The imprisonment of a former Honduran president is an indictment of Canadian foreign policy but due to imperial power it will be ignored by most of this country’s media.
On Thursday Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) was sentenced to 45 years in prison by the Southern District Federal Court of New York for his role in bringing 400 tons of cocaine into the US and other crimes. Against the wishes of the federal government, the New York court successfully pursued JOH almost immediately after he left the presidency for his role in a vast criminal enterprise in the Central American nation of 10 million.
JOH’s presidency was the outgrowth of a Canadian-backed military coup and Ottawa endorsed his stealing an election he shouldn’t have been able to participate in. At JOH’s request the four Supreme Court members appointed by his National Party overruled an article in the Honduran constitution explicitly prohibiting re-election. JOH then ‘won’ a highly questionable 2017 poll. With 70 per cent of votes counted opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla led by five-points. The electoral council then went silent for 36 hours and when reporting resumed JOH had a small lead.
In the three weeks between the election and JOH’s official proclamation as president, government forces killed at least 30 pro-democracy protesters. More than a thousand were detained under a post-election state of emergency for protesting the electoral fraud.
Still, Ottawa immediately endorsed the electoral farce. Following Washington, Global Affairs tweeted that Canada “acknowledges confirmation of Juan Orlando Hernandez as President of Honduras.” Tyler Shipley, author of Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras, responded: “Wow, Canada sinks to new lows with this. The entire world knows that the Honduran dictatorship has stolen an election, even the OAS (an organization which skews right) has demanded that new elections be held because of the level of sketchiness here. And — as it has for over eight years — Canada is at the forefront of protecting and legitimizing this regime built on fraud and violence. Even after all my years of research on this, I’m stunned that Freeland would go this far; I expected Canada to stay quiet until JOH had fully consolidated his power. Instead, Canada is doing the heavy lifting of that consolidation.”
After JOH stole the election the Trudeau government continued to work with his regime. There was no indication that Canadian aid — Ottawa’s largest bilateral aid program in Central America — had been reduced and Canadian diplomats repeatedly met Honduran representatives. JOH’s foreign minister, Maria Dolores Aguero, attended a 2018 Women Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Montreal and Justin Trudeau was photographed with the Honduran foreign minister at a 2019 Lima Group meeting in Ottawa. During JOH’s completely illegitimate second term Honduras was a member of the Canadian-sponsored Lima Group claiming Nicolas Maduro had violated Venezuela’s constitution and that Juan Guaido should be president.
Why was Ottawa so keen to work with JOH? Because he came to power after the military intervened to block a reformist agenda. Two days after JOH was sentenced was the 15th anniversary of the coup that overthrew social democratic president Manuel Zelaya.
Early on June 28, 2009, soldiers entered the presidential palace and took a pyjama-clad Zelaya to Costa Rica. Canadian officials immediately justified the coup, blaming Zelaya for the military’s intervention. Subsequently, Ottawa refused to exclude Honduras from its Military Training Assistance Program and Canada was the only major donor to Honduras that failed to stop aid to the military government. The World Bank, European Union and even the US suspended some of their planned assistance to Honduras.
In response to the conflicting signals from North American leaders, the ousted Honduran foreign minister told TeleSurthat Ottawa and Washington were providing “oxygen” to the military government. Patricia Rodas called on Canada and the US to suspend aid to the de facto regime. During an official visit to Mexico with Zelaya, Rodas asked Mexican president Felipe Calderon, who was about to meet Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama, to lobby Ottawa and Washington on their behalf. “We are asking [Calderon] to be an intermediary for our people with the powerful countries of the world,” said Rodas, “for example, the US and at this moment Canada, which have lines of military and economic support with Honduras.”
Five months after Zelaya was ousted, the coup government held previously scheduled elections. During the campaign period, the de facto government imposed martial law and censored media outlets. Dozens of candidates withdrew from local and national races and opposition presidential candidate, Carlos H. Reyes, was hospitalized following a severe beating from security forces. Hondurans voted in “a climate of harassment, violence, and violation of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly,” according to the Washington-based Center for Justice and International Law.
The November 2009 election was boycotted by the UN and Organization of American States and most Hondurans abstained from the poll. Despite mandatory voting regulations, only 45% of those eligible cast a ballot (it may have been much lower as this was the government’s accounting). Ottawa endorsed this electoral farce. “Canada congratulates the Honduran people for the relatively peaceful and orderly manner in which the country’s elections were conducted,” noted an official statement. Minister of State of Foreign Affairs (Americas) Peter Kent went further, boldly proclaiming, “there was a strong turnout for the elections, that they appear to have been run freely and fairly, and that there was no major violence.” While most countries in the region continued to shun post-coup Honduras, Ottawa immediately recognized Porfirio Lobo after he was inaugurated as Honduran president in January 2010.
In the two years after Zelaya’s overthrow, hundreds were killed in political violence and many more attacked or injured. In May 2012 Reporters Without Borders noted, “His [Erick Avila’s] death brings to 19 the number of journalists who were supporters of former president Manuel Zelaya, who have been killed since his overthrow in a coup three years ago next month.” None of the murders had been solved.
Ottawa stayed silent on the detention, torture, and murder of anti-coup activists. Harper visited Honduras in 2011 and signed a free trade accord. It then supported a more than decade-long neoliberal narco-dictatorship that served Canadian sweatshop and mining interests. JOH was an integral part of that decade-long horror for Hondurans.
But because he was ‘our guy’ no one in the mainstream media or politics is likely to comment on how Juan Orlando Hernandez 45-year prison sentence reflects on Canadian policy. It would undermine Ottawa’s claim to be a force for good in the world.
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