Xiomara Castro for President?

On November 17th El Heraldo ran a news story claiming that Xiomara Castro, Manuel Zelaya Rosales's wife, is the candidate, by consensus, of the new LIBRE party, without ever having to stand for election in a primary. This in turn, was based on a La Tribuna story from the day before.

Trouble is, it wasn't true.

LIBRE includes five political currents, each of which has the right to name a primary candidate for president. These include the Movimiento 28 de Junio (composed of former Liberal Party members) whose candidate will be, if the Pope agrees, Monsignor Luis Alfonso Santos, outgoing bishop of Santa Rosa de Copan. The other currents are the Movimeinto Resistencia Progresista (MRP), the Pueblo Organizado en Resistencia (POR), the Movimiento 5 de Julio, and Fuerza de Refundación Popular (FRP).

According to La Tribuna, the FRP floated the idea of Xiomara Castro being a consensus candidate for the party. This was supposedly announced on the Facebook page of Los Necios.

La Tribuna attributed the posting to Manuel Zelaya, acting as coordinator of the FNRP, who they said wrote that

militants of the FNRP mostly lack a place in (eg, do not identify with) the movements described above that will go to the internal elections of 2012 for reasons that are irrelevant to treat here; therefore we have decided to create the FRP, which is directed by assistant coordinator Juan Barahona.

I am unable to verify this alleged Zelaya statement on the Los Necios Facebook page, since they decided to unfriend me over my questioning of their support for Col. Ghadaffi of Libya. But I tend to doubt its authenticity, since Zelaya's communications are usually published on the website voselsoberano.com, which remained silent on the issue.

It was on voselsoberano.com that Zelaya Rosales wrote his reply to the rumor on the 18th of November. His statement noted that the newspaper had written such an article making claims, but reaffirmed that LIBRE is a political party founded under the election laws of Honduras and as such, those laws and its own charter indicated how it would proceed to select its candidate.

Furthermore Zelaya wrote:

Remember that the Movimiento de Resistencia Progresista (MRP), one of the internal currents of the LIBRE Party, coordinated by Rasel Tomé, has taken the initiative to propose that citizen Xiomara Castro be the presidential candidate, by partial or total consensus of all the internal currents, which means that this decision will be submitted to the groups of the Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE) party, and they will be consulted by the election urns of the internal election.

So not only did La Tribuna get it wrong as to who was proposing Xiomara Castro as consensus candidate (the FRP led by Juan Barahona versus the MRP led by Rasel Tomé), but they got it wrong in reporting it as a decision already made.

So, yes, Xiomara Castro will be the internal candidate of the MRP movement, and her candidacy will be voted on in the internal party elections, supervised by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral in 2012. Only if she wins the internal elections will she become the party candidate for president.

And that should suggest just how unreliable the sources for some of the Honduran media really are.