Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Honduras → 2013–16

Some international tax resistance news:

• Forza Nuova activists in Lamezia Terme piled trash bags at the city gates under a sign reading “No Tari — Tax Strike!” They are protesting a new tax on garbage collection.
• Twenty war tax resisters in the Canary Islands redirected €2,000 from the military to alternative projects.
• The Association of Catalan Municipalities and the Association of Municipalities for Independence are launching a campaign to get local government bodies in Catalonia to pay their federal taxes to the Catalan regional government rather than to the federal government. This is currently mostly a symbolic gesture, as the Catalan government is forwarding such payments along to the central tax administration, but the groups see this as a way of laying the groundwork for independence and as giving the regional government financial leverage in its fight. They also hope that by convincing local governments to do this they will also encourage people and businesses to follow suit.
• The Knowckers.org site has tried to tally up how much the Bonnets Rouges movement cost the French government during its successful campaign against the highway tax, and to explain the cross-ideological appeal of the movement.
• In Honduras, where most of the population works in the “underground economy,” tax evasion is an especially valuable skill. Insurgent criminal groups have infiltrated the tax agency and use the tax rolls to exact a “war tax” from people in areas they control. So if you can stay off the lists, you may avoid persecution from both the government and the insurgents. But the government is cracking down, and has also added a new criminal offense to the penal code — people who encourage, out loud or in writing, people not to pay taxes are subject to a three to six year prison term. “The question arises,” writes Jorge Colindres in El Canal, “if there is criminal liability against those who distribute copies of the writings of Henry David Thoreau or Lysander Spooner, who promoted tax resistance as a means of protest against the policies of the State.”
• Tax season has come to a close in Asturias, and for war tax resisters there it climaxed with a demonstration and blockade of the tax office in Xixón.

An international tax resistance news round-up:

Catalonia

• The Diputació de Barcelona, which governs the largest province in Catalonia, voted to stop paying value-added and income taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead forwarding the money to the Catalan Tax Agency. The left-wing separatist party Candidatura d’Unitat Popular proposed the measure, which managed to also win support of the center-left Entesa bloc. The Catalan Tax Agency currently forwards such taxes to the Spanish government, so the practical effect of this is currently minimal, but it sets the stage for an eventual Catalan independence bid in which its government will stop relinquishing such funds.
• Meanwhile the Spanish Constitutional Court declared Catalonia’s attempts to strengthen the independence of its own tax agency “unconstitutional and nullified.”

France

• I recently became aware of the French Revolution Digital Archive, on which I discovered the following propaganda images or political cartoons from that struggle:

Greece

• Six Δεν Πληρώνω (“won’t pay”) activists who engaged in a protest against transit fare increases in Thessaloniki in 2011 were given suspended sentences.
• The Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών (“people stop paying”) movement continues its campaign of disrupting auctions of seized property.

Honduras

• In many parts of Honduras, crime syndicates / protogovernments rule the streets, often extorting more money from their subjects than does the internationally-recognized Honduran government. Some people resist these taxes, known locally as “impuesto de guerra” or “war tax,” but the consequences of refusal can be, and frequently are, deadly. The latest victims included eight bus company employees in Choloma, who were gunned down in broad daylight, a block away from a police station and by attackers in police uniforms, in retaliation against drivers who did not pay the tax. In May, 2013 bus drivers there took collective action, going on strike to demand better security.

Ireland

• Right 2 Water Galway claims that it has learned via a Freedom of Information disclosure “that 71% of those expected to pay a water charges bill hadn’t done so by May of this year.” They are urging people to continue to hold out, noting that there are no penalties for nonpayment until four quarters have passed without paying, and collection action cannot take place until much later still.

Spain

• The Spanish war tax resistance movement has recently released its tallies of war tax resistance and redirection for this tax season. According to the group, some €92,514 was resisted by the 647 people whom they were able to find in their census. The complete report breaks this down by region and municipality and lists the 162 destinations to which these resisted taxes were redirected.

