Honduras at crossroads in election to end corrupt rule of Juan Orlando Hernandez

Three years before he was elected Honduras’ president in 2013, Juan Orlando Hernandez impressed U.S. State Department insiders as a charming, relatively young, law-and-order candidate capable of stabilizing one of the world’s most violent countries. “A country in debt, with serious narco-corruption, with high levels of criminality and one of the most unequal populations in Latin America.” The ruling National Party’s dependence on drug money and elite military units has led Hondurans to call their land a “narco-dictatorship.” This atmosphere is part of a wider trend of backsliding in democracy across the region, from Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala. Darwin Centeno, a Garifuna fisherman from Triunfo de la Cruz whose cousin Sneider Centeno was a prominent Garifuna activist abducted by a police-linked death squad in July 2020, said the National Party’s legacy is one of “committing damage against our community, disrespecting our ethnic rights.” But the National Party is skilled at mobilizing voters, which could stop the progressive Castro from becoming the country’s first woman president with her promises to wipe away the old ways of power. The president, witnesses alleged, said he would “shove coke up the noses of the gringos.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, left, and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, right, greet Honduras’ President Juan Orlando Hernandez during arrivals at the COP26 U.N.