Beyond Impunity in Honduras
Honduran President Xiomara Castro has canceled the extradition treaty between her nation and the United States. Her family is now in unchartered waters...
Many of you likely haven't been watching Honduras. Most of us don't with everything else going on in the world. But give it a moment...this small Central American nation has just taken sail into uncharted waters. President Castro and her family are at the helm and they’re going to quickly find out that they’re not ready for what’s ahead.
Last week, I provided training on corruption, money laundering, and the criminal system that influences politicians to a group of business leaders in Honduras. It was challenging to bring facts about their country, and their regional neighborhood, that are not easy to share but important to see. And much harder to swallow as someone who lives and works within an economic and social system that has — for over a century — held so much promise but has consistently fallen short of its potential.
I had used the single word "impunity" to describe the outcome when a Democratic system become so corrupt that there is a clear transition from corruption in the institution to an institution of corruption -- one that cannot function without influence peddling, power brokers, super fixers and the like.
InSight Crime recently published a video of a negotiation between some of Honduras' most influential criminal organizations and a man named Carlos Zelaya. He is father to Honduras' former Minister of Defense, who only recently resigned. Brother to Honduras' former president, Mel Zelaya, and brother-in-law to Honduras' current president, Xiomara Castro. Carlos himself serves (and likely for only a few days more) as the Secretary of the National Congress -- a powerful and influential position over the legislative. There are more tentacles but you get the picture: the Zelaya-Castros run the country.
This video is big news, and bravo to the InSight Crime team for bravely publishing this revealing truth. But President Castro will weather the storm. This video is not what worries me. President Castro's decision to cancel the extradition treaty between the United States and Honduras is what worries me.
Extradition treaties are bilateral agreements between two nation states, allowing for the strength and rule of law in one jurisdiction to uphold and support the rule of law in another. It is common ground upon which law enforcement officers in both countries may stand and work together to ensure that the good guys win.
In Latin America, this reality has been undergirded by the rule of law in the United States to support the rule of law in Latin America, where many countries remain plagued by the two-punch combination of a society with limited options for legal, dignified work and the criminal system that preys upon it. Say what you want about the rule of law in the United States — it’s had better days I know — but to a man and woman every narco in Latin America wants desperately to avoid extradition. Until they need it.
Extradition provides government leaders with a definitive option to remove major criminal player from the game. These are the photos we've all seen over the years of the well known yet fallen Warlord Entrepreneur taking that long walk across the tarmac to that small jet, in cuffs. He's done.
But from the other side, extradition is an escape route for high-level traffickers who feel like it's gotten too hot in the kitchen. They trade information and good behavior for a lesser sentence.
In both cases, extradition is a massive lever to wrest actionable information from people well positioned to know. Well positioned to finger corruption and in a small but consistent way help keep it in check. Extradition is the long arc of the law that will sooner or later — tarde o temprano — come knocking.
And in every case, extradition treaties represent a strong, defiant defense against impunity: the result when national leaders play too long in a world of corruption and power that they ultimately cannot control.
Impunity in Honduras has taken a big step in the wrong direction. When impunity is at or close to 100%, the judicial system is broken. This is not the case in Honduras. Their judicial system does have challenges but it is not broken. President Castro, however, may come close to breaking it as she attempts to ensure protection for her administration and her family in the coming months and years, especially if by some miracle her family manages to get the new Minister of Defense Rixi Moncada — the presumed heiress to the throne — elected.
President Castro is today on a path that leads to somewhere unknown, beyond impunity. This blurry destination is somewhere before her; it is hard to see, easier to feel. The destino it is much more sinister, and powerful than where she, her husband, or her brother have previously stepped. It is a place that Democratically elected leaders should strive to eliminate, not stride to reach.
Yet the Zelaya-Castro family — parents, brother, children — are all convinced that they’re heading in the right direction. They’re disillusioned. One just needs to listen. The Honduran president has long sounded a little too much like Venezuela’s Maduro, or her neighbor in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega. How fare the good people of those two countries?
No, the Zelaya-Castros cannot begin to imagine what awaits them on the other side of this wild ride, but it's likely to be nothing more than the same that awaits any criminal who stays in the game too long: prison or death. Only, it will no longer be the United States that helps bring them to prison — their best bet for safety when it gets too hot in the kitchen. Only mayhem awaits, and I’m saddened to say that Hondurans will suffer for it.