Honeymoon ending
for Honduran president

When Honduran President Ricardo Maduro traveled to Europe on state business in April, he refused a first-class seat offered as a courtesy by the airline and insisted on standing in line with other passengers. Dressed casually, Maduro took along just one assistant, a dramatic contrast with the practice of his predecessors who traveled with a large entourage of cabinet ministers, security officials, and public relations staff.

Maduro took office on January 27 and quickly mastered the art of making government service appear less privileged. He auctioned off hundreds of fancy cars assigned to administration officials, and told his cabinet ministers they could start driving their own cars to work. He fired dozens of government employees caught driving official vehicles during Holy Week vacations, including the head of immigration, who was nabbed while headed to the beach in a state-owned car that contained his wife, their maid, an ice chest and the family dog.

Maduro has also won kudos for his highly public campaign against crime, which he believes is the strongest disincentive to foreign investment. Declaring “zero tolerance” for delinquency, the president sent army troops into the streets to back up police who were outnumbered and outgunned by burgeoning street gangs. Maduro promised to increase the police force from 8,000 members to 12,000 members over the next four years, and proposed laws that would ban civilian ownership of assault weapons and reduce the number of handguns that one person could legally own from five to one.

Maduro is not a typical Honduran politician. A wealthy entrepreneur who served as Banco Central president in the administration of Rafael Callejas (1990-94), Maduro is one of few Callejas appointees not tarred by corruption. He had little interest in further political service until his son was killed in a botched kidnaping attempt in 1997, an event which friends say convinced him to seek the presidency. Since he doesn’t need the job to get rich, a fact which sets him off from most of the political class here, Maduro can afford to clamp down on corruption. And the memory of his son–he often wears a small black ribbon pinned to his shirt–fuels his campaign against violent crime.

With good reason, Hondurans are cynical about politicians, yet when one comes along with new enthusiasm and promises, they inevitably believe in them. Maduro capitalized on that trust in easily gaining electoral victory last November, but he and the other 6.5 million Hondurans are now discovering that good intentions don’t automatically translate into effective government.

Maduro’s campaign for fiscal responsibility has been plagued by a conflict with the Congreso Nacional, in which his Partido Nacional has only 61 of 128 seats, less than the simple majority which would make passage of his programs easier. And while Maduro slashes spending, Congress deputies–some who ran for the office because of the immunity it bestows–continue handing out fiscal privileges to themselves and their cronies, including several directors of failed banks who discovered that the best way to rob a bank is to own one.

To combat a crippling fiscal deficit that bothers international financial organizations, Maduro sent a series of economic measures to the Congress, something all new presidents do that’s come to be known here as the “paquetazo.” Yet some of the measures, such as raising the price of a passport from 50 Lempiras to 750 Lempiras (roughly $3 to $45), provoked protests. Maduro had to order army troops to restore order in passport offices besieged by middle class citizens trying to obtain the document before the raise took effect.

Critics claimed Maduro’s paquetazo burdened the middle class with balancing the books while letting the wealthy off the hook. “The big businesspeople and deputies, instead of sacrificing during the crisis, cede themselves even more privileges than they already had,” said Julieta Castellanos, a sociologist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma. “It’s cost us a lot to have a bourgeoisie.”

Maduro finally relented, agreeing not to raise the passport fee and taxes on sausages as much as he planned, yet in so doing set the stage for a confrontation the International Monetary Fund, which has included Honduras in the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.

The president received good news in May when the U.S. government extended Temporary Protected Status for another year to more than 105,000 Hondurans living in the U.S. That decision, for which Maduro had lobbied hard, will protect much of the $600 million that Honduras expects to receive this year in family remittances–now the country’s largest single source of hard currency.

Maduro has also lobbied hard to revive the country’s ailing maquila sector, in which some 120,000 Hondurans work. Hard hit by the U.S. recession and reduced trade benefits, as well as strong competition from cheaper wages in neighboring Nicaragua, several plants have closed, producing a net loss of 10 percent of maquila jobs here last year. Yet in recent weeks Maduro has personally convinced several companies to relocate in Honduras, apparently reversing the trend in the short term.

Hondurans might be able to do more than sew clothes if they could stay in school, and Maduro, a Clintonesque policy wonk on education, has an ambitious plan for remaking Honduran schools, but he spent must of his first 100 days in office engaged in a bitter fight with the teacher’s union.

The president did marshal through the Congress a 2 billion Lempira allocation to agriculture (roughly $125 million), but critics said it would mostly just pay off outstanding debts to banks, aiding bankers but not doing much for farmers plagued by a drought that won’t go away and coffee prices that won’t go up.

With life in the countryside growing more difficult, peasants continue to swarm into burgeoning urban barrios beleaguered by a gang culture that has swept up more than 40,000 young people into a life of tattoos and violence.

Gang members provide handy scapegoats for citizen insecurity. According to Casa Alianza, 53 Honduran youth were assassinated in April in what it termed “social cleansing.” It was the largest monthly body count since the children's advocacy group started keeping track four years ago. Rights groups suggest police are behind many of the killings.

Maduro’s crackdown on street delinquency brought praise from most observers, and after 100 days in office he claimed that several crime statistics had dropped, though by all accounts kidnapings have risen markedly. Nonetheless, some observers suggested the president, despite an expanded police budget and the proposed formation of local citizen councils, lacked a long-term approach to resolve growing insecurity.

“He’s provided curative security but not preventative security,” said economist Nelson Avila. “He wants to show that violence comes from poor communities. And there are certainly serious problems with the gangs, but the gangs aren’t the principal problem of Honduras. The principal problem is organized violence, and this doesn’t come from the poor, it comes from people linked to structures of economic, political, and military power.”

- From Tegucigalpa, Paul Jeffrey