Human Rights Groups Decry Post-Election Violence, Torture in Honduras.

AutorRodriguez, George

The bloody 2009 coup d'etat in Honduras is not actually over, and its negative effects are still being felt, as the violence that has gripped the country since the Nov. 26 presidential elections demonstrates.

That is the assessment of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and of a local organization made up of relatives of disappeared men and women in Honduras, the Comite de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH).

Incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernandez's victory, made official by the country's top electoral authority, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE), was the result of what political opposition forces and the population in general describe as flagrant fraud (NotiCen, Jan. 11, 2018).

Early irregularities

Opponents say the irregularities that led to Hernandez's second term in office started at the constitutional chamber of Honduras' highest court, the Corte Suprema de Justicia (CSJ), whose 2015 ruling, ratified in 2016, lifted the constitutional ban on presidential re-election (NotiCen, Oct. 6, 2016).

The irregularities continued when the preliminary results on election night were delayed for five hours by TSE president David Matamoros, who is a member of the ruling Partido Nacional (National Party, PN). The first set of results placed Salvador Nasralla, of the center-left Alianza de Oposicion contra la Dictadura (Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship), ahead of Hernandez by close to six points. An alleged crash of the electronic vote computing system followed, and by the time the system was back on, the two top positions were reversed, unleashing massive public protest and repression nationwide (NotiCen, Dec. 7, 2017).

The official results announced by the TSE three weeks after the vote declared Hernandez the winner by a mere 1.6 percentage points.

Opposition street demonstrations and repression by police and Army troops continued into Hernandez's inauguration on Jan. 27 with a high degree selective persecution, according to human rights watchdogs, repeating the pattern seen under the regime established immediately after the 2009 coup.

"The human rights violations described in this report occurred in the context of a political, economic, and social crisis that can be traced back to the ... coup d'etat, and the subsequent delay in undertaking critical institutional, political, economic, and social reforms," the OHCHR said in a 34-page document issued on March 12 and titled "Human...

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