Tegucigalpa (Prensa Latina) On November 28, 2021, the general elections took place in Honduras, the second poorest country in the Americas (75 percent poverty), the country of the massive caravans of migrants fleeing overland to the United States, the nationalist government This was through highlighted the overwhelming evidence linking the then-President and those close to him to the drug trade. The country of coups and repeated electoral fraud. The darlings of the OAS, the most loyal friends of conservative geopolitics in the United States.
On the night of that day, in Tegucigalpa, thousands of people gathered around the small headquarters of the Libertad y Refundación LIBRE party, as it was known that Iris Xiomara Castro Sarmiento was waiting there for the results of her third confrontation with a regime that had seemed immobile for years , invincible.
The LIBRE candidate from 2013 and 2017 ran again in 2021. By this point, Xiomara Castro had already been fighting in the streets for 12 years and seven months alongside the Honduran people, who went from opposing a coup to organizing the largest social and political movement in national history: the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), until the founding of the Political Party, which was intended to put an end to more than 130 years of conservative and non-partisan tradition in the country.
Next to Castro was José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, father of her four children, whom she has accompanied personally and politically for more than four decades. She saw the armed forces take him out of the country on June 28, 2009, and instead of going into exile, she remained in Honduras to face one of the most terrible repressions and atrocities that a Latin American people has experienced in recent memory. They were together, waiting for the rewards of history at the party headquarters that they built together with the people of Resistencia.
Although the polls showed her as the clear favorite, the candidate’s caution was more than justified. In 2013 the elections were stolen through the manipulation of voting documents, LIBRE and Xiomara had neither eyes nor representatives in the electoral control bodies. In 2017, the protocols were well received, but when almost 80 percent of the audit was recorded, the electoral court system was mysteriously paralyzed, and when Xiomara and the opposition alliance returned, they were under the ruling party, which was forcefully imposed in a re-election This resulted resulted in dozens of Hondurans being murdered during demonstrations denouncing the fraud.
The first report of the National Electoral Council (CNE) of 2021 – where, after hundreds of days of protests on the streets over more than a decade, it was possible to have the LIBRE party represented, which had already become one of the most important The political forces of the country gave the Honduran opposition candidate a lead of 51 to 30 percent. This small headquarters exploded with cheers, as did the entire country. Xiomara Castro hugged her family, her fellow fighters, her husband and quickly went downstairs to talk to her people. She ordered them not to trust each other, that they would finish the whole counting and that they had to stay until the last vote was counted. Alarm.
He went to the second floor and removed the blinds from a window so he could greet all the people flooding the streets around the political headquarters. The first female president of Honduras, the first Socialist Party to win an election, the first time a coup in Honduras was reversed with democracy and without violence – all of this became a reality on that November night two years ago.
The attacks began almost immediately and Xiomara Castro has declared herself president of the resistance. She does not let go of the streets, she is deeply convinced that the drug dictatorship has not been completely dismantled and that the people therefore cannot abolish their process of grassroots popular organization.
The head of state of Honduras increased her budget by 40 percent to fight poverty and hunger, she organized the state’s finances, she canceled the manipulated contracts with the financial sector, she put a stop to the privatization processes through trusts, she demanded Tax reorganization, has saved the Agricultural Development Bank and the Housing Bank, established relations with China and will be Pro Tempore President of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and the Central American Integration System (SICA) from January 2024, gives few interviews and Despite the attacks, is making progress in its political project of re-establishing Honduras.
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*Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Government of Honduras