The Honduras' crime problem and 'advisories'

Another grisly warning from the U.S. government this week about travel to Honduras, and an off-key response from the Honduran government.

The State Department advisory cautioned in the first sentence that “crime and violence levels remain critically high.” Things mostly went downhill from there.

La Gringa, an ex-pat blogger living in La Ceiba, did a useful comparison of this advisory with the last warning from Nov. 21.

Generally, the new version paints a picture of greater danger. For instance, both documents say U.S. citizens do not appear to be targeted. But the new advisory adds “Crimes are committed against expatriates at levels similar to those committed against locals.” 

Not good when you’re writing about the country with the the world’s highest murder rate. And not accurate, based on my experience. Locals are at much greater risk of crime. 

The advisory is bad news. Hondurans need U.S. visitors and investors. When the American government talks about “critically high” crime, they stay home.

The Honduran government’s response was uninspiring. President Porfirio Lobo instructed staff to prepare a map for foreign visitors that would show where they should and should not go and provide safety information. But being greeted at the airport with a map of danger zones won’t likely inspire confidence. (And Hondurans might wonder why they are expected to live and work every day in areas too dangerous for foreigners to visit.)

There were the usual complaints that other countries also have crime and that Honduran media do too many graphic crime stories. Possibly true, but unlikely to have an impact on prospective visitors.

Pompey Bonilla, who was replaced as security minister but remains a presidential aide, said things aren’t so bad, but many Hondurans would disagree.

Bonilla also rightly noted that a lot of crime in Honduras is related to the country’s role as a big cocaine trans-shipment centre. The trade exists largely because of failed U.S. drug policies, he said, and Honduras pays the price.

The gangs are another big problem here, and the U.S. has a role there, too. The two main gangs developed in Los Angeles, among migrants from this region and their American-born children. When the gang problem grew too large, the U.S. government launched a policy of deporting people convicted of criminal offences. 

Between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. sent 44,042 criminals to Honduras, many of whom had been in U.S. prisons. Convenient for the U.S., but bad news for Honduras, flooded with gang members with skills honed on the hardest streets of America.

There aren’t many easy solutions to the crime problem. But there are some simple first steps.

For example, the State Department warning - like the last advisory - notes that “A majority of serious crimes are never solved; of the 18 murders committed against U.S. citizens since January 2011, police have closed none.”

Given the stakes, surely the government and police could have a made it a priority to solve a few of those murders. (The real goal, of course, is to improve the overall effectiveness of police and courts, so that literally getting away with murder isn’t the norm. But progress has been dismal.)

Americans still come here. There were 286,000 visitors from the U.S. in 2012, an increase from the previous year. 

But Costa Rica had 864,000 U.S. visitors in 2012. Honduras has similar, if untapped, potential.

And only 34 per cent of visitors to Hondurans - about 97,000 - were tourists. About 100,000 were visiting relatives, about 57,000 were on business and about 34,000 were on missions and aid work.

Honduras is a great country to visit. The two big cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, are dangerous and demand caution. Many Hondurans suffer greatly from crime.

But in Copan Ruinas, where we live, visitors are probably safer than in their hometowns. We’ve travelled pretty widely through the country and felt secure.

The country has extraordinary potential as a tourist destination. Mayan ruins, beaches, reefs, jungles, mountains, lagoons and rivers, indigenous cultures, wildlife - it is a knockout.

But the infrastructure isn’t there. And won’t be, if travellers and investors are scared off by grim travel advisories. 

Laurie Watt scores a win for real journalism over sycophancy

Score for one for competent, responsible journalism.

A communications officer in the Prime Minister’s Office sent an email to The Advance, in Barrie, Ont., encouraging the paper to do a story on a speech that Justin Trudeau gave in the community six years ago.

Trudeau got $10,000; the local college lost $4,118 on what was supposed to be a fundraiser.

An OK little story, although Trudeau wasn’t an MP at the time.

But PMO communications staffer Erica Meekes asked that the the information - including a poster for the 200 event - be identified as coming from a “source.”

Instead, reporter Laurie Watt reported the story, including where the information came from.

Why did Meekes want to hide the role of the Prime Minister’s Office? Maybe she thought it looked bad that people on the public payroll are spending their days on partisan work for the Conservative party. Maybe secrecy is just a way of life for PMO staff. Maybe she thought the story would be more credible if the source of the information wasn’t identified.

Who cares? She wanted to hide information from the public, and Meekes and The Advance recognized their role was to report, not keep secrets.

Sources sometimes require anonymity. People might have legitimate fears about repercussions. But at a minimum media should say why, specifically, they aren’t identifying the source of the information. It’s a critical part of the story for readers and viewers.

(And while they’re at it, media should push back against the growing and destructive practice of accepting vapid, anonymous email responses from government and other institutions instead of demanding real interviews and accountability.)

Why it's bad when ministerial assistants are transformed into chiefs of staff

Useful editorial in the Times Colonist today on the big increases in salary scales for political staffers in the Christy Clark government.

