Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, using the specter of rampant crime and the drug trade, won extensive support from the American government to build up highly trained state security forces. Now, those same forces are repressing democracy. The post-election situation in Honduras continues to deteriorate as Hernández, a conservative leader and stalwart U.S. ally in Central America, has disputed the result of last week’s vote while working to crack down on protests sweeping the nation. Initial results showed Salvador Nasralla, an ex-sportscaster chosen by an alliance of left-wing political parties as their candidate, leading the vote count after the November 26 presidential election. The lead was substantial enough that a magistrate on the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, or TSE, estimated victory by Nasralla, characterizing his lead as “irreversible.” The next day the TSE announced that Hernández was closing the gap. Then it suddenly stopped publicizing the tally, alleging that its electronic system went down, prompting criticism from European Union election observers. Police and military flooded the streets in the hours of silence that followed. On Wednesday, the announcement that Hernández had overtaken Nasralla in the vote count was met with disbelief. In the words of Salvadoran journalist Carlos Dada, “There are only two possibilities: Either the TSE is of Olympic incompetence or it’s committing fraud.” The turn of events led to chaos on the streets, and Hernández instituted a military-imposed curfew across the nation on Friday. At least one protester has been killed and scores of others have been injured and arrested in violent clashes with police. For human rights observers, the curfew and delay of an official recount are steps to produce an inevitable Hernández victory, regardless of the vote tally. “The delay has only served to fuel claims of mass fraud, confusion, and deep suspicion,” said Karen Spring, a human rights activist with the Honduras Solidarity Network. The demonstrators “went into the street because they know that being calm means allowing a cover-up to happen and what many call a dictator to illegally stay in power,” she added. Several observers on the ground told The Intercept that they have seen elite military police from the TIGRES and Cobras units alongside the Honduran National Police involved in clashes with protesters in the capital, Tegucigalpa, and around the country. The three forces are increasingly coordinated as the violence soars, they say. On the evening of Wednesday November 29, the three forces launched tear gas against an estimated 1,000 people who were gathered to wait for results outside the building where the TSE tabulated. Among the demonstrators was former Police Commissioner María Luisa Borjas, who wrote in an email statement to a group of journalists that the people gathered included many children and the elderly, along with opposition candidate Nasralla and his pregnant wife. An American human rights observer also present said that when the coalition of police forces attacked the crowd, the gathering was peaceful. “People were singing and had a giant Honduran flag, they were running up and down the street. It was beautiful actually. People were angry — it was loud — but it was peaceful,” the observer, who asked for anonymity given the increasingly dangerous situation, told The Intercept in a phone interview. On Friday evening, as police cleared demonstrators from the streets of the La Kennedy neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, officers adorned with visible TIGRES insignia were spotted by Spring. The TIGRES were accompanied by Cobras and Honduran National Police, or PNH, according to another human rights observer from the U.S., who also asked not to be named out of fear for her safety. On Saturday night, Borjas received multiple emergency calls from the Cabañas neighborhood of San Pedro Sula, a city in northern Honduras. People were being forced out of their houses and into the streets when Honduran law enforcement, including the PNH, launched tear gas canisters into their homes. Police attacked because the neighbors had begun a “cacerolazo,” a common form of protest in Latin America, banging pots and pans when state repression makes anything else impossible. Upon forcing people out of their homes, the PNH arrested them, Borjas said. “This is happening as we speak,” she told The Intercept in a phone interview Saturday night, adding that the TIGRES and Cobras maintain a strong presence on the streets, especially around the building where the votes are being tallied.

Police officers in riot gear clash with supporters of Honduran presidential candidate for the Opposition Alliance against the Dictatorship coalition, Salvador Nasralla, near the Electoral Supreme Court, as the country waits for the final results of the weekend’s presidential election, in Tegucigalpa, on Nov. 30, 2017. Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images



The PNH and elite military police units are among the beneficiaries of generous security-related foreign aid earmarked for Honduras by the U.S. government. Figures compiled by the Security Assistance Monitor show that Honduras has received nearly elite military police units are among the beneficiaries of generous security-related foreign aid earmarked for Honduras by the U.S. government. Figures compiled by the Security Assistance Monitor show that Honduras has received nearly $114 million in security support since 2009. The PNH receives extensive training by various branches of the U.S. government. The exact substance of U.S. training for foreign security forces is notoriously difficult to ascertain, but some light has been shed by new data provided by the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security at the request of Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., and shared with The Intercept by John Lindsay-Poland, a Latin America expert who participated in making the request. In 2015, for instance, the data shows that members of the PNH received courses titled “Advanced Close Quarter Combat,” “Tactical Safety and Survival,” “Communication and Electronic Intelligence,” among others, and received donations, including Toyota trucks and computers. “Multiple Honduran Military and Law Enforcement Units” also received trainings on “Special Forces Advanced Military Operations in Urban Terrain,” “Reconnaissance and Surveillance,” and other themes. “This will support [U.S. Southern Command] Theater Engagement strategy and will improve partner national [counternarcotics] units’ abilities to conduct unilateral and combined [counternarcotics] missions,” reads the text describing the purpose and objective of those courses, as reported by the Defense Department and U.S. Southern Command. Courses listed for the year 2016 were similar. The instructors of the courses both years included federal agencies like the DEA, FBI, and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, along with other agencies such as the Chicago police force. The data does not include additional detail about course curriculum or identifying information of trainers or trainees. Since the elections, the Honduran government has made no effort to conceal the role of the two elite military police units. In the run-up to the election, Secretary of Security Julián Pacheco Tinoco announced that TIGRES and Cobra forces would be among the 16,000 police officers deployed to monitor the election. The Comando de Operaciones Especiales, or Cobras, are riot police trained by U.S. SWAT teams. The Tropa de Inteligencia de Respuesta Especial de Seguridad, or TIGRES, were formed to fight urban violence and organized crime in 2014 by Hernández as he took office promising to bring down the world’s highest peacetime murder rate. The TIGRES are paid a higher salary than traditional Honduran police, and they have also benefited from close coordination with multiple U.S. military bases in Honduras. A video obtained by the Wall Street Journal shows Green Beret units training with the TIGRES in the mountains of Honduras. The militarized units, known to operate at night with uniforms that disguise officers’ faces, have featured widely in Hernández’s political campaigns as the president has championed his war on crime. But the TIGRES, Cobras, and PNH have all been denounced for human rights violations. The TIGRES in particular are said to have been used to harass political opponents and simply rob the cartels they are designed to rein in. Shortly after the formation of the unit, TIGRES officers assigned to work with the U.S. Embassy on counternarcotics operations stole $1.3 million from cocaine traffickers targeted in a raid. Most controversially, there have been allegations that TIGRES were involved in the harassment of Berta Cáceres, an internationally known and respected human rights and environmental activist who was assassinated last year. Before her death, Cáceres, an outspoken critic of the Hernández administration, warned that commandos from the TIGRES had occupied her rural community, where Cáceres had led a protest movement against a planned hydroelectric dam. In a recording made just one month before her killing, she explicitly named the TIGRES, calling commandos from the force a “hostile and aggressive presence.” There have been attempts to stem U.S. aid to Honduras since the environmentalist’s killing, either through enforcing existing statutes, such as the so-called Leahy Law, barring aid to military or police units with serious human rights violations, or passing new legislation. In the House of Representatives, 68 Democrats have sponsored H.R. 1299, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, to make Honduran foreign aid contingent on anti-corruption measures and a halt to the killing of journalists and activists in the country.

“The Honduran security forces are using our taxpayer dollars to repress peaceful demonstrations against stolen elections.”