Honduran Police Chief Accused of Intimidating Opposition

Honduras’ Liberation and Re-foundation Party (LIBRE), the opposition party associated with deposed former president Manuel Zelaya, has formally accused the head of the country’s police force of orchestrating a campaign aimed at intimidating its members.

As El Heraldo reports, Zelaya and around one hundred supporters presented a denunciation to the public prosecutors’ office yesterday alleging that National Police Director Juan Carlos Bonilla had threatened LIBRE’s leadership and member base.

The move comes after Bonilla publicly accused LIBRE of plotting to damage the credibility of the police force by spreading videos purportedly showing evidence of police misconduct and abuses. In a press conference on Friday, Bonilla appeared with the rest of the police command and accused the party of working to “destabilize” the country’s security forces.

"I want to be very emphatic, there are members of the Liberation and Re-foundation Party with the sole intention of discrediting the work of the director of the National Police and likewise the entire institution, who are leading a smear campaign against me personally," he said.

Bonilla was referring in part to a widely-shared video recently posted on YouTube which claims to depict the police director planning the assassination of Zelaya during the 2009 political crisis caused by his ouster. As InSight Crime notes, there is nothing in it to suggest the assassination plot allegation is true, although police officials have admitted that the operation Bonilla planned was involved with Zelaya’s appearance at the Honduras-Nicaragua border after the coup.

LIBRE denies Bonilla’s accusation, and there is no solid evidence that the party is behind this or any other video’s release, making the police chief’s public warning look very much like an intimidation tactic. And while it is possible that LIBRE is capitalizing on public distrust of police to score points ahead of the November elections in which Zelaya’s wife Xiomara Castro will run for president, the party’s allegations fit well with Bonilla’s profile.

The complaint is the latest in a string of misconduct and corruption allegations against the police chief. As El Faro detailed in a 2011 profile of Bonilla, in 2002 human rights organizations accused him of being part of an extrajudicial killing squad known as “Los Magnificos” which murdered suspected gang members. He was acquitted in court only after the prosecutor in the case was fired mid-trial.

More recently, another former Honduran national police chief, General Ricardo Ramirez del Cid, directly blamed the February 17 murder of his son on Bonilla. While officials said the teen had been killed by gang members, Ramirez claimed to have proof that his murder was the result of a botched kidnapping orchestrated by corrupt elements of the security forces under Bonilla’s command.


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