Manuel Zelaya
Manuel Zelaya was elected as a conservative, governed as a leftist, and was flown out of the country in his pyjamas. He was a wealthy rancher and timber businessman from Olancho who won the 2005 election for the Liberal Party, one of the two that had alternated in power for a century. Honduras was the poorest country in Central America apart from Nicaragua, and had been the one the United States used as a base rather than fought in - the Contras had operated from its territory through the 1980s, which is why the word banana republic was coined about it and why the army was the institution that worked. In office he raised the minimum wage by sixty per cent, made schooling free, and joined the Venezuelan oil arrangement and then the Bolivarian bloc, which turned the business class and his own party against him. The crisis was over a referendum. He proposed a non-binding poll on whether a later ballot should ask about a constituent assembly - two steps short of the re-election his opponents said he wanted, and the constitution made term limits unamendable. The supreme court ruled the poll illegal, he ordered the army to distribute the ballots anyway, and the chief of staff refused. On 28 June 2009 soldiers took him from his house before dawn and put him on a plane to Costa Rica, and congress installed its own speaker. Whether to call it a coup mattered: the word triggers an automatic cut-off of American aid, and the State Department declined to use it. He returned in 2011, and his wife Xiomara Castro was elected president in 2021.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Honduran
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
