Since 2009, the country has dragged on economic, political and social problems. Poverty affects more than half of the country of 9.5 million inhabitants.
Ending the electoral calendar in Latin America for this year, Honduras must go to the polls on Sunday to elect a president, three presidential appointees (vice presidents), 298 mayors, 128 deputies to the local Parliament and 20 to the Central American, all in the middle of a triple crisis that has dragged on since 2009, with economic, political and social problems.
The creation of jobs, the fight against the pandemic, stopping the gigantic caravans of migrants who try to arrive irregularly in the United States in search of employment, regulate fuel prices and improve the educational system and legal conditions for women. companies and enterprises are considered the main challenges that the new government that emerges from Sunday’s elections will have, since there is no option of a second round and the candidate who obtains a simple majority wins.
Honduras, with 9.5 million inhabitants, has been mired in a complex situation since June 2009, after the coup against the then-ruler, Manuel Zelaya, which was exacerbated by the “fraud” that the opposition alleges that President Juan Orlando Hernández in the 2017 elections to remain in power.
Fátima Romero, newspaper journalist The Press, from Honduras, says that “the statistics institute recently released data on the fact that 74% of households enter the poverty line”, and comments that this report, after having a lot of echo among the population, was deleted from the page where was published, which caused criticism among the population.
The crisis affecting the Central American nation suffered a greater deterioration with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Romero emphasizes that the health emergency has caused 70% of the country’s workers to work informally.
He refers that, in addition to the pandemic, last year the country faced two hurricanes ten days apart, and that in total around 400,000 jobs have been lost in 2020, according to figures from private business unions.
According to data from the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise (Cohep), one million people in the formal sector are unemployed and more than 1.5 million have income problems in the informal sector.
Yony Bustillo, Honduran journalist, agrees that the situation in Honduras in recent years has become difficult.
“An attempt has been made to reduce poverty, but it continues to be one of the main problems … And this influences the corruption that exists in the country in the last years of the present government; there are many problems linked to corruption in terms of handling the pandemic, ”he says.
Bustillo mentions that one of the main cases is the purchase of seven mobile hospitals to care for patients with the virus that the Government carried out for tens of millions of dollars, and that they gave positive results in the most critical months of the pandemic.
Regarding the current situation of the health emergency in the country, he comments that the cases have been decreasing thanks to vaccination. He adds that 7.1 million Hondurans are eligible for vaccination, but that only 4.5 million have received the first dose, and 3.3 million people, the second.
However, the lack of doses is not the reason that the population has not received the vaccine. Bustillo says that the country has those donated by the Covax mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO), but that vaccination campaigns have not yet been able to reach rural areas; He also mentions the distrust of the vaccine in part of the population, something common throughout the world.
The country counts so far a total of 378,000 infections and 10,393 deaths due to the virus.
In addition to the economic and health situation, Romero, for his part, stresses that the distrust in the political class is deep and that it grew in the face of the current process, after the primaries of March did not comply with giving official results and these took more than a month.
“On Sunday they are supposed to give the results three hours after the polls close, but there is mistrust,” he says and highlights that in this process political violence has strengthened.
Since the general elections were called, in September 2020, and to date 29 people have been murdered, collects EFE.
For his part, Bustillos states that another aspect that has further complicated the situation in the country are the allegations of links to drug trafficking that President Hernández has had.
The president has been identified by a prosecutor in New York as an accessory to drug trafficking. His brother, Juan Antonio, is imprisoned and sentenced to life in prison for this crime. Tony Hernández.
Meanwhile, according to opinion polls, of the twelve presidential candidates, only three have the option to succeed Hernández, who will conclude his second term on January 27, 2022.
They are Yani Rosenthal, from the Liberal Party; Nasry Asfura, of the ruling National Party; and Xiomara Castro, from the alliance between Libertad y Refundación (Libre) and the National Opposition Union of Honduras (Unoh), wife of former President Zelaya.
More than 5 million Hondurans are entitled to choose in the elections. It will be the eleventh elections since Honduras returned to democracy in 1980, after almost two decades of military regimes. (I)
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