It’s exactly two years since Xiomara Castro was sworn in as the first female president of Honduras. At the head of the leftist Freedom and Refoundation Party – Libre (‘Free’) for short – Castro’s landslide win ended the 12-year dominance of the conservative National Party (PN), which began with a 2009 military coup that deposed former president and Castro’s husband Manuel Zelaya.

Castro ran on a platform of change on all fronts. She promised big things – democracy, peace, justice and reconciliation. The fact that she was elected by a 14-point margin with 51 per cent of the vote on a historic 69 per cent turnout showed how high expectations were.

Some of these promises she fulfilled by taking office: as the campaign slogan ‘Ya se van’ (‘They’re on their way out’) indicated, her inauguration meant the ousting from political power of privileged, corrupt and authoritarian elites that had captured the state, instrumentalising it for their benefit, to the detriment of the vast majority of Hondurans.

But it’s one thing to occupy the presidency and quite another to take the reins of the state effectively, dislodge deeply rooted networks of complicity and impunity and rehabilitate institutions so they can fulfil their proper roles. Midway through Castro’s four-year presidential term, the picture is mixed.

A democracy in decline

Democracy has long been more an aspiration than a reality in Honduras. Even before the coup, Honduras barely qualified as an extremely flawed democracy. Subsequent regressions in human rights and the rule of law turned it into what the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index calls a hybrid regime – a combination of democratic elements, mostly related to electoral processes and political pluralism, and deeply authoritarian traits, particularly when it comes to civil liberties, political participation, political culture and government functioning.

Honduras is Central America’s most dangerous country for journalists and has one of the world’s highest number of killings of environmental and land rights defenders. Political violence is rife: in the 2021 election campaign at least 23 candidates were killed.

With democracy long an empty shell, it’s no wonder the 2021 Latinobarómetro opinion poll placed Honduras as the Latin American country with the lowest proportion of people who thought democracy was preferable to any other form of government and with the highest proportion who saw no big difference between democracy and authoritarianism.

The same poll ranked Honduras as one of the region’s countries where people were least satisfied with the functioning of their democracy. Only 16 per cent thought wealth distribution was fair and a similar percentage thought the government ruled for the benefit of all people, while 76 per cent believed it only served powerful interests. Levels of trust in political institutions were at historically low levels. Only the church continued to be trusted by the majority.

In 2021 Honduras also hit a historic low on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, indicating corruption had become a deeply ingrained systemic issue. At that time, then-president Juan Orlando Hernández was under investigation by US prosecutors, suspected of being part of a criminal conspiracy to bring cocaine into the USA.

Restoring trust

It fell upon Castro to rebuild trust by restoring some of democracy’s substance. In February 2022, the government reformed the selection process for Supreme Court judges so they’d have to be picked from a merit-based list prepared by an independent committee. Gender parity standards were introduced and Castro appointed the first Afro-Honduran judge to the Supreme Court.

In April 2022 Castro had her predecessor extradited to the USA to face his drug charges. She then sought international help to combat corruption, seeking to revive the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH). This was an international body established in response to anti-corruption protests in 2016 through an agreement between the Organization of American States and the Hernández administration. MACCIH saw some success but lasted only four years before the government dissolved it. Legal changes followed aimed at hindering further anti-corruption efforts.

In December 2022, the Castro government signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations (UN) to work together towards the establishment of an international, independent, impartial and autonomous mechanism against corruption and impunity in Honduras. A team of UN experts was deployed to assess the feasibility of the proposed International Commission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras.

In the meantime, some progress was made in repealing laws and decrees enacted to impede the investigation and prosecution of corruption. In July 2023, Congress repealed a 2020 decree that prevented the seizure of documents from people accused of corruption and amended a 2021 decree on money laundering. In August, it repealed a 2019 decree that protected public officials from tax investigations into the use of public funds.

However, some key reforms – including reversing a change to the Penal Code that reduced penalties for corruption and organised crime and repealing a decree that established parliamentary immunity – remain pending. And more than a year after the memorandum with the UN was signed, no international anti-corruption body has been set up, despite calls from legal experts and civil society organisations.

Insecurity and human rights

The links between corruption, drugs and organised crime make Honduras one of the world’s most violent countries. Its homicide rate is the second highest in Latin America and the Caribbean, behind only Jamaica.

On the campaign trail, Castro vowed to fight insecurity – not with the iron-fist approach used by President Nayib Bukele in neighbouring El Salvador but by addressing the structural causes of insecurity, notably the lack of opportunities for young people. She promised to stop the cycle of violence through a combination of social policies, fair and responsible use of police power and a cleaner and less politicised justice system.

In her inaugural speech, she said she’d turn Honduras – a country with a poverty rate of almost 74 per cent, one of the region’s highest – into a ‘socialist and democratic’ state. Two years later, the poverty rate is down by 9.5 percentage points. It’s a strong performance, but not nearly enough to tackle the poverty that helps fuel insecurity and migration. In early 2023, Honduras remained the country with the third-biggest flow of people towards the USA, behind only Mexico and Venezuela.

With insecurity a pressing concern, less than a year after taking office, in November 2022, Castro declared a state of emergency to deal with crime and gang violence. Constitutional rights to freedoms of movement and assembly were suspended and security was militarised. Security forces were allowed to arrest people and search houses without a warrant. Following a prison confrontation between gangs that left 46 inmates dead, the government also approved military operations in prisons.

