Podcast: Honduras Copy-Pastes Bukele’s CECOT Marketing

The following is a transcript of episode 31 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

TER LAAG: We lived in between hope and disappointment. We are happy that we can close this chapter and that they were convicted. It is more important than them going to jail.

GRESSIER, HOST: That’s the voice of Sonja Ter Laag, whose brother Hans was one of the four Dutch journalists murdered by the Salvadoran Army in March 1982, speaking to Al Jazeera. Three top military officers were convicted in this emblematic war crime on June 3, marking the first conviction of high-ranking military officials in El Salvador for crimes committed during the civil war.

“A historic precedent”

For their roles in plotting the ambush of the journalists traveling with FMLN guerrillas in Chalatenango, former minister of defense General José Guillermo García, former police colonel Francisco Antonio Morán and ex-brigadier commander Mario Reyes Mena were sentenced to 15 years in prison — a sentence reduced from 30 citing ill health and old age.

As our sister podcast in Spanish, El resumen, noted last week, García and Morán were both deported from the United States a decade ago. They are being held under police surveillance in a private hospital in San Salvador. Reyes Mena continues to live free pending an extradition request approved this year from the Salvadoran Supreme Court. The Attorney General’s Office has yet to make the formal request to the United States.

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Reyes Mena, who is also facing a civil lawsuit in the United States by the brother of one of the victims, was confronted in 2018 by Dutch documentary film makers on his doorstep in Virginia. “Journalists never tell the truth,” he told the Zembla interviewers. “You’re all part of a communist conspiracy and after revenge in any way you can. Why should I have to talk about something that happened more than 30 years ago?”

The sentencing has brought closure to the deaths of IKON TV reporters Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen, and may serve as hope for the thousands of survivors and victims from the conflict between the U.S.-backed military and FMLN guerrillas with open cases growing cold.

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In a joint statement, the Fundación Comunicándonos and the Salvadoran Association for Human Rights described the trial as “a historic precedent in the fight against impunity”.

The Supreme Court’s vote to move forward with the extradition request is particularly striking given that the high court has been tightly controlled by Nayib Bukele since 2021.

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Bukele promised early in his presidency to promote accountability for war crimes, even saying he would open classified military records. But he then backpedaled, and a judicial purge that same year led to the replacement of the judge of the El Mozote massacre case, in which General García is the chief defendant. That case has not moved forward.

In the case of the Dutch journalists, their families waited for over four decades for a verdict. Now, as the military leaders have been convicted, El Salvador is returning to a time of rising political violence against dissidents, human rights defenders, and journalists. When the Military Police were called out in May to quash a protest at Bukele’s home, the increasing clout of the military in his regime was on full display.

“Human rights do not govern us”

In June 2023 in Honduras, 46 women died by fire and bullets in a massacre in Támara Prison. Seven months into a state of exception modeled on El Salvador, President Xiomara Castro ordered her own Military Police, a force implicated in human rights violations that she had promised to disband, to take control of the prisons in a campaign of “pacification.”

She also announced plans to build a new megaprison on the Swan Islands, an archipelago protected as a national marine park. But those designs fell through when the government failed to find a contractor. As we reported in episode five, the government has not quashed extortion, which it initially claimed was the reason to install the state of exception. Meanwhile, reports of an array of police and military crimes have increased.

Two years after the Támara massacre, in the middle of election season, the administration has turned the page, opening a maximum-security wing. In a carceral P.R. campaign, they opened the doors to the press, promoting images of hundreds of men packed into 28 unventilated cells and pressed against steel bars.

Sound familiar?

Digital outlet Contracorriente called the new supermax facility a “CECOT replica,” referring to Nayib Bukele’s Terrorist Confinement Center, or CECOT. “Its opening to the media appears to be part of an official strategy to project a heavy hand, despite the fact that the system was already under military control,” they wrote.

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“Human rights do not govern us,” said Honduran General Fernando Muñoz, commander of the Military Police for Public Order, according to the outlet. Directly echoing the talking-points of Bukele at the White House with Donald Trump, Muñoz added: “The rights of prisoners are not being violated, but rather the rights of 10 million Hondurans are being protected.”

A brazen escalation

In early May, Guatemalan Attorney General Consuelo Porras accused Luis Pacheco and Hector Chaclán, two Maya K’iche’ leaders of the 2023 mass mobilization against an electoral coup, of terrorism and obstruction of justice. Two days ago, an appellate court granted prosecutors’ request to expand those charges to include illicit association.

Luis Pacheco, who last year became vice minister of Energy and Mines, is the former president of the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán, an Indigenous municipal authority in the highland department of the same name. In 2023 and early 2024, the 48 Cantons were a visible actor in a national dialogue between the government, civil society, the private sector, and the diplomatic corps to avert a coup.

They were also a key motor of the protests, in which tens of thousands of Guatemalans called for the resignation of the attorney general as she was sanctioned internationally for attacking the electoral process. The charges have been condemned by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, who had met Pacheco during the 2023 electoral process.

On Thursday, the E.U. placed visa sanctions and an asset freeze on the president and the legal representative of the Foundation Against Terrorism, key allies to the attorney general. Brazenly, the expanded accusation comes days after the E.U., Dutch, and German Embassies visited the men, as well as publisher Jose Rubén Zamora, in prison.

“[Porras and allies] are attacking the institutionality of the Indigenous peoples,” lawyer José Santos Sapón told El Faro English last month. “They are in a hurry because obviously it will be Arévalo who will appoint the new attorney general next year,” he added. ”It's getting tough for them. All they need is the coup.”

Roman Gressier wrote today’s episode, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms