{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.kaine.senate.gov/tim-in-the-news/political-doubt-poses-risk-to-honduras-battered-by-coup-and-violence", "Political Doubt Poses Risk to Honduras, Battered by Coup and Violence", "2013-11-22", "2013", "2013-11", "Democrat", "House", "VA", "Tim Kaine", "K000384", "www.kaine.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "Political Doubt Poses Risk to Honduras, Battered by Coup and Violence\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\r\n                \r\n            \r\n            \r\n            \r\n                \r\n                    By:\u00a0\r\n                    Elisabeth Malkin\r\n                \r\n            \r\n            \r\n                \r\n                \r\n                \r\n            Friday, November 22, 2013\r\n            \n\t\n\r\n            \r\n            TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras \u2014 When police officers arrived last week after the murder of Felipe Nery Aguilar and his daughter Gladys, they seized on what appeared to be a clue: a childish scribble on a broken television set. A message from local gangs, the officers figured, demanding protection money, known here as a \u201cwar tax.\u201d Case closed.\r\nBut for the victims\u2019 family, the explanation made no sense. A second daughter, Rosa Alba Aguilar, 35, agonized over why anybody would kill a 73-year-old fruit seller.\r\n\u201cIt was just pure evil,\u201d Ms. Aguilar said. Nobody was extorting her father. It was one of his grandchildren who had scrawled over the television screen.\r\n\u201cThe police come here asking stupidities,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat are the laws for?\u201d\r\nThat question is at the center of elections on Sunday, when Hondurans will choose a new president four years after a coup expelled a previous one. The rule of law, which was never sturdy to start with, has all but evaporated since then.\r\nThe coup upended the political landscape here, and the outcome of the vote in one of Latin America\u2019s poorest and most unequal countries is unpredictable. Honduras\u2019s fraying social fabric may not withstand a new bout of political uncertainty.\r\nDrug traffickers and street gangs act unimpeded as the National Police look the other way, or even run their own criminal rackets. Dozens of human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, and peasant and labor leaders have been killed. The country is believed to have the highest peacetime murder rate in the world.\r\nThe combustible mix of drugs, gangs, arms and impunity has created a \u201cvery violent element\u201d that will \u201ckill anybody for any reason,\u201d said Leticia Salom\u00f3n, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. \u201cThey don\u2019t care anymore.\u201d\r\nWashington is watching closely, because greater instability could add to the flow of migrants trying to reach the United States and open space to drug traffickers, who have turned Honduras into a way station for South American cocaine flights.\r\nIn a Nov. 13 letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and a dozen other senators wrote that the \u201cdifficult and dangerous climate\u201d in Honduras raises \u201cserious concerns over the Honduran government\u2019s ability to conduct free and fair elections.\u201d\r\nAgainst this backdrop, the question is whether politicians will respect the results after what most expect will be a very close race for president and a fractured vote for Congress.\r\nThe ousted former president, Manuel Zelaya, known to everyone as Mel, is back. He leads a new left-wing party, Libre, that could seize the presidency from the two parties that have swapped political power and its spoils for decades. His wife, Xiomara Castro, is the party\u2019s candidate, because the Constitution prevents him from running again.\r\n\u201cTrust me,\u201d Ms. Castro said at a noisy closing rally in the market town of Siguatepeque last week. \u201cYou trusted Mel, and he never let you down.\u201d\r\nAfter Mr. Zelaya won the presidency in 2005 as a candidate of the Liberal Party, he broke with the political establishment and tacked left toward Venezuela, embracing its interventionist economic policies.\r\nNow the former presidential couple is running on a promise to rewrite the Constitution to give a greater share of the country\u2019s wealth and power to its dispossessed citizens. \u201cWe will break the chains that tie us,\u201d Ms. Castro declared in Siguatepeque.\r\n\u201cXiomara owes the people,\u201d said Alex Isidro Turcios, 46, who owns a small hardware store. \u201cThe other candidates all have debts to the oligarchy, the power groups, the elite bourgeoisie, not to the people.\u201d\r\nOpponents describe the couple as a stalking horse for Latin America\u2019s left. \u201cSomebody who is desperate and who does not have support at home has to appeal to foreigners,\u201d said Mauricio Villeda, the presidential candidate for the Liberal Party.\r\nBut even some in the conservative establishment acknowledge that it is time for change. \u201cI see what\u2019s happening here as a flowering of democracy,\u201d said Adolfo Facuss\u00e9, the head of one of the country\u2019s main business associations and an outspoken supporter of the coup.\r\nThere have been no polls for a month, but the front-runners are Ms. Castro and Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez, the former president of the Congress.\r\nMr. Hern\u00e1ndez, the candidate of the governing National Party, has focused on law and order. At the center of his campaign is the military police, a new force approved by Congress to patrol the streets and fight crime.\r\nBut many analysts worry about the growing role of the military in a country that endured years of military dictatorship. The coup \u201cshowed that the armed forces were capable of \u2018maintaining order,\u2019 \u201d said Leo Valladares Lanza, a former human rights commissioner and law professor. \u201cNow they have much more control over the political process.\u201d\r\nThere are eight presidential candidates, but political analysts believe that only Mr. Villeda, who has a rare reputation for probity and is the son of a popular president, and Salvador Nasralla, a television host campaigning on an anticorruption platform, have enough support to pull off an upset.\r\nMr. Hern\u00e1ndez is widely seen as having accumulated enormous power in Congress, crushing all opposition. When the Supreme Court threw out several new laws he had pushed through, Congress simply replaced four justices late last year.\r\nIn his last campaign appearance on Monday, Mr. Hern\u00e1ndez led a couple of hundred supporters in a candlelight vigil for a peaceful vote. It was a none-too-subtle reminder that the rival Libre emerged from the protests against the coup.\r\n\u201cIf there is political unrest after the election, what will be the role of the military police?\u201d asked Carlos Hern\u00e1ndez, the president of the Association for a More Just Society, which works on justice, labor and security issues. (He is not related to the candidate.)\r\nViolence has marred the campaign. A study by the national university released Thursday found that 17 members of Libre \u2014 among them candidates, activists and relatives \u2014 had been killed since May 2012 and that the party had faced threats and armed attacks. Sixteen people from the two traditional parties have also been killed.\r\n\u201cAlmost all the violence has gone unpunished,\u201d said the report\u2019s author, Blas Enrique Barahona.\r\nPolitics may be behind the killing of Mr. Aguilar, the fruit seller, who was a Libre activist in his neighborhood of Santa Cecilia. His daughter Gladys was a Liberal supporter.\r\nCampaign financing is opaque, leading many to assume that candidates have taken money from traffickers. \u201cThere is drug money in the majority of the big parties,\u201d said Osman Aguilar, a Liberal Party congressman who is a security specialist.\r\nAmerican collaboration with Honduras on fighting drug trafficking has been uneven under the government of President Porfirio Lobo, who cannot seek re-election.\r\nWashington has suspended some security programs over human rights violations, and it has not supported the new military police. \u201cIn democracies, police are used to enforce the law and the military is used to protect the borders,\u201d Ambassador Lisa J. Kubiske told a Honduran television station in August.\r\nThe United States government also ended financing for a unit set up to purge the Honduran National Police, because it got no results.\r\n\u201cRemoving the dirty police officers should not be difficult; everybody knows who they are,\u201d said Mr. Hern\u00e1ndez the security expert. \u201cBut they are associated with politicians \u2014 they know things about politics.\u201d\r\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.kaine.senate.gov/tim-in-the-news/political-doubt-poses-risk-to-honduras-battered-by-coup-and-violence"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.2597829811275005, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}