Supposedly temporary, the state of emergency has been extended several times and remains in effect, currently scheduled to expire in May 2024.

The government declared the measure a success, reflected in the lowest homicide rate in 16 years. But human rights organisations have criticised the rise in arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has also expressed concern about the militarisation of public security and disproportionate use of force.

Environment and human rights

When it came to protecting the environment, Castro promised no more concessions to exploit rivers, water basins and national parks. Some progress has been made. In March 2022, for instance, the government banned open-pit mining and promised to intervene ‘immediately’ to conserve areas of ‘high ecological value’ for the benefit of communities. This came just a month after the government stopped the eviction of Indigenous families living on land claimed by a real estate developer.

Environmental groups have long called for the repeal of the law that established Employment and Development Zones (ZEDEs) throughout Honduras, with a ‘special regime’ that includes fiscal exemptions and puts security powers in the hands of investors. They view this as ceding sovereignty and entailing potentially deadly social, economic and environmental consequences. But little progress has been made here.

Ingrained dynamics are hard to change. Extractive practices have long been a key source of elite wealth and government corruption, and therefore of human rights violations. Most of the human rights activists murdered in Honduras are environmental rights defenders. Jairo Bonilla and Aly Dominguez, who protected the Guapinol river and nearby communities from the operations of a mining company, were the first – but far from the last – to be killed in retaliation for their work in 2023.

Honduras has a law for the protection of human rights defenders, journalists and justice officials dating back to 2015, but the system lacks financial resources and experienced staff with human rights training. Activists fear that if they collaborate, information could fall into the wrong hands and they’d suffer the consequences. Castro promised to establish a new mechanism, but it hasn’t yet materialised. In the meantime, activists remain on the receiving end of violence. In the first half of 2023 alone, 236 experienced harassment, threats or attacks, and 13 were killed.

Anti-rights backlash

Honduras has the region’s highest femicide rates. Violence and discrimination are also part of the daily lives of Honduran LGBTQI+ people, forcing many to leave the country. In 2023, 40 LGBTQI+ people were killed due to their gender identity or sexual orientation.

In 2022, Castro recognised that the state of Honduras was responsible for the 2009 death of Vicky Hernández, a transgender woman killed during the coup, and officially asked for forgiveness. But her administration has yet to fulfil its promise to safeguard women’s and LGBTQI+ people’s lives. The ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the Vicky Hernández case included guarantees of non-repetition, which would require actions such as training security forces, enabling LGBTQI+ people to change their names and gender in official documents, adopting special procedures to investigate abuses against LGBTQI+ people and compiling data. None of this has happened.

The liberalisation of abortion laws is another pending promise. Honduras criminalises abortion under all circumstances, including for pregnancies resulting from rape and when there’s a risk to a pregnant person’s health or life or severe foetal impairment. No progress has come. Much more modest advances brought a strong conservative backlash that forced the government to backtrack: in response to the reaction, Castro vetoed a law guaranteeing comprehensive sex education in schools that would have helped prevent teenage pregnancies.

But it’s not all bad news. An executive decree issued in March 2023 repealed a ban on the use and sale of emergency contraception. Now the government must ensure broad access, while continuing to take steps towards the full recognition of women’s autonomy to make decisions over their bodies and lives.

Two more years

Having reached the presidential term’s halfway point, Castro’s government shows progress in the right direction, but still has far to go. Castro has acknowledged this.

In a televised New Year speech, Castro highlighted the difficulties involved in ‘building back on the destruction left after 12 years and seven months of dictatorship and drug trafficking’. With entrenched interests fighting hard to maintain their privileges, she asserted that the government had still managed to make headway – supporting agricultural and improving infrastructure, increasing the education budget, subsidising energy for poor people and creating jobs. Although some of her statements were imprecise, civil society fact-checkers largely confirmed that progress had been made.

In this and another speech that opened the 2024 legislative session, Castro said that her government had started working to protect forests and achieved a significant reduction in homicide rates. Here, both statements are disputed or at least qualified by civil society. Environmental groups decry the slow and insufficient progress made in reversing the corrupt deals that resulted in land concessions to private interests that put profit above the environment and the wellbeing of communities. Human rights organisations point to the inadmissible high human rights costs incurred in fighting crime.

But the president’s speeches were revealing as much for what they left unsaid. At the opening of the legislative session, which coincided with the commemoration of Honduran Women’s Day, she invoked the struggles of ‘martyrs like Jeannette Kawas and Berta Cáceres’ – women murdered in retaliation for their work to defend environmental rights – and spoke of the importance of ‘resistance against imperialist forces that seek to exploit our land and undermine our sovereignty’. But she didn’t mention any plans to establish effective mechanisms to protect human rights activists so they don’t become martyrs.

Castro vindicated her status as a woman, celebrated her ‘brave’ Honduran sisters and urged respect for ‘human rights and women’s lives and rights’ – but made no mention of the state’s lack of recognition of sexual and reproductive rights, or protection against gender-based violence. Her brief presentation gave no space to demands for LGBTQI+ rights.

Civil society wants this government to succeed and will continue to push it to do its best in the two remaining years. In the face of anti-rights resistance, the government must work with civil society. Failure shouldn’t be an option.