Home Appointments President
President
Honduras Government
| Appointee | Xiomara Castro |
|---|---|
| Role | President |
| Organisation | Honduras Government |
| Domain | Politics |
| Start | 27 January 2022 |
| End | Currently in role |
| Notes | First woman elected President of Honduras |
Institutional context
The President of Honduras is the head of state and head of government, directly elected to a four-year term. From the country's nineteenth-century founding through January 2022 every holder was male.
Career path
Xiomara Castro Sarmiento de Zelaya (born 1959) is the wife of Manuel Zelaya, who served as President of Honduras from 2006 to 2009 before being deposed by a military-backed constitutional coup. She led opposition activism during her husband's exile and the subsequent administrations, and was the founding leader of the Liberty and Refoundation (LIBRE) party.
Appointment
She won the November 2021 presidential election decisively with approximately 51 percent of the vote and was sworn in on 27 January 2022. She is the first woman elected President of Honduras.
Tenure
Active. Tenure has covered substantial reform of the country's anti-corruption institutions, the establishment of an internationally supervised anti-corruption commission, and Honduras's foreign-policy reorientation including the recognition of the People's Republic of China.
Cluster context
Castro's 2022 appointment is the dataset's sixth elected first-woman head of state in Latin America, after Chamorro (1990), Moscoso (1999), Bachelet (2006), Fernández de Kirchner (2007), Chinchilla (2010), and Rousseff (2011). The Latin American sequence demonstrates a sustained regional pattern across more than three decades that pre-dates and runs in parallel with the Western European post-2018 cluster.