It was useless that thousands of people from all over Honduras surround the country’s Congress in support of the president, Xiomara Castro. His pressure to elect the new attorney general and deputy prosecutor did not achieve his goal of unblocking the vote, and the ruling Libertad y Refundación (Libre) party failed in its attempt to elect its list of lawyers. Johel Zelaya and Mario Cabañas for both posts by not having a sufficient majority in the Legislative Chamber. Specifically, 86 votes are required in a highly polarized Congress, where Libre has 50 deputies, followed by the National Party (43), the Liberal Party (26) and the Salvador de Honduras Party (9). In the vote this Tuesday, Xiomara Castro’s formation only achieved 52 votes, which made it impossible to elect those who should take office as of September 1.
Next, the Salvador Party of Honduras proposed to Marcio Cabanas as attorney general now Jenny Almendárez as deputy prosecutor, although he did not achieve sufficient consensus after gathering 70 votes in favor in a Congress of 128 deputies. For this reason, the president of the Chamber, louis redondocalled a new session this Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. in which he hopes to reach an agreement with the National Party to choose among five candidates the two people who will be in charge of criminal prosecution in the next five years.
Castro and his Libre party have taken advantage of this election to give the opposition a political pulse and make a show of strength of the popular support that his government has. To do this, they summoned thousands of people from the 18 departments of the country who came to the Legislative Chamber to show their “total support” for the Honduran president. The protesters plan to hold a vigil tonight around Congress “until we have a prosecutor” as a show of pressure on opposition groups to give in and support one of the five people sent to Congress by the Proposing Board to direct the Prosecutor’s Office
The massive mobilization of Castro supporters occurred after around 20,000 people demonstrated on August 19 in the streets of Tegucigalpa and in front of the Presidential House against the “communism” that President Xiomara Castro intends to implement, according to a complaint Salvador Nasrallapromoter of the march called by the so-called Citizen Opposition Block, which brings together the National, Liberal, Patriotic Alliance and Salvador de Honduras parties, as well as various civil society organizations.
Despite this climate, Castro appeared at the demonstration on Tuesday before thousands of supporters who dressed in the red and black colors of the Libre party and where he assured that he has not lost “hope” of reaching consensus in Congress, despite to recognize that the opposition has a majority. The president also referred to the climate of tension in the Central American country, for which she said that she is “forced to denounce the cconspiracy of organized crime mafias and drug trafficking to overthrow my government.” However, she stressed that she is a “president in resistance” after 12 years and seven months of “countless human sacrifices until the disgraceful dictatorship was defeated.”