Roberta Jacobson, who worked for decades as a U.S. diplomat specializing in Latin America, called the Northern Triangle “a poisoned chalice.” Harris and Zúniga need reliable partners, but the United States’ willingness to encourage despots has left the region largely in the hands of corrupt autocrats. As Jacobson said, “Who is there to trust?”
The senior Biden official acknowledged that even the old playbook of propping up ruthlessly effective autocrats didn’t seem feasible anymore. “If there was an efficient authoritarian like Lee Kuan Yew out there, maybe we’d look the other way,” he said. “But there isn’t.”
In his view, the most worrisome Central American leader is Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador. “He’s hitting the whole authoritarian punch list—demonizing your enemies, dominating the legislative assembly, and then controlling your population through the media,” he said. Bukele, a forty-year-old former night-club manager, is an abrasive populist who tweets without restraint. (He got along notably well with Trump, whom he once described in a press conference as “very nice and cool.”) Bukele took office in 2019, and has become enormously popular, through an effective crime-reduction program and a relatively efficient response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But he has also relentlessly undermined democratic institutions. In 2020, he ordered armed troops into the Salvadoran Congress to coerce legislators into facilitating the purchase of new security equipment. This past May, he fired the country’s attorney general and replaced five senior Supreme Court justices with his own picks. After Vice-President Harris, among other critics, registered “deep concerns about El Salvador’s democracy,” Bukele tweeted, “We’re cleaning our house . . . and that is none of your business.”
A few weeks later, Bukele ended his country’s coöperation with the International Commission Against Impunity in El Salvador—a group, backed by the Organization of American States, that had been investigating corruption in his government. In September, Bukele’s Supreme Court ruled that Presidents can serve two consecutive terms, allowing him to run for reëlection in 2024. The top U.S. diplomat in El Salvador lamented the move as a “decline in democracy.” Days later, Bukele changed his Twitter bio to “The Coolest Dictator in the World.”
In late June, Harris made her first foreign trip as Vice-President, with a stop in Mexico and a visit to Guatemala. With Hernández a pariah and Bukele openly defiant, Guatemala was the only Northern Triangle country where the Administration could hope to muster a semblance of official coöperation.
The trip did not go well. In a press conference with President Alejandro Giammattei, Harris announced a new U.S.-led task force, to oversee anticorruption efforts. “I can tell you from my work on this issue—follow the money,” she said. There was surely money to follow. In 2007, the U.N. had created an investigative commission in Guatemala, which helped secure the prosecution of two Presidents, a Vice-President, and dozens of other officials, before being dismantled by Giammattei’s predecessor.
Now the country’s primary anticorruption body was the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity, which Harris pointedly mentioned, promising the support of the United States government. Giammattei, visibly uncomfortable, denied malfeasance by his administration, and vowed to assist the U.S.’s efforts. But, when I talked with Giammattei several days later, he complained about the intrusiveness of international judicial systems, and said that he objected to calling the new anticorruption unit a “task force.” He said, “It reminds me of the eighties”—a decade when the U.S. used the prospect of foreign aid to try to restrain Guatemala’s military during a bloody civil war.
Not long afterward, I met with Juan Francisco Sandoval, who at the time led the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity. When I described Giammattei’s concerns, he replied diplomatically: “The President is entitled to his opinions, and he’s a temperamental man.” Sandoval was grateful to Vice-President Harris for offering support, though. Laughing, he said, “At least now I know there’s a place to which I can escape.” A month later, Sandoval was removed from his post, and fled to the United States. In a press conference before leaving the country, he suggested that he had been pushed out because his office was looking into evidence that Giammattei had taken bribes from shadowy Russian investors. Soon after that, a warrant was issued for Sandoval’s arrest.
“Take your time.”