Noteworthy, for example, that salaries for ministerial assistants - sorry, deputy chiefs of staff, as they are now called - have increased 53 per cent since 2003, while the average British Columbian has seen a 28-per-cent wage increase. (The premier’s pay is up 60 per cent.) The top pay for minister's aides is now $102,000.

The grandiose new job title is alarming in itself. Ministerial assistants - usually one or two per minister - are support staff. The main responsibility is making the minister look good and keeping him or her on top of the ministry. The principal qualification is effective service to the party in power - active Young Liberals and New Democrats, keen campaign workers and volunteers. A few have broader work experience, but not many.

The Liberal government, for example, just gave one of the new chief of staff jobs to the party’s defeated candidate in North Island. His resume lists no work experience beyond a co-op stint in a paper mill.

‘Chief of staff’ also suggests some considerable responsibility.

But the chief of staff for Teresa Wat, minister of international trade, the Asia-Pacific strategy and multiculturalism, supervises one administrative support person. He's a Young Liberal with a work history as a government political appointee. (Nothing wrong with that, of course, for partisans of any party. Politics can be a career choice.)

It’s just a title, some might say. 

But if a ministerial assistant calls a business, or government employees, they assume he or she is seeking information or action on behalf of the minister, but that they are dealing with an assistant. If necessary, they will ask to hear directly from the minister.

But a chief of staff - even if there is only one staff - sounds rather grander. Maybe people won’t ask. And the people with the new titles can’t help but have an inflated sense of their own importance.

When Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber quit the federal Conservative caucus this month, he complained political staff in Stephen Harper’s office ran roughshod over MPs, telling them what questions to ask in committees and what to say and to vote “like trained seals.” Those are the federal equivalents to the new provincial chiefs of staff. And his complaints suggests the risk in elevating the power of political staff.

In my past days in the Press Gallery, we joked with ministerial assistants about their roles as ‘dog walkers,’ accompanying the minister to the caucus and legislative chamber each day, file in hand and earnest expression firmly in place, as if even the one-minute walk from the office could not be wasted. (We also joked that some ministers simply couldn’t find the caucus room without help.)

Practically, it’s an important political job. Ministerial assistants keep the minister informed and briefed, help decide who gets access and schedule the days.  They are valuable.

But the elevation of ministerial assistants to chiefs of staff implicitly redefines their roles and increases their authority. And increasing one person’s authority inevitably means diminishing someone else’s - in this case, likely the people actually elected to govern.

Taking on a culture of violence with street art in Tegucigalpa

I came across the Mona Lisa with a pink gun on a wall near a Tegucigalpa hotel on a previous visit.

The work is part of a series by a Honduran artist who uses the name Urban Maeztro. The prints mixed classic art images with the weapons that are part of life for many Hondurans.

Street art can be dangerous work here. Authorities don’t like it, as in most cities, but they express they’re disapproval more forcefully. And gangs aren’t sure if Urban Maeztro is mocking them.

It’s not going to end violence. But anything that challenges the status quo is a good thing.

You can read more about Urban Maeztro and his work here. 

The Canadian government and the Honduran drug business

You can draw a straight line from the Canadian government’s stupid and cynical drug policies to crime here in Honduras.

Canada and the U.S. continue to follow a drug policy that has failed every test since Prohibition in the 1920s. The governments spend billions in a futile effort to block the supply of drugs and lock up users and dealers. 

It has never worked. Over the 42 years since Richard Nixon declared the “war on drugs,” nothing has changed. Drug use and drug-related crime haven’t been reduced.

The beneficiaries are criminals. Gangs make big money because drugs are illegal and widely desired. The risks are worth the huge rewards. It’s simply a question of market forces.

Honduras has become a big trans-shipment point for cocaine bound from South America to the insatiable North American and European markets. Planes land on strips carved in the jungle, boats race to dark beaches. They even use submarines.

The U.S. state department estimates 80 per cent of cocaine bound for American consumers passes through Honduras. Maybe 130 tonnes, or $80 billion in street value. 

In a desperately poor country, the chance to be part of an $80-billion business is irresistible. At the low end, people can earn a month’s pay by carrying a backpack of cocaine over the hills and into Guatemala. At the upper end, there is big money to be made. A narco in a community about 40 kilometres from here has lives in a replica of the White House.

It’s not all bad. A woman told me a narcotrafficante was elected mayor in her hometown. He had money to fix things up, and muscle to discourage troublemakers. People were happy with his administration.

But an illegal drug trade always has fallout. Participants settle disputes with guns. They bribe police and governments to look the other way. Corruption become corrosive. 

The drug industry in Honduras thrives thanks to the policies of the Canadian and U.S. governments. 

That could be defensible if those policies were based on evidence and made sense.

But they aren’t.

The latest Canadian example is the government’s response to a Supreme Court ruling rejecting its effort to close Insite, the B.C. government’s supervised drug injection site in Vancouver.

The issue has travelled through the courts - the B.C. Supreme Court, the province’s appeal court and the Supreme of Court of Canada - since 2008.

The rulings have been consistent, and based on the evidence from supporters and opponents. The supervised injection site saves lives and reduces illness. People manage their addictions and some seek treatment. Public disorder is reduced and community life improved.

