La Gringa's Blogicito

For email Blogicito readers

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 20:19:00 +0000

For some reason that I don't understand, my video in yesterday's article, How to Harvest Cinnamon, was not included in readers' emails though another referenced video was included. I'm going to try to include it again below:

If you don't see the video (it's usually included near the bottom of the email, please go to the original blog article to view it. Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope you'll watch it. I spent days editing it!

How to harvest cinnamon

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 07:02:00 +0000

Our lopsided cinnamon tree after pruning
(It was more lopsided before)

We have a big cinnamon tree that we planted about 9 years ago. It was about 12 inches tall (30 cm) and cost around a dollar when we planted it. Cinnamomom zeylanicum (Ceylon cinnamon or true cinnamon) is a beautiful shade tree with small, dark, glossy leaves.

See the little berries towards the bottom

It blooms once a year with white flower clusters, followed by small, acorn-shaped 'berries' (terrible tasting – don't try them!). Tender new growth sometimes has a pinkish hue.

Even if you aren't interested in harvesting the spice, I highly recommend this attractive tree as an ornamental shade tree in your tropical garden. CURLA (north coast Honduran agricultural university) recommends that it be grown below 500 meters altitude, though it can be grown up to 1,000 meters (3,200 feet). Cinnamon trees can grow to 10-15 meters in height (~30-45 feet).

Tree at about 1 1/2 years (Nov. 2006)

Cinnamon needs to be grown in tropical climates where temperatures are mostly in the 27-30°C (80°-86°F) range and the rainfall is heavy, 1,500-4,500 mm per year (~60-180 inches). It does not like prolonged dry periods. Be careful where you purchase the tree, though, as my CURLA tropical fruit book mentions that the trees grown from seed in the Lancetilla botanical garden are subject to fungal problems. CURLA propagates from cuttings of a Puerto Rican variety which doesn't have problems with fungus or insects on the north coast.

We've trimmed the tree several times to remove low hanging branches and to try to correct its lopsidedness. This was caused by dog damage, overcrowding, and rainy season neglect when it was young. The tree generally has a very nice shape which doesn't require much, if any, pruning. Trimming emits the most wonderful smell of cinnamon (canela in Spanish), as does crunching up a leaf. I always wanted to harvest the cinnamon but didn't know how. (We didn't have internet for several years.) This time I searched until I found some information that made it clearer how it was done so we decided to give it a go.

How the professionals do it

On cinnamon plantations, I've read that they allow the young tree to grow for 3-6 years until it is 2-3 meters tall (~6-10 feet) and then cut it back a few inches above the ground. This allows multiple new stems to shoot up. The cinnamon can be harvested from this first cutting. The new stems are allowed to grow for 2-3 more years and then the cinnamon is harvested by cutting the stems almost to the ground again. In this manner, the individual plantings can be kept going for many years. There is the added benefit of having long, straight, mostly branchless stems from which to harvest the cinnamon. I may try that with some of the many seedlings that pop up under the tree every year.

The best time for harvesting cinnamon is right after the rainy season, but not while the ground is saturated. Unfortunately, we trimmed this tree right before the rainy season, so we soaked the wood overnight. This supposedly is to make the bark easier to remove, though we aren't sure if it made much difference. I'll skip this step next time unless the bark proves hard to remove.

The recommended sizes for harvesting the cinnamon are branches or stems with diameters from 1.2 to 5 cm (about 1/2 to 2 inches). Smaller diameter branches don't have a thick enough layer of cinnamon and larger branches are used for making cinnamon oil because the cinnamon will be bitter.

The harvesting process

First, any leaves and small twiggy branches shooting off the branch that you are going to use should be removed. Unless you are a pro, you'll probably want to cut the branch into shorter, easier to handle pieces. Around 60 cm (24 inches) worked well for us.

Then the dark outer bark is scraped off being careful to remove it all but not to scrape into the thin orange cinnamon layer. A paint scraper worked well for this. Initially, the cinnamon may appear yellow, but after exposed to the air for awhile, it will be more orange.

Next the branch is firmly rubbed all over to loosen the cinnamon layer from the wood. We just used a short piece of wood to rub the cinnamon layer but in Ceylon they apparently use a special tool, a brass rod. It was mentioned that you shouldn't use any other type metal for the rubbing as it can darken the cinnamon.

A long lengthwise cut is made through the cinnamon layer with a sharp stainless steel knife and one or more cuts are scored around the circumference of the branch, depending upon the section length you feel comfortable working with. Ceylon professionals cut the entire length of 1-2 meter branches into one piece of cinnamon, but being beginners, and not having long straight twigless branches like they grow specifically for this purpose, we had better luck sectioning the cinnamon into about 4-5 inch cinnamon stick-sized pieces. 'Knots' from side branches make it more difficult to remove the cinnamon in large sections.

After scoring the sections, begin to carefully pry up the cinnamon layer in as big a piece as you can with a knife or metal spatula. With practice, you'll be able to remove most sections in one piece. The cinnamon will quickly start curling up into a cinnamon stick as it dries. A few pieces can be rolled together or a big piece can be filled with the smaller scraps of cinnamon to make cinnamon sticks.

The sticks needs to thoroughly dry in the shade for about a week. Sun will leach out the flavor. I also put the cinnamon sticks in a barely warm, turned off oven to help them along since we have such high humidity here. Wow! Did my kitchen smell good!

After it was dried, I ground some cinnamon in a coffee grinder. I had to do it several times to get all the chunks out, but eventually I ended up with a jar of finely ground cinnamon. I put the rest of the sticks in a glass jar. I use the sticks for cinnamon tea, a new favorite of mine.

It's a lot easier to show than tell, so here is a video that our part time garden helper Ever helped me to make. He did a great job explaining.

Watch my video on YouTube if it is not showing above.

This turned into quite a popular project, with some neighborhood kids coming to learn how and Yamileth, my housekeeper, getting enthused about helping, too. She told me that her neighborhood pulperia charges three lempiras for a very tiny piece of canela about two inches long. The boys told me their mom was going to make arroz con leche (rice with milk, sort of a rice pudding) with some of their cinnamon. We all have enough cinnamon to last a long time. The boys have since come back to get some of the seedlings to try to grow their own cinnamon trees.

This was also a very 'green' project. We accomplished trimming the tree, used the small twigs and leaves in the compost, harvested enough cinnamon for workers and friends, and gave the left over wood to a poor man who sells leña (firewood) to those who still cook with wood stoves. No waste at all.

Soaking the branches might have removed some of the cinnamon flavor. The soaking water certainly turned into cinnamon tea. But my sister-in-law says that it takes much less of our cinnamon to make tea than it does the cinnamon she's bought in La Ceiba before, so I'm not sure. We have some more trimming to do where the tree is hanging over the fence but I'm going to wait until after rainy season next spring as recommended. It will be interesting to see if the flavor is any different next time.

Uses

This cinnamon is very sweet and mild, which was really good in iced coffee and made a great flavored cinnamon ice cream. I've used it in cinnamon bread, cookies, and a few other recipes. I used a little more than I do with store bought cinnamon, which has a harsher flavor.

Besides a cooking spice, cinnamon tea has been used in home remedies for thousands of years but has recently become very popular as a means to aid weight loss, blood sugar control, stomach upsets, and other health concerns. Scientific studies sometimes disagree, but users swear by it.

Two varieties of cinnamon

Less expensive Cassia cinnamon is more often found in US grocery stores, though you can get Ceylon cinnamon (true cinnamon) in specialty stores and online. Cassia is stronger flavored and is considered a less desirable cinnamon. Some people even consider it unhealthy because it has much higher levels of coumarin, which can cause liver damage.

Image from Cinnamon Vogue

Ground cinnamon will generally be labeled as to the type but other ways you can tell which type you have is that Ceylon cinnamon is lighter colored, more of a golden or oranish brown, while Cassia cinnamon is dark, reddish brown. In stick form, Cassia is much thicker and the stick usually consists of one layer, hollow inside. Ceylon sticks may consist of several thinner layers or small pieces rolled up inside like a cigar. You can break the Ceylon cinnamon sticks and cannot break the Cassia. 80% of the world's Ceylon cinnamon still comes from Sri Lanka, formerly called Ceylon. Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese cinnamon are all forms of the cheaper Cassia cinnamon.

If you buy a tree, make sure that you get true cinnamon, Cinnamomum zeylanicum. I believe it is still sold at CURLA here in La Ceiba. You might consider buying two, one for growing a shade tree and one for harvesting the spice. That way you can have the best of both worlds: a beautiful shade tree and your own small cinnamon plantation.

More cinnamon info

To see how Ceylon professionals harvest cinnamon, check out this beautiful video, The Cinnamon Story. They are amazing! This man was getting cinnamon pieces at least 1-2 meters long. In the last part of this video, they are making cinnamon oil. There is no 'cooking' involved in harvesting the spice, though drying ovens or rooms are used to speed the drying process on cinnamon plantations.

For everything you ever wanted to know about cinnamon, check out Cinnamon Vogue.

One of my favorite comment exchanges

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 20:46:00 +0000

Someone just posted a comment on an old article about typical Honduran food and skimming through the comments, I ran across this old exchange that made me laugh (again).

Anonymous Nina posted a comment, Saturday, November 5 2011, 1:01 PM

this isn't helping me at all!!!!! i Hate this website!!!!!!

La Gringa, reply to Anonymous Nina, Saturday, November 5, 2011 1:49 PM

Why doesn't it help?!!!!! Do you have a homework assignment?!!!!!

Anonymous Nina reply to La Gringa, Sunday, November 6, 2011 1:25 PM

i cant find what im looking for... and yeesss i have a homework assignment due Tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! bllaaaahh!!!!!!!!

La Gringa, reply to anonymous nina, Sunday, November 6, 2011 1:50 PM

Should have started earlier like your mom always says!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What do you need?

Unfortunately, Anonymous Nina didn't reply so I don't know what she was looking for. I would have tried to help her! I just couldn't resist giving her a little bit of a hard time. If her question was about typical Honduran food, it was a shame that she didn't take the time to read through the 60 comments in which many Hondurans offered their insights about many other typical foods that I didn't include in the article. I think it is time to expand on that article!

Honduran comida tipica (typical food)

For a very good blog written by a Catracha with lots of Honduran recipes, most of which are in both Spanish and English, check out Cocina Hondureña y Mas.

Extorting the lifeblood out of Honduras

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 22:29:00 +0000

"For not wanting to give up his house"
Photo: El Tiempo, Honduras

Extortion is a massive problem in Honduras. It's sucking the life out of businesses, transportation providers, entrepreneurs, neighborhoods, even schools and churches. Yes, even schools and churches in some areas have to pay extortion. Teachers and children are extorted daily in some schools. One 11-year-old was killed recently after his young extortioners graduated from charging him 10 lempiras a day at school to kidnapping him. Lots of kids quit school because it's too dangerous for them to go. Gangs pressure boys as young as 10 years old to join and girls are pressured to become 'girlfriends' or prostitutes.

If you are like I was, you probably have a hard time understanding what this extortion is. I used to think of extortion like blackmail – person-A did something and person-B extorts money to keep the secret – or protection payments – business owner pays a gang to protect his business against robberies by the same gangs that are doing the extortion. Especially confusing was how anyone could be extorted by telephone. This extortion is different; it boils down to 'You have something; I want it. Pay or die'. Anyone who has anything may be required to give up part or all of it to the extortionists. The extortion demand may be made in person, by someone hired to carry a note, or by telephone.

I was in a doctor's office when the doctor left to take a telephone call. She was very upset when she came back and I asked what was wrong. "Extortionists!", she said. "They've been calling me for weeks, saying I have to pay or they will kill my sons. They know their names and where they go to school! We want to get out of this damn country! We are trying to emigrate to Europe. We have friends there." "Did you report it to the police?", I asked. "Yes. The police do nothing."

Many people, right after filing a complaint with the police, report that they and/or their families have been threatened by phone. Who is calling, how do they have their phone number, and how would they know the person filed a complaint unless the police were involved? A few months ago, an entire extended family who were running a day care center was wiped out just two days after one of the women filed an extortion complaint with the police. It's not unusual that children, even babies, are killed in these massacres.

In La Ceiba, so many people were being threatened by telephone that many gave up their landline phones. After decades of no phone lines being available from the government monopoly – we were on the Hondutel waiting list beginning in 2002 and never were able to get a phone line! – Hondutel was so desperate that they began sending employees door-to-door to solicit customers for the estimated 20,000 excess lines they now had available. However, we were warned by several neighbors not to get a Hondutel line as many of their friends were reporting extortion attempts right after their new line was installed. They believed that Hondutel employees were selling the personal information of new customers.

Honduran police have captured some of the 'collectors' carrying as much as L.170,000, presumably a day's collections, but they rarely or never arrest the bosses behind these criminal enterprises. Based on what comes out in the news, a lot of the collectors are women and minors and I don't know if police even look for the bosses. In some cases the police are the bosses behind this. I can tell you this without a doubt, anyone who is making L.100,000 a day or a week or even a month, is not going to spend his days beating the streets around town in the hot sun to collect money. He would play the executive and hire other people to do it for him. It's just like with the paid assassinations: the assassins (who are a dime a dozen and easily replaced) are sometimes captured and prosecuted, but the persons who paid for the assassinations are never, ever prosecuted in Honduras.

In some areas, you pay to live there, you pay to work there, you pay to drive a taxi there, you pay to operate a corner store or restaurant, you pay to go to school. Many small and medium Honduran businesses have closed due to extortion – the 'tariff' imposed is greater than any profit made. Many others have had to cut jobs to compensate for the money lost to extortion.

A frail old lady had a small stand on the street in La Ceiba where she sold backpacks and purses. Finding a job in Honduras when you are over 35 is very difficult. When you are in your 60's, forget about it! But guess what, people in the "third age", tercera edad as it's called in Spanish, still have to live, they have to eat, and they still need a roof over their heads, so this enterprising woman started her own little business where she was eking out a very modest living. That was until the extortionists latched on to her. Initially she paid what they asked out of fear, but when they increased her weekly payment to L.1,000, she said that left nothing for her. She decided to close her stand. What will she do now?

People have abandoned their homes to the gangs in the most dangerous areas. They can't sell their houses because who would buy a house in such an area, and even if there was a buyer, guess what? You have to pay the gangs $20,000 or whatever they decide you owe to sell your home, too. What is the penalty for not paying? Death. Enough bus owners, taxistas, business owners, and other extortion victims have been killed to prove that this isn't an empty threat.

Why don't people stand up to this extortion?

Many people have stood up to the extortionists. Emilio Sánchez did.

Emilio Sánchez Rodríguez (40) ran a small business out of his home in Comayagüela. On July 23, he commented to his mother that he was living in fear and that it was better that he sell his house and go somewhere else to rent. The next day he was abducted by gang members who took him to a 'casa loca' where he was tied up, tortured and burned. After hours of torture and mutilation, he was taken, still alive, to a street near his home where he was shot 40 times in broad daylight at 1 pm in the afternoon. A note was left on his body: "For not wanting to give up his house, sincerely, the diec18cho" (signifying the gang taking responsibility). The police have no suspects. 'Casas locas' are houses that have been taken over by gangs and are used for gang activities.

Emilio Sánchez left behind a wife and five children who now have the choice of living every day in fear that they will be next or abandoning their home. The day after Sánchez was killed, a young person was killed and his body was left with a sign that said that the rival MS gang "put him down because he didn't do what we said". The woman with the day care center mentioned above reported it to the police. That cost, if I remember correctly, five lives and it would have been more except that four children escaped through a back window when they heard the gunshots and ran to the neighbors.

More and more frequently, people aren't just being killed, they are being tortured and horribly mutilated. Their bodies aren't being hidden in empty fields, they are being transported back to the areas where they lived and dumped in open areas to further terrorize the people. Many recent murder victims have been dumped in big sacks and have written signs placed on their bodies as a warning to others.

Some of the taxi associations in La Ceiba stood up to the extortioners and refused to pay. One by one, those taxi drivers were killed until the others relented. A lot of bus owners and their helpers have been assassinated and/or their buses burned, most likely because they refused to pay. Extortionists often threaten to kill employees, wives or children in order to coerce cooperation. It's not an empty threat.

In one La Ceiba neighborhood where the gangs were trying to take control, one man was leading the neighbors to stand up to them. He had seen what happened in a nearby area and didn't want that to happen in his colonia. He was murdered after being tortured and his body mutilated. But it wasn't only him. His university student son was also tortured and murdered as was the man's brother who was only visiting at the time. The son was a friend of El Jefe's and he wasn't "involved in anything" except going to school to try to make a better life for himself.

What are the effects of extortion in Honduras?

With only an estimated 9% of homicides in Honduras even investigated by the police, there is no way to know how many people have been killed due to extortion. In some cases, relatives or friends know and say publicly that the victim was being extorted. But it's dangerous to even talk about it.

Though there is no way to accurately quantify the effects of extortion, various studies have reported that gross income from extortion is more than a billion lempiras per year in Honduras and that 40% of the population is affected by extortion. One congressman said that he personally knows at least 100 people who are paying extortion and are afraid to go to the police. He flatly states that the police have no credibility, especially when they lie to the people about crime, and admits that victims have valid fears.

An estimated 18,000 small and medium Honduran businesses have closed during the past year due to extortion. In La Ceiba alone, an estimated 200-250 businesses closed due to extortion in the first nine months of 2013, where extorsionistas may demand L.10,000-25,000 per month and even up to L.50,000-100,000 for large businesses. Based on those local figures, I would guess that the national effect is much larger than a billion lempiras.

One Walmart-owned grocery store in La Ceiba ignored extortionists and shortly thereafter was robbed by a pickup truck load of heavily armed robbers. A cashier was killed in the robbery. A few weeks later, a second robbery resulted in the death of a customer in the parking lot. Amazingly, to the best of my knowledge, neither of these robberies made the national news.

What is the government doing?

