Return of the Left in the Honduras elections

Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the socialist candidate, got elected as President of Honduras in the elections held on Sunday. 

She is the first woman to become President of the country. Her victory puts the Left back in power after twelve years of right wing governments in the country. Her election assumes significance for more reasons:
 
It is a sweet revenge for her husband Manuel Zelaya, who was overthrown from presidency by a rightwing coup in 2009, with the support of US. The rightists had justified their action on the ground that President Zelaya was planning to hold a referendum asking the people if they would approve a change in the constitution to extend the mandate of president to two terms from the existing single term limit. But the US administration and the American mainstream media accused Zelaya of trying to commit a crime of violation of the constitution by proposing to change the term limit. They called Zelaya as a Honduran Chavez with dangerous leftist tendencies. The Honduran military barged into the presidential palace, picked up Zelaya in his pyjamas, put him in a plane and dumped him in Costa Rica. This was the first-ever coup in the twenty first century in Latin America which was seeing the strengthening of its democratic foundation in the first decade of the new century. 
 
Manuel Zelaya himself could not stand for elections since the rightwing administration has banned him from public office. 
 
President Juan Orlando Hernandez, elected in 2013 from the right wing National Party, changed the constitution, removed the term limit and got elected for a second term in 2017. The military, supreme court, the human rights council and other organisations which had opposed removal of single term limit during President Zelaya’s time had reversed their stand and endorsed the action of Hernandez. The American administration and media kept quiet and did not raise the issue of constitutional violation. 
 
Hernandez’s victory in 2017 was controversial. There were allegations of fraud in vote counting. When Hernandez started losing, the counting was stopped. Later, the computers started showing winning numbers for Hernandez. There were protests against the rigging and over two dozen protestors were killed in the violence. But Hernandez managed to escape the fate of President Evo Morales who tried the same trick in Bolivia but was thrown out of power.
 
Hernandez’s government is also accused of massive corruption and links with drug trafficking. Juan Antonio, brother of the President, is already in a US jail for life after drug trafficking conviction. The US Justice Department has accused President Hernandez of links to drug trafficking. The U.S. federal prosecutors in New York have accused him of running a narco state and fueling his own political rise with drug money. They might start prosecuting him when he leaves the presidency in January 2022.
 
The ruling party’s candidate Nasry Asfura, who got the second largest number of votes after Castro, was accused in 2020 of embezzling public money when he was Mayor of the capital Tegucigalpa. The third major candidate in the presidential race, the Liberal Party's Yani Rosenthal, spent three years in a US jail for money laundering.
 
The victory of the Left in Honduras should give some satisfaction to Lula of Brazil. As President, Lula tried to help the exiled Zelaya to get back to power. The Brazilians helped Zelaya return to Honduras secretly three months after his exile and gave asylum to him in the Brazilian embassy. This was a huge embarrassment for the anti-Zelaya US administration. It was the first time that Brazil challenged US in Central America which is a traditional backyard of US and playground for CIA. The Americans wanted to cut down the overreach of Brazil and President Lula and reacted ruthlessly. They put pressure on the illegitimate Honduran regime which sent its military and police to surround the Brazilian embassy. There was a war of words exchanged between the Brazilian government and the Honduran regime. Eventually the Honduran regime let Zelaya go on exile to Dominican Republic. This was a bitter lesson for President Lula who had ambitions to check American hegemony and assert Brazilian leadership in Latin America.
 
The return of the Left to power is important for the Honduran masses, majority of whom are below the poverty line. It is the extreme poverty which is the main reason for thousands of Hondurans trying to emigrate to the US legally and illegally. There is desperate need for pro-poor and Inclusive-development policies and Castro is promising to give priority to these. Further, she wants to decriminalize abortion, reduce bank charges for remittances, create a U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission and repeal laws which feed corruption and drug trafficking.
 
On the external front, Castro wants to open diplomatic relations with China and close the Taiwanese embassy. Honduras is one of the remaining fifteen countries in the world which recognize Taiwan. But the US administration is putting pressure on the Hondurans not to recognize China. It is one of the typical hypocritical examples of US foreign policy lectures to other countries: “Do not do what we do but do what we say”. Earlier the US government had unsuccessfully pressurized Panama, Dominican Republic and El Salvador with similar advice. 
 
The election of Left to power in Honduras is a boost to the larger Latin American Left which has returned to power in Argentina and Peru. Castro will resume relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, earlier shunned by the previous right wing administration of Honduras. 
 
Honduras is the original “Banana Republic” exploited by the United Fruit Company of US in collusion with local oligarchs. The United Fruit company is no more but the local oligarchs continue their exploitation with their deeply entrenchment. They will not let Xiomara Castro to make any significant reform to bring about social justice. 
 
Although Honduras is a small country of just ten million people, India’s exports were 163 million dollars last year. There is scope to increase the exports to 300 million dollars in the next four years. It is time for India to consider opening an embassy in Honduras. The Chinese  export about 1.5 billion dollars of goods to Honduras.