On Sunday, Nov. 24, Honduras showed a devastating situation in the polls: 70 percent of the population lives in poverty and 40 percent is unemployed. The collusion between officials and organized crime is invasive and the militarization of society, on behalf of the fight against organized crime, has caused an increase in murders and the presence of drug-trafficking organizations, which takes advantages of the impunity of 80 percent of crimes.
According to the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), 80 percent of the drug that transits to the United States crosses through Honduras, and in 2013 the authorities have seized only two tons of cocaine. In addition, the vice-minister of the Defense, Carlos Roberto Funes has recently stated he suspected that “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of a drug-trafficking Mexican organization, is in the country.
The army increased its presence for the elections, and was put in charge of guarding the entrance of each polling venue, as accounted by Azadeh Shahshahani, president of Nacional Lawyers Guild, who went to Honduras as one of 800 international observers, and arrived in a plane from Georgia to Central America, together with Honduran military students from the School of the Americas, who came back to the Central American nation because of the elections.

Since last October, the Honduran military police unit has been reinforced with a thousand members of the new Military Order Police, created to fight drug trafficking. The formation of the elite body has been promoted by presidential candidate Juan Orlando Hernández, of the ruling National Party, who won the vote for the presidency of the Central American nation with 34.08 percent.

The campaign of Juan Orlando – conceived by the Venezuelan JJ Rendón, involved in successful campaigns of several Latin American right-wingers, such as “Pepe” Lobo, Enrique Peña Nieto and Henrique Capriles – has focused on the promise of security through the militarization of society. In addition, Juan Orlando has promised the creation of thousands of jobs in maquiladoras (sweatshops), improving the housing situation in the poorest neighborhoods and the expansion of sugarcane crops and African palm. The program of the Nationalist Party has been welcomed by the Honduran oligarchy, the group of people that owns 40 percent of the wealth of the country, mainly concentrated in the maquiladora industry and ended in large monocultures for export, especially African palm.

“In Honduras there are ten families who make the decisions. They control industries, banks, the media, the justice and the government,” says Miriam Miranda of the organization for the defense of the rights of people with African background, OFRANEH. The owners of Honduras have middle-eastern surnames: Facussé, Canahuati, Kafie and they finance the system that ensures the alternation between the National Party and the Liberal Party since 1902.

With her candidacy, Xiomara Castro – wife of former President Manuel Zelaya, forced into exile in June 2009 following a coup organized by the oligarchy – challenged Honduran machismo, that takes the life of a woman every 14 hours and a centenary of bipartisanship at the only Central American country that didn´t have a guerrilla able to challenge U.S. imperialism during the Cold War. Americans have always ruled in what is considered the quintessential Banana Republic, putting  puppet presidents to allow companies like Chiquita exercise a de facto government.

“In 2009 Xiomara Castro was with us in the streets of Tegucigalpa marching against the coup and I support her candidacy, although I do not like some members of her party and I keep the right to criticize her government,” says Tomás Gómez Membreño of COPINH indigenous organization, who met with El Reportero with a few days before the election. “Besides, I’m afraid there will be election fraud, it’s difficult to think that the oligarchy will let Xiomara rule.”

In fact, the Bureau of Analysis on Violations of Human Rights received 60 complaints of irregularities during the electoral process, from the harassment of international observers to vote-buying by the National Party in exchange for food or money.

On the morning of Monday, at a press conference animated by their bases, the Libre Party (Libertad y Refundación) ignored the election results that attributed only 28.92 percent of the votes to candidate Xiomara Castro. Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, former president of Honduras, husband of Castro and general coordinator of Libre, reported that over 20 percent of the ballots had not been registered. Moreover, Zelaya stated he was not seeking an agreement with the National Party and denounced an electoral fraud, but could not present to the international community the necessary evidence to invalidate the election.

According to later statements, Libre would present the evidence to the fraud.

