Military Warns Honduras Chief on Political Rift

The armed forces have told President Roberto Suazo Cordova to stop meddling with Honduras’ main political parties, but he appears to be paying little heed. A resulting crisis threatens the country’s young democracy.

Early Sunday, a Liberal Party convention under Suazo Cordova’s control nominated his handpicked candidate for president in November’s scheduled elections. Dissident Liberal Party politicians held a counterconvention and declared the nomination invalid.

This was the latest episode in a political drama that has sown confusion, alarmed the public and provoked speculation that the armed forces might intervene, as they have often done in the past.

Suazo Cordova has been manipulating the nation’ two largest political parties like a puppeteer. A disgruntled majority in Congress rebelled late last month and appointed a new Supreme Court chief justice in an attempt to snip the strings of Suazo Cordova’s political control. The judge, however, was thrown in jail on the president’s orders and has been there ever since.

The crisis makes provocative political soap opera, but it could also undermine a fragile democratic system that has been nurtured by the Reagan Administration as a cornerstone of U.S. policy in Central America.

The United States has exerted a strong influence in favor of continued civilian rule, making it clear that military and economic aid to Honduras would be jeopardized by a coup. Official U.S. policy in Central America advocates democracy as the best alternative to Marxist revolution.

“The next elections are a key to the consolidation of the democratic process here in Honduras, and it is an opportunity that must not be lost,” U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte said in a pointed statement last week.

Honduras’ armed forces have refrained so far from upsetting the constitutional order but continue to be the ultimate arbiters of political power in this nation of 4 million people.

Sources close to the armed forces said that Gen. Walter Lopez, the air force officer who heads the military establishment, told Suazo Cordova last week that the president is mainly to blame for the current crisis and must bring it to an end.

Lopez said the the armed forces want Suazo Cordova not only to stop manipulating the political parties but also to seek a compromise with the majority in Congress, according to the sources.

“It was a pronunciamiento (uprising) by the army,” one civilian with high military connections said.

Suazo Cordova, however, has shown no sign of complying. As a result, the sources said, a substantial part of the armed forces leadership is proposing that the president be forced to resign, turning his office over to a constitutional successor.

Some officers are said to favor an out-and-out military coup.

Suazo Cordova, 57, is a rotund country doctor who developed his taste for power and his brash political style as a provincial party boss. He was elected president in November, 1981, and took office in January, 1982, ending 11 years of military rule.

The president’s critics say he has attempted to govern as if the country were still under a dictatorship.

“Suazo Cordova is an autocrat who has wanted to control all of the branches of power in the nation,” said Manuel Acosta Bonilla, a leader of the opposition National Party.

Constitutionally unable to seek a second term, Suazo Cordova has been openly trying to make sure that someone beholden to him is elected president next November.

In an all-night session, the Liberal convention controlled by Suazo Cordova voted early Sunday to nominate Oscar Mejia Arellano for the presidency. Mejia Arellano, 70, is a former interior minister whose loyalty to Suazo Cordova is unquestioned.

“I am going to continue the progressive work of Suazo Cordova,” Mejia Arellano told the convention.

Factions loyal to Suazo Cordova are in administrative control of both the Liberal and National parties. Rival factions in both parties have tried to gain control but have been overruled by the National Electoral Tribunal, which is controlled by Suazo Cordova.

The five-member tribunal has consistently voted 3 to 2 to settle party disputes in the president’s favor.

Four members of the tribunal represent political parties: the Liberals, the Nationals and two others that are not controlled by the president. The tribunal’s fifth member is appointed by the Supreme Court, which is also stacked in Suazo Cordova’s favor.

If Suazo Cordova lost the majority of the nine-member Supreme Court, he would then lose his majority on the Electoral Tribunal and would no longer have that body’s decisive backing for his party manipulations.

That was why a majority of the Congress, including many Liberals as well as opposition Nationals, voted March 29 to replace five of the court’s nine members. Suazo Cordova deployed police around the Supreme Court to keep the newly appointed justices out.

Siding with the president, a criminal court judge issued arrest orders against the new justices. Four of them escaped arrest by hiding, but Ramon Valladares Soto was picked up by police and taken to jail, where he remains, charged with treason for accepting the congressional appointment as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

An order for the arrest of 50 congressmen who voted to install the new justices has not been carried out because Congress refused to lift their legal immunity.

Last week, Congress passed an amnesty bill aimed at freeing Valladares. Suazo Cordova said Sunday that he did not know whether or not he would veto the bill. However, he said he would veto another bill passed by Congress to require nationwide primary elections for the nomination of presidential and congressional candidates.

That bill’s aim is to try to keep the president’s hand-picked candidate from getting the official Liberal Party nomination. The presidential veto would kindle new flare-ups in the political crisis.

“The situation could grow worse, and the military is going to have to take a position,” said Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga, the Christian Democratic Party’s lone member of the country’s unicameral Congress.

Diaz said that an increasingly likely solution to the crisis is Suazo Cordova’s resignation under pressure.