In Decreto 16-2012, Congress changed the law to provide for more severe sentences for those convicted of extortion. The penalty now is 15 to 20 years in prison. If a death is involved, the penalty is a life sentence.

After more than a decade of serious extortion problems, in 2012 the police set up anti-extortion units (Fuerza Nacional Antiextorsión de Honduras [FNA]) initially in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, later in La Ceiba, and possibly other towns, as well a dedicated telephone tip line. It's hard to know what effect the FNA has had, but 2013 statistics released by them indicate that they received almost 2,000 complaints, captured 452 persons of which 242 have been prosecuted, and saved the victims payments of about L.36 million. So far in 2014, FNA has arrested 274 extorsionistas, including 74 minors. However, after creative police math, the previous official reports of 158 arrests in 2012, 452 in 2013, and 274 in the first six months of 2014 now somehow total 1,003 extortion arrests. The police blame the population for not reporting extortion.

FNA also says that the majority of cases have nothing to do with gangs. They say, in fact, that the transportation associations themselves are involved with some of the extortions of transportistas. Every now and then there is a show of taking back a neighborhood, but the fact is that these neighborhoods were lost long ago and the police were perfectly aware of that and did virtually nothing for years. A former police commissioner denounced that one high level police official receives L.950,000 per month as a result of his cut of the impuesta de guerra (war tax). Other police have been captured in the act of extortion but its likely that they don't even lose their job for that until and if they are prosecuted and convicted.

~~~~~~~~

Have you or anyone you know been threatened by extortion in Honduras? Please leave a comment.

Passionfruit (Maracuyá)

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 05:22:00 +0000

Passiflora edulis – Passionfruit vine

That is my passionfruit vine. Here's another photo of it growing around a banana plant.

Click any of the photos to view larger

Here the vine is continuing its journey over some other plants.

And here climbing over my macadamia nut tree.

Here is another vine climbing up to the top of my crepe myrtle tree.

And here it is reaching for the roof on top of my variegated hibiscus. When it takes hold, it does not want to let go!

I should have paid more attention to my CURLA tropical fruit book. I read about passiflora edulis when I first planted the seeds but then my part in the project (severe pruning) was quickly forgotten and I left the vine to do its own thing. According to CURLA, in this area the vines can reach a kudzu-like 80 meters (~260 feet) in length if left untrimmed.

Did you see the fruits? No? Me neither. Not a one! I've only seen about five flowers, one at a time, which promptly fell off instead of producing fruit. I think we planted them about a year and a half ago so maybe it is too soon. The vines were almost completely defoliated by butterfly larvae last year so that setback might have something to do with the lack of fruit, too. Since I don't have a flower to show you, this is a photo from Wikipedia.

I bought some passionfruit recently from Axel, a little boy who comes around every now and then selling lemons, mangos or other fruit. When he found out I like maracuyá, he came back again a couple of days later with a bigger bag for me. Enterprising little boy! I told him that I have plants but not any fruit and got him to inspect my plantings. He was impressed with the size and said that if his plant was that big, it would have 100 fruit on it. Thanks a lot! Rub it in. He and his brother Juan also pointed out that someone was macheteing my plants and probably cutting off all the potential flowers and fruit. Hmmmm.

If you aren't familiar with passionfruit (maracuyá in Spanish), there isn't much fruit inside – it's mostly brown/black seeds covered with a sort of gelatinous yellowish covering, a little juice, and a couple of small blobs of soft orange pulp. It's like the inside of a juicy, seedy tomato, except that the juice is yellow and the tiny seeds are crunchy. The flavor reminds me of grapefruit with a bit of a tropical twist and the crunch of the seeds is really nice.

Yellow Passionfruit

The first time I ever opened a passionfruit, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the seeds. How could you separate the seeds from the fruit? The recipes that I found called for passionfruit pulp. What pulp? Well, it's simple: you use the bit of pulp, the juice, and the seeds, too. In this photo, I'm cutting into Axel's fruits and scooping out the insides. The rinds are thrown away. The edible part inside easily scoops out with a spoon.

The most common way maracuyá are used in Honduras (that I'm aware of) is to make juice or licuados (smoothies). You can blend the fruit, seeds and all, with sugar and water (about 3-4 parts water to one part fruit, sugar to taste) and strain it, or just mix it all together and serve the juice with seeds. I prefer it with seeds. Passionfruit goes really well with yogurt, but my absolute favorite is passionfruit ice cream, with seeds, of course. Those crunchy seeds give you a burst of flavor when you bite into them.

Passionfruit is also used in jams, cocktails, as toppings for cheesecake and flan, and in other desserts. A nice thing about passionfruit is that if you get a super harvest, you can freeze the excess pulp and seeds with no loss of flavor or texture and it doesn't take up much space at all.

Passionfruit is sometimes available in the grocery stores here in La Ceiba and probably more often in the market. The smaller purple variety is more orange inside and less acidic but the plant is more susceptible to problems. Maracuyá keeps for a relatively long time and is still good even after it gets all wrinkly.

The attractive vines are easy to grow from seeds. Axel suggested I plant some seeds from his fruit to see if they do any better. I'm going to do that and if I get a bumper crop, I'll share the fruit with him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Below are some links if you'd like to know more about passionfruit:

Tropical Permaculture: Growing Passionfruit Vines

Wikipedia: Passiflora edulis

How to (Select and) Eat Passionfruit

One of my favorite sources of tropic fruit information is Fruits of Warm Climates by Julia F. Morton. The book is available online at Purdue University. I enjoy reading about the history of the fruits and the various uses in different countries. Here is the page on passionfruit.

Frutales y Condimentarias del Trópico Húmedo (Fruits and Spices of the Humid Tropics) covers well over 100 tropical fruits with photos of the fruit, flower, leaf, and the plant at various stages of growth. The book includes some information from Julia F. Morton's book, as well as specific local information (best varieties, growing and harvesting conditions, as well as common pests) based on trials done by CURLA and the Lancetilla botanical garden and consultations with local experts. The book is available for about $20 at CURLA University here in La Ceiba. It's in Spanish, of course.

Updated US Travel Warning for Honduras, June 24

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 20:03:00 +0000

Map of Honduras

The US State Department issued a new travel warning today for US citizens planning to go to Honduras.

Here are some of the highlights [emphasis is mine]:

The Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens that the level of crime and violence in Honduras remains critically high....

U.S. citizens are victims of crime at levels similar to those of the local population, and do not appear to be targeted based on their nationality. Although Roatan/Bay Islands, Copan Mayan ruins, and other tourist destinations and resorts have a lower crime rate than other parts of the country, thefts, break-ins, assaults, and murders do occur and are still high by international standards. In 2012, the Government of Honduras increased police presence and established special police forces in areas frequented by tourists, such as the Copan Mayan ruins and Roatan....

Tourists traveling with group tours also report fewer criminal incidents. However, the San Pedro Sula area has seen armed robberies against tourist vans, minibuses, and cars traveling from the airport to area hotels, and there have also been armed robberies along the road to Copan. Visitors are strongly urged to exercise caution in discussing travel plans in public.

Several U.S. citizens have reported being robbed while walking on isolated beaches....The vast majority of cruise line passengers in Honduras experience no problems, but incidents of armed robbery and carjacking have been reported. Coxen Hole on the island of Roatan should be avoided after dark. The vast majority of serious crimes in Honduras, including those against U.S. citizens, are never solved.

Members of the Honduran National Police have been known to engage in criminal activity, including murder and car theft. The government of Honduras lacks sufficient resources to properly investigate and prosecute cases, and police often lack vehicles or fuel to respond to calls for assistance. In practice, this means police may take hours to arrive at the scene of a violent crime, or may not respond at all. As a result, criminals operate with a high degree of impunity throughout Honduras. The Honduran government is still in the early stages of substantial reforms to its criminal justice institutions.

Kidnappings remain a concern and are believed to be underreported. Since January 1, 2012, four cases of kidnapped U.S. citizens were reported to the U.S. Embassy. The kidnapping victims were all subsequently released, sometimes paying large ransoms to their captors.

.....Most of Honduras’ major cities (Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, and others), as well as several Honduran “departments” (a geographic designation similar to U.S. states) have homicide rates higher than the national average for 2013, including:

DEPARTMENT CAPITAL
Atlántida La Ceiba
Colón Trujillo
Cortés San Pedro Sula
Ocotepeque Ocotepeque
Yoro Yoro

There are no reliable statistics for the department of Gracias a Dios; however, travelers to the area should note that it is a remote location where narcotics trafficking is frequent, infrastructure is weak, government services are limited, and police or military presence is scarce....

~~~~~~

The travel warning notes that Honduras has had the highest murder rate in the world since 2010 and also gives both the Minister of Security's calculated murder rate for 2013 (75.6 per 100,000) and the Observatorio de la Violencia murder rate (79 per 100,000). I believe shows that the US government does not rely on the Minister of Security's "official" statistics.

Please read the entire warning at the US State Department website. It includes links to other information as well as safety and reporting tips.

This time the State Department did not include the number of US citizens murdered since 2008. In the December 2013 travel warning, it was 50 US citizens, of which only two cases had been solved. With each warning, the State Department changes the period for which they report the number of murders of US citizens so that it is impossible to quantify the current year. Very annoying.

I was looking at my blog about the June 2013 US Travel Warning and I see that I predicted that the Minister of Security would be manipulating the 2013 crime statistics! At that time, Corrales had forbidden police agents from talking to reporters. About that same time in 2013 was when he stopped providing crime data to the Observatorio.

Recent related articles:
June 22: Honduras solves its crime problem
June 23: The Observatorio will continue publishing crime reports

The Observatorio will continue publishing crime reports

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 05:32:00 +0000

Julieta Castellanos

UNAH Rector Julieta Castellanos announced today that despite the difficulties, the Observatorio de la Violencia would continue to provide crime bulletins utilizing "other sources". Minister of Security Arturo Corrales has still not responded to her latest request for access to the data. He's probably circling the wagons now to put a lock on her other sources. President Hernández has had no comment on the lack of transparency.

"The style of Arturo Corrales is this: close the information. This is where one sees that the state doesn't feel compelled to render accounts," said Castellanos. She lamented that this shows a lack of democracy.

The Observatorio will be looking to establish strategic alliances with civil society and local government to control and prevent the violence phenomenen in Honduras. OV currently has local Observatorios in seven of the larger more violent towns and has plans to open others in Olanchito, Santa Rosa de Copán, and the Aguán Valley.

Failed Police Purification

Police purification was our big hope in Honduras for a year or so until even the most optimistic had to give up. The police still go on with the pretense but nothing is happening. All the international experts who were assisting, including the US, gave up and left long ago.

I ran across an March article on the UNAH newspaper site about this so I should give you an update. Julieta Castellanos reported that 90% of the police who failed the confidence tests (drug and lie detector tests and financial audits) are still working for the police department. She commented that there is incoherence and lack of coordination and investigation in the institutions responsible for the process.

Castellanos went on to say that the Minister of Security, the authorities of the Ministerio Público (attorney general), and the Tribunal Superior de Cuentas (general accounting office) seem to have a resistence to investigate the higher level officers for fear that they will investigate them.

Josué Murillo, coordinator of the Alianza por la Paz y la Justicia (Alliance for Peace and Justice) (APJ) questioned that instead of firing police who didn't pass the confidence tests as the new law allows, an agreement was reached to allow several high level officials to retire honorably complete with benefits. He lamented that there are still police involved in illicit acts. Carlos Hernández, member of Association for a Just Society (ASJ in Spanish) said that only 29 police have been fired and the lack of action results in bad morale for the agents who agree with police purification. (Both of these are great organizations that do an incredible job of exposing corruption and occasionally even getting the government to work with them to make improvements.) Ironically, the photo above is of newly inaugurated President Hernández signing a transparency agreement with Transparency International and ASJ (who is the local TI representative organization).

Here we are approximately 2 1/2 years from the time we were told that the police would be "purified" in six months. Press conferences told us over and over again that 100 police were 'suspended' here, 100 there (that magic meaningless word 'suspended'), yet we would later find out that these police had only been transferred to other duties or at best were on paid leave. Even police who had outstanding arrest warrants (including for bank robbery and murder!) or who were tried or awaiting trial for kidnapping, robbery, or extorsion were still on the payroll. If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this sample of old articles in which I documented newpaper reports of police crimes for a couple of months:

From the 'too odd to believed' criminal cops files
Continuing police crime, November 25

By the way, in most of places in which I mention police agents being suspended or fired in those articles, that was deliberate misleading of the media by the police.

A corrupt – and I mean corrupt – police agent

When we talk about corrupt police in Honduras, we aren't talking about minor things like taking a bribe for not issuing a traffic ticket. One of the worst examples is Santos Arnulfo Padilla Rodriguez.

In 2010, police agent Santos Padilla was charged with the kidnapping of a North American couple and the theft of their vehicle. He was tried but released because the victims were too afraid to testify in court — Padilla had threatened their lives. He had also been investigated along with his partner, Wilfredo Figueroa Velásquez, for robberies, extortion, and paid assassination. He was known as "Trigger Happy" by other police in his unit for his propensity to shoot out tires of anyone who didn't stop at a road block or to even kill and 'disappear' them. According to another police agent, Padilla would shoot suspects, gang members, or anyone who caught him in a bad mood. Amazingly, none of this affected his job with the police department at all.

He was one of the four police who killed Julieta Castellanos' 22-year-old son and his friend in October 2011. Initially police tried to cover up the evidence but due to public outrage, the four officers were taken into custody. Incredibly, these suspects were given "the weekend off" by their superior and told to report again on Monday. They, of course, disappeared with not much effort on the part of the police to find them. Padilla turned himself in a year later. He and the others were ultimately convicted in December 2013. He was ordered to serve 87 years in prison. Four other police were involved but were never arrested or tried, including a higher level officer who allegedly gave the okay to "get rid of the problem".

In June 2014, Padilla was convicted of killing another four young men in September 2011 and condemned to an additional 66 years in prison. Padilla was a mass murderer on the police payroll, wearing a uniform and carrying a gun and the police knew he was trouble for at least a year before any of these murders occurred. If the police had taken action against him in 2010, six (or more) young men might be alive today. There is really no telling how many crimes he was actually involved in that were not investigated or how many more like him are still on the police force.

Another strike out on the Victim Registry

I looked up another 2013 murder victim today on the Honduran police website, Isiaha Alexis Perez Reyes. He was the 18-year-old brother of a friend of ours. Isiaha was severely tortured, then murdered by gunshots, and then his body was thrown in the Rio Cangrejal. Police recovered his body a day or so later. He was identified by the family and autopsied. There was no question of not knowing his name or whether or not it was a case of murder, yet his name was not listed on La Ceiba's register, as was the case with every victim I've looked up so far. Just to be sure his name wasn't mangled, I searched by his first name and both last names each separately. Nada.

I again found duplicate victim listings on the register: a duplicate Perez and a duplicate Reyes.

Honduras solves its crime problem

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 07:22:00 +0000

Cartoon by Dario Banegas, La Prensa, Honduras

Honduras has solved its crime problem in the only way the Honduras government knows how — manipulate the statistics!

Honduras' Observatorio de la Violencia (OV) has announced that they will no longer provide crime reports and statistics because the Honduras Minister of Security has refused to provide data to the OV.

Note: See update Observatorio will continue to provide crime reports using other sources.

The Observatorio has been the only objective source of Honduran crime information since 2005. It is supported by the United Nations and the Swiss Cooperation Agency. It operates out of and under the supervision of UNAH, the national university system. In 2011, after the UN proclaimed Honduras the "Murder Capital of the World" and the Rector of the UNAH system's son was killed by police, worldwide attention was devoted to Honduras' crime statistics.

Then President Lobo and his Minister of Security began putting on hundreds of "shows" — road blocks where police check auto registration and driver's licenses — to show that the police were hard at work on crime. Numerous government announcements began coming out that "Crime has been reduced in Tegucigalpa by 70%", "No murders have occurred in San Pedro for six days", and President Lobo once even had the audacity to proclaim that "crime has been reduced to practically zero". After a decade of rising murder rates, all this supposedly happened practically overnight. But the people weren't buying the propaganda. They knew better. So did the OV. The 2011 homicide report showed a significant increase over the already high levels.

Numbers within the columns indicate the homicide rate per 100,000

Shortly after Minister of Security Arturo Corrales was appointed by President Juan Orlando Hernández, the battle of the crime statistics began. Police would announce the number of murders or reduction in murders with nothing but their word to back it up, but the OV would announce a higher number. In addition to police and morgue reports, the OV compares all of the murders against the national newspaper reports. They were often finding that newspapers reported murders (complete with details and photos) that weren't included in the police statistics. In the months preceding Corrales' denial of data, the following chart shows the types of discrepancies that the OV was finding.

Click to view larger image

I've discussed in the past the many reasons why the police statistics are understated but just briefly, a) murders aren't reported, b) murders are reported but are deliberately not recorded by local police, c) bodies are just buried by perpetrators in clandestine mass graveyards or they just disappear and are never processed by the morgues, and d) there are no reporters in most of the towns in Honduras. Now I would add to that list deliberate government manipulation of murder statistics. Similarly, the OV statistics are understated because there are no reporters in much of the country's small remote towns. I believe that even though the OV statistics are more accurate, they are probably understated by a minimum of 10%, possibly more.

About mid-year 2013, Minister of Security Arturo Corrales began prohibiting police from talking to reporters and refusing to provide data to the OV. He then announcing that the OV statistics couldn't be accurate only the police could determine whether a death was a murder or not — that's a bold statement considering that the majority of violent deaths go uninvestigated. He is apparently saying that without an autopsy, a death cannot be considered a homicide. He realizes, of course, that many murder victims are not autopsied. For the state of Olancho alone, 232 bodies of a total of 278 violent deaths were not sent to Tegucigalpa for autopsy during the first eight months of 2010, resulting in an 83% understatement for that period. It doesn't take an expert to determine that someone shot five times in the back of the head is a murder victim, autopsy or not.

