mobilizing force that sprang out of the opposition to the coup and came together in the National Resistance Front, in the process learning how to establish harmonious independence between the party instrument and the political instrument of social struggle. I say this because in this electoral experience, the border between the two was breached, leaving the social front irremediably subordinated to the political party and on its way to disappearing. This distanced many people who were willing to mobilize for social demands behind the political banner of a front of struggle, but for very diverse reasons weren’t interested in identifying with a political party, no matter how leftwing it claims to be.

The candidate of
a new generation

PAC founder and presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla’s greatest service to Honduran society has been to have gotten thousands of young people interested in politics exclusively through what he has done, as they were born in a world that sees politics as synonymous with trash. Nasralla managed to seduce that youth with brief speeches full of symbols, with few words, many examples and very few definitions, always alluding to the fight against corruption in a country in which talking about politics is to talk about the corrupt.

Despite being a sexagenarian who skillfully hides the ravages of time with surgery and daily sessions at the gym, Nasralla fits like a ring on the finger of young people who are glued to the television and social networks, follow Honduran and world soccer, want to imitate the stars of musical show business and are only up to date on news about fashion, weight-reduction and how to keep fit. When one lady learned the election results, she told us on Radio Progreso: “Given the number of votes he got in his first electoral race, the name of the next President of Honduras will be Salvador Nasralla.”

One of the untouchables

We saw a notable piece of the hard-fought electoral race in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city, where Nasralla’s candidate ran for leadership of the municipal government against Armando Calidonio, the National Party’s extremely powerful strong man in Honduras’ northern coast. Calidonio is surrounded by multiple suspicions due to the avatars of his murky life and the dark side he walks on, but he has so much power that not even the US Embassy has publicly accused him of anything. Being untouchable, he obviously won the San Pedro Sula mayoral seat.

Calidonio lords it over any politician party, police or military officer or government official and even over the country’s most towering business leadera. He emerged from who knows where as deputy minister of security in two government terms, but everyone knows he was even bigger than the ministry.

He’s a veritable symbol of the strong men, the living portrait of the untouchables who control various underground corridors of the hidden powers dominating Honduras. He’s like a cartoon strip character who by day is the smartly dressed public servant always wearing a smile and moving skillfully among important people, but by night emerges as the monster from the black lagoon. Honduras’ black lagoon is huge and is where many clawed and fanged monsters hang out, while politics is the splendid stage on which to appear as honorable gentlemen of society. How will the new political pact relate to the denizens of that black lagoon?

Fraudulent elites

The electoral results and the political setting are irreversible, above all because we mustn’t look at the fraud as limited to falsified or manipulated numbers. That’s the least of it. The reason what is coming is irreversible is that it’s built on a systemically fraudulent and essentially corrupt model that perversely uses the State’s permeable institutionality to accommodate democracy to the interests of the powerful.

The electoral fraud is of a piece with the coup d’état and the November 2009 elections because Honduras’ political and business elites are essentially a fraud for society. Fraud is only achieved and sustained by deceit, traps, adulteration
of the people’s will, force, threats and blackmail. Electoral fraud little is more than a passing sample of these fraudulent elites.

We have to deal with the continuity

The continuity of the dynamics unleashed with the coup is guaranteed. Authoritarian and exclusionary democracy designed and directed by the law of the strongest will now be legitimized by the international community.

Authoritarian democracy has been made to the measure of the interests of the economic and political elites, the national partners of three international stakeholders: the transnational corporations, the US government with its security policy, and drug-trafficking. These three powerful actors operate within their own levels and autonomous spaces, although the consequences of what they do feed back into society’s instability, increasing the violence and impunity.

The international observer missions and Hondurans’ own participation in this electoral process have given it legitimacy. Those banking on consolidating the authoritarian and exclusionary model of democracy in Honduras, which they see as an experiment, a retaining wall against the political and ideological threats emanating from the south of the continent, are celebrating today. Hernández’s campaign strategy was most firmly described by Venezuelan Juan José Rendón as “a victory against Chavism.”

The cherry on the cake

The corporate mass media put the cherry on the cake of Juan Orlando Hernández’s victory by enthusiastically celebrating the International Criminal Court’s conclusion in the first report of its preliminary examination of the suits filed against the major figures responsible for the coup d’état and subsequent acts of repression. It has tentatively found no basis to qualify the Honduran authorities’ violence against the population’s manifestations of resistance to the coup across the country as crimes against humanity.

That report, along with the first repressive actions against university students who came together in a spontaneous grouping they’ve called “Youths in black against Juan Orlando Hernández,” is the precursor to what will surely be a political regime with a large dose of authoritarianism, intolerance and exclusion. We can expect notable features of a dictatorship dominated by the most conservative, militarist and fundamentalist forces in a framework of national and international legitimization .

A negotiation is urgently needed

Various political analysts are unanimous in their view that the electoral results won’t be enough to provide political stability to the upcoming administration. The closeness of the race between the winning and losing candidate, the breakdown of the traditional bipartite model and the holding of these elections in a context of profound ideological and political polarization and deterioration of the State’s institutionality require that the electoral results be put through the filter of negotiations so the new administration will have the minimum recognition and basic legitimacy needed to be able to govern. And these negotiations must happen soon to avoid confrontations between the winning and losing forces playing out into uncontrollable violence.

Beyond the elections

The elections proved to be more a problem than a solution to the conflicts underlying Honduras’ instability and institutional deterioration. Rather than opening doors, they further opened the wounds that have continued bleeding since the coup four years ago.

They confirmed that the path of the social and grassroots movements can’t be reduced to changing a government, but must involve a transformation of the State through struggles in which elections are just one element. Participating in elections without having a strong grassroots and territorial social base is like wanting to transform a rickety house by only giving it a coat of paint and a new roof without shoring up its foundations.

The coming four years will provide the scenario for the diverse resistances to reformulate their strategies, not reducing them to electoral races or to passing responses. The challenge will be to learn how to center themselves in the immediate political moment but with an eye firmly on the long road ahead. We will take on that challenge.

Ismael Moreno, sj, is the envío correspondent in Honduras.

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