Wales

• The town of Crickhowell has decided it’s no use complaining about the strategies big multinationals use to avoid paying taxes — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! They’re pairing up with a television show to try to come up with similar “offshoring” tax strategies to those the big guys use:

  By mimicking the methods multinational companies use to pay less tax in Britain, business owners in Crickhowell hope to protest against those who do not pay their fair share of tax.

  Advised by experts and followed by a BBC camera crew, family-run shops in the Brecon Beacons town have submitted their own DIY tax plan to HMRC.

  Residents want to share their tax avoidance plan with other towns, in a bid to force the treasury into legislation to close loopholes which allowed companies such as Amazon to pay just £11.9m in tax last year on £5.3bn of U.K. internet sales.

  They’ve created a website, Fair Tax Town, and hope, if they’re successful in their scheme, to share their techniques, open-source-style, with other towns, in hopes of getting the government to close the loopholes that allow the multinationals to outcompete them by avoiding their taxes more successfully. The movement is using tax resistance in service of a pro-tax agenda, which they acknowledge may seem ironic:

  We do have reservations about tax resistance as a protest tool. Some within the tax justice movement ask whether it is a legitimate protest tool at all. We generally argue that tax is the lifeblood of democracy and encouraging people not to pay tax is a perverse way of approaching the question. However, tax resistance has a long and honourable tradition — think back to the tax protests of the Suffragettes, of Mahatma Gandhi; or of the Poll Tax movement.

various

• Robert McGee, whose scholarship on the attitudes of people concerning tax evasion and resistance in different cultures has been a topic here before, has published a new paper, this one on The Ethics of Tax Evasion in Islam. In contrast to his more typical work, this one is more speculative than empirical, and summarizes the opinions of Muslim authorities about the proper limits of the government’s authority to tax, and of the subject’s obligation to submit to such taxation.

Some international tax resistance notes

• An article on modern-day Christian martyrs in Crux includes this passage:

  In Honduras, Maria Francisca Sevilla, 39, was a mother of three who co-pastored the “Church of God for Life Ministry” in the city of Choloma alongside her husband. In April 2014, she was stabbed to death by two young gang members, reportedly after she had refused to pay what the gangs call a “war tax” to ensure her church’s safety.

  One year before, Sevilla and her husband claimed they had been abducted and beaten by gang members in an effort to extort “war tax” payments, a practice observers describe as increasingly common.

  “This dedicated couple, who ministered in their church for 10 years, could have moved away for safety, but they felt called to the city and remained even though they were in danger,” said Tim Hill, director of Church of God World Missions, after Sevilla’s murder.

• Business owners in Eastleigh, Kenya have decided to stop paying taxes to Nairobi County in protest against the government’s failure to provide basic services. Eastleigh North Ward representative Osman Adow Ibrahim, a member of the County Assembly, wrote: “As your representative, I fully support the decision you have made and have engaged a lawyer to get an injunction through the courts. The law and Constitution of Kenya allows for peaceful protest to get one’s rights. I hope we all stand together on this, so that we get the service we need.”
• Greek tax resisters have discovered that they can keep the tax collector at bay, at least for a while, by paying only a single euro of their taxes.
• A curious looking Indiegogo crowdfunding project called world citizen solutions has raised (last I checked) about half of its $79,000 goal towards developing a vaguely-described war tax resistance strategy. It is so vaguely described that it’s surprising to me that people are willing to chip in to support it, so maybe I’m missing some context. It has the odor of a sovereign-citizen or maybe a seasteading/micronation plan of some sort. Some excerpts:

  [T]he world citizen solution [is] a no compromise yet peaceful and lawful way to extract ourselves from tax obligations that literally make us accomplices to perpetual war. Or in other words, financiers of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

  [We] are currently developing a legal and social strategic initiative that will have profound effects on releasing humanity from its current paradigm.

  That all sounds pretty woo-woo to me, but it seems to have lit a fire under some folks anyway.