And opponents were not able to show any compelling pragmatic reasons not to allow the centre to operate. Significant benefits, including lives saved, and no good reason to close the site.

The Canadian government should have said we don’t like drug use in any form, but accept the evidence and ruling on supervised injection sites. Our polices will be based on what works.

Instead, it introduced new legislation governing supervised injection sites. The health minister has full discretion to say no, without appeal. Applicants must include letters of support from provincial cabinet ministers, municipalities and police forces and broad consultation.

The legislation is written to ensure the sites won't be approved, despite the toll in lost lives, health care costs and damaged communities.

If there was any doubt about the intent, the governing Conservatives erased it. Even as the health minister announced the new law, the Conservative party launched a website petition headlined “Keep heroin out of our backyards.” It warned “special interests” and opposition parties want safe injection sites across the country.

The governing party once again played cheap and sleazy politics with drug policy.

The results stretch across a hemisphere. Canadians are hurt, of course. But so are Hondurans. The continued allegiance to failed policies in Canada and the U.S. ensures a lucrative market and thriving illegal industry dedicated to meeting the demand. Decades of efforts have failed to change that equation.

How to write about Honduras, or ‘Death, Death, Death!’

It’s been striking how much of the commentary about Honduras in the world press or blogland seems to hit the same strings of clichés, shuffled to suit the bias of the intended audience. It’s been equally striking to see all sorts of claims about the country unsupported by facts, stats or evidence of any kind.

There are notable exceptions, like Alberto Arce, the Associated Press reporter in Tegucigalpa who is doing great work.

Tomas Ayuso offers his take on the lousy writing on the country in ‘Violence and voyeurism: A guide on how to write about Honduras.’

For example:

“If you are to include speaking parts for Hondurans in your piece make sure they are one dimensional husks, that although savory are also easy to digest,” Aysuo writes. “Some examples: The crooked cop, the poor farmer, the battered woman, the malnourished footballer and of course, the overwhelmed priest.’

He even offers help with photos.

“Limit your pictures to those of blood strewn over derelict pockmarked streets, or of black smoke and flaming wrecks. If covering a dynamic situation use instead interesting compositions such as small men with large guns, or sweaty human beings screaming. Otherwise a Caribbean sunset with a diagonally dipping palm tree and a silhouette of a gun will suffice.”

Worth a read. And worth remembering when you read many of the comment pieces on Honduras.

A gang truce in Honduras, with a Canadian connection

Gang members, Adam Blackwell, in El Salvador jail

The big news in Honduras this week is a gang truce, with a Canadian connection. The deal was brokered by the Catholic archbishop and a Canadian diplomat who works with the Organization of American States and played a similar role in El Salvador.

It’s a bit surreal. The gang leaders have issued press releases, just like any political leaders. (Except from prison, and with bandanas over their faces.)

It’s also a positive step, despite lots of questions. The two main gangs - Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Mara 18, or M18, - have signed on. They pledged to stop recruiting new members and committing acts of violence.

The truce in El Salvador, also brokered by the church and Adam Blackwell, the Canadian who is the OAS “Secretary of Multidimensional Security,” has made a huge difference in the murder rate. The rate in El Salvador fell by 52 per cent after the truce, the government says. (The murder rate fell to 38 murders per hundred thousand people. The Honduran rate in 2012 was 87; Canada’s was 1.7.)

The El Salvador truce was hardly a panacea. Gang members are still criminals, and - as in Honduras - extortion is still central to their business model. If you have a business, or drive a taxi or bus, or sell fruits and vegetables, gang members collect a weekly ‘tax.’ 

And truce or not, extortion only works when the victims fear violence and death if they don’t pay. 

The numbers - in either country - are staggering. An El Salvador business group did an informal survey of members, asking if they or their business had been affected by crime in the previous 12 months - extortion, kidnapping, thefts, assault. 

More than 70 per cent said yes; 55 per cent said they had been affected by crime more than once in the previous 12 months.

La Prensa reported last month that extortion is worth $63 million a year to the gangs, and that some 17,000 small businesses had just given up and shut down in the past year because of the gang’s demands.

And there are doubts that the impact will be as great in Honduras. Observers say the gangs are less well-organized, and the truce might be ignored on the street. And gangs here are claimed to be a smaller cause of violence than in El Salvador. A 2010 UN report found gangs were responsible for about 30 per cent of murders.

But people said much the same thing about the El Salvador truce.

Any reduction in the murder rate would be great news. The daily toll of some 20 dead bodies is terrible for families.

And the fact that Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world has become the only thing people know about the country. The news reports are grisly. Potential tourists don’t know that most murders are related to gangs, drugs or feuds, and crime is focused in poor urban neighbourhoods. Or that tourists are not targeted.

So perhaps only half the gang members will accept the truce. Based on the UN estimates, that would mean a 15-per-cent drop in the murder rate - almost 1,100 fewer murders in a year.

There are all sorts of issues still to be sorted. Gang members are worried about continuing police violence. Some Hondurans reject the idea that gangs might not face responsibility for past crimes as part of the deal.