The OV struggled through 2013, gathering and analyzing what data they could obtain from the Criminal Investigative Unit, the police stations, the morgues, and newspapers, and completed the 2013 reports, which of course showed a reduction in murders from 2012, but still not as large a reduction as Corrales claimed. Despite outraged denuncias of lack of transparency, both within Honduras and internationally, no action was taken to support the OV. Corrales' decisions apparently have the support of President Hernández, since he certainly has the power to make Corrales provide the data.

Minister Corrales has additionally discussed setting up "Observatorio" committees in each of the approximately 300 municipalities to oversee the police data. One way to make sure that nothing gets done in Honduras is to appoint a committee to handle the project, even better 298 municipal committees. Committees usually consist of some number of government officials, one church member, one person representing civil society, one person representing labor unions, etc. Citizen appointees often have no particular expertise in the area or special knowledge or ability to analyze the issue, and may not even have an interest in the subject. It's not unusual that some committees never even meet, or if they do, they don't take their responsibilities seriously. In any case, they are always outnumbered by government representatives who control the show and make sure that even if the committee comes up with concrete results or suggestions, those results are never acted upon but instead languish in a Minister or President's desk for years.

The police circumvented the transparency issue by developing their own crime data website. While there are some good things about this website, let me count the ways it is inadequate and inaccurate:

1. Data from one page to another on the site isn't consistent. For example, a data report on 2013 murders in the state of Atlántida results in 464 murders. The interactive map reports 309 for the same state and period. Also shown on this map is an unknown figure of 56 which, if it is supposed to be included, results in a total of 365 murders.

2. The interactive map gives numbers, but no indication of the size of the areas covered by those numbers. The map is a major road map, with the state lines only lightly marked. Those state lines disappear at larger and smaller zoom levels. Numbers are sometimes reflected within one state's borders when they actually relate to another. Additionally, there is no population data. The worldwide standard manner of reporting homicides per 100,000 population is not used at all on this website. The various OV maps and charts were much more informative.

3. The interactive map is inaccurate. It gives different results for the same searches. As discussed in 1. above, the first couple of times I searched for homicides, all sexes, departamento (state) of Atlántida, all municipalities, from 1/1/13 through 12/31/13, the results showed 309 vs. the total of 464 reported in the data section. In another map search of all states, Atlántida was shown to have 457 murders. When I went back to double check, it showed 327 murders plus some miscellaneous numbers, some of numbers are shown in locations that aren't even in Atlántida. Here is a screen shot:

Click for larger view

If you individually select each of the eight municipalities in Atlantida, you get these results: La Ceiba* 280 murders, El Porvenir 27, Esparta 16, Jutiapa 21, La Masica 14, San Francisco 14, Tela 74, and Arizona 8, which totals 454, yet another number that doesn't agree with either the basic data or the statewide data. I have no idea what the 56 to the west of La Ceiba represents. No combination of municipalities in that area gives a result of 56. The blue 2 appears to be over Sonaguera which is not in Atlántida and the 78 appears to be in Yoro. However, if you add those four numbers, you get 463, which is close to the Atlántida total given in the data section.

*In the data section, the report for Registro de Fallecidos (register of deaths) shows that La Ceiba reported 288 deaths in 2013.

If all of that isn't bad enough, I rechecked Atlántida's eight municipality figures and the second time, San Francisco became 13 instead of 14, and Arizona became 9 instead of 8. Apparently, it is possible to make the same selections and receive different results each time.

3. The interactive map is unreliable. The numbers reported change as you zoom in or out. For example, if you zoom in just enough to see a number for Sonaguera (southeast of La Ceiba), the map shows 195 plus 139 in Tocoa and 2 in an unnamed town for a total of 336 murders in the state of Colón. Zoom in one more click and you see Sonaguera 53, Trujillo 62, Tocoa 103, Bonito Oriental 16, plus 5, 2, and 2 in which the towns aren't shown for a total in Colón of 243 murders. (The 22 in Jutiapa is in the state of Atlántida.) Zoom in one more click and you see Sonaguera 38, Trujillo 61, Tocoa 100, Saba 14, Taujica 2, and 2, 5, 2, 2 for which no towns are shown plus 2 blue pins with no numbers, for a total of 228 Colón murders. The data section of the website indicates there were 244 murders in Colón.

4. Data is not "linkable" or downloadable for researchers.

5. Data is missing or duplicated. On the Registro de Fallecidos for Atlantida, I happened to notice a 10-year-old victim named Bairon Noe Muñoz on page one, victim #145. Then I saw the same exact murder also reported on page two, victim #274. The total number on that report is 464 so either his murder was counted twice or at least one other murder victim is omitted.

Click for larger view

I then searched for Héctor Ramos, a well-known La Ceiba businessman who was kidnapped and then murdered after the family had agreed to pay the ransom in December 2013. He was not included on the list on the statewide report. However, in searching for Hector, I found three other Hectors who were also duplicated, Hector Cruz, victim 149 and 278; Hector Sevilla, victim 183 and 312; Hector Coca, victim 191 and 320. In searching the Registro de Fallecidos for La Ceiba, I again found that Hector Ramos' name was missing and the three other Hectors were duplicated, but a fourth Hector, Hector Rivas, was listed who was not included on the Registro de Fallecidos for Atlántida.

I searched for another high-profile murder victim, Nedenia Post Dye of the Post cereal family whose December 2013 murder on Roatán made international news. She was not listed among the 21 victims on the Islas de la Bahia Registro de Fallecidos. Then I searched for Juan Ramón Lopez, who was killed February 7, 2013 near Tocoa, Colón. He also was not listed.

6. Listings of murder victims are not arranged in any order within municipalities and states. To see if a specific murder victim is listed requires scanning through hundreds of names. To search for all the duplicates like I found in 3. above would be impossible.

7. 2014 data is not available in either the detailed data reports or the map. If you wanted to verify that a murder victim was listed or compare last week's newspaper reports with the police data, I guess you would have to wait until next year.

8. Data is laughable in some cases. For example:

a) The "Detinidos" (detained) section of the June 15, 2014 weekly report compares the number of detainees for faltas varias (minor issues) for January 1 through June 15 as 29 in 2013 and 23,978 in 2014. First of all, 'detained', like 'suspended', is a word with no defined meaning which is used by the police department to confuse the media and population by implying one thing when what actually happened is something different. Detained could mean that a criminal was apprehended and put in jail. It could also mean that police stopped a vehicle for 5 minutes or that a teenager was thrown into jail overnight for absolutely no reason and then released the next day with no charges. If I had to guess, these 23,978 would largely be made up of the number of innocent citizens stopped at road blocks to allow the police to check their driver's license and auto registration.

b) Similarly, the "Patrullajes" (patrols) section of that same report include numbers which can only be a result of creative accounting. I'd like to believe that the police are doing more patrols -- I want to believe that! -- but if that is happening, it is primarily in San Pedro and Tegucigalpa and I simply can't believe these numbers: patrols on foot, 2013: 4,837, 2014: 38,007; patrols in vehicles, 2013: 2,524, 2014: 63,855; patrols in motorcycles, 2013: 13, 2014: 19,755. And what is the definition of a patrol? Is it an 8-hour shift or a 10-minute drive around a couple of blocks?

c) For the week ending June 15, this report shows a 24% reduction in homicides. Sorry. I do not believe that for one minute! Overall, the police are showing an almost 18% year to date reduction in homicides. I don't believe that either. I imagine that there are file cabinets full of cases awaiting an investigation or determination that will never happen. I've seen one of those file cabinets in La Ceiba!

d) In the data section for La Ceiba, a municipality of around 250,000 population and the third largest city in Honduras, the police report one robbery of persons and two robberies of homes! The actual numbers would be closer to 1,000 times those numbers. This can't entirely be blamed on the police because the vast majority of crimes are never reported as people know that it is a complete waste of time or that the police might even be involved.

There are some good things about the website, if it was accurate. Listing the victims by name could result in more credibility for the police statistics. Unfortunately, it did the opposite for me since I couldn't find any of the victims I looked for. Additionally, being able to zoom in on the map to the aldea (town) and barrio level to show where the murders occurred is also helpful.

Overall, using the website is tedious and inefficient. To check several categories or departments for any period, you have reenter each of the selections all over again, and click back through 12 calendars to select dates each and every time. Compiling usable data for comparison purposes or even searching for a specific murder is near impossible. The website definitely was not designed with users needs in mind and was not adequately tested to ensure accurate results.

I'm convinced that this was the point of the Sepol website: To be able to say that the police are transparent, while at the same time not providing usable or accurate data and analyses. Having the notoriously corrupt police department provide the only source of information is like having soccer players decide whether or not they have committed a penalty. There is no reason that the Observatorio de la Violencia not continue as the only serious and objective source of Honduras' crime data. The Sepol website is not going to fool anyone, least of all the UN, who ignores government statistics that they find unreliable.

In order to provide real transparency, President Juan Orlando Hernández should order the Minister of Security to provide any and all data requested by the OV. Unfortunately, the truth is not helpful in attracting business and tourists to Honduras which is the President's focus. But the truth is what it is and the Honduran government should be doing more to protect its population and less in trying to obfuscate the facts.

See the update, June 23: The Observatorio will continue publishing crime reports

Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 11:00:00 +0000

“To view the opposition as dangerous is to misunderstand the basic concepts of democracy. To oppress the opposition is to assault the very foundation of democracy.” — Aung San Suu Kyi

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” — James Madison, US President (1809-1817)

"Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence" — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." — Harry S. Truman, US President (1945-1953)

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” — Theodore Roosevelt, US President (1901-1909)

"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections." — Lord Acton

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” — Benjamin Franklin

My thoughts

From my viewpoint, an awful lot of people are losing sight of the true meaning of democracy and instead are siding with the use of the very sort authoritarian and undemocratic actions that they claimed to be protecting the country from in 2009.

It's particularly sad and hypocritical that so much of the media is supporting the right of the Nacionalistas to suppress the opposition's right to speak. In recent years, both Liberal and Nacionalista governments have threatened freedom of speech in the media several times.

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." –Voltaire

"Puede ser que a alguien no le guste la izquierda o la derecha, pero si es demócrata debe defender su existencia" –Piedad Córdoba Ruiz

How many times in history has someone said that it's okay to be authoritarian for the greater good? How many times was it for the greater good?

If you understand Spanish, please watch these video interviews (December 2013) with an open mind. Liberal Diputado Dario Banegas, who I respect greatly, discusses the dictatorial nature and intolerance of Mauricio Oliva who was presiding over the old congress. Banegas and PINU Diputado Mario Rivera also discussed their concern over the mass of laws passed after the election which put too much power in the presidency. Banegas said that JOH spent four years passing laws consolidating power in the congress and then, during the last month (after his election), managed to get a boatload of laws passed that move that power to the presidency.

These two men were the only diputados that I saw in many sessions of Congress in December and January who spoke out against the railroading of laws through without analysis and discussion or even the ability to read the law before it was passed. In this video, both warn of the consolidation of powers in the presidency and the weakening of the powers of the congress. This, in my opinion, is something to be concerned about.

From my last article: Ironically, what Nacionalistas have accomplished in the past four years is not terribly dissimilar to what they and Liberales were warning about in 2009 – consolidating money and power in the executive branch, weakening the judiciary and congress, and trying to debilitate the power of the media. This is something to be feared no matter which party is doing it.

It's just a fact that a large portion of the Honduran population do not believe that they are represented by the traditional parties – even among those who vote for them. In fact, thinking back, I can't remember anyone I know ever telling me that they felt represented by their congressmen. For many years, the only way people believed they could be "heard" was by protesting in the streets or in front of government buildings.

Now Honduras has two new parties who were able to obtain 39% of the congress in their first election. That is a major accomplishment. Just imagine how those voters feel to see that they still have no representation in congress because the traditional parties won't allow them to participate.

That has to change.

Honduran Blueberry-Lemon Cake

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:59:00 +0000

Lemon cake with Honduran blueberries

Ah, we need a break from all that seriousness, don't we?

Doesn't that cake look yummy? Before I came to Honduras, blueberries were my favorite fruit. Now I would have to say that mangoes are on top with blueberries being a close second. Imagine how happy I was to find that blueberries are grown in Honduras! Then imagine how sad I was to find that most of the crop is exported.

You can occasionally find blueberries in La Ceiba, where they are incredibly cheap compared to US blueberry prices, but a little more expensive compared to tropical fruits. However, blueberries aren't well known here so sometimes the store's supply isn't as fresh as it should be.

Lucky me, I have a connection so I get some nice fresh Honduran blueberries every once in awhile. I hoard them away in the freezer and dole them out like they are made of gold. Honduran blueberries are similar (or the same?) as the rabbit-eye blueberries grown in Texas: big and juicy. Combine those berries with some big, fat, juicy Honduran limes or lemons, if you prefer, in a sweet, moist cake and you have blueberry-lemon heaven.

I felt like baking a cake not long ago. I started searching my cookbooks for a lemon cake recipe (one of El Jefe's favorites). Then I remembered my blueberry stash in the freezer and a Lemon-Blueberry cake recipe I had made long ago. It was a lower fat-lower calorie cake recipe.

I started making it, when it occurred to me: Is my Catracho going to be satisfied with a low-fat, low-sugar cake? I don't think so! In fact, after he saw the cake later, his happy face turned downtrodden when I started telling him that I had a recipe from a low-fat cookbook. Then I went on to explain that I modified the recipe to fatten it up, which cheered him up considerably. Yes, that is shameful, but if you are going to eat dessert, it might as well be the real thing.

Here is my recipe. I hope you enjoy it:

La Gringa's Honduran Blueberry-Lemon Cake

3 1/2 cups sifted flour
2 tsps. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
-------
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 cup mantequilla blanca (or sour cream)
1 tsp. vanilla
-------
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup butter, softened (1 stick)
-------
3 tbsp. lemon zest, divided use (~4 medium lemons)
1 1/2 - 2 cups cups fresh or frozen Honduran blueberries
1-2 tbsp. sifted flour

Glaze
1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
3-4 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp. of lemon zest from above

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour a 10-cup bundt pan or, I'm guessing, two loaf pans or maybe 1 1/2 to 2 dozen cupcakes. This cake rose quite a bit so whatever you use, don't fill it more than about 2/3 full.

Combine 3 1/2 cups of flour with baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Combine milk and 1/2 cup lemon juice and let sit for about 5 minutes until it thickens. Add mantequilla and vanilla and whisk to combine. If using sour cream instead of mantequilla, I think I'd add an extra 1/4 cup of milk. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat sugar and eggs about 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Add softened butter and beat another 2 minutes. To the sugar mixture, alternate adding about 1/3 of the milk mixture with 1/3 of the flour mixture at a time, beating on low speed with each addition until blended. The batter will be thick.

Place blueberries in a colander, rinse if necessary. No need to thaw them if frozen. (It's preferable not to thaw because the juice then sometimes turns your batter grey). Shake off excess water and sprinkle berries with 1-2 tbsp. sifted flour. Toss the berries in the colander to lightly coat them with flour. Gently fold the berries and 2 tbsp. lemon zest into the batter.

Pour the batter into the prepared bundt pan and bake for 50-55 minutes until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, invert the cake onto a wire rack to finish cooling. While still a bit warm, but not hot, pour the glaze over the cake. For loaf pans, I'd check the doneness of the cakes at about 40-45 minutes and for cupcakes, at about 20-25 minutes.

Glaze

Sift the powered sugar into a small bowl. Add 2-3 tablespoons or so of lemon juice and 1 tablespoon of lemon zest. Stir well. Add more juice until the glaze is the consistency you like. (Truth is I forgot to measure the juice.) Drizzle over slightly warm cake.

Enjoy!

If you try this recipe, please let me know how you like it. By the way, I call this Honduran blueberry cake not because it is a Honduran recipe but because it has Honduran blueberries – just to be clear. Of course, it would work with any type of blueberries.

Blueberry tip: Don't wash blueberries before freezing. Spread on a cookie sheet to freeze and then place into a plastic freezer bag. They will freeze separately better that way allowing you to measure out what you need, but more importantly, the skin tends to become tough if you freeze them after washing them.

No democracy in new Honduras Congress

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 17:44:00 +0000

New officers of the Honduras Congress
Images: La Prensa, Honduras

(Written Thursday, January 23, 2014, posted today due to numerous internet problems.)

Waiting for the Honduras congressional session to start this morning was a little anti-climatic. I felt like I was watching reruns of 'The Batchelorette' when I already knew who she chose. Last night, the online newspapers had already announced the new junta directiva that was yet to be voted on by congress today.

Today's Honduran congressional session was an exact replica of Tuesday's with a little less chaos. It was absolutely, shockingly, undemocratically unbelieveable!

The session

The session was opened with the usual parliamentary procedures. Then the show started. The provisional president once again called on Nacionalista Reinaldo Sánchez first, despite others who also had their hands up to speak. Sánchez presented president-elect Juan Orlando Hernández's slate of congressional officers and suggested that since 30 voting machines were nonfunctional, the voting be by show of hands.

Provisional (and now permanent) President of the Congress, Mauricio Oliva, announced the following in rapid succession:

We have a motion.
Is there discussion?
Sufficiently discussed, to voting.
Motion approved!
(Officers were sworn in)
Session is closed.

This entire scenario took about four minutes, two of which was Sánchez reading the motion. My head was spinning with disbelief.

Undemocratic display of power

Again the Nacionalistas could not resist a display of dictatorial power. In violation of parliamentary procedures, Oliva denied the other parties a chance to present their own motion or to discuss and debate Sánchez's motion as is the democratic right of every congressman.

Oliva did not even pause after "Is there discussion?" to look up to see the numerous raised hands before declaring the motion to be "sufficiently discussed". Nacionalistas and Liberales cheered loudly and applauded while the opposition parties stood in the aisle in disbelief with hands still raised hoping to be recognized. Two LIBRE members were holding large banners which said "Pido la palabra" ("I ask for recognition"). The 13 PAC diputados turned their backs as a group to the podium after also being denied the right to speak.