Cartoon by Carolita Johnson
In Nicaragua, democratic norms are under even more direct assault. During the summer, the longtime Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice-President, Rosario Murillo, arrested scores of civic activists and opposition politicians, including eight candidates in this fall’s Presidential election. Even old comrades have become targets. Ortega issued an arrest warrant for his former Vice-President, the seventy-nine-year-old novelist Sergio Ramírez, accusing him of money laundering, inciting hatred, and “conspiracy to undermine the national integrity.” A senior White House adviser said he believed that Vladimir Putin, a close ally of Ortega, was instigating the crackdown, “just to undermine the U.S.”
The United States has had little incentive to change the situation in Nicaragua; historically, most migrants from there have headed south, to Costa Rica, rather than toward the U.S. In much of the region, the Biden Administration has tried to apply pressure with targeted sanctions. This past July, Congress authorized the State Department to sanction several officials close to Bukele, as well as others from Guatemala and Honduras. The Engel List, as the register of names became known, has since grown to include sixty-two people in the region. Those on the list had their U.S. visa rights revoked; they may also face frozen financial assets and, potentially, criminal prosecution.
These are more aggressive steps than the previous Administration took, but they are unlikely to produce radical change. Edgar Gutiérrez, a former Guatemalan foreign minister who is now a political strategist, told me, “One of the characteristics of mafia states, like the Central American ones, is that they are increasingly impervious to this sort of international pressure.” Migration and remittances prevent citizens from becoming desperate enough to demand change; complicit militaries protect corrupt leaders from real threats. “Their sources of enrichment and power—the corruption of the public budget, the flourishing trade in drug and people trafficking—are left intact,” Gutiérrez said.
In 2015, when Biden was Vice-President, he visited Capitol Hill to promote his solution for emigration, which encompassed the U.S. Strategy for Engagement in Central America and the Alliance for Prosperity. “As far as I could tell, it was mostly a slogan, a repackaging of what we had been doing,” Rieser, the congressional aide, said. “I recall telling him we didn’t have credible partners in the national governments of those countries. They went ahead with it anyway.” The programs tripled U.S. expenditures on Central America, to more than $3.6 billion. But, despite some local successes, the plans didn’t halt the region’s decline. In 2019, Trump restricted the aid for seven months, as leverage for new migration strictures.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden renewed his efforts, with the optimistically named Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America. The plan called for spending four billion dollars to address conditions that encourage emigration—everything from corruption and violence to poverty and climate change.
This past May, Harris issued a “Call to Action,” urging international companies and organizations to pledge “significant commitments to help send a signal of hope to the people of the region and sustainably address the root causes of migration.” Chobani and Nespresso signed up. Microsoft promised to expand Internet access and to invest in technology for greater transparency in government spending. Mastercard committed to digitizing a million small businesses.
To succeed, though, the Administration will need support from civil society in the countries of the Northern Triangle. One afternoon in Tegucigalpa, I attended a meeting hosted by Fredy Nasser, an industrialist who is thought to be one of Central America’s richest men, at the local offices of his conglomerate, Grupo Terra. In an expensively tasteful boardroom, Nasser suggested that Grupo Terra could help the Administration’s plan for the region; perhaps UNITEC, a private university that his family had recently acquired in Tegucigalpa, could be transformed into an educational hub, with a think tank working on Central American problems. With the right sort of backing, he said, it could also provide Hondurans with improved access to education, through scholarships for rural students.
We were joined by Nasser’s brother-in-law, Miguel Mauricio Facussé, an amiable, sandy-haired man in his early fifties. Facussé was excited by the possibility that the Administration’s goals might jibe with those of his company, Dinant—a consortium with interests in palm oil, snack foods, and detergent. He pointed out that Dinant employed nearly eight thousand Hondurans directly, and provided livelihoods for twenty-two thousand more. With U.S. government support, he said, the company could expand its operations and improve the lives of many others.
Source link : https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/is-the-president-of-honduras-a-narco-trafficker
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Publish date : 2021-11-08 03:00:00
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