And the government’s role and the future of gang members is unclear. Estimates vary wildly, but assume about 7,000 people are currently active gang members. They might stop killing each other, but without alternatives they aren’t likely to give up crime.

Still, even with all the caveats and unanswered questions, the truce is a good thing for Honduras.

Footnote: The two main gangs - Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Mara 18, or M18 - have their roots in Los Angeles, started by the children of a wave of Central American immigrants in the 1980s. They've grown into full-scale multinationals, in part because of a U.S. policy of deporting non-citizen offenders instead of dealing with them in the justice system. That's helped the gangs spread rapidly throughout this region.

For more information

Insight Crime has an excellent briefing on the truce here.

For-profit health care: When surgical complications are good for business

I believe market forces and the pursuit of profits often bring creativity and innovation.

But not so much for health care. The problem was nicely crystallized in a Business Week article I read years ago, profiling the star CEO of a hospital chain. He was lauded for increasing revenue per patient, a key indicator. A few more tests, an extra day in hospital, fees for every aspririn dispensed, and the corporation does well and the CEO gets a bonus.

The problem was set out more starkly in a Wall Street Journal I snagged in one of the airports on the way back to Copan Ruinas from Victoria. 

It reported on a study that found U.S. hospitals make more money when a surgical patient has complications after surgery. A lot more money.

Thus there was no economic incentive to reduce avoidable medical complications that cause thousands of deaths and add billions to health care costs.

In fact, market forces worked against reducing surgical complications.

The study was legit. It was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association and done by researchers from the Harvard Medical School, Boston Consulting Group and Texas Health Resources.

They looked at more than 34,000 surgical patients in 12 hospitals owned by Texas Health Resources.

And they found surgical complications - many avoidable - were good for business. Infections, complications, strokes, they all boosted the hospitals’ bottom line. The study found hospitals made an average $56,000 in profit from each privately insured patient who suffered complications, compared with an average $17,000 when the surgery went well. There were complications in about six per cent of surgeries, a fairly typical rate.

I’m not suggesting corporate execs, wringing their hands like Montgomery Burns, are plotting to have surgeons leave instruments inside patients or skimp on handwashing. (The latter surprisingly common.) The managers go home to their families too.

But proponents of private care can’t have it both ways. They argue market forces - the push for bigger profits - will ‘incentivize’ improvements in care.

So they have to acknowledge market forces now discourage efforts to reduce complications.  

No managers would say they like surgical complications because they are profitable. 

But they might say that spending on projects to address other problems is a higher priority. It’s not easy to explain the benefits of investing in programs that will reduce the companies’ profits.

Free-enterprise extremists likely have answers. The insurance companies, they might argue, should be pressing the hospitals to reduce surgical complications. The smart insurers would use the safest, lowest-cost hospitals, and cut premiums and attract more customers.

Except that isn’t happening. There are some 200,000 preventable deaths a year related to U.S. hospital stays. The rate of deaths from surgical complications has been declining, but slowly. 

The market isn’t working. Maybe the hospitals have too much power, or the insurers can charge what they like and have little incentive to push for better performance. It doesn’t really matter to the people who suffer as a result of avoidable complications, or everyone who pays higher health insurance premiums that flow to hospital shareholders.

There are still useful ways to encourage innovation through competition in a largely public system. (And we have an largely public system. Doctors are effectively Health Ministry employees with a great collective agreement.) 

Hospitals that find ways to deliver successful surgical outcomes could get extra funding, or financial incentives for participants. Why not? Everyone benefits if we can cut complications, or do four hip replacements for the cost of three. 

Meanwhile, proponents of private care face a problem. The current reality is that surgical complications are good for private hospitals in the U.S. And that is bad for patients.

'Research fishery' for Queen conch and the tragedy of the commons

Sometimes news stories just set off all kinds of alarm bells.

Honduras has apparently learned from Japan’s bogus scientific whaling program, which lets that country’s operators kill 900 whales a year - and sell the meat - in the name of science.

The Honduran government has announced a Queen conch fishery, justified as “a research and evaluation project for monitoring giant snail populations.”

It looks more like a way around restrictions on the fishery.

A lot of people have seen golden Queen conch shells, with their pink-tinged centres and classic spiral shape. They were a popular souvenir of Florida a generation ago, and thrived in waters from Florida to northern Brazil. 

They’re considered tasty, and are easy to harvest. Not good for them.

Queen conch aren’t on endangered lists yet, but CITES - the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species - has recommended an embargo on exports from Honduras, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. CITES pitches the embargo as a way to support government conservation measures - if there is no market, there is no reason to grab the conch.

It’s loosely observed, and fishers still harvest both for export and local markets - conch soup, with coconut milk base, is a popular item on the Honduran coast. 

The government’s research fishery looks like a way to get around the export ban.

Honduras is going to let six ships capture 210 tonnes of Queen conch. About 100,000 conch. 

And 95 per cent of the catch is reserved for export, mostly to the U.S.

It’s hard not to be suspicious. If the government wanted to assess Queen conch stocks, it could co-operate with a university or look for grants for a survey. Grabbing 210 tonnes of a possibly endangered shellfish in the name of research seems dubious.