Why? Why act this way? Nacionalistas had already won the game. Their motion was already negotiated and guaranteed to pass. Why did they feel it was necessary to "put the boot to the neck" in another display of absolute power? Why couldn't they have showed a tiny bit of respect for the population who voted for opposition parties and allow everyone to at least discuss the motion that they knew was a shoe-in to win anyway? They had nothing to lose by taking the high road.

The only reason I can think of is that they wanted to provoke the opposition parties again. I know that sounds crazy. Why would they want that? Because more chaos would feed the "ungovernability" argument which the traditional parties are using relentlessly in the media to try to frighten the population.

The session itself was mostly orderly until near the end when opposition members realized that their democratic right to be recognized was again denied. Then the shouting started. Shouting and boos or applause from the audience is common and it's hard to tell how much of the noise was a result of that. By watching the first video below, I later discovered that the government channel didn't show much of the action, including the scene after the closure of the session where LIBREs were shouting "Dictadura!" and "Cabildeo!" The congress' television channel focused on the chairman and the Nacionalista side of the room. I don't remember exactly when or how the government channel ended their coverage or know whether or not it is edited, but watching this Channel 36 video was like watching a different session!

New Junta Directiva

The new 17-member junta directiva (board of officers) consists of 15 Nacionalistas (88%), the one and only UD congressman, who voted with them, and the one and only DC congressman, who also voted with them. Does that sound democratic to you?

Here's the distribution of the congressional seats by political party:

Nacional    48      37%
LIBRE           37 29%
Liberal 27    21%
PAC            13 10%
UD                1    <1%
DC                1 <1%
PINU                1 <1%

Total    128

As a result, the UD and DC parties have 100% representation. Nice. The three parties who formed a pact to reverse the tax paquetazo have 0% representation (LIBRE, PAC, and PINU). And almost one out of every three Nacional congressmen are members of the junta directiva.

Partido Liberal could have had representation if their party leadership hadn't directed otherwise. PL was trying to take the high road and show that they weren't exchanging votes for positions in the junta. Former presidential candidate Mauricio Villeda also proclaimed that Liberales would not accept any positions in JOH's cabinet - but that remains to be seen. It will likely happen despite the official party decree. To me this seems a reckless abandonment of the chance to provide some influence. While party leadership sees it differently, many Liberales are expressing disillusionment, further dividing an already divided party.

The spin

I watched several political talk shows where Tuesday's congress was debated. Many presented only one side, others were less biased. Popular host Renato Alvarez said that he had talked privately to a large number of moderate and knowledgeable analysts and politicians of several parties, including Nacionalistas. He said that the majority of them indicated that what the Nacionalistas did was wrong.

In this show, rather than responding to legitimate questions about what they had done, his Nacionalista guests repeatedly reminded viewers of Mel Zelaya's actions in 2009 (more fear factor). Ironically, what this administration accomplished in the past four years is not terribly dissimilar to what they were warning about in 2009 – consolidating money and power in the executive branch, weakening the judiciary and congress, and trying to debilitate the power of the media.

Nacionalista legal expert Diputado Oswaldo Ramos Soto initially planted the seed that everything was being done appropriately in accordance with parliamentary procedure that is used all over the world. This was taken at face value and was regurgitated without any media investigation of "Robertson's [sic] Rules of Order" as Ramos Soto called Robert's Rules of Order. Opposition parties were called ignorant and told that they need to learn the rules (which they do but so does Mauricio Oliva). However, as time passes, it appears that more are speaking out about democracy and the basic principles of parliamentary procedure, which Wikipedia describes as:

"Parliamentary procedure is based on the principles of allowing the majority to make decisions effectively and efficiently (majority rule), while ensuring fairness towards the minority and giving each member or delegate the right to voice an opinion."

Diputado Antonio Rivera Callejas is the Nacionalistas number one damage control guy. He's everywhere, all the time, giving interviews. When asked why no other parties were allowed to speak, he now simply dismisses the question with, "They have four years to say all they want." (shown also in the video linked below.)

Propaganda

A dramatic new TV commercial debuted shortly after the session. I haven't been fast enough to write down all the dialogue but this will paraphrase it pretty well:

Image: a pendulum swinging gently.
Voice over and text (paraphrased): Democracy has to have balance, without alliances, in opposition as a balance, ...

Image: close up of wonderfully looking fresh vegetables in the market.
Voice over and text (paraphrased): ... for Honduras, for democracy, a vote for governability in exchange for the basic food basket of the Honduran people.

Image: pretty young Honduran lady cooking an ample meal: She says: "Thanks to God for the Liberal Party who gave back the food for my family!"

Here is a print ad with basically the same message:

Whether through neglect or design, both traditional parties are responsible for at least 15 years of dismally inadequate education. It's easy for politicians to assume their people will believe anything. However, people will soon realize that costs of their basic food items have risen permanently whether taxed or not. Some already recognize that PAC, LIBRE, and PINU were the first to propose tax reversals and that it would have happened anyway. Some even are aware that the majority of Liberales voted for the original tax paquetazo in the first place.

