President begins new term amid protests
TEGUCIGALPA: Juan Orlando Hernandez has been sworn in as president of Honduras for a second term amid protests that he fraudulently won the November election.
Mr Hernandez took the oath at a special session of Congress at the National Stadium, with the bleachers packed with his supporters.
At the event, in which he vowed to “comply with and enforce the Constitution and law”, the 49-year-old Mr Hernandez said he was “committed to developing a process of reconciliation among all Hondurans”.
Mr Hernandez takes on his new mandate in the impoverished Central American country of nine million with diminished legitimacy due to the controversial election.
Supporters of defeated opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla accuse him of setting up a “military dictatorship” and insist that the election was stolen.
Mr Hernandez stood for re-election against Mr Nasralla despite a constitutional ban on presidents serving more than one term.
He narrowly won after a three-week stretch of often-interrupted ballot counting that sparked accusations of fraud.
The leftist opposition staged protests that shook the country throughout the week, culminating in a mass rally in Tegucigalpa late on Friday.
On Saturday, however, protesters could get only within 500 meters of the inauguration event.
The stadium was protected by several rings soldiers and police, who were pressed into duty from around the country.
In the capital’s Miraflores neighbourhood, protesters hurled rocks at a bus full of Hernandez supporters.
“The protests do not end today, this will be permanent,” Mr Nasralla told reporters, as he called for new elections.
About 10,000 protesters marched in Honduras’s second city of San Pedro Sula to show their opposition to Mr Hernandez’s inauguration.
“The only way we can get this dictator out is to fight in the streets,” opposition lawmaker Samuel Madrid said.
Dozens of people have been killed and hundreds jailed since Mr Hernandez was declared the winner of the Nov 26 runoff election.
“This is a government that has the seals of the state but has no legitimacy,” said rights activist Berta Oliva.
“It imposes its authority in a savage way with soldiers in the street,” she said, describing the new government as a “dictatorship”.
Political scientist Juan Ramon Medrano has said that the Honduran government “is showing signs of dictatorship”.
“In Honduras there is a political crisis” that the United States and the Organisation of American States (OAS) regional bloc “do not measure with the same yardstick as they measure Venezuela,” he said.
Washington and the OAS have been highly critical of Venezuela’s leftist regime.
Market analyst group Eurasia said the demonstrations “will likely diminish after Hernandez’s inauguration”.
The OAS had proposed holding new elections after its observer mission expressed doubts about the outcome.