Exile is the state or a period of forced absence from one’s country or home. One synonym for exile is deportation. Last year the United States government deported more than 400,000 people; though all of them were born outside the United States, many of them arrived as children and knew only life in the United States, while others assimilated and adopted the United States as their own country. One of those 400,000 deportees was a man named Paul.
In 2011, Paul (not his real name) was attending a rock concert with his younger brother in Phoenix, Arizona. During the show, Paul’s brother became embroiled in a shouting match with another man, which escalated to a brawl. Rushing to restrain his brother, security guards obstructed Paul before he could reach him. Though his involvement was on the periphery of the melee, event security nevertheless turned him over to police, who took him into custody, despite never charging him with committing a crime. A few days later, they handed over Paul to immigration officials, who placed him in deportation proceedings. Paul was indigent, but he had no right to court-appointed counsel to help him investigate his immigration case, and prevent his removal from the United States; as a result, he represented himself. Less than six months after the concert fracas, Paul found himself in a foreign country, Mexico, a country he had left when he was a baby.

In the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainright, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indigent defendants had a right to court-appointed counsel in criminal proceedings. But the Court has declined to hold the same for indigent defendants in deportation proceedings because deportation, according to the Supreme Court, is not punishment, but rather as Justice O’Connor put it: “a purely civil action to determine eligibility to remain in this country, not to punish an unlawful entry . . .” Her reasoning, however, lacks intellectual muscle, because there is no functional difference between a civil and a criminal proceeding, each carries a penalty for violating the law. But whereas the penalty for violating a criminal law can vary (i.e., fine, home confinement, probation), there is no such variation for violating immigration laws; there is only one punishment: banishment.

Undocumented immigrants are detained by ICE.

Throughout history people have been banished or exiled to distant lands as a form of punishment. For his political activities, Dante Alighieri was forced into exile by Florentine authorities. Crushed with grief and indignation at his lifetime sentence, Dante’s poetic book, “The Divine Comedy,” reflects his experiences in exile as wandering through hell. Immigrants, who live in the United States almost their entire lives, endure a similar suffering and hardship when they find themselves in a foreign country with no resources, no money, homeless, and unable to speak the native language. Banishment severs all connections to the harmony of home; indeed, many immigrants who are deported and later return to the United States remark that they would rather be incarcerated in the United States than return to foreign soil. Their antiexile sentiments express not only a feeling that deportation is a worse punishment than incarceration, but also their desperation to cling to some semblance of home.

By small degrees, the Supreme Court is beginning to acknowledge that deportation is a penalty. In Padilla v. Kentucky, Justice John Paul Stevens carried out a drive-by verbal assault on Supreme Court precedent when he wrote that “deportation is an integral part—  indeed, sometimes the most important part—of the penalty that may be imposed on noncitizen defendants,” adding that deportation is “intimately related to the criminal process.” Deportation does indeed have a promiscuous relationship with many criminal offenses, and only an attorney can prescribe which criminal offenses make suitable partners and the immigration remedy available to prevent banishment.

In exile, Paul made efforts to incorporate his surroundings and conform to the local customs and mores, but the only thing he had in common with the foreign country was his Spanish surname. The locals referred to him by the derogatory word pocho, an Americanized Mexican who had lost his Mexican identity, mother tongue, and culture. Unable to assimilate and adapt to his new ecosystem, and moved by despair, Paul returned to the United States and, within minutes of planting his foot in America, was caught by U.S. Border Patrol agents and charged with illegally entering the United States. At his sentencing hearing, where he was represented by defense counsel, Paul told the judge that America was “my country.” As tears marched down his cheeks, he pleaded, “I don’t speak the language. I tried to live there but life is different there. I don’t know anyone there.” Before deporting him again, the federal judge sentenced him to seven days’ jail.

In 1947, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “Deportation can be the equivalent of banishment or exile.” Nonsense! Deportation is banishment or exile – it is a punishment that endures in perpetuity.

To suggest otherwise, is intellectual dishonesty. If Paul had had the assistance of court-appointed counsel at his deportation proceedings, his defense attorney could have investigated his immigration case to determine what forms of relief, if any, were available to him, to avoid deportation; but he wasn’t because the Supreme Court considered his deportation hearing a civil matter. Indeed, not providing court-appointed counsel to indigent defendants in deportation proceedings reveals to the world, as one friend put it, “America without her makeup.”

Juan Rocha is an attorney in Chandler, Arizona. He has written about immigration reform, Arizona politics, and Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski. He can be reached at jrocha.law@gmail.com.