With Central America facing numerous crises, it could be easy to overlook a small legislative scuffle in Honduras. However, the institutional maneuverings there in recent weeks are a great example of the sorts of questionable power grabs that degrade democracy and undermine anti-corruption efforts around the region.
The Honduran Congress was supposed to have selected a new attorney general before the end of August, but its leaders could not pull together the 86-vote supermajority the Constitution requires to do so. With the office still vacant on Oct. 31, the body’s final working day of the year, President of the Congress Luis Redondo named eight members of his and President Xiomara Castro’s ruling Libre Party to a nine-member commission that then selected Johel Zelaya as interim attorney general and Mario Morazan as his deputy. Both men also belong to the Libre Party, despite a prohibition on party affiliation for the post, which is supposed to be apolitical.
Libre, officially known as the Liberty and Refoundation Party, only holds 49 seats in the 128-member Congress, and its control of the congressional presidency is already controversial. In the month after Castro took office in January 2022, a fight over the presidency of the Congress split the party and briefly left the legislative body with two leaders who both claimed authority. The various sides managed to avoid a constitutional crisis as opponents to Redondo backed down, but his legitimacy as president of Congress is weak.
The heavy-handed and undemocratic way in which Redondo handled the attorney general’s appointment now threatens to reopen that begrudgingly resolved institutional fight, with the controversy only growing in the hours and days that followed. The opposition voted to keep Congress in session in an attempt to overturn Zelaya’s appointment, as well as to prevent Libre from making other interim appointments that could reshape the government via Redondo’s ad hoc commission, rather than with a majority vote in the legislature. To fight back and force the body’s closure, Libre called party activists to the building to physically threaten and assault the opposition legislators, with at least three members of Congress injured.
So is Congress now open or closed? The answer is a complicated Schrodinger’s Congress that is simultaneously both. And any definitive outcome will take months to play out, as competing power structures battle for the upper hand. Libre says Congress is closed and that the ad hoc commission can now manage appointments and other legislative rulings until the new congressional session begins in early 2024. Separately, 74 members of Congress made up of the three leading opposition parties say the legislative body is open; they have been meeting outside the official building to reject the moves by Libre’s minority coalition in Congress. If Libre attempts to name more people, the constitutional crisis will worsen.
This controversy is not where Hondurans had hoped the country would be when they elected Castro president in late 2021. Hondurans consolidated around her as the candidate most likely to defeat the National Party, which had become increasingly corrupt and undemocratic. Despite fears that the National Party might not allow a free and fair election, Castro won a first-round landslide victory.
Replacing a corrupt and politicized attorney general by forcing through Castro’s own politicized appointee over congressional opposition undermines the strong democratic institutions that the country needs.
The National Party first took power following the 2009 coup that deposed Castro’s husband, former President Mel Zelaya. After winning elections in 2010, it began consolidating control under a corrupt pact with organized crime, a pact that intensified when President Juan Orlando Hernandez took office in 2013. Due to indictments that were unsealed by the U.S. government just weeks after Castro succeeded him in office, the world now knows that Hernandez took over $1 million from the Sinaloa Cartel and other drug-trafficking organizations, while also stealing millions more from Honduran government programs, including the country’s social security system. Hernandez then stole the 2017 presidential election, in which he should not even have been allowed to run given the Honduran constitution’s prohibition on reelection.
The fact that Castro was able to win in late 2021 and then extradite her predecessor to the U.S. in handcuffs was an enormous victory for democracy and rule of law, and a sign that undemocratic regimes can be removed via electoral means. It’s a precedent that much of the world hopes is replicated in Guatemala this year and Venezuela in 2024.
At the time of her election, Castro was therefore understandably seen as a potential beacon of hope for Honduras. She promised to renew democracy and install an anti-corruption commission that could help clean up the country’s messy politics. That proposed commission was to be based on the now-defunct United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, whose success was due to its prosecutorial independence. In December 2022, Honduras signed a deal with the U.N. paving the way for a similar commission, known as the CICIH.
But Castro’s government has stalled on implementing the commission, with the investigators’ independence among the sticking points. In the meantime, Castro pushed through an amnesty law that prevents corruption prosecutions against many of her husband’s allies. She has also mismanaged the Libre Party coalition into questionable moves in the legislature and judiciary, with the attorney general appointment being the most recent example.
In fairness, there was nothing wrong about replacing a corrupt and politicized attorney general named by the National Party. But doing so by forcing through her own politicized appointee over congressional opposition undermines the strong democratic institutions that the country needs.
In contrast to the threats to democracy on display among Honduras’ Central American neighbors, the attorney general and legislative controversies are small stuff. To the country’s north, Guatemala continues to face a slow-motion coup by the administration of outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei, which is attempting to prevent a democratic transfer of power to President-elect Bernardo Arevalo. To the west, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is using his popularity and manipulation of state institutions to steamroll past a constitutional prohibition on reelection to run in next year’s presidential election. And to the south, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has consolidated a dictatorship where hundreds of political prisoners have been arrested and exiled.
What is occurring now in Honduras is not on par with those threats, but it is nonetheless a step backward. Castro and her Libre Party are overriding institutional checks and balances and attempting to put in place a handpicked politicized attorney general whose term in office will outlast hers. It sets the stage for further backsliding and a potential power grab. If her opponents act in similarly undemocratic ways, the fallout from the power struggle could cause damage that will be felt for years to come.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.