The new congress was officially installed on Saturday. Monday will be the first legislative session.

~~~~~~~~

Chaos in new Honduran congress (revised)

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 05:06:00 +0000

Honduras congress, January 21, 2014
Image: La Prensa, Honduras

Now that I've had time to get a better understanding of what happened yesterday in Congress, I'm (significantly) updating this article on January 22, 2014. I'd like to state that I do not have and have never had a political party preference. Personally, I don't think that any of the parties are good for Honduras. Politics is just a game of power at best, and at worst, a way to get rich at the expense of the poor. Even worse, the majority of the politicians see nothing wrong with what they do – it's all just part of the game: winner takes all (jobs, appointments, contracts, bribes, aid money) including what belongs to the people of Honduras.

I get my sources of information from as many places (political slants) as possible. I've seen plenty of cases of spin (pretty much all the television stations and newspapers have a political party loyalty) and more than a few cases of outright lies and disinformation. I've been particularly disappointed with the television media spin put on what happened yesterday. Unfortunately, most people have their favorite sources and don't have time to investigate further to see if there might be another side to the story that isn't being told.

What happened in Congress?

The provisional officers of the new Honduras congress were forced to leave the room after complete chaos broke out in the first few minutes of the first session of congress. Dozens of people were out of their seats, waving their hands for recognition. Many had moved to the floor in front of the presiding temporary president (Áfrico Madrid, Secretary of Interior and Population) waving their hands (or fists) to be allowed to speak until someone grabbed and broke Madrid's microphone. Things were thrown, people were shoved, microphones were broken, but I didn't see anyone come to blows. The government channel quickly cut off video, but local TV cameramen continued to expose the havoc.

This picture was posted on Twitter yesterday. Look closely and you'll see congressmen with money in their hands, meant to be an insult to the presiding officer that only with payment will anyone be allowed to speak.

The first action after the roll call, prayer, and national anthem was for Madrid to recognize Reinaldo Sánchez, president-elect Juan Orlando Hernández's right-hand man, despite the fact that many Liberales, LIBRES, and PAC members also had their hands raised. Diputado Sánchez, soon leaving the congress to become the minister of the presidency, dutifully presented JOH's selection of three Nacionalistas for the provisional junta directiva (officers of the congress). This isn't me speculating that they were JOH's choice, Sánchez said so himself in Twitter. So much for separation of powers.

In addition to naming the slate of officers, Sánchez, with a smirk, proposed that the controversial vote be taken through a show of hands instead of the electronic voting system (secretly!) which resulted in loud shouts and boos. The president of congress is a very powerful position and often a stepping stone to the presidency of Honduras. Though this was only the provisional junta, it is all but assured that these people will be ratified as the leaders of the permanent junta on Thursday.

Madrid then called on Liberal Diputado Marco Antonio Andino who made a motion that the Liberales and a few others would vote for the Nacionalista officers if the new taxes on basic food items were reversed. This was when the room started going wild, with numerous people jumping out of their seats yelling, waving their hands for recognition, and pounding on their tables. "The fiesta is over!" was one of the calls.

Áfrico Madrid, also smirking, was trying to call the room to order, saying that they needed to vote on the first motion first and that since the voting system depends on fingerprints, it wasn't yet ready for the new congressmen. It was hopeless.

Voting system

I have to ask why wasn't the voting system ready if they knew the diputados were going to be voting on something so controversial. I think the answer is that for political reasons, they wanted the vote to be secret and uncountable. PAC members confirmed that only 8 machines were not working and that the rest could have registered their votes by machine.

Madrid's latter statement about the fingerprints is interesting, maybe true, but Coalianza commissioner José Pineda, who is not a congressman, was caught by TV cameras on Monday in the last session of the old congress voting on approval of a Coalianza contract in place two absent diputados! How could that outrage happen if the system depends on fingerprints? The Ministerio Publico (attorney general) announced later in the day yesterday that the video of the fraudulent votes will be investigated.

Let me look into my crystal ball and tell you what will happen......Nothing! There is no way that JOH will allow a Coalianza commissioner to be accused of a serious crime (usurpation of government officials' powers) when there already is so much suspicion of corruption about this public-private partnership organization. Since the MP and the courts are already under JOH thumb and owe their jobs to him, we'll likely be told that the votes didn't register, there was already a majority so it didn't matter, or some such excuse. Since the Congress stopped posting attendance or voting records back in June 2013, there is no way for the public to verify whether his votes counted or not, but the electronic voting chart in this video shows that Pineda's two votes (from the last row) were registered.

Behind the scenes

The following is what I've gathered. It's speculation but I find it entirely believable.

The Nacionalistas and the Liberales, with the exception of Dario Banegas, Gabriela Núñez, and possibly one other Liberal, had orchestrated the whole process in advance so that they could railroad through the Nacionalista appointees without discussion.

The Liberal Party is in the throes of death and some are saying they committed suicide yesterday. Alone, they don't have enough votes for anything. Supporting the new parties would be seen as being weak. Supporting their traditional adversary would be seen as betrayal. But what drives them most is that both traditional parties are very, very afraid of LIBRE and to a lesser extent PAC. For those two brand new parties to garner so many votes in their first election process is pretty impressive (31% of congress), especially considering that the other three small parties have never gotten more than 1% to 2% of the vote. That is a clear sign that people want change and are finally realizing that change will never come from the traditional parties.

Liberal congressmen plotted with Nacionalistas to try to come out of this with some pride, something they could claim as a victory for their "constructive opposition". So in exchange for voting with the Nacionalistas, Nacionalistas magnanimously let Liberales take credit for proposing a tax reduction for "el pueblo".

That has been the media spin since last night: Congratulations to the Liberal Party for this grand victory for the poor despite the actions of the barbarians (and despite the fact that the motion was never voted on). Liberales are the only hope for "governability" and constructive opposition in Honduras! It's so wonderful that the Nacionalistas and Liberales can work together for the good of the people.

Today, after much study and reflection, JOH announced that the Partido Nacional would agree to the Liberal proposal, once again using the word governability. Hooray! Hooray! Our leaders acting in a civilized manner and with compromise, doing what is best for the poor.

So the whole thing was planned, plotted, signed, and sealed in advance. Calling on Sánchez for the original motion, calling on Andino for a motion that they knew could not be considered or voted on. Even though Andino's motion stated that their support for the Nacionalista nominations was dependent upon the change in law, it turns out that some Liberales, one LIBRE, one UD, and one DC member had already signed Sanchez's motion. Though the news reported different numbers, Madrid show the document on television last night saying it contained 66 signatures in total which would mean that some Liberales and/or some Nacionalistas did not sign it. He gave the number of signatures as justification for his declaring the motion passed and swearing in the new officers. In the end, JOH only barely shared credit with the Liberal Party. Of course, the usual accusations have been made that Liberales were paid for their votes or will be paid with government positions or government contracts.

The believability problem for me is that this reduction in tax for certain food items was already being discussed and was sure to pass congress anyway. PAC, LIBRE, and PINU had formed a pact to ensure that it would be reversed and though not part of that pact, Liberales had called for the same thing, not to mention that the public was loudly protesting. Nacionalistas would have only looked bad to vote against it. The revision was a shoe-in but it was the only bone thrown to the Liberales to try to maintain some shred of dignity. They are making the most of it anyway even though the revised law had already been mysteriously changed to 72 of the 120 or so basic food basket items so there wasn't much left being taxed.

Several Liberales renounced their party yesterday on Twitter. Here's a sad translated tweet from yesterday:

The great loser: The Liberal Party. Divided, debilitated, divorced from their base and the common interest. The deterioration of the party is enormous.

Why the riot?

The main complaint of LIBRE and PAC as well as other congressmen is that they weren't allowed to speak.

The most important thing that I didn't initially realize yesterday when I originally wrote this article, is that Madrid went ahead and swore in the appointees in the midst of the melee. I saw no vote! His microphone was gone. No one else was called upon to speak. Madrid's call for a vote was drowned out by the commotion and I'm not sure that all of the diputados even realized that he had done that. Nevertheless, he declared the motion approved and swore them in before they all left the podium, with unnecessary smirks and chest-thumping. Another victory for our team! Does this make it easier to understand the anger and frustration on the part of many congressmen? Not that this excuses rioting, but it does make it more understandable to me.

If Nacionalistas were surprised at the reaction, they shouldn't have been after the heavy handed and undemocratic way they have legislated for the past four years and particularly after the avalanche of laws they railroaded through in the past month. On the other hand, they aren't stupid. It could be that it was planned in that manner just to provoke the LIBREs into a riot, which wouldn't have been hard to predict based on past actions. In the case of yesterday's session, they had all the votes they needed to secure control of the temporary junta. But rather than at least allowing others the opportunity to speak, they just couldn't resist demonstrating their total power over the congress once again. From my (and El Jefe's) viewpoint, the Nacionalistas did not come out looking good at all. They looked like bullies.

Nacionalista Diputado Ramos Soto, the "constitutional expert", was interviewed on a television show last night. I know a little about parliamentary procedure and I know that he was right in what he claimed. But when asked why Sánchez was called on first when so many other people had their hands up, he said that Madrid had to, because Madrid was a Nacionalista! Madrid, on another television show, defended himself by saying that after the commotion broke out, he even offered Mel Zelaya a chance to speak, which Mel declined.

Rather than being a defense for his action, I take that as showing that democracy does not prevail in Honduras' congress. I was taught that the presiding member is supposed to be neutral and treat all other members equally. But in Honduras, first comes party, then comes "important people", and then everyone else is ignored. Why should Zelaya, who is now just one diputado out of 128, be given special preference? Shouldn't the ability to be recognized be equal for all 128?

This lack of democracy is what Liberal diputado Dario Banegas has been complaining about for ages. Banegas says that opposition diputados are not given agendas for their sessions, they are denied recognition during debates or their microphones are turned off, and they are even denied copies of the laws on which they are voting. Here is what he said yesterday about the first session of the new congress:

"I thought it would be a day of hope, but it brought me sadness. I am deeply saddened and ashamed of the political class. I feel sorry for others because a lack of talent, the Secretary of the Interior and Population sowed the seeds of dissatisfaction in an opposition group that has all the right to speak in Congress."

Though most are demonizing the LIBRE diputados, one Nacionalista diputado was quoted as saying that "the lack of experience of Madrid practically provoked the incident" and that "it wouldn't have cost anything to listen to them".

Many people, not just LIBREs, were happy about what happened! Someone told me he isn't for LIBRE but he's been waiting all his life for someone to stand up to these traditional parties who insist on maintaining the status quo. One of the Tweets most retweeted yesterday was this one (translated to English for my readers):

"With all of the disgust that the congress-zoo generates, today for the first time in my life, I feel represented. LIBRE and PAC"

I empathize with that feeling. Unfortunately, LIBREs are playing into the hands of Nacionalistas with their "indecorous" actions. There is now talk of LIBRE boycotting the Thursday congressional session for the selection of the permanent junta (approximately 13 members unless it was changed in the latest law passed a few days ago). They won't accomplish anything with a boycott. To get anywhere in Congress, they will have to learn and follow parliamentary procedures. But similarly, the Nacionalistas need to stop acting like dictators. They share the blame.

The spin

A national cadena was used last night by Madrid to blast the Nacionalista message, which I'll paraphrase as: Nacionalistas only do what is democratic and best for el pueblo while LIBREs are trying to make the country ungovernable with their barbarities and violence. A national cadena is when the government requires all television and radio stations to broadcast the government's message. Non-Honduran stations are required to be blacked out during the period of the message. Government cadenas should be used for important messages but most often are used for the ruling party's propaganda.

Much of the television media disseminated the message in lock step, with one news devoting the entire hour plus an extra 20 minutes to two guests demonizing the new parties and talking about governability. There was no other news in Honduras yesterday for Channel 3! A big deal is being made of the cost of equipment damaged during the session. Many see that as completely hypocritical when the government response to hundreds of millions lost to corruption every year is usually not much more than a shrug.

"Ungovernable" is the key word of the month. Every politician and analyst mentions it in interviews. It's in the headlines. Even the pastor's opening prayer included that word! I have drafted an article about that which I'll try to get posted soon.

I've spent many hours watching congressional television, reading the news, and following Twitter in the past month. I've drafted some other articles that I haven't been able to finish due to so much TV watching! It is a very interesting time in Honduras. I can't wait to watch the congressional session tomorrow. I won't be surprised to see police or military waiting in the sidelines. I hope it doesn't come to that.

Complete chaos in new Honduran congress

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:53:00 +0000

First session of new congress

I've revised and significantly expanded this article. Please read the update here.

Price increases and mysterious changes to the new tax law

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 21:13:00 +0000

Honduran news is announcing price increases right and left due to the modest increase in minimum wage, electricity increases, and the massive new tax law which includes an additional 3% sales tax (for a total of 15%), income tax increases, fuel tax increases, loss of import duty and tax exonerations as well as new taxes on many previously tax-free items.

Minimum wage

The legal minimum wage varies based on the size of the business (number of employees) and the category of industry. In businesses with 1-50 employees the increase will be 5%. For businesses with 51-150 employees, the increase will be 6% and for businesses with more than 150 employees, the increase will be 7.5%. Slightly larger minimum wage increases were also set in advance for 2015 and 2016.

As a middle of the road example, the wage for category 7 (retail, hotel, and restaurant workers) in businesses with 11-50 employees will be about L.7,300/month in 2014 (~US $354/month) or L.243 per day (~US $11.80/day), or slightly less than US $1.50 per hour. Three exceptions are agricultural workers, maquila (factory) workers, and those in special "regional" zones who will earn much less. I'll be posting another, more detailed article about minimum wage in the next few days.

Nacer en Honduras has the Ministerio de Trabajo tables (complete with obvious typos) posted here. I haven't been able to find a copy of the law posted online yet – not even on the Ministerio de Trabajo website – but hopefully the typos were corrected in the final published version.

The 5% increase in 2014 minimum wage was already eaten up by a 4.92% inflation rate during 2013. Interestingly, the negotiated increase in minimum wage was announced just one day prior to the new tax law being passed. That makes me think that discussion of the tax law was purposely delayed until wage negotiations between government, business, and union representatives were finalized. Workers' finances will be going backwards after the rest of the price increases go into effect.

Announced price increases

The electric increase which was originally estimated at 5-9% is now being mentioned to be possibly as high as 15%. The government-run monopoly closed 2013 with a deficit of L.5 billion.

The additional 3% sales tax went into effect Friday.

Government set fuel prices for this week were announced on Saturday. Super gasoline outside of San Pedro will cost just a hair under L.100/gallon (~US $4.85). Regular gas will now be L. 92.16/gallon (~US $4.47) and diesel 90.80 (~US $4.40), or higher in other locations. A 25-pound cylinder of LPG, which most families use for cooking, has increased from L.276.48 to L.290.35 (~US $14.10).

Transportista associations have announced that due to the rise in fuel costs, increases of bus fares are inevitable. In Tegucigalpa, they estimate that yellow bus fares will increase from L. 4 to L. 7 while executive and rapiditos will increase from L. 10 to L. 13. San Pedro transportistas are asking the government for increases of L.2-5 per passenger. Taxis will no doubt have to increase their fares as well. Transportation increases alone will eat up most of the average L.240/month minimum wage increase.

Tigo cable TV is announcing an average 10% increase starting in January. It's not clear yet whether this increase includes the new sales tax on cable TV or whether sales tax will be added to the increased price, too. In much of the country, the only way to get more than 2-3 channels or even any channels in some areas is by cable or satellite.

Beef producers predicted large increases in prices. One beef producer stated that 70-80% of the meat consumed in Honduras is imported and will face an increase of at least L. 8 per pound, while meat produced nationally will face an increase of at least L.5-6 per pound.

In the agricultural fair in Tegucigalpa last weekend, prices of various vegetables, including lettuce, potatoes, pataste, cucumber, and chiles, were already increased about 20%. Pork leg, which is very popular during the holidays, rose from L.42 per pound to L.44. Most other prices remained stable but that will likely change beginning this month.

Fees for water service in San Pedro were increased on January 1 based on the official annual inflation rate announced by Banco Central Honduras, however, another increase will be announced on January 15 based on increased operating and administrative costs.

The new private port operator taking over in Puerto Cortés, the largest commercial port in Honduras and Central America, will announce new increased tariffs next week which will increase the cost of all imports and exports. However, it is expected that the port will be operated more efficiently and suffer much less from fraud and corruption than it did under ENP, the government agency previously in charge of the port.

A 42.5 kg. bag of cement will increase between L. 11 and L. 13. The price increase will hurt the construction industry as well as price many potential new home buyers out of the market. Ebal Díaz, right-hand man of newly elected president Juan Orlando Hernández, pointed out that cement is tax free so the large price increase is totally uncalled for in his opinion. However, on January 6, 2012, the price of cement was fixed by law at L.142 for two years so considering inflation and increased wage and transportation costs, the price increase may be justified. (Note: Cement is not tax free and never has been so I don't know what Ebal Díaz was referring to. It may be that cement producers are exempt from income tax or it may just be that he didn't know what he was talking about.)

The cost to build a vivienda social (the least expensive type of house) is estimated to increase approximately L.30,000 based on a simple house valued at about L.450,000 (~US $21,850). The current housing deficit in Honduras is estimated at about 400,000 (families who have no house at all) plus about 200,000 which need improvements, by which I'm sure they mean basic improvements to make the home safe and livable, not luxuries like running water and electricity.

Expert opinions

Wilfredo Cerrato, Minister of Finance, reminded people that markets, pulperías, and small businesses whose sales don't exceed L. 700,000 per year (~US $34,000) are exempt from charging sales tax. (Another article in the same newspaper quoted him as saying L.180,000 per year (~US $8,800) so I'm confused.) He also claimed that businessmen are taking advantage of the new tax law to announce "brutal and disproportionate" price increases. Since the government's entire income tax base is only about 70,000 taxpayers (of a population of ~8.5 million!), it seems that income tax increases would not have such a great impact on prices. The increase in wages, fuel, and electricity costs and the increase in sales tax, however, will affect most everyone. The government should have anticipated across the board increases in prices.

Ebal Díaz also announced that one of the laws to be considered by the lame duck congress this week (read 'railroaded through'!) will be a law to provide for criminal action against tax defrauders. Now that is an innovative concept! I wonder why no one ever thought about doing that before? Someone should alert the IRS to look into this. Despite my sarcasm, this is an excellent idea – If it is ever enforced, which it probably won't be toward the worst offenders. The first time someone goes to prison for tax evasion, evasion will probably decrease by 50%.

Economic experts predict the tax law will adversely affect economic growth and increase inflation. Additionally, they lament that the poor will be most affected by the changes. Various organizations have announced proposed legal measures to reverse the law.

Most commentators, including Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez, say that tax increases are necessary for Honduras to survive, but that the government needs to do more to reduce government costs, to fight corruption, and to collect taxes instead of expecting the poor and middle class to make up the difference for government's failures. High among the list of demands is more transparency and accountability for the special funds these new taxes will go into. In 2013, the original national budget was L.76.5 billion, but the actual spent by the government was L.131.7 billion, almost double!

Unauthorized changes in tax law

In one of those 'only in Honduras' moments, when the new tax was published in La Gaceta, it had been illegally changed somewhere between congress approving it, congress' style committee editing the wording, the president signing it into law, and La Gaceta publishing the official version. This isn't the first time this has happened, and like previous times, no one claims to know who made the changes or why it was changed, and it doesn't appear that any investigation will be performed to find out.

I haven't had a chance to compare the entire law paragraph by paragraph with the draft approved by congress, but in one bit of good news, the law was changed to exempt from sales tax 72 food items, increased from the 35 items originally approved by congress. Among the additions are many of the most commonly eaten fruit and vegetable items, so we won't be seeing those contraband carrots and broccoli sold on dark street corners that I had imagined. Another sensible exemption from sales tax is purified water in plastic bags up to 8 ounces and in 5-gallon bottles; apparently smaller bottles will be taxed. Additional types of bread, cookies, and saltine crackers were also added to the exempt list, though whole grain, multi-grain, and 'light' bread, among others, will still be taxed. With the exception of meat items, the tax-free list now includes the majority of foods commonly consumed by the poor and middle class.

It will be interesting to see if any new income tax exemptions slipped through in the final version.

Election fraud in Honduras

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 23:45:00 +0000

Juan Orlando Hernández, President-elect of Honduras

Elections are over. Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH, as he is known in Honduras) is officially the next president of Honduras, winning about 34% of the vote. He will take office January 27, 2014. The election process was declared free and transparent by international observer organizations. No vote recounts will be done by the TSE (Honduras' election authority) despite numerous and some very valid claims of errors and even fraud. TSE says that their only obligation is to certify the actas (explained later) not the ballots. The international auditor says the same. Despite election observer organization positive reports to the contrary, organizations such as OAS provided long lists of changes that are necessary and even the TSE has campaigned for changes to the election law.

Candidates showed proof on television and online of serious errors if not downright fraud both within the polling places as well as within the TSE. Often the claims of errors could be confirmed by viewing the scanned documents on the TSE website. I saw and verified enough to convince me that some of the diputado (congressman) races deserved a fresh count of the ballots.

The election process

Registered voter lists

The basic election process is to confirm voter identity (ID card) and ensure that the voter is registered at that voting table by comparing against voter rolls complete with color photos of the citizens. The ballots are certified by the poll workers.

Voters move to a private table to mark 'x's' on ballots which include names, party designations, and color photos of the candidates (separate presidential, congress, municipal ballots) and deposit them in the appropriate ballot box. The voter's pinky is inked so that he cannot vote again.

The biggest fallacy in the system is that the legitimacy of the election results relies on the independence and honesty of the poll workers. Each voting table is supposed to have a poll representative and a substitute from each party (eight parties this year) to ensure honesty in the count, though that doesn't happen in most cases in much of the country. Rather than 16 or even 8 poll workers, many of the actas that I viewed online were signed by four or even fewer poll workers. Polling places may start out the day with representatives from each party, but often some leave before the actual count is done. Additionally, political parties and individuals are known to traffic in polling credentials (which are issued in blank to the parties, not the individuals), selling their badges to the highest bidder. Channel 10 news interviewed one poll worker who proudly stated that he was a Nacionalista though he couldn't explain why he was wearing a badge from another party. At the location where J voted, the LIBRE party workers loudly stated that they would only verify known LIBRE party voters. In a small town, every knows who has what party loyalty.

Presidential ballot

At the end of election day, the ballot boxes are opened and the ballots are counted by the poll workers using an official count sheet, making a tick mark in the appropriate column each time that candidate's name is called out. Supposedly, in addition to the 16 party workers, any citizen can watch the recording of the count but in reality, that doesn't always happen either, especially when poll workers delay the counting for hours or simply refuse to allow watchers. Then the totals from the count sheets are recorded on an acta (official certificate) along with a count of all unused and invalid ballots and the acta is signed by all the poll workers.

This year, most actas were scanned and sent electronically to the TSE. You might think that most actas would be finalized within an hour or two of the polls closing since most voting tables included a total maximum of about 360 possible voters. However, only about 24% of the actas were sent immediately after the polls closed with many not received until several hours or a day or more after the polls closed; some were not received for a week or more. TSE contract workers then input the numbers from the scanned actas into the TSE computer system, from which the results are reported. Copies of the count sheets and actas were also supposed to be provided to the political parties. Original documents are sent in a sealed box to the TSE.

Ballot boxes and poll workers in background

In theory, all of that sounds like enough independent controls to ensure a fair election. The problem is that in Honduras, the number of ways these controls can be and are thwarted is positively endless. The internet is full of examples, from everything you could think of to subvert an honest election to acts so flagrant the average person couldn't even imagine them.

Incidentally, the entire election process cost somewhere around L.1.5 billion (about 100% over budget) and I don't think that this figure includes the cost of the military who are custodians of the election materials and provide security at the polling places. I can't help but believe for that amount of money, a better system could be developed.

Tons of complaints

Candidates demonstrated numerous documents showing examples of voting tables where the count sheet showed, for example, 81 votes for a particular candidate, but the acta showed only one vote (indicating error or fraud at the polling place). Other examples were where the acta showed, for example, 68 votes but the TSE official transcribed count showed zero votes for that candidate (indicating error or fraud within the TSE). Most actas contained around 200 or fewer valid votes, so these errors had a significant impact per voting table. Several online videos document numerous transcription errors that occurred within the TSE (Here is one and here is another). Oddly, every error I saw was in favor of JOH and against the other leading candidates.

There is no question that the TSE software program is extremely poorly designed since the "total votes" doesn't have to equal the real total of the individual votes recorded! Surely one basic control would be to flag the acta for further review when 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4! Even more ridiculous, I found out later that the votes input to the TSE system can be more than the total ballots issued to that voting table. This system was designed for corruption!

Many candidates brought forth such examples, but the TSE still refused to do an overall audit or a recount, only correcting errors if the candidate brought the specific error to their attention. Amazingly, TSE claims that the election law does not require them to count the ballots and that fraud in the polling places is the responsibility of the political parties, not the TSE. The international auditor also only "audited" the transcription of the actas. Any auditor knows that you don't audit the final report to the intermediary reports; standard auditing procedure is to compare the original documents (ballots in this case), or at least some reasonable percentage of them, through the system to the final reports. The auditor stated that 10,000 TSE transcription errors and other anomalies were noted and corrected, but he declared the final results "correct" without anything that could be considered a real audit. The auditor did, however, state in a television interview that if their recommendations for improvements in the system were not corrected, they might not be returning to audit the next election.

Sure, one voting table here and there is not going to make a difference, but one particular congressional race was ultimately won by only 140 votes. The losing candidate had many examples of these type of 'errors', a total of more than 300 votes, more than enough to make him the winner, but according to him, the TSE inexplicably added 300 votes to his opposing candidate's count in the middle of the night on a Saturday when "the system was down". One presidential candidate also said that the TSE system "went down" for three hours after which his party lost thousands of votes while thousands were added to another party.

The interesting thing about Honduras' congressional races is that in the end, the candidates are basically competing against other candidates from their own party. (Too complicated to go into in this article.) In the congressional race mentioned above, the declared winner is a long-time congressman and is considered a legal and constitutional expert, whereas the losing candidate is a sports reporter new to politics. Clearly the former was his party's preference, so the reporter received no help from his party. I don't know who would make the better congressman, but based on the errors I saw, I believe the reporter was elected by the people, and that is what is supposed to count in a democracy.

Ultimately, the congressional races resulted in a big turnover of congressmen with many long-time diputados being ousted by the voters. In the current congress, Nacionalistas have a large enough majority that they don't need any votes from the other parties to pass laws and they have often railroaded laws through without sufficient time for discussion or even any time for diputados to read the draft laws they were voting on. In the new congress, starting on January 25, Nacionalistas will have only 48 congressmen, LIBREs (Mel Zelaya's new party) will have 37, Liberales (the other traditional party) 27, PAC, the new anti-corruption party, will have 13, and DC, UD, and PINU will have one each.

Presidential election

Though I was convinced that there was some fraud in the presidential race, it was won by such a large margin (around 250,000 votes of a total of 3,275,000) that it was hard to believe that fraud could account for that much difference. Hmmmm. That was until I read this article, Honduras' Flawed Election: The Case of El Paraíso.

What are the chances? Is El Paraíso the only harmonious municipality in all of Honduras? (click to enlarge images, click on the links below to view the scanned documents at the TSE website)

Voting table 2685
94% voter turnout, 100% of the vote going to JOH

Voting table 2688
94% voter turnout with 99.7% of the vote going to JOH

Voting table 2693
93% voter turnout, with 100% of the vote going to JOH

Voting table 2711,
97% turnout with 99% of the vote going to JOH

Three voting tables at Esc. Juan Guzmán
98% voter participation, 96% of the votes to JOH

Though it is never mentioned by the politicos, El Paraíso, Copán, has been long known as one of the narco-controlled areas in Honduras. See my 2008 articles, particularly the "King of the Pueblo" section in La Prensa exposé: Narcotrafficking in Honduras, part I and part III for some eye-opening information on El Paraíso and its narco mayor as well as other narco-controlled areas. Mayor Ardón's connection with the Sinoloa drug cartel was also highlighted in the Wilson Center study on organized crime in Central America which I wrote about in 2011 in Drug Trafficking in Honduras (Crime Part III). The Wilson report states:

"To varying degrees, international DTOs [drug trafficking organizations] and local transportistas have penetrated portions of the police, treasury, customs, military, attorney general’s offices, jails and court systems in Central America. They regularly finance pubic works and bankroll political campaigns."

I checked the figures given in the Truth-Out article against the TSE website, and sure enough, they were true. In fact, JOH won 88% of the valid votes in El Paraíso, Copán with 85% overall turnout. Many of the individual voting tables show 90%-100% of the vote going to JOH. Is that possible? I don't think so! I also don't think you will find a single person in Honduras who would believe these results. Hondurans were so divided among the top four candidates that even within individual families, their votes often canceled each other out, with many believing it was time for a change from the two-party system (voting for Mel Zelaya and his wife's LIBRE party or PAC, the anti-corruption party) with others sticking to their traditional party loyalties or believing the "devil you know may be better....". The other four parties aren't worthy of mention with even their own poll workers often not voting for their party's candidates. I do not understand why they exist.

Satisfaction with the current Nacionalista government won't explain these votes either. You would be hard pressed to find anyone of any party who is satisfied with the current Nacionalista administration or thinks that the country is any better off after this last four years. In fact, current President Pepe Lobo had a large lead in the vote for the "Worst Villain of 2013" in a Nacionalista-leaning newspaper poll – until an obviously organized campaign against another candidate occurred with that candidate receiving 5,000 votes all in one day, and similar massive votes on following days. El Heraldo supposedly had a sign in system where you could not vote more than once, but I tested it and you can vote as many times as you want. See, even the newspaper polls are rigged!

Voter turnout

Additionally, the voter turnout in El Paraíso is just not believable. I will go so far as to say it is impossible. Only two of the polling places in El Paraíso had less than 80% turnout and none had less than 75% in the presidential race. In the process of checking out various fraud claims on the TSE website, I probably looked at at least 50 actas from several different states. The vast majority of them were tables in which there were 300-360 or so registered voters and maybe 150-200 voted (50-60%), in line with the overall country totals and past election history. In El Paraíso polling places, voter turnout was often 90-98% of which often 85-98% voted for JOH. Not believable when JOH averaged only 34% in other parts of the country and even in his home state he averaged only around 55%. This was certainly suspicious enough to audit!

Interestingly, I looked at a few of the congressional races for some of these same polling places and not only were the votes distributed among the parties a bit more, but the turnout was more reasonable (50-60% range). There were exceptions to that, though. One example is Acta 2693 in Escuela Francisco Morazán which reported 103% voter turnout, and with a total of 56 congressional candidates to choose from, 100% of the votes went to the Nacionalista party. Not one person, including the party representatives, voted for a single candidate from another party. That link will not work unless you select the third 'Esc. Francisco Morazán' and the second 'Acta 2693' which is another anomaly I can't explain. The TSE reporting of the congressional races is very cumbersome and impossible to track through the system to the final totals, not to mention that both Escuela Francisco Morazán and Acta 2693 were each listed three times on the website. Since JOH also received 100% of the vote in that voting table, my guess is that this polling place was never opened and that the poll workers filled out all the ballots. This would be easy enough to verify with the registered voters, if they weren't afraid to talk and if the TSE wasn't afraid to investigate. If only they hadn't been quite so incredibly and blatantly greedy, it probably never would have come to light.

Those high percentage turnout amounts are actually impossible since it is estimated that at least 10-20% of "registered voters" don't exist in Honduras; they are either dead or living in other countries. This percentage might even be much higher since the voter rolls seem to include everyone who has ever been issued an ID card in Honduras even if they haven't lived here or renewed their cards for 15-20 years. An estimated one million Hondurans live in the US alone. The TSE was supposed to have purged the voter rolls since the 2009 election, but El Jefe was surprised to see color photos of at least 10 of his deceased or long absent relatives on the official rolls, just as they were in 2009. He doesn't know if they 'voted' or not. It's amazing that the auditor stated that only 20 such cases of the dead voting or the live not being allowed to vote because they were 'dead' on the rolls were discovered in the whole country. How could he possibly know that?

Why JOH?

Why would narcos prefer this candidate? How many other narco-controlled areas or party controlled voting tables were there in the Honduras election? Enough to elect a president? We'll never know.

It's frightening to think that narcotraffickers and organized crime helped to elect the President of Honduras. To those election watchers like the USA, OAS, EU, and Carter Foundation, I'd like to see you send observers to El Paraíso next time. More than that, I'd like to see these international organizations stop certifying results based on 50-100 poll observers watching 5,000+ voting tables, in some cases for only a few minutes before they moved on to a different location. Giving such esteemed blessings to a poor system filled with corruption does nothing to further honest elections or promote democracy. When they say it was a "free and fair" election, they mean that they didn't see soldiers with guns pointed at voters heads. Yes, in that respect, it was a free election. But was it fair? That is an entirely different question. I do have to say that the US Ambassador's official statement was quite a bit less glowing than what was reported in the Honduran news.

My conclusions

My conclusions are that yes, there was corruption in the elections. Yes, the system is designed to allow for corruption. No, I don't know how much it affected the end results. And no, nothing will ever be done about it.

The elections are over and done with. The results are set in stone and aren't going to change. Results have been certified by the TSE and a case brought by Mel Zelaya to the Supreme Court has been rejected. The US has spoken! The OAS has officially congratulated the president-elect. The EU has blessed the results! Jimmy Carter has said it is so! We have to move on.

Anyone still complaining is considered a sore loser, unpatriotic, and/or undemocratic. It's thought that to prove any fraud at this point would only make Honduras look bad in the international media so it's best to keep quiet. It's hard enough to fight your own government corruption (impossible really); how can you fight the proclamations of the US, OAS, and EU? As we always do, we've moved on to new corruption scandals and new outrage at the recently passed tax law and the reincorporation of dirty police back into the system after supposed 'purification'. After all, the election was five weeks ago and you can only stay riled up about so many things at one time!

JOH is king. Long live the king!

