DEVELOPMENT-HONDURAS: Politics Overshadow Reconstruction

By Thelma Mejía Reprint | | Print |

Thelma Mejia

TEGUCIGALPA, Aug 11 1999 (IPS) - Representatives of civil society in Honduras complained that an unusually early pre-election campaign seemed to be pushing the reconstruction and development programme agreed with donors to the backburner.

“Where is the reconstruction? When will civil society be called upon to join in the activities” designed to overcome the severe damages caused by hurricane Mitch in late October? asked Mauricio Diaz, with the non-governmental organisation Interforos, at a Tuesday follow-up meeting to the agreements reached in Stockholm in May.

The nations of Central America agreed with multilateral institutions and donor countries in Stockholm on the foundations for building new relations between leaders and the people, based on transparency and broad participation. But no such efforts have been seen in Honduras, according to Diaz.

The Stockholm agenda has been overshadowed by the fever already surrounding the elections to be held in the year 2001, said participants in the follow-up meeting, who pointed out that three of the eight strong contenders for the presidency were members of the cabinet of President Carlos Flores, while a fourth was a former minister of the administration.

The reconstruction agenda entails initiatives for overcoming the damages wrought by the worst storm to hit the region in centuries, and for boosting productivity, citizen participation, transparency and decentralisation.

But the only visible results so far have been the housing donated by the international community, while little has been done by the Honduran government, complained participants.

“We have overslept a little, and I particularly am concerned, because the government is not making decisions,” an official close to Flores, who preferred not to be identified, told IPS.

He said the government had not yet decided what to do with respect to the reconstruction of areas devastated by the hurricane, which claimed at least 10,000 lives in the region and caused billions of dollars in damages, over three billion in Honduras alone.

The official stressed the need to give life to the plan presented in Stockholm, and to open the projects to participation by civil society.

Delegates of multilateral bodies visiting Tegucigalpa to oversee the reconstruction work warned that funding would only be forthcoming as the projects were presented and implemented.

Honduras was expecting an allotment of 300 million dollars, which has been frozen as donors await signs that reconstruction work is underway.

According to political analyst Victor Meza, the pre-election fever dominating the governing Liberal Party and opposition National Party indicates that the coming election campaign will be “one of the longest and most interesting in the history of Honduras.”

But concern for reconstruction “unfortunately appears to be moving little by little to the backburner,” he added.

The government “seems to be focused on responding to the strategy being mounted” by the National Party, at the expense of “a practice coherent with reconstruction,” said Diaz.

But Minister of Cooperation Moises Starmank argued that the criticism of the government was unfounded, as 250 projects at least partially funded by donors were currently in progress.

The projects, which mainly involve housing, are part of the fruits of Stockholm, said the minister, who maintained that “those who criticise have not gone to the interior to see what we are doing.”

Honduras bore the brunt of hurricane Mitch, which also tore through parts of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Honduras’ leading export, bananas, were particularly hard hit.

Non-governmental organisations see the task of reconstruction as an opportunity to come up with a comprehensive development programme. But Starmank described that idea as “utopian.”

“We are doing what we can, and we are not offering anything that exists only in textbooks containing theories,” he asserted.