The whole tragedy of the commons theory is lived out vividly here. Serious poverty is a factor. So is the near-total absence of effectively enforced laws and regulations. Why should a small fisherman obey limits on Queen conch catches when people with influence can get access to a “research fishery”? (Or why should a campesino respect a forest reserve, or water source, when others are conducting illegal logging?)

Of course, North Americans shouldn’t be too judgmental of practices that evoke our relatively recent past. We moved to Copan Ruinas from British Columbia. That province built its current prosperity by logging old-growth forests. Wild salmon runs were sacrificed for quick profits for the fishing industry, developers and forest companies. It’s no different than grabbing the last of the Queen conches, except Hondurans are more legitimately desperate.

The theoretical argument for conservation is sound. Manage the resource and you will have sustainable economic activity long into the future. 

But the argument didn’t persuade British Columbians. Why should Hondurans, so much poorer, think it a good idea?

It’s great to talk about tourist potential and the economic value of preserving tropical jungles and deserted beaches and coral reefs and vast mangrove shorelines. The economic argument for conservation.

But not realistic. We were in La Moskitia, the vast biosphere in  southern Honduras, and it is spectacular - unspoiled nature, beaches, lagoons, fascinating cultures. But the roads are poor to nonexistent, there is no tourist infrastructure and travel is a challenge.

And the Honduran government’s total tourism promotion budget this year is $2.2 million. Destination BC has $49 million to promote one province.

Still, the alternative is grim. The newspaper reported last week that a company had cleared 50 acres of protected mangroves for a new shrimp farm. The story said nothing about investigations, or sanctions. The lesson is to join the gold rush, in conch or shrimp or logging or African palm plantations.

And La Moskitia includes the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But since 2011, the reserve has been in UNESCO’s World Heritage in Danger list. Illegal logging and farming are factors, according to the UN agency. 

But so are the Honduran government’s lack of capacity and “general deterioration of law and order and the security situation in the region.” (It is a popular transit point for northbound cocaine shipments.)

Ultimately, for the Queen conch and La Moskitia and the mangroves and rain forest and so much more, that’s the greatest problem. There are solutions, and perhaps international partners to help. But only if the Honduran government can play a role..

Too broke, or too disorganized, to keep the national gallery open

The Honduran National Gallery of Art locked its doors this week.

The government hasn’t provided any money since January. Staff haven’t been paid since November. They finally quit coming to work, and now management has chained the doors and started packing away some of the works.

The gallery is good. We visited, looking to kill time in Tegucigalpa, the capital, and liked it.

It’s in a 450-year old convent, a beautiful two-storey building with an open courtyard. There are about six galleries, and they cover art in Honduras from pre-Columbian carvings, through the religious art of the Spanish era and into the contemporary scene. There is a nice auditorium, and gardens in the courtyard.

The displays are basic, but that adds to the power of some work, especially the religious paintings and spectacular silver from the colonial-era churches.

I gave it a glowing review on TripAdvisor.

It’s a bad sign, I think, when a government can’t make the budgeted payments to the national gallery. It’s not even big money; gallery managers say $45,000 would be enough to open the doors and get through the next four months. The total annual budget is about $135,000.

None of this is surprising. Stories of government employees going unpaid for months - teachers, health workers, anyone - are regular features in the newspapers. Sometimes, it seems the government simply can’t get its act together to issue the cheques. Sometimes there is no money. (Sometimes, I’m sure, the employees’ claims are bogus.)

What’s surprising, for a North American, is that people keeping showing up for work for months without getting paid.

Mostly, that’s what happens when people really need a job and have no other prospects. You keep on heading into work, hoping some day that you’ll get some of that back pay and the regular wages will start flowing. Why not? There is nothing much else to do.

But it might also reflect a cultural value of just accepting life’s blows and keeping on. (Written down, that looks practically noble; in practice, it look more like learned helplessness.)

The failure to pay people also illustrates another problem. Hondurans talk a lot about ‘impunidad’ - the ability of some people to ignore laws without consequences. 

Honduras has a fine set of laws and regulations. They just aren’t enforced.

There are legal minimum wages, for example, based on the nature of work and size and location of company. But employers can ignore them without fear of consequences. Or they can simply refuse to pay people for months at a time.

It’s new to be in a land where the government doesn’t have the money to pay the bills. Canadian governments, even in deficit years, can borrow whatever they need to cover budgeted costs.

The Honduras government can’t do that. Tax exemptions and evasion are widespread, so revenues are low. The domestic borrowing market has been tapped out, and foreign borrowing is difficult and interest rates are high. Some months, there just isn’t enough money to cover costs, or pay salaries. And, eventually, people get fed up.

A national art gallery isn’t essential. (Though Tegucigalpa has few attractions for visitors - a couple of other museums, a great nearby national park. The gallery could be a draw. And it is a refuge just a few blocks from the central square and the quite ratty downtown - the neglected office buildings call up the end years of the Soviet bloc.)

Government could even have decided to close the gallery’s doors to save money in tough times.

But it didn’t. The Finance Ministry just failed to send the promised money, month after month.

And, finally, the national gallery closed its doors, for who knows how long.

Four reasons the Liberals won, and the NDP lost

So why did the NDP lead in the polls evaporate?

Sure, the $17 million in taxpayers’ money spent promoting the Liberals was a factor, as were the negative ads. 

From far away, I’d offer four more basic reasons.

Christy Clark and the Liberals ran a tidy campaign with a simple message. The Liberals, they said, would manage the economy better and protect jobs. They gave people something to vote for, in a vague and not particularly credible way.

They also ran gave people reasons not to vote for the NDP, arguing Adrian Dix was at best an unknown quantity and the party platform unclear. (And talking a lot of rubbish about the NDP as well.)

Adrian Dix and the New Democrats did not give people something to vote for. There was a platform, of course, and excellent positions on some issues, like banning corporate and union donations. But by the end of the campaign, the main message seemed to be that the New Democrats would be careful. That’s a laudable quality. But it’s not a substitute for a vision of what B.C. would be like in four years, or 10 years.

And the New Democrats failed to give people reasons not to vote for the Liberals. It’s welcome that the party pledged to avoid the kind of slimy attack ads that too often pollute politics. (Like the ones the Liberals used against Dix and Cummins.)

But it would have been completely legitimate to suggest that voters should be suspicious of the Liberal campaign, citing the example of the HST and the 2009 pre-election budget that turned out to be fiction. It would be just as legitimate to talk about the Basi-Virk payment, or growing secrecy, or attempts to limit the role of independent watchdogs like the auditor general and the representative for children and youth, or cronyism. Or the current budget, which falls somewhere between dubious and bogus.

Of course, everything is clear after the fact. And, as it said on a coffee mug a reporter gave me in my days as an editor, ‘Everything is easy for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.’

Julia the banana seller: Putting a face to Honduras' poor

Julia Pérez Alvarado and part of her large family

On a good day, Julia Pérez Alvarado makes about $6 selling bananas in Tegucigalpa neighbourhoods. Not much for a single mom with eight children.

But pretty typical for the way many, or most, Hondurans scratch out a subsistence living. In fact, Alvarado’s take on good days is pretty typical wage for a laborer or household worker. 

La Tribuna has been doing regular stories on poor people around the city.

For me, they’re great. It feels pushy to start grilling strangers about their lives in bad Spanish. 

But I’ve been curious about the women who sell bananas outside the market in Copan, crouching on the sidewalk.

Statistics are important. This week, the Honduran national statistic’s agency reported 69 per cent of Hondurans live in poverty. About 24 per cent survive on less than $1 a day.

People’s stories are important too.

More children? 'Only God knows'

Alvarado’s business model is simple, according to the paper. She leaves her house - a shack really - at 5 a.m. each morning and walks an hour to a largish market. She buys 200 minimos - a variety of small bananas - for about $4, or two cents each. Then she walks kilometres selling them door-to-door in neighbourhoods for five cents each. (Which is the same as I pay at the market.)

Is she sells out, she makes $6. If she doesn’t sell at least 80 bananas, she loses money.

At 41, she has eight children, the oldest 23. She left her husband because he was jealous and beat here, she told La Tribuna, and a second man in her life turned out to be a louse.

“Men today don’t work, they go into the streets and find other women,” she said. “They stay for a while then they rush away  and don’t help me in anyway.”

Based on conversations with Hondurans, that seem a problem. About 34 per cent of households are headed by a single woman. That’s much greater than in Canada (about 13 per cent), and there is no structure for child support or safety net. 

You can survive on $6 a day, even with a family. The print edition of La Tribuna showed Alvarado’s house, which was two rooms, cobbled together out of sticks and corrugated tin, likely squatting on the land. So her housing is free

 Food, even for all those kids, would be manageable, at least in terms of enough calories (though not remotely adequate for nutrition). Tortillas are cheap - about five cents each - and filling. Beans are 30 cents a pound and rice about 60 cents. (Beans, corn tortillas and rice make up about 60 per cent of the calories consumed in a typical Honduran diet.) 

The problem is that people living that way are always on the edge of disaster. If Alvarado wrenches her knee and can’t walk to the market, or someone robs their house or the school demands kids pay fees, then things fall apart. (Alvarado told La Tribuna all her children in school, some at night and some in the day. That doesn’t actually guarantee they’re learning much.)

There is an obvious question. Why would anyone have eight children without any ability to provide for them? The online comments on the article included some pretty forceful expressions of the same question.

Religion, partly. The interviewer asked Alvarado if she was going to have more children. “I don’t know,” she said. “Only God knows that.” (Though she added “je, je, je,” which often means a person is joking.)

About half the population say they are Roman Catholic. That church says members can’t use any birth control measure except abstinence when women are most likely to conceive. That’s the equivalent of no effective birth control for poor people with little education. 

Religion aside,  there are issues of access and education. About one-quarter of births are to women under 18, a rate 26 per cent higher than the average for the region. A 2008 HDR report on Honduras found 46 per cent of first-time teen mothers had no education.

But even with no children, for many - maybe most - Hondurans, poverty is just reality, and disaster just one piece of bad luck away.

