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• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, centralamericanpolitics.blogspot.com. The views expressed are the author's own.

On Sunday, I wrote about theÌýtemporary halt of some USÌýaid to Honduras. The suspension of aid was brought on by alleged connections between the current national police chief, Juan Carlos Bonilla, and death squads that operated about a decade ago. The US is going to step back and sort things out.

RAJ at Honduras Politics and Culture asks really important questions about where exactly the US is going to be holding back aid. The US said that it is suspending aid to those personnel and units who are not directly supervised by Bonilla.

Only those elements of the national police that the chief of the national police does not oversee? That's not very comforting. Given the evidence available, Tigre looks like it might be the unit cut from US assistance.
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Greg Weeks at Two Weeks Notice has more on the role of a human rights agenda in US foreign policy. Given what the US cares about in Honduras, concerns about drug trafficking should trump human rights concerns. However, in this case, aid is being suspended because the chief of police might have been involved in extrajudicial killings years ago. Aid is not being suspended because Bonilla was involved in drug trafficking, was corrupt, or incompetent in carrying out his duties. Those might all be there case, but for now, they are not.
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A few more things about the story. I don't think that the letter from US and Honduran academics and members of the US Congress caused the State Department to do something that it didn't want to do. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's just a coincidence, but there's got to be more to the story, obviously, than what we already know. For example, what the State Department did isn't exactly what the letter writers asked them to do. (Here's the letter.)

Remind you, this is after blaming the US for just about everything that has gone wrong in Honduras since the 2009 coup. The letter talks about US responsibility "in part" but that's not really the tone of the letter. The US is directly and indirectly to blame for just about everything that is wrongÌýin Honduras today. The US is asked to suspend all aid. It is asked to stop occupying HondurasÌý(Occupying? Seriously?). And then, the US should only be allowed to re-establish bases once Hondurans allow them to do so "through the ballot box" which I take to mean not through their elected representatives (I know, today's leaders weren't really elected in free and fair elections nor do they really represent the people of Honduras) but through a separate referendum.
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ÌýHere's the other quote from the letter that I found interesting.

I've seen the first sentence quoted in a few places but it's the second one that interests me. I'm sure that everyone thinks that they know who the drug traffickers are and where to find them. However, that's not the same as knows. And even if the US knows who the traffickers are (even that's not very convincing to me), they are going to need some evidence on which to act. And even if they do have evidence on which to act, it's not really clear that the US has many reliable partners in Honduras with whom it can act.
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--- Mike Allison is an associate professor in theÌýPolitical Science DepartmentÌýand a member of theÌýLatin American and Women's Studies DepartmentÌýat theÌýUniversity of ScrantonÌýin Pennsylvania. ÌýYou can follow his Central American Politics blogÌýhere.