The Americas | A would-be strongman?

Juan Orlando Hernández looks headed for re-election in Honduras

His tough-on-crime policies are paying a political dividend

|TEGUCIGALPA

JUAN ORLANDO HERNÁNDEZ is the first presidential candidate in Honduras’s recent history to run for re-election as an incumbent. He is making the most of it. Last month he took a sledgehammer to the masonry of a notoriously permissive prison due for demolition. A brand-new landing craft, commissioned to repel drug-traffickers from the northern coast, is distributing food to the poor. The media gave both events flattering coverage.

With days to go before elections on November 26th, he is the firm favourite to win the presidency (congressional elections also take place on that day). The latest poll puts him 15 percentage points ahead of his main rival, Salvador Nasralla, a sports broadcaster. Mr Hernández’s approval rating is 56%. He is reaping the benefit of a tough-on-crime policy, which helped reduce Honduras’s murder rate (it had been the world’s highest when he became president in 2014). But he has also been tough on institutions like the judiciary and congress, which are supposed to be independent of the presidency. His re-election could encourage other would-be leaders with an authoritarian bent, such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

In Central America’s “northern triangle”, a region of political pygmies, Mr Hernández counts as a colossus. The president of neighbouring Guatemala is a bumbling political neophyte who came into office after demonstrations against corruption and the arrest of his predecessor in 2015. Similar protests in Honduras barely weakened Mr Hernández. His underlings marvel at his energy and foresight. Wilfredo Cerrato, the finance secretary, says that the president often sends him text messages at 5am. “It’s incredible what he can manage in his mind,” Mr Cerrato says. A business boss praises Mr Hernández’s “vision of what he wants for Honduras for the next 30 to 50 years”.

The president’s biggest boast is that he has cut the murder rate nearly in half, from 79 per 100,000 people in 2013 to 42 this year. His government has nearly doubled the budget for security, sent the army to patrol violent neighbourhoods and strengthened the border. After a constitutional change allowing extradition from Honduras, he was the first president to send criminals to the United States. Such measures have discouraged traffickers from shipping cocaine to the United States through Honduras. Many now prefer to trans-ship through El Salvador, Jamaica and Mexico.

Purging the police

The murder rate is still 50% above Latin America’s high average, and crime remains the top concern of 60% of Hondurans. To hold the murder rate down, and lower it further, the government needs to replace the army with a reformed police force. In 2012, 63% of Hondurans thought police were involved in crime, the highest level in Latin America. Mr Hernández’s government completed a purge of the police, in which a quarter of its 14,000 officers were dismissed. It plans to double the size of the force by 2022 and replace promotions based on seniority with a system based on merit.

Mr Hernández takes more credit than he is due for a buoyant economy. GDP is expected to grow by 4% this year, helped by a 10% jump in remittances from Hondurans abroad, bigger harvests of shrimp and coffee, and higher banana prices. His main economic success has been to slash the budget deficit, from 7.9% of GDP in 2013 to 2.8% last year. Credit-rating agencies have upgraded Honduras’s debt.

But his plans for making Honduras a hub of activities besides cocaine-smuggling have not progressed very far. Plan 20/20, a strategy to develop the economy by encouraging tourism and attracting factories, among other things, is so far mostly a plan. Foreign direct investment fell by 30%, to $1bn, between 2014 and 2016; most of it consists of profits reinvested by firms already operating in the country. A scheme to set up investment-friendly “charter cities”, with their own rules and courts, is shrouded in secrecy. Despite strong economic growth, the poverty rate as measured by the World Bank is above 60%.

Though Mr Hernández’s accomplishments are debatable, his ambition is not. His bid for re-election is itself an act of audacity. Honduras’s constitution bars presidents from seeking re-election. In 2009 the army staged a coup against Manuel Zelaya, a left-wing president who tried to get rid of the term limit by arranging to hold a referendum. Mr Hernández was wilier. As president of congress from 2010 to 2013 he encouraged the sacking by the legislature of four supreme-court judges; their successors went on in 2015 to invalidate the term-limit clause in the constitution.

That was just the start of Mr Hernández’s power grab. In the days before he became Honduras’s president, congress passed more than 60 decrees giving him more control over spending. If revenue is higher than expected, he can spend some of the surplus as he pleases (so the government lowballs revenue estimates). He can withhold money for discretionary spending from congressional districts. That has helped Mr Hernández win votes in congress, even though his centre-right National Party does not have a majority. During his presidency of congress it tamed the press by threatening to withdraw tax exemptions, to which it is entitled under the constitution. “Hernández could do anything he wants and nobody will say anything,” says Hugo Noé Pino, an economist.

An exception is MACCIH, an anti-corruption body under the aegis of the Organisation of American States, which Mr Hernández invited in to appease protesters in 2015. They were outraged by corruption in earlier governments and by reports that his campaign had benefited from stolen public money. Unlike CICIG, a similar agency in Guatemala backed by the UN, MACCIH cannot bring cases directly to court. It acts through the attorney-general’s office, which is led by an independent-minded prosecutor, Oscar Chinchilla. So far, MACCIH’s main achievement has been to draft a party-financing law, approved by Mr Hernández, which seeks to eliminate illicit money for campaigns. It led to a 60% drop in election spending this year.

One test of the partnership between MACCIH and the attorney-general will be whether they prosecute allies of Mr Hernández who are suspected of corruption. Another test of the justice system stems from the murder in 2016 of Berta Cáceres, an indigenous leader who had lobbied against the building of a hydroelectric dam. A report by an international panel of lawyers published last month said government officials and businessmen had colluded with gangs in the killing. Much will depend on whether Mr Hernández reappoints Mr Chinchilla, whose term ends in August, or opts for someone more pliant.

Mr Nasralla, on his second run for the presidency, promises to sweep away the corrupt governing class. He will establish a “Berta Cáceres Day” if elected. Mr Hernández, whose 115-year-old National Party has provided 13 presidents, should be an easy target for an anti-establishment candidate such as Mr Nasralla.

But the anti-Hernández vote is split between Mr Nasralla and Luis Zelaya (no relation to Manuel), a reform-minded former professor who is running as the candidate of the Liberal Party, the other traditional political force. Mr Zelaya has little chance of winning, but he has made it harder for Mr Nasralla to defeat the incumbent in an election that has just one round.

Hondurans who give Mr Hernández credit for reducing violence and steadying the economy after a post-coup recession may hardly mind that he is not much of a democrat. Support for democracy has dropped by seven percentage points this year to 34%, the lowest level in Latin America, according to Latinobarómetro, an opinion survey. Prizing democracy so little, Hondurans risk letting it slip away.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Smashing. But a success?"

A hated tax but a fair one

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