For the fourth year running, San Pedro Sula has been one of the most dangerous places on the planet outside of a war zone. Credit: daviditzi/Flickr

By Lisa Haugaard, Sarah Kinosian, and William Hartung
WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb 22 2015 (IPS)

Honduras is one of the most violent nations in the world. The situation in the country’s second largest city, San Pedro Sula, demonstrates the depth of the problem.

For the fourth year running, San Pedro Sula has been one of the most dangerous places on the planet outside of a war zone. Its murder rate in 2014 was an astonishing 171 per 100,000. The city, which is caught in the crossfire between vicious criminal gangs, has been the largest source of the 18,000 Honduran children who have fled to the United States in recent years.

The vast majority of killings in Honduras are carried out with impunity. For example, 97 percent of the murders in San Pedro Sula go unsolved.

Corruption within and abuses by the civilian police undermine its effectiveness. A controversial new internal security force, the Military Police of Public Order (Policia Militar del Orden Publico, or PMOP), does not carry out investigations needed to deter crime and is facing a series of allegations of abuses in the short time it has been deployed. There are currently 3,000 PMOP soldiers deployed throughout the country, but this number is expected to grow to 5,000 this year. The national police feel that the government is starving them for funds and trying to replace them with PMOP."The vast majority of killings in Honduras are carried out with impunity."

The rise of PMOP is part of a larger trend toward the militarization of government and civil society. The military is now in charge of most aspects of public security in Honduras. But the signs of militarization are everywhere. Each Saturday, for example, 25,000 kids receive military training as part of the “Guardians of the Homeland” program, which the government says is designed to keep youths age 5-23 from joining the street gangs that control entire sections of the country’s most violent cities.

But putting more guns on the street is unlikely to sustainably stem the tide of violence in Honduras. What would make a difference is an end to the climate of impunity that allows murderers to kill people with no fear of consequences.

“This country needs to strengthen its capacity and will to carry out criminal investigations. This is the key to everything,” said an expert on violence in Honduras who spent years working in justice agencies there, and who spoke on condition of anonymity for reasons of personal safety.

The Three-Fold Challenge

The Honduran government faces three key challenges: It must reform a corrupt and abusive police force, strengthen criminal investigations, and ensure an impartial and independent judiciary.

Police reform appears to be stalled. There was some hope after the surge of civilian pressure for reform that followed the 2011 killing of the son of the rector for the Autonomous National University of Honduras and a friend. The Commission for the Reform of Public Security produced a series of proposals to improve the safety of the Honduran citizenry, including recommendations for improving police training, disciplinary procedures, and the structure of pubic security institutions.

Unfortunately, the Honduran Congress dissolved the commission in January 2014, during the lame duck period before President Juan Orlando Hernandez took office. Few of its recommendations have been carried out.

“They could have purged and trained the police during this time. But instead they put 5,000 military police on the street who don’t know what a chain of custody is,” lamented the expert on violence.

The Honduran government claims that over 2,000 police officers have been purged since May 2012, but there is little public information that would allow for an independent assessment of the reasons for the dismissals. And even when police are removed, they are not prosecuted; some are even allowed to return to the force. This is no way to instill accountability.

Meanwhile, the independence of the Honduran justice system is under attack. Since November 2013, the Judiciary Council has dismissed 29 judges and suspended 28 without an appropriate process, according to a member of the Association of Judges for Democracy. “This means that judges feel intimidated. They feel if they rule against well-connected people, against politicians, they can be dismissed.”

In an attempt to improve investigations and prosecutions, special units have been created to investigate specific types of crimes. For example, the Special Victims Task Force was created in 2011 to tackle crimes against vulnerable groups such as journalists, human rights advocates, and the LGBT community. This approach has been funded by the United States. It has promise, but the results are unclear so far. So is the question of whether the success of these specialized efforts can lead to broader improvements in the judicial system.

Protecting the Protectors

Providing security for justice operators is a particularly daunting problem. From 2010 to December 2014, 86 legal professionals were killed, according to information received by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Although the state provides some protection, the funding allocated for this purpose is inadequate. “In a country with the highest levels of violence and impunity in the region,” noted the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, “the State necessarily has a special obligation to protect, so that its justice sector operators can carry out their work to fight impunity without becoming victims in the very cases they are investigating.”

To try and target the problems driving the endemic violence in Honduras, the government, joined by the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador, has released its Alliance for Prosperity plan, which is designed to increase investment in infrastructure and encourage foreign investment. The Obama administration has announced that it will ask Congress for $1 billion to help fund the initiative, but details about the security strategy are scarce.

It remains to be seen exactly how this money will be spent. Looking at San Pedro Sula, it is clear that a dramatic change in political will would be needed for any initiative of this kind to be successful. International donors should not support a militarized security strategy, which would intensify abuses and fail to provide sustainable citizen security.

Funding for well-designed, community-based violence prevention programs could be helpful, but only if there is a government willing to reform the police, push for justice, and invest in the education, jobs, violence prevention, health, child protection, and community development programs needed to protect its poorest citizens.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus.