Some other tabs I’ve opened in recent weeks:

• Some Tax Day Reflections from Bryan Caplan, from back when he was a grad student (he’s now a professor of economics at George Mason University). Excerpt:

  Morally, taxation is unjust; practically, it is unnecessary. Yet taxation is unlikely to disappear in the near future; so what is the right thing to do in the meanwhile? Thoreau’s advice is again sound: “It is not a man’s duty’s to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.” Which means: Don’t work for the IRS, never support higher taxes on anything, and never let anyone pretend that you pay taxes of your own free will. Taxation is always theft, and the more people hear this insight repeated, the sooner they’ll see taxation for what it is.

• The war tax resistance campaign has kicked into high gear in Spain. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Jesús Paz of the Mambrú Antimilitarist Collective:

  What is tax resistance?

  It isn’t a model regulated by the Treasury, but a campaign of civil disobedience that has been practiced for more than thirty years in countries like Spain, the U.S., Canada, Holland, Germany, France, or Italy. Simply, it is the use of the tax return as a tool for redirecting to socially useful purposes the portion of military spending from each citizen. Antimilitarist Alternative coordinates a state-wide campaign to help the maximum number of people to participate. We collect data from various peace research centers and we compose a study that adds the Defense Ministry budget to the spending on other armed forces and also other items that are dispersed by other ministries, such as credits to arms companies for so-called research & development of a military character. These credits, in reality, have ended up financing the arms industry, generating along the way €27,000 million in debt. We also include spending that, in our view, tends to a more militarized society: for example, a large part of the prison population is there because the system does not facilitate social integration. So, with all of the global military spending and spending on state repression and social control, we calculate that the military spending per person is greater than €700 this year. In any case, we make it clear that the objective is not to object to a particular amount, but that people take this step of disobedience and demonstrate that we are not going along with this. From conscience, acting collectively, it is an organized political campaign of disobedience. We also make it clear that this is not a campaign for paying less to the Treasury: the tax resister pays exactly the same tax the Treasury asks for, but a part of this money is not allocated to military spending, but to a social project.

  Have any cases of war tax resistance reached the court system?

  We don’t put much stock in the legal process; recognition of the right to tax resistance has already been rejected on two or three occasions in various instances. The philosophy of the vast majority of campaign groups is not to search for a legal body to give us a legal right; it is fundamentally a protest campaign. That said, there is one unusual judgment from the Supreme Court of Catalonia concerning the tax resistance of representative Joan Surroca of the PSC: although the Court rejected the right to tax resistance, it also declared it illegal for the Treasury to fine Surroca for something where he could not be considered to have committed fraud, that is, the intent to conceal money. We consider this a small victory that the Court recognizes that it is not simply an individual matter or a scheme to pay less. There is a space for someone who does not do what the Treasury orders, but who does so in a public way, without concealment.

• War tax resistance groups in Catalonia are redirecting their taxes to groups that are trying to ameliorate the refugee crisis.
• “Divest from Pentagon, invest in people,” headlines the People’s World in their article about a war tax resistance demonstration in San Diego. The resisters there redirected $6,000 in federal taxes from the Pentagon, including a donation to an organization that is trying to build tiny, affordable homes for the homeless. One of these homes was wheeled to the outdoor redirection ceremony to give it some extra splash.
• Raul Perez is going to try to figure out some new angle to get the U.S. courts to recognize a right to conscientious objection to military taxation. He also wants to make a documentary film about the process.
• Erica Weiland, at NWTRCC’s blog, makes note of some recent war tax resistance demonstrations.
• “Is it immoral to evade taxes?” asks a columnist for Tiempo Digital of Honduras. He reviews some of the historical tax resistance campaigns in the service of justice, and then asks: “Can we in Honduras feel morally comfortable and have clear consciences while paying taxes?” Citing corruption, the bulk of government spending compared to national gross domestic product, and the abysmal lack of security and legal protection for citizens, he concludes that Honduran citizens do not owe allegiance or tax to the government.
• Finally, here’s Joan Baez dedicating a song to the IRS: