Mission impossible: cracking down on Honduran corruption and impunity.
| Autor | Rodriguez, George |
Corruption and impunity go hand in hand, and in Honduras, they have been there--as a sort of negative country trademark--for as long as Hondurans can remember.
Tackling both is an uphill battle, to say the least, but the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Honduran government say that, together, they can do it. Nevertheless, skepticism runs considerably high in civil society quarters, where indignation has surfaced strongly.
The straw that broke the camel's back in Honduras--and brought the OAS into the picture--was the phenomenal rip-off against the Instituto Hondureno de Seguridad Social (IHSS), which left a deficit of 6.4-billion lempiras (just under US$280 million) and collapsed the institution. The plundering was perpetrated three years ago by means of high-priced, fictitious IHSS acquisitions of medical equipment and drugs from nonexistent pharmaceutical companies.
3000 deaths
According to local media reports, as a consequence of the scam, some 3,000 IHSS patients died. And as Honduran journalist David Romero, director of Radio Globo and Globo TV reported on May 8, 2015, some of the money was funneled into President Juan Orlando Hernandez's successful 2013 election campaign.
After the news broke last year, angry but peaceful Hondurans all over the country took to the streets by the thousands to express their disgust and outrage at unpunished corruption, and to demand Hernandez's resignation as well as the creation of what they named a Comision Internacional Contra la Impunidad (International Commission Against Impunity, CICI). The Oposicion Indignada (Indignant Opposition)--initially called Movimiento de Indignados (Indignants' Movement)--was thus born, and for months held weekly torchlight demonstrations at dusk to back their demands.
JOH--as Hernandez is usually referred to in Honduras--immediately reacted with a television address declaring himself an indignado as well. He decried endemic, unpunished corruption, and in an attempt to weaken civil society's demands and ease the pressure, called for a national dialogue on the issue (NotiCen, July 2, 2015). He even went as far as proposing what he then said was something even better that CICI: the Sistema Integral Hondureno de Combate a la Impunidad y la Corrupcion (Integrated Honduran System to Combat Impunity and Corruption, SIHCIC).
The unrelenting marches--along with a 42-week hunger strike outside the Casa Presidencial--led Hernandez to call on the OAS and the United...
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