From Tegucigalpa
January 27, 2022 will go down in history as the day that for the first time a woman -and a feminist, Xiomara Castro- assumes the presidency of Honduras and at the same time, the bipartisanship ends and the tragedy caused by the coup d’état suffered twelve years earlier by his partner, then President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, begins to be reversed.
illustrious visits
The change of government also implies the return of the Central American country to regional and international consideration, with illustrious visits such as that of the Argentine vice president Cristina Fernandez -who gave a lecture yesterday at the public university-, the former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseffthe president of Costa Rica Carlos Alvarado Quesadathe Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard and the Venezuelan Felix Plasenciain addition to receiving an emotional video of the former Uruguayan president Jose Pepe Mujica.
will also participate in the ceremony kamala harristhe US vice president -who had already called Castro to congratulate her-, with the symbolic burden of her trip to these tropical lands where the Embassy has played a vital role since the installation of the multinational banana companies in the 1950s.
Breaking off
After having obtained a resounding victory in the elections held at the end of November of last year with more than 50 percent of the votes, peace was disturbed less than a week ago, when, surprisingly, twenty deputies of the now ruling Libre decided oppose the pact of unity that had led them to victory and refused to accept as president of Congress Luis Redondo, a parliamentarian elected by the Salvador Party of Honduras (PSH).
Worse yet, they preferred to ally themselves with the two traditional parties – the Liberal and the Nationalist, whom they denounced for years from the opposition and during the electoral campaign – to assume the presidency of Congress and, according to their words, watch over the legislative agenda proposed by Castro. Surreal, but real. The response of the president of the executive was immediate and she accused them of being traitors. Libre expelled them from their ranks and those who had voted for them reacted with indignation. Seven of them would repent and end up returning to the Libre bench, which received them to applause, despite the fact that trust is more difficult to rebuild.
Responding to Castro’s quick call in those hours of uncertainty, the militancy gathered at the entrance of the Congress so that the dissident legislators could not pass and the facilities where the Official Gazette is printed were taken The Gazettewhich would end up publishing the Board of Directors supported by Libre and chaired by Redondo.
To this day, both congresses are considered official. Except that one meets in the building that corresponds to it and has popular legitimacy, while the other meets via zoom and its members move in helicopters. Members who claim to have the legality of the majority of votes and who promised to approve the extradition of drug traffickers, but who later stated that they would have to be tried in the country.
Narco-state
People eagerly follow how the current Honduran novel unfolds, with the brother of until yesterday President Juan Orlando Hernández sentenced in the United States to life imprisonment for large-scale drug trafficking. The Democratic American congresswoman of Guatemalan origin Norm Torres He asked for a little patience and assured in a tweet that they will pressure the New York Prosecutor’s Office to reunite the Hernández family soon.
Apart from dismantling the narco-state that entrenched itself after the coup d’état in Honduran institutions, the Castro government has a lot of challenges ahead of it in a country where three quarters of the population lives in poverty and from which thousands of families flee in migrant caravans with the hope of finding more dignified living conditions in other geographies.
Schedule
Since winning the elections in November, the Libre party has organized several tables where it has been receiving diagnoses and demands from different sectors of society, from teachers to artists, passing through diversity and native peoples.
Everything remains to be done, but expectations and confidence are great. Indigenous groups announced that they will give Castro an ancestral baton in whose worldview it means that she has earned the respect of authority for her wisdom and her service to the community. But she also represents a commitment on the part of the new president to command a good government that stops criminalizing them for defending the territory and natural resources. And that he get justice for so many martyrs, including the renowned environmentalist and indigenous activist on the long list Berta Caceres or current criminalized as the inhabitants of the Guapinol River.
Despite the earthquake that could have caused the disbanding of part of the deputies elected by the Libre party, Castro skillfully managed to circumvent the unexpected move by the previously possible presidential candidates and today political corpses that wanted to generate a vacuum of power.
And it came out strengthened by the legitimacy that honoring its agreements gave it and by the massive support it received from the people, in addition to the support represented by the also historic number of international missions that will witness its investiture, compared to the null attendance that there was four years ago when Juan Orlando Hernández clung to power with an illegal re-electionan electoral fraud with repression of those who mobilized in the streets demanding a change, which little by little begins to materialize today.
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