Speaking Spanish, and the challenge of criticism

It’s tough to serve up criticism in a second language.

Or it is for for me. I spent a day last week working with four other people on a funding proposal for a Honduran NGO. In Spanish. 

Luckily, one woman was making notes on her computer, which were projected on a screen in the meeting room. Instead of struggling to grasp spoken comments, I could read them. My personal effectiveness increased tenfold. (Another occasion to give heartfelt thanks for technology.)

Responding still wasn’t easy. While meetings leave me feeling like my head will explode, there is now a point - maybe 45 minutes in - when something in my brain clicks into Spanish mode. (That fades, like a superpower granted by a genie. By the six-hour mark, the simplest sentences are hard to decode.)

More importantly, I am prepared to sound stupid in order to participate.

That’s probably a triumph of ego. I don’t like to sound dumb in front of other people, or course. But, even more, I can’t resist offering ideas and comments. (The Honduran women from the development agency were encouraging, which helped.)

It’s a weird experience. I was good at meetings in Canada. I had insights, and usually an idea of the optimum outcome. I could help win support for good ideas, and might have even been a little pushy. Here, I am a struggling, well-intentioned amateur.

The hardest thing, I have realized, is to offer criticism. It’s difficult in a first language - look at how useless most managers are at offering guidance to employees on their job performance.

But it’s really challenging in a second language. In the meeting, the group came up with a lamish statement of the objectives for the project. 

In English, I could say ‘what a great start, let’s see what we can do to make it even better.’ 

In Spanish, all I could say was “That’s very general and generic. We need to be more specific about how the project will bring the changes the funder wants.” It sounded judgmental even to me. (I don’t know why I felt the need to criticize the main objective as both general and generic. Either might have sufficed.)

When we offer criticism in our first language, it’s all about tone. We make people think the new ideas are actually their own, or create an imaginary consensus, or make an overwhelming case.

None of that is possible when you’re struggling to come up with a semi-coherent sentence. All subtleties are lost. 

It’s not just a problem in meetings. Our organization uses one taxi driver in Tegucigalpa to keep everyone safe. (We walk in Tegus, in the daytime and carrying nothing that would attract bad guys. But it is a dangerous city.)

He's great. Mostly. But if you call him, he will always say he is 10 minutes away. Then he doesn’t show up for an hour, which can be discouraging at the end of a difficult day.

After two one-hour late pickups at the end of the working day last week, I wanted to complain to him and and the staff who rely on him. I couldn’t judge how harsh I was being in my challenged Spanish - a pushover, or a crabby, time-obsessed gringo?

My Spanish efforts are already producing benefits. Hondurans like it when you can speak their language, even badly. And I’ve seen the weight lift off store staff when they realize I can communicate and they don’t have to launch into a stressful, crazed version of charades with yet another gringo.

I’m sure learning a new language is helping my brain.

I’m also learning a lot about humility and what it’s like to be scrabbling to make your voice heard. And I’m wondering how many great insights have been lost because people haven’t been given the space and time to explain them.

Photo radar and taxes and the power of political myths

It’s interesting the way political orthodoxy emerges, without much real evidence.

Take two examples - photo radar and irrational tax phobia.

Photo radar, it was clear during the leaders’ debate, is seen as political poison. Asked about reinstating it, all four leaders said  no.

The evidence from around the world is conclusive - photo radar reduces crashes and health care costs and saves lives. In the six years that B.C. had photo radar, road deaths averaged 408 annually. In the previous six years, an average 534 people died on the roads. That’s 126 families spared the death of a loved one each year. (You can read more stats here.)

And the politicians can’t claim they’re reflecting the will of the people. A 2007 poll for the Canada Safety Council found 75 per cent of British Columbians supported photo radar on the highways - and 90 per cent in school zones.

So why the fear about an evidence-based public policy move - one accepted in Alberta? Maybe the opponents are considered passionate enough that they’re not worth riling. Maybe the politicians have bought into a myth of public opposition.

The more dramatic and damaging myth is around taxes.

Somehow, politicians have reached an agreement that they have to pretend all taxes are bad. If they plan increases, they offer elaborate apologies.

But the public isn’t stupid. Government services cost money, and have to be paid for. If you want a hospital bed, or a road, or a school for your children, then taxes have to be collected.

Further, people have indicated they’re willing to pay more for better services from government, just as they are in any other area of their life. A B.C. poll several years ago found 60 per cent of residents would pay more in property taxes to improve services. 

And an April poll for the Roundtable of Community Social Services of BC found 53 per cent of British Columbians would pay higher taxes to ensure better services in their community.

There is an important qualifier there - more money in return for better services. Not for convention centre or fast ferry overruns, or endless re-orgs or government advertising.

Still, it’s odd that politicians have largely accepted the myth that citizens reject all taxation, and allowed it to shape their policies and the public debate.

Sinking in a sea of garbage

Tegucigalpa floods: Take hills, garbage-blocked ditches and drains, add rain

I’ve been wondering about garbage-per-kilometre as a development indicator, along with all the formal measures like stunted children and GINI indexes and poverty rates.

Maybe when a society gets a handle on garbage, it’s reached some sort of turning point.

