Peter Schurmann. Ethnic Media Services
TEGUCIGALPA – His face streaked with tears, a teenager hides at the entrance of a building, staring beyond the yellow police tape that secures the area. Inside, a group of indigenous Hondurans are gathered after traveling to the capital to denounce what they say is “the government’s continued theft of their ancestral lands.”
“I’m sorry about all this,” the security guard says, gesturing at the scene around him: “this is Honduras.”
In this context of extreme poverty and social violence, Hondurans will vote for their president on November 28. For many, the upcoming elections offer the best, and perhaps the last, opportunity to improve the deplorable situation in their country.
“These elections are an opportunity to recover the democratic process and confront the multiple crises we are experiencing,” says Gustavo Irias, executive director of CESPAD, a nonprofit that advocates for marginalized communities. “This is an opportunity for Honduras to recover its sense of nationhood.”
That notion was shattered in 2009 when the Honduran military overthrew former President Manuel Zelaya in a move in which the United States is believed to have played a fairly active role. Since then, Honduras has remained under the control of the right-wing National Party, currently led by President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is ending his second term under a cloud of suspicion over possible links to drug trafficking.
Candidates seeking to replace him include National Party front-runner and current Tegucigalpa mayor Nasry Asfura — “Papi” as he is known — and the Libre Party’s Xiomara Castro, wife of ousted former president Zelaya, who has vowed to rein in the excesses of free-market policies adopted by her opponent while forging closer ties with China.
Corruption and poverty are endemic in the Central American country. According to the World Bank, since 2019, 15 percent of Hondurans live on less than 2 dollars per day, conditions likely worsened by Covid-19 and the impact of two hurricanes last year, which led to more than half of its inhabitants falling below the poverty line in 2020.
Such conditions are fueling a mass exodus of migrants from the country. According to data from June 2021 presented in a June report by the Migration Policy Institute, 168,546 Hondurans were detained by immigration officials in the United States and Mexico, with the report noting that 1 in 5 want to leave their country for reasons ranging from food insecurity to unemployment and fear of insecurity.
But for some citizens of the capital, the upcoming elections offer little hope of improvement.
“Nothing is going to change,” says Victor Manuel Mayorga, a civil servant who says he has been unable to retire because the government has stolen state pension funds. At 79, Mayorga is part of a small minority of older people in a country where the average age is just 24.
Sitting in the city’s central square talking about football with friends, he laments the lack of education and healthcare, and accuses officials of all political persuasions of abandoning the country. “I believe in democracy, but in Honduras it is destroyed. It has been broken since the coup.”
Still, not everyone is so desperate.
Cesar Nahun Aquino, 44, is a car mechanic in the town of Yoritos, located about 200 km north of the capital. This small town made headlines two years ago because residents successfully united to expel a mining company that had tried to set up operations in the region.
A member of the Tolupán indigenous community, Aquino ran a transport company in San Pedro Sula before the Covid-19 pandemic, which he says wiped out his business. He is now back in his hometown, a largely agricultural region known for coffee, avocados and cattle ranching.
“We’re asking for the basics, getting rid of corrupt elections, transparency, reviving the local economy so it benefits the people in the community,” says Aquino, a supporter of local mayoral candidate Freddy Murio, an undocumented migrant who spent 12 years working in construction in New York before returning to his hometown two years ago. “We have to start with our municipality before we can start changing the country.”
Back in the capital, officials acknowledge that no election will resolve the challenges facing Honduras. But they stress that protecting the integrity of the vote and ensuring the democratic process in November are key to repairing the ongoing damage caused by the 2009 coup.
“The only opportunity for the country to build a democratic foundation is through the next elections,” says Rixi Moncada, a lawyer and one of three people who, with rotating positions, form part of the recently created National Electoral Council (CNE).
The CNE, the entity responsible for delivering the final count once the polls close, was created in the wake of widespread irregularities and violence that marked the 2017 election. Along with the National Registry of Persons and the Clean Politics Unit, it is charged with monitoring campaign financing in a country where drug money and politics are rife. intrinsically united, These three institutions are responsible for ensuring the integrity of the elections.
Moncada, a former member of Zelaya's government, admits that it is not an easy task.
“Nobody is prepared for the criminality,” he says, referring to the ongoing political violence that he sees as an extension of the 2009 coup, including the recent assassination of mayoral candidate and member of the opposition Libre Party, Nery Reyes, who was killed in early this month. No one has yet been arrested for her murder.
“We are prepared for the process.”
