Citing Hostility, Leader of Anti-Corruption Panel in Honduras Resigns

MEXICO CITY — The leader of an international anti-corruption panel in Honduras has resigned, delivering a blow to the campaign against the country’s deeply rooted corruption and throwing the future of the panel into doubt.

In a letter released late Thursday, the panel’s leader, Juan Jiménez Mayor, a former Peruvian prime minister, said his small group of prosecutors had been abandoned as they faced rising hostility from the Honduran government.

The panel is backed by the Organization of American States, but the regional body’s secretary-general, Luis Almagro, who appointed Jiménez, refused to meet with him in Washington two weeks ago. Jiménez had planned to discuss the corruption cases his prosecutors were pursuing and the resistance, including threats, that was blocking their work.

“We shouldn’t be alone, and he knows it,” Jiménez wrote.

The panel’s top prosecutor, Julio Arbizu, a former anti-corruption prosecutor in Peru, and a Chilean judge, Daniel Urrutia, also resigned from the panel.

Although Jiménez said the remaining group, some two dozen experts, would continue its investigations without him, it might be difficult to attract someone with his background to take charge of the task in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.

“The question now is whether Almagro will step up and appoint a qualified and experienced prosecutor to replace Juan Jiménez or simply appoint a diplomat disinclined to ruffle feathers in Honduras,” Eric L. Olson, a Honduras expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, wrote in an email. “That would be disastrous.”

Clean government groups in Honduras responded to the news with dismay. “This is the beginning of a political offensive against the fundamental pillars that are against corruption in Honduras,” said Gabriela Castellanos, director of the National Anti-Corruption Council, a private group.

Tensions between Almagro and Jiménez had been rising for months, but the last straw appeared to be a letter Almagro sent to President Juan Orlando Hernández on Wednesday. In it, he complained that the panel, whose full name is the Mission of Support Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras, “had not been able to produce the results and prosecutions of corruption cases that we would have wished and which we owe to the people of Honduras.”

It was an odd complaint to direct at Hernández, who agreed to the establishment of the panel under pressure after large street protests against corruption in 2015. The president’s allies have worked to sabotage much of the panel’s efforts, freezing proposed legislation to protect witnesses and stalling the enforcement of new campaign finance laws.

But the most direct affront came last month, after the attorney general’s new corruption unit, working with the panel, charged five legislators with pocketing money intended for social projects in their constituencies. In response, the Honduran Congress passed a budget decree that froze all investigations into the money for those social projects, and a judge threw out the case against the lawmakers.

Furious, Jiménez said then that the investigation had spread to about 60 current and former lawmakers, including the powerful president of the Congress, Mauricio Oliva Herrera, a close ally of the president.

The investigation also appeared to be widening beyond Congress. Last month, investigators from the panel and the attorney general’s office raided a foundation that is one of many that channel the Honduran government’s social spending with little oversight. The president’s mother-in-law, Carlota Carías, was a former executive director of the foundation.

The panel also made enemies among business leaders when it began an investigation last year into a concession for a dam opposed by members of the Lenca Indian community.

Berta Cáceres, an indigenous rights activist and an environmentalist who led the opposition, was assassinated two years ago in a case that has become emblematic of the violence in Honduras against human rights defenders, political activists, journalists and environmentalists.