Manuel Zelaya

José Manuel Zelaya Rosales (born 20 September 1952) is a Honduran politician who was President of Honduras from 27 January 2006 until his forcible removal in the 2009 coup d'état, and who since January 2022 serves as the first First Gentleman of Honduras.

He is the eldest son of a wealthy businessman, and inherited his father's nickname "Mel".

Before entering politics he was involved in his family's logging and timber businesses.

Elected as a liberal, Zelaya shifted to the political left during his presidency, forging an alliance with the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas known as ALBA.

Zelaya joined the Liberal Party of Honduras, Partido Liberal de Honduras, (PLH) in 1970 and became active a decade later.

Zelaya's father got a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the 1975 Los Horcones massacre, which took place on the Zelaya family ranch, Los Horcones.

As a result of an amnesty, he served less than two.

Since January 1976 Zelaya has been married to Xiomara Castro, the current President of Honduras, elected in the 2021 general election.

Upon his wife's inauguration, Zelaya became the first "First Gentleman" in Honduran history.

Zelaya was born the eldest of four children in Juticalpa, Olancho.

Two of his brothers remain alive.

Zelaya's mother, Ortensia Rosales de Zelaya, has been described as his best campaigner.

His family first lived in Copán, then they moved east to Catacamas, Olancho.

He attended Niño Jesús de Praga y Luis Landa elementary school and the Instituto Salesiano San Miguel.

He began his university studies in civil engineering, but left in 1976 with 11 courses completed, for agriculture and the forestry sector.

He was forced to take over the family business by the arrest of his father José Manuel Zelaya Ordoñez, implicated in the murders known as "Slaughter of the Horcones."

These murders also involved Mayor José Enrique Chinchilla, Sub-Lieutenant Benjamín Plata, José Manuel Zelaya Ordoñez (property owner) and Carlos Bhar.

They were charged and taken to the Central Prison; after four years in prison, they were favored with a pardon from the head of state, General Policarpo Paz García, in 1979.

He has engaged in business activities, including timber and cattle, handed down to him by his late father.

He is now a landowner in Olancho.

He was a deputy in the National Congress for three consecutive times between 1985 and 1998.

He held many positions within the PLH and was Minister for Investment in charge of the Honduran Social Investment Fund (HSIF) in a previous PLH government.

In 1987, Zelaya became manager of the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise (COHEP), as well as of the National Association of Wood Processing Enterprises.

The COHEP occupies a particularly important role in Honduran politics, as the Constitution delineates that the organization elects one of the seven members of the Nominating Board that proposes nominees to the Supreme Court of Honduras.

In the 2005 presidential primaries, his faction was called Movimiento Esperanza Liberal (MEL).

He received 52% of the 289,300 Liberal votes, vs. 17% for Jaime Rosenthal Oliva and 12% for Gabriela Núñez, the candidate of the Nueva Mayoría faction.

Zelaya won the general election of November 27 with 918,669 votes, which accounted for 49.9% of voters, defeating the National party candidate Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who received 46.22% of the votes.

During Zelaya's time in office, Honduras became a member of ALBA, an international cooperation organization based on the idea of social, political, and economic integration between the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

It marked his turning to left-of-center politics, the first such case of right to left policy switch as he had been elected in on a conservative platform.

Political opponents, particularly business elites, opposed his foreign policy, including his alliance with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and friendship with Cuba's Raúl Castro.

In spite of a number of economic problems, there were a number of significant achievements under Zelaya's presidency.

Under his government, free education for all children was introduced, subsidies to small farmers were provided, bank interest rates were reduced, the minimum wage was increased by 80%, school meals were guaranteed for more than 1.6 million children from poor families, domestic employees were integrated into the social security system, poverty was reduced by almost 10% during two years of government, and direct state help was provided for 200,000 families in extreme poverty, with free electricity supplied to those Hondurans most in need.

On 22 July 2008, Zelaya sought to incorporate Honduras into ALBA, an international cooperation organization based on the idea of social, political, and economic integration in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Zelaya said that the main media outlets in Honduras, owned by wealthy conservatives, were biased against him and did not cover what his government was doing: "No one publishes anything about me. . . . what prevails here is censorship of my government by the mass media."

Inter Press Service says that the vast majority of radio and TV stations and print publications are owned by just six families.

According to a paper written by Manuel Orozco and Rebecca Rouse for the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in the United States, the Honduran media operate as arms of political parties.

On 28 June 2009, during the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis, he was seized by the military and sent to Costa Rica in a coup d'état.

On 21 September 2009 he returned to Honduras clandestinely and resurfaced in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.

In 2010, he left Honduras for the Dominican Republic, an exile that lasted more than a year.

He now represents Honduras as a deputy of the Central American Parliament.