Honduran President Xiomara Castro
Numerous press outlets have taken great pains to counter claims that Vice President Kamala Harris is or ever has been the “border czar”, contending instead that her migration portfolio simply involved the “root causes” of illegal migration from the three “Northern Triangle” countries of Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Those same outlets have been circumspect though in mentioning the fact that U.S. relations with one of those countries — Honduras — are currently at a breaking point.
“Root Causes”, in Brief. As it was dismantling former President Donald Trump’s border policies, the Biden-Harris administration embarked on an effort to instead tackle the “root causes” of illegal migration — the push factors that encourage migrants to leave their homes.
On February 2, 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order (E.O.) 14010, “Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework To Address the Causes of Migration, To Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and To Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States Border”.
Section 2 of that EO directs four high-level executive branch officials — including the DHS secretary — to prepare “the United States Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration” (the “Root Causes Strategy”).
That root causes strategy was to have five focuses: fighting corruption; ensuring the rights of civil society; countering criminal violence and trafficking; “combating sexual, gender-based, and domestic violence”; and “addressing economic insecurity and inequality”.
The Vice President Goes to Tegucigalpa. At a public event at the White House on March 24, 2021, President Biden tasked the vice president with overseeing the administration’s root causes strategy.
As I explained in July, Harris thereafter made two trips abroad to meet with regional leaders as part of that effort: to Guatemala City and Mexico City in June 2021 and to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in January 2022.
Harris was in Tegucigalpa to meet with the newly inaugurated president, Xiomara Castro. In addition to being the new president of Honduras, she is also the wife of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who had been overthrown in a 2009 coup.
Not only is she the wife of a former president, but Castro has other familial connections throughout the Honduran government. As Americas Quarterly (AQ) explained in March: “Castro’s eldest child is her private secretary, her youngest daughter is in Congress, her brother-in-law is the president of Congress, and his son is the defense minister”.
Things have changed for the family since that AQ report, as I’ll explain below.
Harris and Castro discussed a number of issues, according to a White House readout of their meeting:
Vice President Harris emphasized that combating corruption and impunity remains at the center of our commitment to address the root causes of migration. To that end, Vice President Harris welcomed President Castro’s focus on countering corruption and impunity, including her intent to request the assistance of the United Nations in establishing an international anti-corruption commission and commitment to advancing necessary legislative reforms to enable such a commission to succeed.
Corruption and the August 29 Termination of the U.S.-Honduran Extradition Treaty. It does not appear that Harris and Castro have met since, but the vice president likely shouldn’t have taken the Honduran leader at her word when it came to the latter’s dedication to “countering corruption and impunity”.
As I noted in that earlier piece, AP reported in June 2023 that Gabriela Castellanos, director of the Honduran NGO “National Anti-Corruption Council” (CNA), had fled the country “due to threats”.
She left not long after the council “warned of the dangers posed by a ‘concentration of power’ from government posts going to the sons and other relatives of Castro and her husband, former President Manuel Zelaya”.
Castellanos has apparently returned, because on September 4, she sent a public letter to Castro in which she demanded that the president resign “based on the serious accusations of drug trafficking that have been presented against your family, whom you have appointed to work in the State”.
As AP explained:
The demand comes after a rocky week for Castro, who won the presidency on an anti-corruption campaign.
The day before the letter was sent, a video recorded in 2013 was released purportedly showing drug traffickers currently imprisoned in the United States offering more than $525,000 to the president’s brother-in-law and congressional leader, Carlos Zelaya.
The timing of that video’s release of is curious, given it came six days after Honduras announced it would be ending its (1912) extradition treaty with the United States in the wake of criticism by U.S. Ambassador Laura Dogu about a different meeting, this one between Honduran and Venezuelan officials.
According to the New York Times, Dogu told reporters “she was ‘surprised’ to see Honduras’s defense minister and a top general” — Honduran Roosevelt Leonel Hernández — “seated next to a narco-trafficker in Venezuela”.
