With the Election of Xiomara Castro, a New Feeling of Hope Has Arrived in Honduras
None of Honduras’s long-standing problems have disappeared with Xiomara Castro’s election as president. But the Honduran people have struck a blow against rapacious capitalists at home and Washington’s meddling from abroad.
Xiomara Castro speaks at a press conference on November 28, 2021, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (Inti Ocon / Getty Images)
On November 28, 2021, Hondurans took to the ballot box in masses and voted the country’s first woman into the presidency, the leftist Xiomara Castro Sarmiento Zelaya. Her win comes twelve years after the 2009 coup d’état that destroyed constitutional order and the rule of law in Honduras.
Castro’s win is a blow to the oligarchic power of the National Party, which masterminded the 2009 coup with the help of the US State Department. The country never recovered from the coup; in fact, under National Party rule things got worse, with violence and narcotrafficking increasing while Juan Orlando Hernández, the outgoing president who was supported by the US State Department and Barack Obama’s administration, stole directly from public institutions.
Beyond his own implication in venal criminal activity, Hernández has allowed crime and corruption to flourish in an impoverished Honduran society. The working poor faces utter and unrelenting destitution, high levels of crime and violence are a part of everyday life, and conditions have forced a migrant exodus of mostly women and children.
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