Tulsa World: Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Zelaya agenda bypassed in election campaign

MAKE US YOUR HOMEPAGE | Tuesday, February 09, 2010 | WIRELESS

Home > News > Article

Newspaper View Print this story

Comment

RSS

Bookmark

Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Zelaya agenda bypassed in election campaign

A boy attends Sunday's closing campaign rally for presidential candidate Elvin Santos of the Liberal Party in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press

By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ Associated Press
Published: 11/23/2009 2:28 AM
Last Modified: 11/23/2009 6:06 AM

The coup last summer in this tiny, Central American country blew up into an international incident, with thousands of Hondurans taking to the streets while leaders from Barack Obama to Fidel Castro lined up behind ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

Now, with Zelaya still holed up in the Brazilian Embassy, voters will choose a president Nov. 29 from the political establishment that has dominated Honduras for decades.

No one is pushing the leftist agenda of the ousted leader, who said he was trying to lift a country where seven in 10 people are poor.

That's because Zelaya was disturbing a deeply conservative society that has long cherished peace and stability.

Even many of the poor who supported Zelaya as he aligned himself with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Latin America's new left say they will vote for conservative front-runner Porfirio Lobo, a 61-year-old wealthy businessman who is ahead by double digits in the polls.

"I will vote for the one who can fix this and give us work right now, because those suffering are the poor," said Reina Gomez, 53, a single mother who washes clothes for a living and who supported Zelaya in 2005.

Zelaya, a commanding figure whose standard uniform includes a white cowboy hat, was prohibited by the constitution from running for more than one term — even before the military whisked him out of the country at gunpoint in the June 28 coup.

His opponents said he wanted to follow in Chavez's footsteps and revise the constitution to extend his time in office. Zelaya denies any such intention.

Honduras has always been run by a handful of families who control the news media, economy and every power sphere from the military to the Supreme Court.

As many of Central America's conservative governments battled leftist insurgencies from the 1960s to the 1980s, Honduras had no civil war and served as a key staging area for U.S.-backed Contras fighting Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

But in one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations, gaunt workers in worn clothing trudge from their hillside shanty towns past Tegucigalpa's gleaming shopping malls to work in garment factories or American fast food restaurants. Most survive on $250 a month.

Like his counterparts from Nicaragua to Ecuador, Zelaya began preaching reform that favored the poor. He raised the minimum wage by 60 percent and pulled in Venezuelan aid that included free tractors and $300 million a year for agricultural investment.

While many Hondurans want reform, they were reluctant to trust Zelaya, a wealthy rancher elected from one of the two major conservative parties.

Manuel Orozco, a Central American expert with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialog, notes that other Latin American leftist leaders — from Chavez to Bolivia's Evo Morales and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil — grew up poor. They also spent years building their grass-roots movements, while Zelaya started shooting from the hip late in his term.

Presidential front-runner Lobo, who lost to Zelaya in 2005, is campaigning on a return to normalcy and blames Zelaya's Liberal Party for thrusting the country into international turmoil.

His main opponent is the Liberal Party's Elvin Santos, a construction magnate who distanced himself from Zelaya's leftist rhetoric at a closing campaign rally on Sunday. By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ Associated Press

Newspaper View Print this story

Comment

RSS

Bookmark

Reader Comments

Show: Most Recent Comment First

Add your comment

0 comments have been made on this story so far. Tell us what you think below!

Reporting Comments

If you see a comment that violates our terms and conditions, please help us by clicking the "Report this Comment" link next to a comment. That will alert the web staff to review the comment. Thank you. -- Web Editor Jason Collington

Add Your Comment
In order to post a comment on this article, you must sign in to Tulsaworld.com. If you do not have a site account, you can create an account for free.