More than a decade after her husband was removed from office by the military, Castro de Zelaya is the new sovereignist president in Honduras. Xiomara Castro, the wife of ousted former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, was pronounced the winner of Honduras’ presidential election on Tuesday after rival Nasry Asfura conceded defeat.
Asfura conceded the election after 52% of the counted votes showed Castro had a clear majority of 53% over Asfura’s 34% and he publicly congratulated her victory, saying, “I hope that God illuminates and guides her so that her administration does the best for the benefit of all of us Hondurans, to achieve development and the desires for democracy.”
Castro previously served as Honduras’ First Lady between 2006 and 2009, up until her husband Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a military coup. Zelaya claimed the US was behind the coup and attributed it to his signing of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).
“The US warned me: If you sign the Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas (ALBA), you’re going to have problems with the US. I signed it, and six months later, I had problems,” he told RT America in 2019, adding, “When you give them competition in the free market, they stop being capitalist. They become retrograde, authoritarian, and they play coups, wars, invasions.”
Castro de Zelaya said recently in a campaign speech, according to the AP. “People of Honduras, now is the time to say enough of the misery, poverty and exclusion that our country suffers.”
While he was away in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, his wife led protests and became the face of the opposition to the man who defeated her in 2017, Juan Orlando Hernández, and his party.