If so, Honduras has a long way to go.

Early this year, slick new recycling containers sprouted on the streets in Copan Ruinas. We saw them in Tela too, so it must be some sort of national program. They had their own little concrete pads and were abut four-feet tall tall and slender, with ad posters for banks or tourist sites on two sides. There was an opening on each end, and signs said one was for organic waste, and the other for plastic, cans, glass and cardboard.

Pretty darned green. Except if you looked inside, all the trash dropped into one open area. It was a really fancy and, it turned out, easily vandalized garbage pail.

That’s not surprising.

The “Don’t Be a Litterbug” stuff hasn’t caught on down here. When you ride the buses, people finish their snack or pop and toss the garbage out the window without a thought. (If the window is broken and won’t open, they toss it on the floor.) We’ve waged a continuing battle with the kids from Angelitos to use garbage pails, since their inclination is drop garbage anywhere.

The results aren’t pretty. A stretch of green roadside becomes an impromptu dump. The river - especially after a holiday - is littered with styrofoam food containers, bags of garbage and whatever detritus is left from the day’s fun.

Rivers and creeks are generally treated as good places to throw garbage, even whole communities’ garbage. In part, that’s because when the torrential rains come the garbage is swept away.

A Utila beach, and mainland garbage

Not good news for the people downstream, of course. Ultimately, the garbage ends up somewhere, and oceanfront communities complain the big rains bring a flood of garbage into the Caribbean and onto their beaches. We wandered along a dirt road to a deserted cove in Utila, which would have been stunning except for the dune of plastic garbage, likely largely from the mainland.

Even the rains can’t sweep all the garbage away. Tegucigalpa, the capital, was hammered with a two-hour rain during Semana Santa and had massive flooding.

A big part of the problem was garbage. “The floods in the capital were generated by the large amount of garbage dumped in streams, rivers, streets, curbs and gutters,” La Prensa reported. Drains were blocked, creeks and ditches overflowed and streets filled with black, garbage-choked water.

Maybe worrying about garbage comes later, when two-thirds of the population isn’t living in poverty. 

Maybe the lack of easy access to markets for recycled materials, especially outside the cities is an issue. (There are people who scavenge the loads as they come into the Tegucigalpa dump, grabbing cardboard and plastic and metal and selling them to brokers on the fringes. We get garbage pickup three times a week; I assume the guys on the truck grab what can be sold. My partner met a guy who scavenged plastic bottles, crushed them with his truck and took them to the city to sell when he had enough.)

Or maybe getting people to think about garbage - about shared responsibilities and shared losses - would be a step toward a society that thought about tackling some of those harder issues.

The children's education fund: Even really stupid commitments should be honoured

Martyn Brown raises an interesting point about the NDP pledge to kill a really stupid piece of public policy the Campbell government put in place in 2007.

The Children’s Education Fund never made any sense. The Liberals said the government would put $1,000 for every child born in the province into a fund. Beginning in 2025, when the a teen graduated from high school, he or she would get the money, plus interest, for postsecondary training or education. Figure $2,200.

It was a goofy policy, pulled out of thin air when Gordon Campbell needed something to announce at the party’s 2006 convention.

And there have been suggestions for a couple of years - OK, perhaps just by me - to get rid of it.

In 2011, I wrote that the government was committing $47 million to the fund that year, money that was needed for services.

“There’s no logical basis for the government to decide that a tuition subsidy for students starting school in 2025 is a priority today — more important than caring for the disabled, improving health care or offering a tax cut to encourage employment growth," I wrote then.

“In fact, the notion that the government can predict the needs of students two decades in the future is dubious. Imagine the outgoing Socreds trying to come up with a tuition plan that would work for students in 2011.

“The amount, for example, could be a pittance compared to the cost of education more than a decade from now.

“Or alternately, a future government, given the need for skilled British Columbians, could have decided post-secondary education should be free to some qualifying students, or even all students. That’s not an outlandish notion, given the shift to a knowledge-based economy in the province....

“Why not take the $47 million and address today’s needs, through scholarships or education credits or tax breaks, or target First Nations’ high school graduation rates, or address other educational needs?

“It’s also bizarre that the fund makes no distinctions based on the needs of either the province, or the students.

“A multimillionaire’s child will get $2,000; so will a youth coming out of care, living on income assistance and trying to get an education. 

“A smart program would target bright students who couldn’t afford an education, and be based on merit and need. Or it could support education for students entering fields that were critical to the province’s future.”

By 2025, I noted, the government would have stashed more than $1 billion in the fund.

The government changed the plan this year, pledging to give parents a cheque for every child on their sixth birthdays, to put into an RESP.

Brown’s point is that parents who had babies between 2007 and today had a right to count on the money and taking it away violates a “social contract.” (And he acknowledges, implicitly, the irony of the argument, given his role in the Campbell government’s illegal ripping up of contracts with pubic sector unions.)

The programs needs to be axed.

But perhaps there was a commitment here, at least to the parents of children born since in 2007. It might be right to preserve the program in its original form for those families. After all, the money has been set aside.

Even stupid commitments probably should be honoured.