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Excerpt:

The first U.S. Navy T-45A Goshawk (BuNo 162787) pictured on the assembly line at the McDonnell Douglas facility at Long Beach, California (USA). Credit: public domain

By William Hartung
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 2014 (IPS)

The United States is the world’s leading arms trafficking nation, with $60 billion in arms transfer agreements last year alone. In 2011, U.S. companies and the U.S. government controlled over three-quarters of the international weapons trade.

The Obama administration regularly touts the role of U.S. officials in promoting U.S. arms sales. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Tom Kelly underscored this point in April 2013 testimony to Congress.Whether arming the Shah of Iran in the 1970s or transferring of weaponry to Afghan extremist groups fighting against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has paid too little attention to where U.S. arms end up.

“It is an issue that has the attention of every top-level official who’s working on foreign policy throughout the government, including the top officials at the State Department …in advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through . . . we take it very, very seriously and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

But according to administration officials, promotion is only one side of its approach to arms transfers. On Jan. 15, the Obama administration issued the first official policy directive on conventional arms sales since the mid-1990s. The document, Presidential Policy Directive 27, carries on the administration’s explicit commitment to promoting arms sales, but it also includes a pledge to show restraint.

The human rights connection

The most encouraging element of the new policy is its pledge to forego sales where there is a likelihood that the weapons transferred will be used to conduct genocide or other atrocities, violate international humanitarian law, or contribute to violations of human rights.

One would think that any reasonable policy on arms transfers would include these strictures, but that is not the case. Human rights concerns have too often taken a back seat to other considerations, from access to military bases and the cultivation of allies in key strategic locations to a desire to cement relations with major oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia.

The explicit human rights language in the new Obama policy directive mirrors that contained in the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, and it holds out hope that basic principles of human rights may now be given higher priority in arms export decision-making.

As the State Department’s Tom Kelly put it in an interview with Reuters, “we wanted to make sure that it’s very clear that human rights considerations really are at the core of our arms transfer decisions.”

Another promising element of the administration’s new policy is its pledge to pay closer attention to where U.S. arms end up. Whether arming the Shah of Iran in the 1970s or transferring of weaponry to Afghan extremist groups fighting against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has paid too little attention to where U.S. arms end up.

Iran still has U.S. weaponry dating back to the Shah’s era, and Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-like groups around the world have benefited from the U.S. weapons that were poured into South Asia during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The new Obama policy seems to take account of the risk of U.S. weapons ending up with hostile regimes or organisations when it states that it will take into account “the risk that significant change in the political or security situation of the recipient country could lead to inappropriate end use transfer of defense articles.”

The real question is how these new arms transfer criteria will be applied in practice.

A loosening of controls

Ironically, the administration’s new rhetoric of restraint has been enunciated in parallel with an effort to loosen arms export controls, an initiative that could make it easier for U.S. weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists and human rights abusers. This danger results from a decision to take thousands of items off of the U.S. Munitions List (USML) and place them on the less restrictive Commerce Control List (CCL).

This will mean that these items will no longer need a license from the State Department to be exported and will instead be subject to the less stringent controls maintained by the Department of Commerce.

There are two principal problems with the administration’s new approach. First, the weapons and weapons components that are moved under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Department are not likely to receive the regular human rights vetting that occurs during the State Department’s licensing process.

Second, the decision to allow many of the items moved to the Commerce list to go to 36 allied nations with no license at all will make it easier for smugglers that have set up front companies in these allied nations to get a hold of U.S. arms components and ship them on to Iran, China, or other destinations prohibited under U.S. law.

The administration has defended its new arms export control policy as an effort to put “higher fences around fewer items” so that scarce enforcement resources can be concentrated on high-end weapons and weapons components. But the administration’s narrow focus on controlling the flow of modern equipment to potential competitors ignores the danger posed by making it easier to export low-tech items.

Iran wants spare parts to keep its aged U.S.-made fighter jets and attack helicopters flying; China wants older model technology to copy and manufacture; and many regimes want the means of daily repression, like low-tech guns and communication and surveillance equipment. None of these items would be kept behind the “high fence” of United States export controls as envisioned by the Obama reform.

Business interests

The Obama reforms did not occur in a political vacuum. Major business networks like the Coalition for Security and Competitiveness have welcomed the administration’s pro-industry stance.  The 19 members of the group, which lobbied hard for the arms export control reform, include the Aerospace Industries Association, the Business Roundtable, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the National Defense Industrial Association.

As so often happens in the realm of business lobbying, the public rationale for this policy change focused not on the possibility of increasing industry profits but on the jobs that would allegedly be produced.

The only study of the subject was a flawed effort by the Milken Institute – funded by the National Association of Manufacturers — which arbitrarily assumed that export control reform would radically increase U.S. sales to key markets like China and India. And neither the Milken report nor the administration accounted for the job loss that could occur if the reforms make it easier to transfer U.S. production technology to other countries.

It’s hard to see how the Obama administration’s aggressive promotion of arms exports can be made compatible with the pledges of restraint contained in its new policy directive. Congress needs to subject the arms export decontrol initiative to much greater scrutiny with respect to its impact on human rights and jobs. And the public and the Congress need to press the administration to adhere to the human rights principles set out in its new arms transfer policy directive.

Given the uncertainties of current global politics, a policy of unrestrained arms exports is both unwise and unacceptable.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Risks and Returns: The Economic Illogic of the Obama Administration’s Export Reform (August 2013).