~~~~~~~~

Some related articles that I found interesting:

HondurasWeekly: Fraud: Part of the Political Game

HondurasWeekly: The Weisbrot Piece
(bottom of the page)

CS Monitor: Honduras recount: Can a free and fair election also be fraudulent?

COHA: International Election Monitors in Honduras: Do They Ensure Clean Elections or Whitewash Fraud?

USA issues new travel warning for Honduras

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 11:58:00 +0000

On Christmas Eve, the US State Department issued a new travel warning for US citizens traveling to Honduras. Though the warning states that "tens of thousands of U.S. citizens visit Honduras each year for study, tourism, business, and volunteer work without incident", it goes on to state this:

"The vast majority of serious crimes in Honduras, including those against U.S. citizens, are never solved; of the 50 murders committed against U.S. citizens since 2008, police have only solved two. Members of the Honduran National Police are known to engage in criminal activity, including murder and car theft. The Government of Honduras lacks sufficient resources to properly investigate and prosecute cases, and police often lack vehicles or fuel to respond to calls for assistance. In practice, this means police may take hours to arrive at the scene of a violent crime, or may not respond at all. As a result, criminals operate with a high degree of impunity throughout Honduras. The Honduran government is in the early stages of substantial reforms to its criminal justice institutions."

Apparently the Embassy does not agree with President Lobo's assessment that homicide has decreased tremendously in Honduras this year. If there really had been a reduction, the Secretary of Security would provide the data to the Observatorio Nacional de la Violencia (ONV), an independent academic research institution based out of Honduras’ national university and supported by the UN. ONV has been charged with providing Honduras' official crime statistics for many years and has always worked with the police and media to generate the statistics – until Arturo Corrales became Secretary of Security. Recently, the director of the ONV denounced that based on Secretary Corrales' orders, police have refused to provide any crime information since June 2013. The State Department chose to include ONV's estimate of an increase in 2013 homicides in their warning rather than President Lobo's verbal assurance of a big reduction.

Alianza para la Paz y la Justicia (Alliance for Peace and Justice, APJ) issued a public pronouncement (in Spanish) earlier this month condemning not only the failure of the government to purify the police department but also a condemnation of the Secretary in particular for his inability to reduce murder and violence as well as his lack of transparency and his refusal to provide data to ONV.

APJ demands reforms in the entire justice system, which they say have been obstructed to date. They say that the new president has an obligation to name a new Secretary of Security who is valiant, honest, and professionally capable of fomenting a policy of transparency, accountability, and an open-door policy for the media, civil society, academia, and citizens in general. APJ (Facebook page) is a coalition of civil society, NGOs, and religious organizations whose leading members are among the bravest people in Honduras. They literally risk their lives every day by speaking out against crime and corruption in the government and justice system. One of their member organizations (AJS) is the national representative for Transparency International and another, Transformemos Honduras, has worked with the Secretary of Education to develop numerous improvements in the education system as well reductions in corruption. APJ has my total respect.

The previous June 17th US State Department travel warning as well as a comparison with the November 2012 warning can be found here.

Merry Christmas and Feliz Navidad from La Ceiba

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Wed, 25 Dec 2013 15:16:00 +0000

"House of a million lights"
Images: La Prensa

I'd like to wish all of the Blogicito readers a Merry Christmas and Feliz Navidad! I hope your holidays are filled with love and happiness.

The house shown above was called the "House of a million lights" by La Prensa. The owners have put on a different display every Christmas for several years but I think they've outdone themselves this year. If you are in La Ceiba, you can see the house in Las Colinas. Las Colinas is a very pretty, and as the name would indicate, very hilly colonia (neighborhood) just outside of town. I can't give you directions to the house, but I'm sure you'll have no trouble following the glow of lights to find it; there aren't that many streets in Las Colinas. You can also see it from above by following the highest street that runs along the back of the colonia, as shown in the photo below.

La Colinas, La Ceiba, Honduras

Here are some old photos taken from that same upper street in Las Colinas during the daytime:

Las Colinas in the daytime

This is a great place to get a panoramic view of La Ceiba.

The spectacular view from the other side of that road

Abusive tax paquetazo from Honduran Congress

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:04:00 +0000

Honduras Congress
Image: La Prensa

Nacionalistas enacted a huge blow to the poor and middle class of Honduras in the middle of the night last night (Friday), railroading through a tax paquetazo that will cause prices of virtually everything in Honduras to rise. The Honduran twitterati was afire last night as many watched the 11-hour long process on the congressional television channel. Outrage is the best way to describe the reaction.

Since Nacionalistas have a sufficient majority in Congress (until Jan 25, 2014) to pass any law, they were able to force dispensing of the required three congressional sessions for discussion, enabling them to railroad the new law through in one night – a Friday night before Christmas holidays no less. This was done despite the opposition congressmen complaining that they hadn't even received the law before the session or had time to read it nor had citizens had any advance knowledge of the law or opportunity to provide input. While the party in power said that this was such an important law that it needed to be passed immediately, the opposition responded that it was such an important law that it needed more time for study and analysis. Article after article was passed with the right side of the room (Nacionalistas) voting 100% in favor and the smaller left side (the other four parties) voting 100% against. The session ended at 1:00 a.m.

Let's put this in order!

The law is called the "Ley de Ordenamiento de las Finanzas Públicas, Control de las Exoneraciones y Medidas Antievasión" (translated something like Law of Public Financial Management, Control of Exonerations, and Anti-Evasion Measures). Sounds good, doesn't it? President-elect Juan Orlando Hernández has been promising a reduction and consolidation in the "obese" government and initially I thought this law might have something to do with that. We definitely need some new measures in this bloated, inefficient government on the verge of bankruptcy and incapable of providing the most basic services to its people. The government can't even pay its bloated salaries much less have any money left over for the services those employees are paid to provide. Tax evasion by the rich and powerful is the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, the name of the law disguises its real purpose, increased taxes.

Just like the name of the law, the document was written in such a tricky manner that it cannot be understood without reading the 50 or so laws which it amends. For example, in many cases, you wouldn't know whether this new law was increasing or decreasing taxes by the way it is written, though we all instinctively know that it is increasing taxes. By how much are the numerous taxes being increased? You won't have any idea from reading this law. Even congressmen didn't know in many cases. The increase in sales tax was disguised as a "3% special contribution" in one short sentence. In one case, a paragraph full of business types was listed without specifically stating whether they were being subject to a tax or exempt from a tax. That may be clarified in the final law.

This law does much more to hurt the average Honduran than it does to manage tax evasion or cut government expenditures. The government won't go after the powerful so they pick the pockets of the middle class who are much easier targets. Honduras already has tax evasion laws; the problem is that they are rarely enforced, except against small businesses. The Minister of Finance who was in the session to answer questions, said that in addition to the new "contributions", the law will represent a reduction in public expenditures of approximately L.16 billion (US $780 million). That figure seems unbelievable to most, with the current annual deficit at L.24 billion and projected to be L.36 billion in 2014 if the changes aren't made. Maybe he was referring to an impact over the next 10 years. If not, you have to wonder why some of these changes weren't made sometime during the past four years.

Here some of the highlights of the new taxes:

Sales tax

Called a "Special Contribution", sales tax will be increased from 12% to 15%. Supposedly, the estimated extra L.4.5 billion (~US $220 million) generated by the additional 3% will be used for social programs. However, like most special funds (Petrocaribe or the Security Tax, for example), it's doubtful that citizens will ever get a true and complete accounting of where the money was spent and the definition of "social programs" is often not what most would think.

Food

Additionally, numerous previously tax-exempt food items in la canasta basica (the basic food basket items) will now be subject to a 15% tax. Tax-free basic food items were reduced from around 150 items to 35, with 10 of those being various forms of beans, rice, and tortillas. (I have to point out that corn tortillas are tax free but flour tortillas are taxed.) Not too long ago the exemption for beans and rice purchased pre-packaged was removed, so I presume this exemption still only applies to beans and rice purchased at the markets. These food exemptions were taken away despite the fact that a proposed increased sales tax on alcohol from the current 15% to 18% was removed! Oh no, we don't want to discourage drinking, do we? But eating carrots, green beans, or ground meat? Those are taxable luxuries according to congress. I know that a price increase of 15% will affect the purchasing and eating habits of the poor. Maybe soon we'll be seeing contraband carrots and broccoli being sold on dark street corners.

Beef or pork ribs, stew meat, whole chicken, and whole fish are the only meat items that remain exempt from sales tax. In the vegetable category, the only non-starch veggies that remain tax-free are tomatoes, onions, cabbage, and white corn (used mostly for tortillas and tamales). In this land of abundant, healthy tropical fruits, the only tax-free fruits will now be oranges and bananas. On the other hand, white bread, sugar, salt, and hydrogenated vegetable fats will remain tax free. So much for promoting healthy eating. Honduras has high rates of diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure, as well as mothers who will feed their children only rice because it costs one lempira (~US 5 cents) per pound less than more vitamin-rich red beans. I really wish the proponents of this law had gotten some input from the medical community.

Update: The list of tax-free food items was increased to 72 items in the published law.

Fuel

The tax on gasoline will be increased by about 5 lempiras per gallon making the total tax per gallon US$1.40 for super and US$1.24 for regular. Other types of fuel will be taxed as follows: diesel US$0.86, bunker US$0.42, kerosene US$0.15, LPG US$0.15/per 25 lbs., and jet fuel US$0.03. We currently pay around US$4.50 per gallon of gas.

Electricity

The electric subsidy was reduced from customers who use 150kw/month or less to those who use 75kw/month or less. A cash subsidy of L.120 (~US $6) per month will be paid by banks to the La ENEE client in person. An amazing 600,000 or so (somewhere around half!) of the government-run electric monopoly customers enjoyed free electricity in the past, including many foreigners and owners of palatial vacation homes used only part of the year. A couple of interesting aspects of this clause apparently did not occur to the law makers. One is that new consumers eligible for the subsidy have to be of low income. How do you prove that? Is there somewhere you can get a certificate of non-employment or poorness? The other is that the very poor often do not live anywhere near a bank or have money for transportation to get to a bank to pick up their subsidy. If they do have a job, it probably won't be convenient to take off half a day's work every month to go stand in line in a bank to collect their L.120. They might even lose half a day's pay to collect the equivalent of half a day's pay. You might think that a direct subsidy posted through La ENEE's computer billing system would be the simplest and most efficient answer but that would mean that you don't know Honduras and the infinite ways any system can be corrupted.

Not included in this law, but also announced yesterday, is the revision of the calculation of electricity charges which will result in an estimated 5-9% increase for users beginning in January.

Communications

Cell phone and cable TV usage are now subject to a 15% tax. Originally internet usage was also included but in one of the few changes proposed by congressmen, internet service was ultimately exempted from this tax in the interest of education and advancement of the country. Land line telephone services provided by the government monopoly were also excluded from this tax. According to my receipts, cable TV and internet were previously tax-free. I don't know about cell phone charges.

Property tax

A new tax of 10% will be charged to property owners based on the amount of increase in the valuation of their property or capital gain. This will be charged each time there is a registration operation in the Institute of Property.

Income Tax

In addition to regular income tax, all businesses except importation and tourism companies will pay an "Aportación Solidaria" (tax) of 5% of their net taxable income over L.1,000,000 (~US $50,000) beginning in 2014. If, however, the importation or tourism business is subject to income tax, they will pay this tax also.

Tourism businesses must now pay income tax in accordance with the expiration of their benefits granted by the Tourism Incentive Law. Tourism related companies (which was broadly defined and included all fast-food restaurants) were granted 10 years relief from income tax as an incentive to open new businesses in Honduras. However, this period was extended by congress over the years so that the US fast food franchises continued to not pay taxes, a real sore point among many Hondurans.

Foreign transportation companies (air, land, or sea) operating in Honduras may pay a new tax of 10% of their gross Honduran income but it is impossible to understand exactly what this article is saying without finding and reading the original law which it amends. (I'll bet congress didn't do this either!)

Previously granted income tax exonerations established by decrees and special laws are now revoked. Several specific exceptions are made for exonerations granted by the Constitution, including those to all teachers, unions, political parties, retirees and others, as well as those granted by the international treaties and the Free Zone Law (Zolitur). Others, such as call center operations, the diplomatic community, and government organizations and institutions, also will continue to be exempt from paying income tax. Businesses may also be excluded from income tax on the profit from government contracts

Businesses which have gross income above L.3 million (roughly US$150,000) will pay a tax of 1.5% of gross income when the calculated tax on net income is less than 1.5% of gross income. In other words, companies can suffer losses and still be required to pay income tax. In a last minute change, it was decided that bread producers would be exempt from this tax because bread is a staple of life and such companies typically have a very large gross income due to volume, but a very small profit margin.

This 1.5% tax will be reduced to 0.75% for the following products and services: production and distribution of cement, medicines, and petroleum, and public services provided by the government. (Many prominent Honduran families are involved in the specified businesses.)

Not subject to this clause are persons receiving a salary, businesses whose gross income is less than L.3 million, businesses in their first two years of operations or for two years for businesses suffering loss due to natural disasters or other catastrophes - sufficiently vague enough to provide for future exemption for friends and family.

Dividends received in Honduras will now be taxed at 10%.

The law provides for a 4% retention of tax on certain transactions of non-residents. I tracked down and read the original law this paragraph is amending to try to understand what this is but I still don't. The only thing I know is that it was previously 2%. (Article 16 of the new law, if anyone can help me out here.)

Import Exonerations

The law repeals all import exonerations and tax exemptions for merchandise imports, including those of the government.

Especially sad is that the law specifically revokes all import exonerations granted to private non-profit volunteer organizations, regardless of their activities. This was no doubt done due the extreme amount of tax abuse of the congressmen and other government officials themselves who use fraudulent NGOs to import products for their businesses and personal use. Unfortunately, honest, non-profit NGOs serving the poor of Honduras will suffer for the illegal acts committed by the dishonest. This is typical of Honduras laws: the government is incapable of routing out the bad guys so they pass abusive laws that punish everyone instead.

Exonerations granted by the constitution, international treaties, and decrees in favor of Honduran non-residents, as well as sports delegations, churches, the National Coffee organization, handicapped persons, and those granted by the Law of Free Speech, among many other laws, will continue. Of special interest to my expatriate readers, the one-time exoneration in the immigration law for pensionado or rentista residents to bring in their household goods and one vehicle tax-free when they move here will continue.

