Republic of Honduras República de Honduras (Spanish) | |
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Motto:
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ISO 3166 code | HN |
Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Ocean at the Gulf of Fonseca, and to the north by the Gulf of Honduras, a large inlet of the Caribbean Sea. Its capital and largest city is Tegucigalpa.
Honduras was home to several important Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya, before Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century. The Spanish introduced Catholicism and the now predominant Spanish language, along with numerous customs that have blended with the indigenous culture. Honduras became independent in 1821 and has since been a republic, although it has consistently endured much social strife and political instability, and remains one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. In 1960, the northern part of what was the Mosquito Coast was transferred from Nicaragua to Honduras by the International Court of Justice.
The nation's economy is primarily agricultural, making it especially vulnerable to natural disasters such as Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Honduras has a Human Development Index of 0.624, ranking 138th in the world. In 2022, according to the National Institute of Statistics of Honduras (INE), 73% of the country's population lived in poverty and 53% lived in extreme poverty. The lower class is primarily agriculturally based while wealth is concentrated in the country's urban centers. The country is one of the most economically unequal in Latin America. (Full article...)
José Manuel Zelaya Rosales (born 20 September 1952) is a Honduran politician who served as the 35th president of Honduras from 2006 until his forcible removal in the 2009 coup d'état; since January 2022, he has served as the inaugural first gentleman of Honduras. He is the eldest son of a wealthy businessman, and inherited his father's nickname "Mel". Before entering politics he was involved in his family's logging and timber businesses.
Elected as a liberal, Zelaya shifted to the political left during his presidency, forging an alliance with the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas known as ALBA. On 28 June 2009, during the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis, he was seized by the military and sent to Costa Rica in a coup d'état. (Full article...)
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