Heavy burden Millions of Central Americans, like this woman in Nicaragua, remain poor, while ousted President Zelaya is the latest symbol of the region's lack of progress
Antonio Aragon / EPA
If he holds his handy lead in the polls, Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo will be the next President of Honduras. Problem is, the last man elected to that office, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted last summer in a military coup. That makes it unlikely that any nation — except maybe the U.S. — will recognize Lobo if he wins the Nov. 29 election. But as he relaxes in his opulent house near Honduras' capital Tegucigalpa after a day of campaigning, Lobo sounds unfazed. "I practice Taekwondo for serenity," he says with his trademark Cheshire cat smile. "We have to hold this election, and the world has to recognize it, because Hondurans have to move on."
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It would be great if a presidential election could magically transport the small, impoverished Central American nation beyond the political crisis that has gripped it since the June 28 coup. But unless Zelaya is restored to office before next week's balloting, which looks extremely unlikely, the international community is poised to brand the vote illegitimate. Instead, the election will confirm that Honduras has slipped back into the political chicanery and military meddling that typified the 1970s and '80s. "You can't use an election to clean the slate after a coup," says Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director at the Council of the Americas in New York City. "It just threatens to roll back democratic norms in Central America by decades."(See pictures of violence in Honduras.)
Honduras, in fact, is the latest example of how little progress Central America has made since the coups, civil wars and corruption of the past. The institutional rot that spawned those Cold War conflicts remains, not just in Honduras but in nearby countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama. In Nicaragua, for example, leftist President Daniel Ortega last month had Supreme Court justices loyal to him summarily lift a constitutional ban on presidential re-election so he can run again in 2011, even though most Nicaraguans oppose the change. In Panama, members of the powerful Arias family have so far been able to block the will of a relative who left some $50 million to poor children — the largest private gift in the nation's history. Even Costa Rica, once Central America's hopeful exception, has been rocked in recent years by corruption scandals involving Presidents.(Read: "Costa Rica's President: It's Not Easy Staying Green.")
And while it's been 20 years since Central America's last major civil-war battle, the isthmus is actually more dangerous today. Thanks in large part to exploding gang violence and useless justice systems, Central America has seen 79,000 murders in the past six years, more than the 75,000 people killed in El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war or the 50,000 killed in Nicaragua's 1980-1990 contra war.(See pictures of El Salvador's gangs.)
To be sure, Central America has shed some of its banana-republic baggage. Democratic elections have replaced right-wing death squads and Marxist guerrillas. This year, Salvadorans for the first time elected a President, Mauricio Funes, from the party of El Salvador's erstwhile leftist rebels. But life after elections remains as dysfunctional as the ubiquitous tangles of pirated electrical lines that hang above Tegucigalpa's streets. "The region has a greater understanding of the rule of law today," says Mark Rosenberg, president of Florida International University in Miami and an expert on Honduras and Central America. "But it's very incomplete." Even in Costa Rica, President Oscar Arias is elbowing for greater executive powers while weakening his country's famously strong environmental standards. The region's health — half of all Guatemalan children under age 5 suffer chronic malnutrition — and its education levels remain pathetically low. Only Africa has a worse regional literacy rate.
Zelaya had sought to address such problems in Honduras, where 70% of the population lives in poverty and the richest 10% owns more than 40% of the wealth. But measures like a minimum-wage hike irked the political and business élite who fear Zelaya's ties to firebrand Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Zelaya overreached in June when he defied a Supreme Court order not to hold a referendum asking if a constitutional-reform assembly should be held. But instead of trying him legally for that crime, Zelaya's foes committed their own — flying him off to exile at gunpoint. (They rationalized the move by insisting Zelaya was plotting to lift Honduras' own ban on presidential re-election, though his referendum never broached the issue.) The Obama Administration joined the world in condemning the putsch; and it thought it had the crisis resolved last month when it got Zelaya and interim President Roberto Micheletti to agree to let Honduras' Congress vote on Zelaya's restoration. But the legislature has refused to act before the Nov. 29 election, effectively kiboshing the accord. The U.S. has said it may endorse the election anyway — and risk looking as if it's condoning yet another coup in Latin America. Meanwhile, supporters of Zelaya, who is holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa after sneaking back into the country in September, have vowed to boycott the vote and may even try to block it.(Read: "A Deal Finally Ends Honduras' Coup Crisis.")
One of the main reasons bad old habits have lingered is that despite the gains of the past decade or so, the same few families and business groups continue to control the region's economy. The 14 clans that commanded El Salvador's vital coffee industry, for instance, have morphed into eight conglomerates in recent years, but they still have a choke hold on the country's finances. In Honduras, such tycoons as José Rafael Ferrari and Freddy Nasser monopolize sectors like broadcasting and energy — and, say analysts, continue to exert incredible influence on the government. Little will change, says Rosenberg, unless those local élites "step up and assume a greater sense of [social] responsibility." Former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Emilio Alvarez agrees, but says Honduras' coup is only likely to encourage more meddling. Central America, he says, "is like a small village where the same group of families controls everything."
Adolfo Facussé, a Honduran textile baron who heads the National Industrial Association, insists the wealthy are doing their part to promote efforts like microcredit and new schools. He blames a political culture that's obsessed with the spoils of office instead of civics and progress for all. But even he concedes that "Honduras has to change after this." It's for that reason, Lobo claims, that he's moved his conservative National Party to the center. The next government should "reflect more Christian humanism. We've been too alienated from the poor."
It seems a bit late, if not disingenuous, for a Central American politician to experience that epiphany in 2009. The real problem, says Lobo, is "our utter lack of vision about who we are and how to order ourselves." Ever since its Maya glory ended a millennium ago, Central America has been little more than a vulnerable land bridge whose political tragedies are matched only by its natural disasters: earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes such as Mitch, whose floods almost wiped Honduras off the map in 1998. Honduras has yet to really recover from that calamity — and a presidential election held under the cloud of a coup isn't going to help.
— With reporting by Tim Rogers / Managua
— With reporting by Tim Rogers / Managua
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940235,00.html?iid=tsmodule#ixzz0Xhs6Zy3o
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