There is more...

I almost forgot to mention that earlier this week, congress voted to extend for 10 years the 'temporary' Security Tax law, previously discussed here. This is a 0.2% tax on withdrawals from business bank accounts with a balance of L.120,000 or more and business or personal checking account dispersals. Thankfully, this law wasn't changed to include individual savings accounts. We're still waiting to find out what the heck they spent those billions on.

...but that is it for your Honduran tax lesson today. My head is pounding from reading and translating this crap with four hours sleep last night after staying up into the wee hours watching those politicos in action. My best advice if you have a Honduran business: get a good tax accountant or lawyer to explain it to you after the law is finalized and published in La Gaceta. The law could always be changed before it is published and the opposition congress will have a majority (collectively) at the end of January, so actually anything could happen. I really don't expect significant changes but you never know what will happen in Honduras' congress.

Merry Christmas from our new President

So, Hondurans can look forward to higher prices in 2014 for food, electricity, communications, transportation, and anything else transported or imported which includes the vast majority of consumer items. This congress resumes sessions on January 6 until the new congress is seated on January 25, so there may be more surprises in the future.

There also is no doubt that if this law had been passed in November, Juan Orlando Hernández would not be president-elect of Honduras. Good job keeping this all a secret until December, JOH! There is no question that this bill was imposed by president-elect Hernández. He is the one who has been calling the shots regarding appointing ministers, firing officials, and passing laws in congress since election day. Many tweets sarcastically commented: "Welcome to the nueva vida (new life) promised by JOH". Others joked: "These taxes will not apply to Nacionalistas, will they? Please confirm." I noted that some of the very high-profile congressmen did not appear to be in the session last night. I guess that is so they can deny being involved with this paquetazo during their future presidential runs. Congressman Dario Banegas and a few others fought the good fight but they were vastly outnumbered by those whose party loyalty is much greater than their loyalty to the people who elected them. Banegas noted that it was the ninth paquetazo of this administration and that this one will probably not be enforced or show results any more than the previous eight.

The Honduran government has been under pressure for years from the International Monetary Fund and other international donors to reduce the size of government and to increase the tax base and tax collection. All of that would be wise and fiscally responsibly, but I wonder if this law is what they really had in mind.

Nobody likes paying taxes. Hondurans would just like to be sure that everyone is paying and that the taxes are put to good use for the benefit of the people, neither of which has ever been true in Honduras. We'll see what happens. Maybe we really will see a more austere government. Or maybe not.

And one last thing....

For sticking with me through all of this, here's a little treat:

Image: El Heraldo

This is controversial diputado Sergio Castellanos stripping his own shirt from his back after he made an emotional outburst against the new tax law to the cheers of his personal audience. He said this was to demonstrate how congress was leaving the public (shirtless) and in more squalor than ever. The government television cameras were quickly taken elsewhere, but El Heraldo reporters captured this image.

Lotsa lemons!

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 22:21:00 +0000

Lots and lots of lemons/limes

Remember when I showed you my first lemon harvest in 2009? Go ahead and take a look. I'll wait.

Things are definitely looking up now. This particular day's batch includes some smaller lemons (limes?) because El Jefe had to cut off some of the lower branches of one tree which were so heavy with fruit that they were hanging on the ground and killing the grass. We generally get big fat lemons/limes.

We've only had to buy lemons a couple of times in the past many months and wow! Ours are so much juicier. I don't know how long the season continues but I hope it is a long time. For some reason, I haven't kept track of when the trees are producing. I really should do that. This photo is of the fruit blossoms. They smell so good!

My odd – and possibly annoying – habit of not specifying lemons or limes is because here in Honduras, they are all called limones (lemons) and a lima is something you sharpen your machete with. Obviously the yellow ones at the top with the pointy ends are lemons. Those come from a deadly thorny tree that will rip your skin open if you aren't careful. My sister-in-law gave us a start from her tree. The odd thing is that her lemons are very small and round (called indios) and ours our big and pointy, the shape we typically think of for a lemon. These are so acidic that I can't use more than one slice a day in my tea or my teeth start hurting. They are also chock full of seeds so based on all those clues, I think they may be límon agria. The others (the round green ones) are much tastier, less acidic, and have no seeds or thorns. They appear to be limes, and if you pinned me down, I would say they are limes. But before you jump to any conclusions, read Lemons or Limes?. It's definitely not as clear cut as you might think if you are North American where your lemons are always yellow and your limes are always green.

I was trying to make an artful arrangement for the photo, but they kept rolling out of the bowl. The ones on the table are the ones that I had to keep picking up off the floor after they rolled out of the bowl.

Yes we have no documents today

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 22:18:00 +0000

So many catalogs, so little time

Doing the right thing in Honduras is no easy task. You try, try, try to learn the ropes and jump through all the government hoops, but if the agency is not out of paper or ink, not on strike, or the system is not down, there will be something else to prevent you from getting those documents! Always has been, always will be. The most frequently spoken sentence of government employees seems to be: "Come back next month."

Most any government office anywhere...
on a good day

License plates

Shortly after President Lobo came into office (January 2010), La Prensa published an article saying that the government had run out of vehicle plates early in Zelaya's administration, none were purchased, and there was a huge backlog of people waiting for plates.

The new head of that department in DEI said that it would take at least a year to do the public bid process and receive the plates. He wanted to do an emergency purchase, which in Honduras means that somebody gets rich and favors to friends, family, and political benefactors are repaid. With my suspicious mind, I figured that it could only take that long because they had to ensure that the proper people got the proper cuts of the contract. Apparently that took a loooong time to work out.

Where is everyone?

In 2011-2012, the lack of vehicle plates came to light again due to the significant increase in violent crime. Tagless vehicles included motorcycles for which no plates had been issued in at least 5 years. Assassinations are frequently committed by two men on a motorcycle. With no plates and the riders heads covered with helmets, there is no way to identify them that will stand up in court. The majority of such assassinations are never solved, especially since they are usually paid-for-hire killers with no personal connection to the victim.

Two or more years into Lobo's administration, I read that they still hadn't issued a contract. I don't know if it was ultimately done on an "emergency" basis, but sometime in the past few months, DEI supposedly received 60,000 plates. They are now complaining that nobody is picking up their plates and they are going to start fining people. However, La Ceiba's DEI people don't seem to know anything about this and still say that they don't have any plates and that it will be at least a year.

~~~~~~~

Maybe it's like the security cameras in La Ceiba: Fake! Last year, La Ceiba paid L.10 million (approximately US $500,000) for 100 security cameras (obscenely expensive!) but it has just been denounced that at least half of the cameras are fake with nothing inside the shell except a battery operated light to make people think a camera is functioning. When the batteries quit working, there is no doubt that we'll hear that there is no money for batteries. Instead of being shamed by this ridiculously abusive, if not corrupt contract, the mayor accused the denunciante of helping the criminals by making this public. "Any incident that happens is on his shoulders" said the mayor.

To put this into perspective, a security company recently quoted us L.8,000 for a system of (I think it was) 4 cameras complete with a monitoring system which we could access at home or online from anywhere. Granted, a city-wide system is on a different scale than a home system, but still I see no way on earth to justify L.10,000 per camera, even if they were all real cameras, which they are not.

~~~~~~~~

Waiting to serve you

My guess is that DEI didn't receive 60,000 license plates but that the ones they did receive went to San Pedro and Tegucigalpa, like everything else in this country. Those are the only cities that count with the politicians, especially during an election cycle. That is where the majority of voters are.

Instead of a plate for your vehicle, the government issues a piece of paper saying that you have applied. So what's the big deal if you can stay legal without the metal plate? Well, 90% of Honduras police 'work' is ineffective nonsense: setting up road blocks to harass drivers by checking for expired drivers' licenses and registrations (you know, going after the real bad guys - the paperwork criminals!). Vehicles without tags are probably pulled over and inconvenienced hundreds of times until and if they ever get their official plates. The temporary paper is only valid for 60 days, so it's entirely conceivable that a person could have had to return to the DEI and stand in line for renewal up to 50 times! It's also conceivable that person could buy a new car, keep it for several years, and sell it without ever having a plate for it. TIH! (This is Honduras!)

There really is no excuse because this is one thing in Honduras where the fees to the government far, far exceeds the cost of the "product" issued by the government – by many thousands. But greed and corruption keep the system from working. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Hello? Hello? Anyone here?

Residency cards for foreigners

We foreign residents are required to renew our residency cards every year (with a few exceptions for certain types of residencies). This can be done only in three cities in Honduras, Tegucigalpa, San Pedro, and La Ceiba. This card is our official identification document and is required to be carried at all times. Failure to renew on time is subject to a hefty fine.

About mid-year this year when the government ran out of money (and mid-year most years if truth be told), nobody was able to issue cards. I've heard that recently San Pedro and Tegucigalpa immigration began issuing cards to some people or the promise of them anyway.

Information - Leave your guns here

Like with the car tags, applicants are issued a temporary permit, but only for 30 days in this case (60 days if the stars are in alignment with your astrological sign). So every month for about the last 6 months (and who knows how many months to come), foreign residents are expected to return to the immigration office only to hear that cards are still not available and to receive a new 30-day temporary permit. A pain for Ceibeños, or anyone who has to miss work or has a business to run, but also an expensive inconvenience for foreigners living on the islands or more remote parts of the country where they may have to drive for 5-6 hours or more each way or pay airfare and stay overnight at a hotel.

In a new procedural twist, legal foreign residents can now get driver's licenses only for the length of the validity of their residency card. If your license expires in November, but your residency card expires in December, you can only get a one-month driver's license. Then you have go back in December to get a new one! Just in case that wasn't annoyingly inefficient enough, if a foreign resident doesn't have the official plastic residency card, they can't get their driver's licence renewed at all! No valid driver's license? Go back to police road stops above. You are now officially a most-wanted criminal. It really is like Alice in Wonderland.

Oh, there you are! Break time.

Gun registrations

Woohoo! This one is really crazy considering that Honduras is widely proclaimed in the international media as the murder capital of the world.

Back during the Maduro administration (2002-2005), the police began officially registering guns. They had an amnesty period for a year or two but the police had a real system to record and register guns. You had to bring several bullets for ballistics testing. You, your fingerprints, your gun, and the ballistics testing were all recorded into a computer system for posterity and future police investigations. Shades of CSI-Miami! Honduras has come into the 20th century! Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

Yeah, it was too good to be true. The Zelaya government quit paying the contractor so the company yanked the machines and, I think, the record data base, too. For several years, there was no gun registration. I don't remember exactly when, but at some point in the last couple of years, apparently registration was restored in San Pedro and Tegucigalpa. But police in the step-child of Honduras, La Ceiba, to this day still don't have the ability to register guns, even though it has had the highest murder rate in the country. Of course, it's debatable how much that matters anyway since only honest citizens would ever bother to register a gun.

"You could go to San Pedro, couldn't you?" I hear you saying. Well, let's go back to the road blocks mentioned above. Can you tell me how you could get past a police road block with an unregistered gun in your car without the police confiscating it and probably taking you to jail for at least a time until you got it sorted out? You can't register a gun that you don't have with you. Chances of ever getting your gun back are slim to none since the police regularly pawn evidence guns if not steal them for their own criminal activities. It's catch-22. It's a virtual impossibility to drive between those cities without passing police road blocks 2 to 5 times. If you don't have a licence plate, that increases your chances of being stopped by 100%. What if you don't have a license plate and don't have an official ID card? What are the chances of being stopped and convincing five different sets of police that you are really a law-abiding citizen trying to do the right thing? Hahaha!

Oh, and gun registration is not a one day process, at least it wasn't in La Ceiba, so you would be looking at a minimum of one night's hotel stay, not something that most Hondurans can afford.

Another example of efficiency: Stand in line so
you can look through 100s of cards to find yours.

What does the future hold?

Someday these problems will be resolved and will be replaced by new problems like no ID cards for Hondurans or no drivers licenses or inability to issue birth certificates, graduation certificates, deeds to properties or something. It's always something especially with a new government, new employees, and new procedures that we'll be facing in January.

Will any of this change with new President Juan Orlando Hernández? Maybe a little since security was his big campaign promise. But that is probably being overly optimistic based on this insightful (if I do say so myself) article, Vicious circle, that I wrote back in 2008. I firmly believe that nothing has changed since then, especially since JOH, who was president of the congress, began using government resources to campaign for president in January 2010!

The only advantage next year will be that we aren't changing political parties and maybe there won't be quite as much turnover or sabotaging. On the other hand, sometimes new administrations decide that they don't trust the old administration/system/employees and that everything needs to be done or at least approved in Tegucigalpa. No, I don't really believe Honduras will change significantly but you always have to have hope, right? Always the pollyanna, that's me!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS: Dear Honduran friends, I do realize that your problems with government tramites are often much worse than foreign residents and can have an even more severe effect on your lives. I commiserate with you, I really do! It doesn't have to be this way.

Honduras is a small world

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 19:27:00 +0000

This amaryllis gets up to 6 spectacular blooms at a time

Honduras is a small, small world! Every now and then something happens to remind me just how small Honduras is. The moral of the story is to be nice to everyone because you never know how it might come back to bite you.

These beautiful flowers (Amaryllis, I think) are a frequent reminder to me of that. Here is my story.

~~~~~~~~

El Jefe wanted to have some pants made. To a gringa, that seems an odd thing. Only the very rich have their clothes tailor-made in the US. But okay...I hope they turn out well because I know you're going to have to pay for them no matter what. What you do is go to a sastre (tailor) or costurera (seamstress), get measured for what you want, and then he or she tells you how much fabric, zippers, etc. to buy. You come back with the materials and a day or two later, voila!, your clothes are specially made just for you. J had heard about a good tailor and went to his house to get started.

As J was ringing the bell, a man walked up and asked what he wanted. "Who sent you?", he asked suspiciously. "I only take clients who have referrals from my current clients." He rattled off some important Ceibeño names from his client list. Needless to say, J was somewhat taken aback. We don't run with the "important" crowd. J mentioned his friend's name, and although the friend wasn't on the sastre's 'A' client list, he reluctantly agreed to make an exception, probably due to El Jefe's charm. Everyone likes El Jefe. The sastre made it clear that his prices are his prices and no exceptions!

Beautiful!

El Jefe was so surprised about the experience that he came home and told me all about it with raised eyebrows the entire time. Who turns away paying customers in Honduras? We laughed about it because most people are begging for customers, promising the moon whether they can provide it or not. But I imagined that the tailor has had some cases where the person never came back to pay for the work. Our TV/electronics engineer has about 500 TVs, stereos, radios, and kitchen appliances stacked to the ceiling in his house that people never came back to pay for or never went to buy the parts needed for the repairs. I kind of admired the sastre for valuing his work and sticking to his guns about his clients. Not easy to do in this economic climate.

So J got his pants. They fit well. When he brought the first pair home, I inspected the work, as I have some heavy sewing experience myself. The pants were well done with all the little touches that are supposed to be there in a well-made piece of clothing. I was impressed. Not long after that, J decided to go back to get another pair. After dropping off the materials, he remarked to the sastre what a beautiful garden he had. He pointed to some 'lilies' (all bulbs are called lilies by many) and said that his wife would love those. The sastre dug up/pulled up a whole pile of bulbs and gave them to J for me!

What a nice man, I thought, while going through the bagful of goodies! I wonder what else he has? So when J went to pick up his second pair of pants, of course, I had to go, too, to check out his garden. Nice!

~~~~~~~~

A year or two later, some very good friends were visiting from San Pedro. J was driving us around, giving a tour of La Ceiba, when the wife mentioned that her brother lived near where we were. She asked if we could stop by his house for just a minute to say hello to him.

Yep. You guessed it! The brother is the sastre.

After the initial "What a coincidence!", forgetting just how small a town La Ceiba is, I had a moment of "what if" thoughts. What if J had left in a huff at the initial 'are you good enough to be my client' meeting?' What if he hadn't been satisfied with the pants? What if I had pointed out something that needed to be corrected (unforgivable!) and insulted the sastre's work? Ooooh, that would have been uncomfortable and hugely embarrassing. As it was, the sastre gave J a hug and me a hug and a kiss and asked how the lilies were doing.

~~~~~~~~

Every time I look at these flowers, I think about the tailor and how nice he was to give them to me.

Honduran Election 2013: Fear as a Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:56:00 +0000

2013 Honduras presidential ballot

Guest Blog by Jorge Gallardo Rius

The two leading contenders in the Honduran Election of 2013 have based their winning strategies on fear.

The leading contender according to recent polls, Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National Party, has identified himself with hawkish views and promotes his candidacy by harking on fear of the extreme left. While the leading leftist contender, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, wife of deposed ex-president Zelaya and openly supported by South American ex-presidents, is promoting the fear of military repression.

The big issue for Mr. Hernandez at this point is trying to make permanent a military police that was originally slated as temporary while the crime rate remained high. They argue that the extreme left wants this force to disappear. Whereas, the Libre Party supporters went to the US Congress and tried to turn a land dispute into a case of state repression and a sign that the election process was tainted in order to strengthen their followers’ anti-constitutional beliefs.

The use of these fears as campaign themes is probably the result of an analysis of the mind frame of Hondurans after the events of 2009 in which a left-right polarization came to be, and the intent is to make the center disappear as an option to Honduran voters. They want us to believe that there is no center, no real options in the middle, because 25% of probable voters, enough to decide the outcome haven’t decided yet and they just might go massively to the center.

But this fear based strategy has been known to backfire. Initially it was working, but apparently, it was turned on too soon. Many independent voters, tired of the never-ending conflicts, are fleeing both extremes and moving to the center. After 8 years of reckless law-making by both sides while impunity reigns, and excessive expenditures that can’t be paid off, people are now realizing that we need a government of stability and austerity.

In the internal elections, the second strongest party votes was won by the centrist candidate Mauricio Villeda and by making the center disappear both sides are trying to steal votes from this candidate. Mr. Villeda of the Liberal Party, unanimously recognized for his honesty and who, in all the recent polls proved to be the fastest growing movement, may become the one that benefits the most by the failure of the fear strategies and the convergence to the center. He is backed by a strong organization with experience in past elections.

It just might be that Mr. Villeda peaks at the precise moment and produces an unexpected upset.

