The Lighthouse - Volume 11, Issue 47

This Sunday voters in Honduras will elect their next president. The election should solve the crisis that culminated last June in the forced exile of former president Manuel Zelaya, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who met with interim President Roberto Micheletti, judicial and legislative leaders, members of the opposition, and other key players during a recent trip to that country.

A few holdouts have resisted giving the election their blessing--including Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Spain, and the Organization of American States, which refuses to send monitors to the election. Fortunately, everyone Vargas Llosa talked to expressed strong support for the rule of law. Zelaya and Micheletti even agreed to leave the National Assembly to decide whether to reinstate Zelaya until power is handed over to the winner of the upcoming election. (Zelaya himself was never eligible to run in the long-scheduled election, and his party has a candidate on the ballot.)

"Nobody in the current government is interested in a fraudulent election, nor is one likely given safeguards that include a widely respected national electoral tribunal and Supreme Court," writes Vargas Llosa. Hondurans have gone through too much to endure another crisis. "Let us hope that the Hondurans do not succumb to the temptation [to undermine the election], after what they perceive as a David versus Goliath kind of victory, to continue to go it alone in the future. Honduras desperately needs to engage the rest of the world diplomatically and economically in order to address its most important mission--putting itself on the path to prosperity."

Read more articles about Honduras at the link above