Et af de fattigste – og mest voldsprægede – lande på den vestlige halvkugle går til præsidentvalg søndag, hvor tilhængerne af tidl. præsident Mel Zelaya, som blev styrtet ved et militærkup i 2009, nu har kastet deres støtte på hans kone, Xiomara Castro.
Xiomara Castro (54) is making a bid for the presidency under a newly-formed political party, Libre, in which the ex-president plays a significant role, writes BBC online Saturday.
“This is a struggle which grew up in the wake of the coup and a revolutionary party which is resisting against violence, against crime, against everything that has happened since the coup d’etat. The people are rising up,” the former first lady said – mere om hende på http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiomara_Castro
But if she hopes to move back into the presidential palace, this time as the leader of Honduras, she will have to defeat the candidate of the party which openly backed the coup against her husband. The governing National Party candidate, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was until recently the president of the National Congress.
Despite his party being in power for the last three years as well as many times in the past, he places the blame for the violence, poverty and disenfranchisement (fratagelse af stemmeretten) in Honduras firmly at the feet of Mel Zelaya.
“Because of the conduct of the previous government and the party now called Libre, Honduras almost became a failed state,” Mr Hernandez told the BBC.
Many people in Honduras, particularly the young, would undoubtedly welcome a genuine “window of opportunity”.
However, in a country with one of the lowest GDPs per capita in the Americas, where doctors, teachers and government professionals have gone unpaid for months, with rapidly dwindling foreign currency reserves and spiralling debt, not to mention the high levels of violent crime, they are sceptical that one will emerge any time soon.
