Military, security, and elections in Honduras: a community perspective

By Megan Turley, the Connecting Peoples Coordinator in MCC Honduras.

The November elections in Honduras seemed to center around the theme of security, and the two leading political parties, the new party LIBRE and the incumbent National Party, had opposite views on the recently-formed “policia militar“ (military police). National Party’s winning candidate Juan Orlando Hernandez was the only candidate to push for increasing the military police force, while LIBRE candidate Xiomara Castro advocated for a community policing alternative. According to a recent article in the Economist:

Analysts say one of the reasons Mr Hernández eventually overcame Ms Castro’s early lead in the opinion polls was his promise to do “whatever it takes” to improve law and order. The creation this year of a 2,000-strong military police, which he says he will increase to 5,000, appears to have gone down well with voters, though the shape and scope of that force is still unclear.

Despite the poll reporting that 70% of Hondurans were in favor of the military police, Hernandez only won 37% of the vote, while the shift from a bipartisan to a multi-partisan system split the traditional liberal vote, suggesting that voters’ decisions were more nuanced. Not all were pleased with the creation of the military police:

 “The military police goes against everything that we’ve fought for,” says Josue Murillo, coordinator of Alianza por la Paz y la Justicia, a broad coalition of nonprofits, unions, churches, and the UNAH. Murillo is referring to overcoming the state violence of the 1980s, when a powerful Honduran military “disappeared” scores of people suspected of being dangerous leftists. Civilians definitively took back the reins of power in 1999.

This past week I had the chance to visit one of the communities where our partner organization Proyecto Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Project) works. PPYJ is a program of the Honduran Mennonite Church based in La Ceiba that works in several communities in San Pedro Sula affected by violence.

The neighborhood we visited on Wednesday is one of the most violent in San Pedro Sula (the violence has increased substantially since March of this year), but the Mennonite congregation there is respected in the community for its social commitment and work with the gangs. PPYJ has come alongside this church, training and supporting the church members since 2011 to be able to work in violence prevention and conflict resolution with the children of their neighborhood.

While we were there talking with several of the PPYJ volunteers from the church, who all happened to be women, I took the opportunity to talk to them about their perspective on the military presence in their neighborhood. I had heard several people say that gang violence has decreased in the neighborhood since the military arrived, which has been true in several other communities where our partner organizations work as well.

But I have also heard about the history of the Honduran “mano dura” policy, which is the current trend and does not have a good human rights track record. It can even strengthen the gangs’ activity. In Honduras’ history, this policy has led to human rights abuses and inappropriate “social cleansing” by the military/police, causing oppression and fear.

In this community that has been so deeply affected by violence, I was curious what these church members had seen in their community: how do they view the military presence there? Especially in light of recent elections, what do they think about the presidential candidates’ different views on the newly-created military police?

They originally welcomed the military police. The violence had caused a vast exodus from the neighborhood, and those who stayed were scared to even leave their houses. After Holy Week of this year, things started to go downhill. People started to abandon their houses, displaced by the violence. Several people from the church were killed by gang-related violence, or violently questioned and detained by the police. The neighborhood saw this and questioned: if they no longer respect the people of the church, why would they respect us?

Most of the homes are now empty in this neighborhood, vandalized “out of need,” say the women. “When the soldiers first arrived, they said it was like a desert. One of the soldiers told me they had been there two weeks before they started to see children leave their houses to play in the streets.”

“[The first soldiers] were neutral, and we had very few interpersonal interactions with them,” said the women. But when this first group of military police left, another group came. The new group sympathized with one of the gangs more than the other gang. Community members saw these military people painting over the other gangs’ street graffitti with the markings of the gang with whom they had aligned themselves.

Young men and adolescents from the rival gang and young men who are not affiliated with any gang are hassled, taken to prison, or killed without trial. Six young men from the community, not connected with gangs, were taken away and are currently still in prison without trial. One of the women from the church shared that they almost took her son away: she heard the military outside of her home questioning her son aggressively, and went outside to tell the military that he was a minor, and they would have to speak to her first. They asked to see his documents, then left.

In light of this, how did they choose to vote? “None of the presidential candidates are good,” agreed the women. “A president is not going to make this change. They can send people to improve the security, even people from outside Honduras. But the real difference will be made by people in their own communities. You can’t change something by force, either. Transformation happens in stages, with our own help.”

The community members realize that the person who is president does not affect them very much at the level of their community. The more important election choice for them is the mayor.

“The politicians promise us many things. Some people voted for Zuniga (incumbent candidate of the Liberal Party) so that they can continue to pressure him to follow through with all the promises he made. They promised to fix up the abandoned houses, so that people could return, among other things. I think we need a change, so I voted for Milla (PAC candidate). They could help with unemployment, which is extreme – the young people in this community look and look for jobs but can’t find anything. In the end, the president is too far away, and the mayors aren’t interested in us. They are only interested in what is around them, acting where people can see them. These things do not reach us.”

The people of this community, and especially this church, have taken matters into their own hands where possible. For example, they regularly do community clean-ups, and the church members participate in the activities with the schools and the children. “The police would not accompany the public energy company ENEE into our community to fix the streetlights, so we did. We accompanied the people from the ENEE in their cars. That was the only way they agreed to enter into the neighborhood.”

Some of my impressions from this visit were:

1. The importance of local politics. The Presidential election is important, but the communities most affected by violence do not believe the President actually knows what’s going on in their community. The mayor and other locally elected officials are closer to their reality, and more important to affecting overall change. When we think about systemic change, working at national levels is important, but it is just as important to work at the local level, closer to the communities, which will have more practical and sustainable effects.

2. Community participation. The local community knows its needs best and therefore can help respond to its own needs with some outside assistance. A community like this one that already actively participates in its own affairs would be every governing authority’s dream, if these authorities could see the communities not as a threat but as potential partners. The marginalized communities of San Pedro Sula are an important social resource for municipal authorities.

3. Military presence. From this community’s perspective, military presence is okay and even positive when it is neutral, but it has not been neutral and has even contributed to a deeper sense of fear in the community. The community is seen as the enemy. Also, the community does not think that military presence alone is enough to combat the violence. Once the military leaves, then what? Is the military the appropriate entity to be dealing with the violence in this community?

In the March 2013 article in Envio Honduras, Matias Funes Valladares argues that giving the military civilian powers is dangerous, because the military acts

under the model of “National Security” instead of “Citizen Security.” That model sees subversives everywhere: in the political parties, in the unions, in the campesino organizations, in the student fronts, in the cooperatives, in churches.

One cannot forget that the military is prepared for war – crudely said, to kill – and for this reason sees in the other an enemy susceptible to being eliminated. Police, on the contrary, upon working every day to maintain order, which means the prevention of crime and not just its repression, have to see the people as the principal beneficiaries of their work, very different from military conflicts. It should build itself to form a space of mutual trust and collaboration to fight, together, the real enemy: delinquency.

Lasting change in these communities will depend on the extent to which Honduran authorities can see the communities as a partner in peacemaking, as opposed to viewing them as a political tool for getting more votes or as the enemy. These communities, the ones most directly affected by the violence, should neither be taken advantage of nor taken for granted in Honduras’ search for security.