Drugs and Democracy in Honduras

Shocking revelations about meetings between Honduran drug traffickers and senior members of the government have shaken the foundations of the country’s democracy. Sadly, this debacle is only the tip of the iceberg. Honduras will not be able to escape the cancer of narcopolitics without credible institutions and support from the international community.

The latest scandal began with the release of a video and investigative piece by Insight Crime on August 27. It documented a 2013 meeting, filmed secretly, where drug traffickers discuss illegal contributions to an earlier failed campaign by Honduran President Xiomara Castro. The video contains two shocking revelations–an insistence that a portion of the bribes go to “el comandante” a reference to former President Mel Zelaya, Castro’s husband, and the appearance in the video of Zelaya’s brother, Carlos, who was serving as secretary of the Honduran Congress until he resigned just prior to the video’s release. (Carlos Zelaya has acknowledged attending the 2013 meeting but denied accepting illegal contributions.)

The video and other evidence were devastating for the government and ruling Libre Party. Castro and her leftist party have long positioned themselves as anti-corruption champions, a task made easier by the brash misconduct of recent governments. In 2021, Castro won the presidency riding a wave of public disgust at the conservative outgoing president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was implicated in several drug-related trials in New York, including a case involving his brother and Mexican criminal organizations. Following the election, Hernández himself was extradited and convicted by the United States for drug-related crimes.

Now, however, Castro, who handed over her predecessor to the United States, has suspended the extradition treaty, apparently to protect her brother-in-law and other members of her family and inner circle allegedly involved in narcopolitics.

Honduras’s problems are not limited to particular individuals, parties, or families. Rather, its entire political system and public institutions are infected by corruption.”

Sadly, her fall from grace was not all that surprising. Corruption in Honduran politics goes far beyond the Castro and Hernández governments. Honduras’s problems are not limited to particular individuals, parties, or families. Rather, its entire political system and public institutions are infected by corruption.

To fully comprehend the depth of democratic decay in Honduras, consider what happens after each of the country’s regularly scheduled, reasonably free and fair elections. Instead of populating the country’s professional and technical agencies with qualified public servants, state institutions are simply spoils to be divided up among political parties and their loyalists based upon their electoral performance. No institution is free of this negotiation, not the Supreme Court of Justice, the Attorney General’s Office, or the electoral institutions, to name a few.

Systems to require merit-based appointments are easily circumvented, as party bosses negotiate “cuotas de poder” (shares of power). It is partisanship above qualifications. Hondurans, for example, can easily identify whom the Libre Party or National Party control on the Supreme Court. The system is so institutionalized that a third senior position was recently created in the Attorney General’s Office to make space for cronies of the country’s third-biggest party.

When partisanship reigns supreme, the results are predictable. Informal agreements to guarantee mutual impunity are commonplace. Legal reforms to increase accountability are undermined by backroom deals. Tellingly, Castro’s decision to suspend the extradition treaty was welcomed across the political spectrum in Congress, where members of all parties face corruption allegations.

…state institutions are simply spoils to be divided up among political parties and their loyalists based upon their electoral performance.”

There are no easy or immediate solutions. Rather, change will require a new long-term strategy, in Honduras and in Washington. Hondurans hungry for change will have to build grassroots political movements outside the traditional parties. This is already beginning, but disagreements among civil society groups and grassroots movements are an obstacle.

Here, international actors, including the United States, could help. For one, donors such as USAID should step up their investments in these citizen initiatives. The international community could also help broker a deal between Honduras and the United Nations for a partnership to fight corruption, as the UN once did in Guatemala. Castro ran on that promise, but she has resisted the legal reforms that would allow a UN mission to succeed.

The stakes are too high, for Honduras and the broader region, for the international community simply to watch in quiet horror as yet another corruption scandal plays out in Tegucigalpa, hoping a future election solves the problem. Otherwise, the cycle will continue, depriving Hondurans of a government capable of solving the country’s serious problems–including poverty and violent crime–and pushing more and more Hondurans to flee north.