~~~~~~~~~

Jorge Gallardo Rius is a Honduran citizen who was born in La Ceiba and currently lives in Tegucigalpa. He studied in Louisiana, Houston, and Romania and is an Information Systems Analyst. Jorge's mother was a US citizen so he grew up speaking both languages at home. For a time, he wrote a weekly column on Education and Technology for an English-language weekly newspaper. He offers English/Spanish and Spanish/English translations. Sr. Gallardo can be contacted at jgallardo515 at yahoo.com and we welcome your comments here as well.

Memoria Gráfica de Honduras (Memories of Honduras)

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 02:03:00 +0000

La Ceiba beach front after the 1932 hurricane

I can't remember if I ever told my readers about the Memoria Gráfica de Honduras blog. I first discovered it in 2009 during the 'bad' time and sent the link to some of my Honduran friends but may not have posted it here during that hectic time. Oh, well, even if I have already written about it, it is worth repeating.

If you are Honduran, and even if you are not, you will love this blog. I promise. It includes a lot of history on various topics as well as the old photos, antique postal cards, money, stamps, and documents.

Honduras' postal service, 1897

The articles are in Spanish, but even if you don't read Spanish, you'll enjoy the photos. Click the first photo in each article to view a slide show of enlarged photos for a much better experience.

Article topics include the exacavation and restoration of Copán Ruinas from the 1890s, historical photos of the national railroad, early aviation in Honduras (did you know that Charles Lindberg landed here in 1928?), post cards from the early 1900s, historical maps of Honduras going back to the 1700s, and much, much more. One of my favorites are the original pencil drawings of a Honduran artist from Williams Vincent Wells' 1857 book "Explorations and Adventures in Honduras, which I have read and thoroughly enjoyed (with caveats). Oddly, the artist was not given credit in the book, being named only as "a Honduran". Hmmmph!

6th Avenue, San Pedro Sula

Memoria Gráfica includes old photos from towns such as La Ceiba, Puerto Cortés, Trujillo, Utila, Comayagua, San Pedro Sula and the largest collection, Tegucigalpa, with 160 photos.

Tegucigalpa from La Leona, year unknown,
but some time before 1948

This photo of Tegucigalpa intrigued me so I scoured the internet looking for a current day shot of this approximate area. I think I found some! That is some change, isn't it?

Current day Tegucigalpa, Cerro Juan A. Lainez
Image: Skyscraper City

By the way, the Skyscraper City Honduras forums are worth a visit, too. I would have posted this article hours earlier but I was lost in time looking at all the current day photos.

Tegus, a more panoramic view (Wikipedia)

And the other side of the same hill

If you love Honduras, you are going to want to bookmark this blog and keep going back until you've seen the whole thing. If you or your family have antique photos of Honduras or other documents, the author invites you to send digitized copies for inclusion in the blog. I noticed in one of his comments that he speaks English, too, so don't let that stop you if you have any old items to send him.

Most importantly, please leave a comment to thank the blogger, Marti Corrales, for his efforts in displaying this wonderful collection! Congratulations, Marti, for your wonderful blog. It is a real tribute to Honduras.

Crime hits close to home again

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 22:43:00 +0000

So beautiful and peaceful out there...

The other night we were awakened about 2:30 a.m. by two very loud gunshots. It sounded as if it was right outside our fence but sounds carry weirdly out here where we live. Sometimes during the day, I hear voices that sound like they are in my back yard but it is actually workers at a construction site about a block away. Since the shots woke us up, we were groggy trying to figure out where it was and what we should do. But there was no question that it was a gun and a big one at that. This was no birthday party fireworks.

Right after that a flatbed truck went racing by our house. I stayed low but peeked through the window expecting to see TVs and computers or construction materials in the back of it but there was nothing there. Maybe a neighbor or the construction guard chased off the robbers with his gun? Our guard dog was going crazy, but she was running along the fence, barking the angry warning bark, not the 'imminent danger' bark that would indicate that someone was in or trying to get in the property.

Thoroughly frightened, we did what most good Hondurans do. We said a prayer for our own and our neighbors' safety, and went back to sleep. Surprised? For me it is like when I was a little girl and would hide under the covers, hoping the monster under the bed couldn't get me. If you pretend it isn't there, it isn't. It certainly wasn't the first and won't be the last time that we heard gunshots in the middle of the night. What could we do? Go out and get killed when we didn't even know what was going on and whether the truck was the bad guys or the good guys? We weren't even sure whose house was affected or whether it was one of the construction sites or whether it might even be narcos doing an execution (though they usually shoot seven times). It was definitely not a situation that we wanted to stumble into. Being a good Samaritan in a case like this would be foolish, if not deadly.

Then a few minutes after we went back to sleep, the truck came racing back and another shot was fired from a very big gun. WTH? Was someone chasing the robbers/murderers/whatever they might be? Please, God, let the dog scare them off if they are running and looking for a place to hide. Things quieted down after that and eventually we went to sleep again.

~~~~~~

The following day, El Jefe was at the mall and a man said, "Aren't you my neighbor in the xxxx house...? I live in the xxxx house at the xxxxx." "Yes, that's me. Nice to meet you. How are you?" "Well, we got robbed last night." And for the next 45 minutes, the new neighbor told him all the details. J came home and told me and I'm having a hard time not thinking about it — a LOT.

He and his wife awoke hearing what sounded like someone in their house. When they cautiously opened the bedroom door, they were faced with five armed men. Even if he had had a gun, the neighbor said at best he might have been able to shoot two of them before the others shot him and his wife. The men gathered the couple and their three children, lined them up, made them lay face down on the floor. And then the robbers ominously covered them up with a blanket. You don't have to live in Honduras to know what they were thinking: "This is it. We are going to be murdered."

The robbers tore their house apart looking for and taking all valuables, TVs, computers, phones, just everything. They found a gun registration card and demanded, "Where is the Berretta?" The man had a hard time convincing them that he didn't have it anymore. They roughed him up, twisting his arm until they almost broke it. Finally he yelled, "Look at the card! See how old it is. I don't have it anymore!" and they left him alone.

At one point, the neighbor realized that all the home invaders were in other parts of the house and he ran out, ran toward our house and alongside the back of our fence (which backs up to a wooded area and creek). He was the one that our dog had been barking at! He immediately called his security company and they were the people in the truck that we saw. They were firing into the wooded area to flush out the thieves who by that time had left the house. The neighbor also called the police. I don't know how he was able to hide his cell phone from the robbers.

El Jefe said, "Why didn't you yell for help? I would have helped you! I would have let you in!" The neighbor said that he thought we were asleep and wouldn't hear him but that the robbers might. Also, not many Hondurans would open their door to a screaming stranger at 2:30 a.m. anyway. Lesson learned: Know your neighbors.

The neighbor says that they will never recover from that experience. They left their home and are staying with family elsewhere. He doesn't know if they will come back and that they would like to move to the US. Other neighbors have had similar or worse experiences (one was murdered by home invaders) and have moved away, but honestly, I don't know where you would go. Not in Honduras anyway.

Oh, by the way, in case you were wondering. The police. NEVER. came. period.

US renews Honduras Travel Warning

noreply@blogger.com (La Gringa) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 22:02:00 +0000

Honduran President Pepe Lobo and
Minister of Tourism Nelly Jerez

The US State Department has issued another Travel Warning for Honduras. I thought it would be interesting to compare the wording in this one with the previous November 21, 2012 warning. Below is the June 17, 2013, warning with the new words and sections underlined. The parts changed or eliminated from the 2012 warning are indicated with ~~strikethrough~~.

Travel Warning
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of Consular Affairs

Honduras

June 17, 2013

The Department of State ~~has issued this Travel Warning to inform U.S. citizens about the security situation in Honduras.~~ continues to warn U.S. citizens that the crime and violence levels in Honduras remain critically high. This Travel Warning supersedes the Travel Warning dated November 21, 2012, to include additional information about reported kidnappings, information for victims of crime, as well as the Honduran police force's ability to respond to reports of crime, and also serves to update contact information.

Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens ~~safely~~ visit Honduras each year for study, tourism, business, and volunteer work without incident. However, crime and violence are serious problems throughout the country and the Government of Honduras lacks sufficient resources to address these issues. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. ~~San Pedro Sula is considered to be the world’s most violent city, with 159 murders for every 100,000 residents in 2011.~~ These threats have increased substantially over the past several years and remain high. Incidents can occur anywhere. ~~In January 2012, the Peace Corps withdrew its volunteers from the country to conduct an administrative review of the security situation.~~

U.S. citizens do not appear to be targeted based on their nationality. Crimes are committed against expatriates at levels similar to those committed against locals. Most resort areas and tourist destinations have lower levels of crime and violence than other areas of the country, though still high by international standards. Moreover, tourists traveling with group tours ~~only rarely report~~ report fewer criminal incidents. In ~~June~~ 2012, the government agreed to increase police presence in areas frequented by tourists, such as the Copan Mayan ruins and Roatan. The government also established special tourist police forces in Copan and Roatan and is evaluating this option in other locations. Additionally, major hotels and other tourist installations have increased security, including with the help of police, in response to the crime epidemic. These efforts are in various stages of implementation.

A majority of serious crimes are never solved; of the ~~24 murders~~ 18 murders committed against U.S. citizens since ~~January 2010~~ January 2011, police have closed none. Members of the Honduran National Police have been known to engage in criminal activity, including murder ~~and car theft~~. The Government of Honduras lacks sufficient resources to properly investigate and prosecute cases, and to deter violent crime. In practice, this means police may take hours to arrive at the scene of a violent crime or not respond at all. The police often lack vehicles or fuel to respond to calls for assistance. As a result, criminals operate with a high degree of impunity throughout Honduras. The Honduran government is in the early stages of substantial reforms to its criminal justice institutions.

Transnational criminal organizations conduct narcotics trafficking and other unlawful activities throughout the country and use violence to control drug trafficking routes and carry out other criminal activity. Other criminals, acting both individually and in gangs in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, commit crimes such as murder, kidnapping, carjacking, armed robbery, rapes, and other aggravated assaults.

Kidnappings and disappearances are an ongoing concern throughout the country. Kidnapping affects both the local and expatriate communities, with victims sometimes paying large ransoms for the prospect of release. Kidnapping is believed to be underreported. Since January 1, 2012, four cases of U.S. citizens being kidnapped were reported to the U.S. Embassy. The kidnapping victims were all subsequently released.

U.S. citizens should be vigilant of their surroundings at all times and in all locations, especially when entering or exiting their homes, hotels, cars, garages, schools, and workplaces. Whenever possible, U.S. citizens should travel in groups of two or more persons; avoid wearing jewelry and carrying large sums of money or displaying cash, ATM/credit cards, or other valuables; and avoid walking at night in most areas of Honduras or walking alone on beaches, historic ruins, and trails. Incidents of crime along roads, including carjacking and kidnapping, are common in Honduras. Motorists should avoid traveling at night and always drive with their doors locked to deter potential robberies at traffic lights and on congested downtown streets.

The location and timing of criminal activity is unpredictable. We recommend that all travelers exercise caution when traveling anywhere in Honduras. However, certain areas of the country demonstrate higher levels of criminal activity than others. Honduran “departments” (a geographic designation similar to U.S. states) with homicide rates higher than the national average of 85.5 per 100,000 in 2012 include:

Atlántida (including La Ceiba)
Colón
Comayagua
Copán ~~(where the Mayan ruins are located)~~
Cortés (including San Pedro Sula)
Francisco Morazán (including Tegucigalpa)
Ocotepeque
Olancho
Yoro

There are not reliable statistics for the department of Gracias a Dios, however travelers to this area should note that it is a remote location with limited government services and frequent presence of narcotics traffickers.

~~Certain areas of Olancho, particularly the municipalities of Catacamas, Juticalpa, San Francisco de la Paz, and Santa Maria de Real, also report a significantly high crime rate.~~

For more detailed information regarding personal security, please see the State Department's Country Specific Information for Honduras. For the latest security information, U.S. citizens traveling abroad should regularly monitor the Bureau of Consular Affairs'Web site, where the Worldwide Caution, Travel Warnings, and Travel Alerts can be found. U.S. citizens living or traveling in Honduras are strongly encouraged to sign up for the State Department's Smart Traveler Enrollment Program to obtain updated information on travel and security within Honduras.

If you or someone you know becomes the victim of a crime in Honduras, you should contact the local police and the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa. If your passport is stolen, the U.S. Embassy can help you replace it. For violent crimes such as assault and rape, the U.S. Embassy can help you find appropriate medical care, contact family members and friends, and help them send you money. Although the investigation and prosecution of crime are the responsibility of local authorities, U.S. consular officers can provide guidance on the local criminal justice process and find you an attorney if needed. The U.S. Embassy does not provide private security for citizens visiting Honduras.

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I didn't include the last three standard paragraphs which is information about obtaining more information about personal security and contacting the Embassy or Consulate. Here are the highlights of that if you want to save the phone numbers or read the websites:

US State Department Country Specific Information - Honduras

US Embassy in Honduras
Phone: (504) 2236-9320 or 2238-5114
Fax: (504) 2236-9037
After-hours emergencies: (504) 2236-8497

Embassy’s American Citizen Services Unit (Tegucigalpa)
Phone: (504) 2238-5114 ext. 4400
Fax: (504) 2238-4357
Email: mailto:usahonduras@state.gov
Facebook page

US Consular Agency (San Pedro)
Passport applications and notarial services
Monday-Wednesday-Friday from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Phone:(504) 2558-1580

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President Lobo minimized the warning because, he says, "the whole world has security problems" and that the difference is that people know where to go and where not to go. This is the same President who, when the rector of the university system's son was killed by police, stated that he had no idea that crime was so bad. He still doesn't have a clue. Since the new Minister of Security has given orders that no crime information be revealed to reporters, I am more sure than ever that we will be seeing manipulated 2013 crime statistics in an attempt to deal with this little 'problemita'. However, bodies are usually found by citizens before the police get there, so the news is still full of murders on a daily basis. The Travel Warning and the Embassy's online security conferences last year made it eminently clear that crime and murders happen everywhere, including tourist areas.

Rather than suggesting more needs to be done to protect citizens as well as tourists and that the so far failed police purification needs to be made a priority (just yesterday a police prison guard was charged with raping a 12-year-old girl), Lobo's only idea was to define the "complicated areas" and let tourists know about them. What about the people who live or work in those dangerous areas? I guess they are on their own.

People are killed in buses, taxis, public streets, restaurants, schools, markets, and yes, in tourist areas though those in the tourism business conveniently forget that or blame the victim. Lobo also did some victim blaming saying that "sometimes there are problems when people visit places late at night." Who wants to vacation in an area where it is safer to stay in your hotel room after dark or where you have to be on guard all the time? "Honduras is no worse than any place else" is simply not a true statement and there is no one, including the President, who can make an honest list of guaranteed safe areas in Honduras. I'll give you one guess where Pepe Lobo spends his vacations and it isn't Honduras.

I found President Lobo's remarks to be highly offensive, as if the murders of 7,000+ people per year is not important, especially if those murders occur in marginal, non-tourist locations or to what he considers marginal people, i.e., Hondurans, not tourists. The Minister of Tourism, Nelly Jerez, was equally ridiculous in her remarks. Jerez showed her lack of credibility by flatly stating that "tourists are not in danger". I challenge her to report the number of tourists who have been robbed, raped, attacked, or murdered in Honduras. It may not be a large number compared to the number of Honduran victims, but it does happen.

Only ex-Ambassador Guillermo Pérez Cadalso showed some integrity by saying "It [the travel warning] is worrisome, but at the same time, we as Hondurans know that much of it is true. We only have to read the newspapers, listen to the radio, watch television to know the scale of violence that our country is suffering....We can't cover the sun with a finger, but we can tell the truth about what we are doing to counteract this negative situation that in the last decade has increased." He explained that insecurity is a reality that exists, that we see every day in the country and that chases away the tourists. He qualified this as "an ethical, moral, and patriotic obligation that Honduran diplomats explain the actions that are being taken to deter organized crime in the country."

Unfortunately, the lack of any real action is precisely what has caused the US to pull funds from the police purification program. We get so many misleading and downright false statistics from the government, but it appears that only something like seven police officers have truly been fired in the almost year and a half of police "purification" and that virtually none of the criminal or corrupt police are in the process of prosecution, not even the ones who have been found to have become millionaires on salaries of a few hundred dollars per month. We constantly read headlines reporting that hundreds here or hundreds there have been suspended only to find out later that no, they actually were not suspended, and that they have been reinstated or transferred.

The US isn't the only country to issue Honduran travel advisories to their citizens. Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Germany, Italy, Japan, and others have, too. They are showing more concern for their citizens' safety than Honduras shows for its own.

I was going to give my take on some of the changes in wording in the US warning but this article is already too long. So I'll ask you, what do you think about the changes in wording?

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I have no doubt that this article will anger some people. This is my opinion and I struggle with my desire to not do anything that will hurt Honduras business and what I feel is my moral obligation to be as honest as I can possibly be. I respect that others have other opinions and here is one that may be more to your liking.

I think it is better to admit the problem and do something about it than to ignore it or try to sweep it under the rug as the Honduran government and tourism industry do. It isn't scary travel warnings that are hurting Honduras, it is scary, violent crime that is hurting Honduras. I'm not going to encourage people to ignore the warnings because it would be better for business. I just don't want that on my conscience if one of those people turn out to be one of the unfortunate tourists who does become a crime victim. Around 7,000 people are murdered each year in Honduras. Every life is as important as each of the others no matter what their nationality.

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Honduras

June 17, 2013

Travel Warning
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of Consular Affairs