Who is honduran leader

In May , Honduras was reported to have asked its neighboring country El Salvador for help in getting Chinese mainland vaccines, as it was hit by shortages amid the COVID pandemic. Hernandez's trip is his third as Honduran President, but experts said he will need to seek assurances. Zhou Zhiwei, an expert on Latin American studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that Honduras's domestic epidemic situation is worrying and its economy is struggling.

So the visit to Taiwan may be intended to seek assistance in this respect. The people of Honduras have seen this," said Zhou. Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox. More from Reuters. Sign up for our newsletter Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox. Image source, EPA.

Protesters demanded "justice for Honduras" outside the courthouse. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Related Topics. Published 10 February. Published 22 January. It is a chronic emergency with growing political ramifications. Soon after taking office, Biden handed the Central America portfolio to Harris. The new Vice-President had little experience with international diplomacy and no special expertise in Latin America.

Biden seemed unconcerned, pointing out that he had carried the same brief when he was Vice-President. But many policymakers and analysts in Washington told me that the situation in the Northern Triangle has deteriorated significantly since the Obama era. The United States has aided governments in this region, while ignoring corruption and abuses of power. Will they be successful? In the long run, possibly. In the short run, I fear not. Roberta Jacobson, who worked for decades as a U.

Bukele, a forty-year-old former night-club manager, is an abrasive populist who tweets without restraint. But he has also relentlessly undermined democratic institutions.

In , he ordered armed troops into the Salvadoran Congress to coerce legislators into facilitating the purchase of new security equipment. The top U. The trip did not go well. There was surely money to follow. In , the U.

Giammattei, visibly uncomfortable, denied malfeasance by his administration, and vowed to assist the U. In a press conference before leaving the country, he suggested that he had been pushed out because his office was looking into evidence that Giammattei had taken bribes from shadowy Russian investors.

In Nicaragua, democratic norms are under even more direct assault. Even old comrades have become targets. The United States has had little incentive to change the situation in Nicaragua; historically, most migrants from there have headed south, to Costa Rica, rather than toward the U.

In much of the region, the Biden Administration has tried to apply pressure with targeted sanctions. This past July, Congress authorized the State Department to sanction several officials close to Bukele, as well as others from Guatemala and Honduras.

The Engel List, as the register of names became known, has since grown to include sixty-two people in the region. Those on the list had their U. These are more aggressive steps than the previous Administration took, but they are unlikely to produce radical change. In , when Biden was Vice-President, he visited Capitol Hill to promote his solution for emigration, which encompassed the U.

They went ahead with it anyway. In , Trump restricted the aid for seven months, as leverage for new migration strictures. During the campaign, Biden renewed his efforts, with the optimistically named Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America. The plan called for spending four billion dollars to address conditions that encourage emigration—everything from corruption and violence to poverty and climate change.

Microsoft promised to expand Internet access and to invest in technology for greater transparency in government spending.

Mastercard committed to digitizing a million small businesses. To succeed, though, the Administration will need support from civil society in the countries of the Northern Triangle. With the right sort of backing, he said, it could also provide Hondurans with improved access to education, through scholarships for rural students. He pointed out that Dinant employed nearly eight thousand Hondurans directly, and provided livelihoods for twenty-two thousand more.

With U. There was a potential complication: for much of the past decade, Dinant was notorious among human-rights organizations. He conceded that the conflict had eased after Dinant consented to disarm its guards. But he noted with pride that the company had agreed to a strict code of conduct, monitored by a law firm in Washington, D. He told me that the land invasions continued, some of them apparently backed by organized crime.

This was where the U. He offered to show me the situation at his main palm-oil plantation and food-manufacturing facility, in Tocoa, in the north. We could go there by helicopter. It sits just down the coast from Trujillo, one of the ports used by the United Fruit Company to ship out bananas. It was a stay in Trujillo that inspired O. In Guatemala, it abetted the C. In Honduras, it bought and sold leaders.