The “narco-trafficker” in question is apparently Venezuelan defense chief Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, who was indicted in federal court in the District of Columbia for conspiring to smuggle cocaine in 2019.
As per the Times, the Honduran foreign minister is terminating the extradition treaty because he fears it “could be used as a ‘political weapon’” by the United States — a curious worry for a “root causes” regional partner.
That treaty had been a key instrument in Honduras’ battle against corruption. As ABC News reported on September 2: “64 Hondurans have been extradited to the U.S., largely on drug trafficking charges. Among those was former president [Juan Orlando] Hernández.”
Hernandez — Castro’s immediate predecessor as president received a 45-year sentence in U.S. prison and an $8 million fine in June “for teaming up with some bribe-paying drug traffickers for over a decade to ensure over 400 tons of cocaine made it to the United States”.
In a statement at his sentencing, Hernandez “portrayed himself as a hero of the anti-drug trafficking movement who teamed up with American authorities under three U.S. presidential administrations to reduce drug imports”.
Had he stuck around for yet another term, Hernandez could have been the one making anti-corruption promises to the U.S. vice president in January 2022.
Street Protests and “Dark Forces”. A Costa Rican news outlet, Tico Times, reports the termination of the extradition treaty triggered protests in Honduras on September 7, with thousands of President Castro’s opponents taking to the streets under the aegis of the “Citizen Army of Peace”.
The outlet explains:
Right-wing political groups accuse the ruling Liberty and Refoundation (Libre) party, led by Castro’s husband, former president Manuel Zelaya — who was ousted in 2009 — of seeking to establish a government similar to Venezuela or Nicaragua under the guise of “democratic socialism.” The opposition also alleges that Castro ended the extradition treaty with Washington to protect members of her administration and her family.
Just three days after the decision, two of the president’s relatives resigned: her brother-in-law and her nephew. Carlos Zelaya, the Secretary of Congress, stepped down after admitting to the Attorney General’s Office that he had met with drug traffickers in 2013, a revelation made public by a leaked video earlier that week. José Manuel Zelaya, the Minister of Defense and the president’s son, also resigned.
Last Tuesday, the U.S. Embassy in Honduras issued an advisory warning citizens “to monitor local media and avoid travel to the U. S. Embassy while demonstrations [planned for September 5] are ongoing to avoid traffic and congestion that could result”.
The embassy added: “Even demonstrations intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and escalate into violence.” Apparently, Honduran locals haven’t read the root causes EO or the White House readout.
For her part, Castro blames “dark forces” — both domestic and international — that are seeking to launch another coup. “The plan to destroy my socialist and democratic government and the upcoming election is underway”.
“No, Kamala Harris Isn’t The ‘Border Czar’”. In advance of the Tuesday presidential debate, Forbes published an article on September 10 captioned: “No, Kamala Harris Isn’t The ‘Border Czar’ — What To Know About Her Immigration Record Before Tonight’s Debate”.
As with most such articles of late, it attempts to deflect any responsibility Harris may have for the border crisis that has been ongoing under the Biden-Harris administration.
While Forbes argues “[i]mmigration levels from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have gone down in the years since Harris’ assignment began” (which is only partly true), it also asserts:
Addressing the root causes of migration is something that by nature will take longer to bear fruit than more immediate efforts to stop migrants at the border — so it’s harder to see how Harris’ work has had an impact — with Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, telling TIME that while the VP did “reasonably well” in working with the private sector, her assignment is one “that could not produce results anytime soon.”
Keep in mind, that article was published more than a week after Honduras withdrew from its 112-year-old extradition treaty with the United States —a key anti-corruption tool — and days after street protests against the government there.
There’s a difference between the Biden-Harris root causes strategy taking time to “bear fruit” and U.S. relations with one of just three “root-causes countries” devolving into acrimony two-plus years after the vice president went there to secure “clean government” promises. And “acrimony” is about the best way to describe our relations with Honduras these days.
Maybe ABC News should have fact-checked that.