In Honduras, many aspire to achieve a change of course and move towards a better future.
Photo: Prensa Latina

By Guillermo Alvarado

Around 5.2 million Honduran citizens are summoned to the polls this Sunday, November 28 to elect their president, deputies and mayors in elections that could be the opportunity to change the course of the country, the poorest in the Central American isthmus.

The polls place Xiomara Castro, wife of former president Manuel Zelaya Rosales, who was deposed by a coup d'état perpetrated by the army high command in 2009, as the favorite among the 14 aspirants to the first magistracy.

Precisely, that coup was the beginning of the calamities plaguing Honduras, among them the sharp increase in unemployment and poverty, administrative corruption, drug trafficking and violence perpetrated by youth gangs and organized crime.

Business sector statistics place the number of unemployed people at one million and those seeking to enter the informal sector of the economy at one and a half million, high numbers for a country with 9.5 million inhabitants.

The program of Xiomara Castro, 62 years old and proposed by the Libertad y Refundación Party, revolves precisely in the search for solutions to these serious problems.

In second place in the polls is Nasry Asfura, of the conservative National Party, currently in government, who, if he wins, will continue the same line of Juan Orlando Hernández, that is, an administration at the service of the most powerful economic sectors and transnational corporations.

Hernández ends his second term in the midst of a great discredit and there is no lack of those who link him to drug trafficking, an activity for which one of his brothers is imprisoned in the United States.

The third and last one with real possibilities of winning the elections is the businessman Yani Rosenthal, of the Liberal Party, who spent three years in a US prison for the crime of money laundering.

Due to the critical situation in which the majority of the population lives, Honduras is nowadays the main source of undocumented migrants to the north, men, women and children, and whoever wins the elections will have to find a solution to this phenomenon.

There is no second round of elections in this country, so whoever gets the most votes in his favor this Sunday will win the presidency.

This process has been marked by violence and as of today there are 31 murders linked to the elections, the highest number in the history of Honduras, where many people aspire to win an election.

Honduras where many aspire to achieve a change of course and move towards a better future.