Honduras, plagued by poverty and crime, picks new leader
Tegucigalpa (AFP) - Hondurans went to the polls amid tight security Sunday to pick a new president for their Central American nation, the world's deadliest and among the region's poorest.
The election pits Xiomara Castro, leftist wife of ousted former leader Manuel Zelaya, against conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez.
As the around 5,400 polling stations opened at 7:00 am (1300 GMT) with a ceremony at a school in the capital Tegucigalpa, electoral tribunal chief David Matamoros expressed hope the vote would "heal the wounds" of the 2009 coup d'etat that toppled Zelaya.
He also urged the 5.4 million voters to carry out their electoral duty with "faith, dignity and civility."
The candidates are vying to succeed President Porfirio Lobo, who was elected after the coup in a controversial election boycotted by Zelaya's leftist allies.
The heavily guarded polling stations, to which some 800 foreign election monitors were dispatched, closed at 5:00 pm (2300 GMT) after a one-hour extension was agreed, Matamoros said. About 25,000 police and military officers stood watch over busy proceedings.
Castro, with the Libre Party, could become the first female president of Honduras, the poorest country in the Americas after Haiti. An estimated 71 percent of the population lives in poverty.
"The people have decided, and the people want change," she said after voting in Catacamas. "A new era has started for all Hondurans," Castro said.
Her main rival, speaker of the legislature Hernandez, is a supporter of the 2009 coup and a law-and-order conservative who has vowed to bring order by flooding the streets with soldiers.
The message from the ruling National Party candidate has resonance in this country of 8.5 million that records 20 murders a day -- the highest rate in the world, according to UN figures.
"I am happy, joyful that the Honduran people are voting peacefully... united to take our country forward," said Hernandez, 45.
He spoke surrounded by supporters, after voting in Gracias, some 300 kilometers (190 miles) from the capital.
Government institutions are so weak and the police so corrupt that Honduras is on the brink of becoming a failed state.
Gangs run whole neighborhoods, extorting businesses as large as factories and as small as tortilla stands, while drug cartels use Honduras as a transfer point for shipping illegal drugs, especially cocaine, from South America to the United States.
"We want more work and less crime," said Sandy Rivera, 31, who sells used clothes in the San Miguel neighborhood.
That sentiment was echoed by Pedro Garay, a 72-year-old retired economist, as he left a polling station.
"The main problem is violence caused by unemployment," he said.
Hernandez has promised to end violence by deploying 5,000 military police officers. Castro, in turn, has proposed a community police force to fight local crime and to deploy soldiers to the borders to halt drug trafficking.
Castro, who proposes "Honduran-style democratic socialism," wants to rewrite the constitution and "re-found" the country -- a move similar to the one that led to the coup that ousted her husband in 2009.
Hernandez claims that he can create more than 100,000 jobs by supporting Hong Kong-style "model cities" in Honduras.
Many Hondurans are ambivalent about his proposal to use soldiers to fight crime, because abuses attributed to the military during the coup period are still fresh in voter's minds.
A pre-election Cid-Gallup survey showed Hernandez with 28 percent support against 27 percent for Castro -- a statistical dead heat -- in a pack of eight candidates. There is no runoff, so whoever gets a plurality of the vote wins.
Since 1902, the Liberal Party and the National Party, both politically conservative, have traded the presidency with military dictators. Zelaya was elected in 2005.
"The Honduran two-party system is now the oldest in Latin America," said sociologist Matias Funes. "There has never been such a real chance (of breaking it) until now."