The Case Against Recognizing "Sham" Elections in Honduras

“Barack Obama's administration may be tempted to congratulate the winner, gradually resume normal diplomatic and economic relations with the successor government to the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, and thus enable the de facto government that drove him from office to erase the remaining stains of its coup d'état,” argues George Vickers in Foreign Policy this morning. “Yield not unto temptation.” “In a political environment contaminated by repression, violence, and fear,” Vickers writes, recognizing Sunday’s vote will only lengthen the Honduran crisis and hurt the country’s “prospects for real democracy.” Rather, says OSI’s director of international operations, the U.S. should publicly support a national dialogue in Honduras around shortcomings in the Honduran constitution, recently called the “worst in the world” by the United States’ own handpicked negotiator, Oscar Arias. This may be only way for the U.S. to retain “a trace of goodwill” among many frustrated Hondurans and Latin America more generally, writes Vickers.

This opinion is echoed once again this morning by Reuters who adds to yesterday’s news that the Honduran crisis has driven a wedge between the U.S. and rising regional power, Brazil. It was Brazilian foreign policy adviser, Marco Aurelio Garcia again, who repeated the Brazilian position while speaking with US National Security Adviser, James Jones. “The United States will become isolated — that is very bad for the United States and its relationship with Latin America,” Aurelio Garcia told Jones this week. As Spain’s El Pais puts it today, the difference of opinion between the U.S. and Brazil over Honduras (as well as Iran) has led the two countries to “collide.”

For more on the case against recognizing Sunday’s elections, the Washington D.C.-based Latin America Working Group and Washington Office on Latin America have released a joint statement, saying “basic conditions for a free and fair election do not exist” in Honduras. Analysts from both organizations recently returned back from Honduras and report that restrictions on freedom of assembly continue, as do restrictions on the media. They also point out the direct and visible involvement of the military in the election process. Quoting Honduras’s Tiempo, the LAWG and WOLA write: “the high level of military involvement in the electoral process is ‘an extraordinary, bizarre development,’ as in recent years ‘the military invariably played a limited, imperceptible, and detached role in safeguarding polling places.’” Also, in the Guardian, Calvin Tucker argues against recognizing Sunday’s elections and adds to the list of “irregular” pre-election activity. “‘Cash discounts’ will be offered to anyone who can prove they voted, courtesy of the country's coup-supporting big business federation.”

Meanwhile, with the latest reporting on the ground in Honduras, COFADEH says the de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti has acquired new equipment—including water cannons and security cameras—which are being used to intimidate anti-coup activists who are supporting a Sunday boycott. In country reporting says de facto foreign minister, Carlos Lopez Contreras, publicly admitted that the coup regime has been blocking transmission of pro-Zelaya Canal 36. El Heraldo has news about the Attorney General’s office turning in its report to the Congress on whether or not to restore the ousted Mel Zelaya to power. However, the details of the report have not been revealed. New reports indicate that over 100 candidates for public office have now pulled their name from Sunday’s ballot after some 55 members of Zelaya’s Liberal Party joined over 50 PINU candidates in protest this week. And AFP reports that around 15 U.S. analysts and ex-government officials will be in Tegucigalpa as guests of the Election Tribunal Sunday. The TSE has also set up a website where those not in country can apparently watch electoral proceedings from afar. Check out Hondurasvota2009.com for more.

Around the region on this Thanksgiving morning:

· The New York Times reports on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela Wednesday. In the Iranian leader’s fourth visit to Caracas, Chavez called him a “gladiator of anti-imperialist struggles.” The Times Simon Romero writes of material cooperation between Venezuela and Iran as well: “Studies here of Venezuela’s economic ventures with Iran, which began in 2004, reveal more than 300 cooperation agreements, but few projects of any substance. A planned oil refinery and plans to build factories to produce cement and munitions have not materialized. Plants that produce cars and bicycles are running well below capacity.”

· From Haiti, Reuters writes that the Lavalas Family Party, the political party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, will be banned from participating in Feb. 28 legislative elections. “The Lavalas Family party will not be allowed to participate in the next election, because the electoral council’s legal counsel said the party did not meet all legal requirements,” Gaillot Dorsinvil, head of the Haitian electoral council told local radio stations Wednesday. He did not comment further on what those legal requirements were but there is speculation that some of the party’s registration papers may have been falsified. Banned from prior elections as well, Mr. Aristide’s allies have accused election officials of dismissing their party to aid a new coalition close to President René Préval.

· The AP reports that Mexican president Felipe Calderon is trying to refocus energies away from his controversial war on drugs and toward an anti-poverty agenda. “This is our conviction, which has led us to make a significant reduction in poverty the first priority for my administration in the three remaining years ... and particularly extreme poverty,” Calderon told an anti-poverty conference in Mexico City. In a taped interview that aired Wednesday Calderon elaborated further. “My objective from here on is to greatly reduce poverty, by taking the Opportunities program to places it doesn't exist,'' referring to a program that gives cash grants to families for keeping children in school and giving them medical care.

· In Colombia, the AP writes that ex-Gen. Jaime Humberto Uscategui has been convicted of murder by a Colombian court and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in a notorious 1997 massacre by far-right militias in the village of Mapiripan. The sentence was the most severe to date against a high ranking Colombian military official, says the AP. The wire service goes on: “The killings - bodies were hacked up and many were thrown in a river - marked the bloody arrival of right-wing death squads in Colombia's eastern plains, where they would go on to kill hundreds of suspected leftist rebel sympathizers. Human rights groups have long accused Colombia's military of aiding and abetting right-wing death squads, citing the Mapiripan massacre as a clear case of close cooperation between the army and landowner-backed militias operating outside the law.”

· Finally, an opinion today on Brazil from commentator, Alvaro Vargas Llosa. He writes critically of Brazil’s rise to the world stage: “First, while Brazil's economy is becoming first class, its politics is still Third World. Second, the leaders are impatient to make their country a global power before their citizens become truly prosperous.”