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| Honduras is located in Central America |
The flag of Honduras was officially accepted in the month of January 9, 1866. The flag of Honduras relates well to the design of United States of Central America flag. The flag is designed with three equal parallel bands; wherein the topmost and the bottom most band, colored in blue denote the presence of two major seas in our province namely the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The blue five-pointed stars are scattered in the middle portion of the white band in a typical X pattern, which denotes the existing five nations of the previous United States of Central America after the province emerged its victory and autonomy from the Spain domination. They were El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala nation.
The name of the country means "depths." It was so named by Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage because of the deep waters at the mouth of the Tinto o Negro River off the Mosquito Coast.
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INFO AT A GLANCE
Wedge-shaped Honduras, the second largest of the five Central American republics, is the most mountainous and the only one having no active volcanoes. Extensive forest regions cover 45% of the country. Conquered by the Spanish in the 1500s, Honduras gained independence from Spain in 1821, along with the other Central American provinces. In 1838 Honduras declared its separation from the Central American Federation and became an independent republic.
The Honduran people are chiefly of Spanish and Indian descent (mestizo), with a few areas of strictly Indian descent. Over half of the population of Honduras is under the age of 15 years old. About 70% of the people live in the central plateau.
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| On the island of Roatan |
Honduras is a study in contrasts. Tourists flock to its Caribbean coastline resorts, picturesque colonial cities and famous archeological sites. Its capital city, Tegucigalpa, bustles with commerce and statecraft. This Central American country is a democracy, with a popularly elected president and Congress. It’s also home to many Rotary clubs, which have supported a myriad of community service projects over the years, including microfinance.
The commodities that are exported from this region are bananas, coffee, timber, minerals (Silver, lead, zinc), beef, and seafood. The agricultural industry supports the economy efficiently. The major crops that are produced here are corns, beans, rice, and sugarcane.
Republic of Honduras
República de Honduras (Spanish)
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| Honduran Coat of Arms |
Motto: "Libre, Soberana e Independiente" (Spanish)
"Free, Sovereign and Independent"
Anthem: National Anthem of Honduras
Capital: (and largest city) Tegucigalpa
Official Language(s): Spanish
Recognised regional languages: Garifuna, English, Miskito,and other indigenous languages
Ethnic groups:
90% Mestizo mixture of white and american indian
7% Amerindian
2% Black
1% White
Demonym: Honduran
Government: Constitutional republic
- President: Porfirio Lobo Sosa
- Vice President: María Antonieta de Bográn
- President of the National Congress: Juan Orlando Hernández
- President of the Supreme Court: Jorge Rivera Avilés
Independence:
from Spain: 15 September 1820
- from the Federal Republic of Central America: 31 May 1838
- recognized by Spain: 17 November 1894
- from the United States of Central America: 10 December 1898
Area
- Total: 112,492 km2
43,278 sq mi
43,278 sq mi
Population
- August 2009 estimate: 7,810,848²
- 2000 census: 6,975,204
- Density: 64/km2
166/sq mi
- Per capita: $2,150
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| Currency: Lempira (HNL) |
Time zone: CST (UTC-6)
Drives on the Right
Internet TLD: .hn
Calling code: 504
2 Estimates explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality and death rates, lower population and growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected, as of July 2007
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LANGUAGE
Spanish is the dominant national language. Although originally imposed by the conquistadores, it has been widely spoken in Honduras for over two hundred years. Almost all residents speak Spanish, although some also speak English or one of the Native American languages discussed in the previous paragraph. Honduran Spanish has a distinct accent. Hondurans use some words that are not heard in other Spanish-speaking countries, and this gives their speech a distinctive character.
ECONOMY
The other reality of Honduras is that nearly two-thirds of its rural population lives in poverty. In fact, Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. As one of the poorest countries in Latin America, Honduras has a per capita income of US$920 (2002). According to the World Bank, nearly two-thirds of Hondurans (63.3 percent) live in poverty, and close to half (45.2 percent) are extremely poor.
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| Harvesting Coffee Beans |
Honduras is a country rich in natural resources, but like most developing countries, only the wealthy and foreign corporations benefit from this wealth, not the poor. In fact, Honduras makes more money exporting its people to work abroad than it does on traditional exports of bananas or coffee. The gross family remittances from Hondurans living abroad (mostly in the United States) rose 27 percent to $700 million in 2002, making family remittances the country's main source of foreign currency.
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| Tegucigalpa, the capitol of Honduras |
In an effort to combat poverty and unemployment, Honduras has opened up its economy to the maquiladora sector (foreign-owned assembly plants for export), which is the third-largest in the world, employing 110,000 Hondurans (out of a total population of 6.5 million). Maquiladoras are foreign-owned assembly plants for the export of goods, and are an integral aspect of the Plan Puebla Panama
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| The poor people use whatever materials are available for building their homes |
(PPP), a mega development plan encompassing the expansion of maquiladoras in industrial zones. This is despite the fact that they pay, on average $3.50 a day, allow no union organizing, and predominantly employ only young women who are often forced to work long hours of overtime and face high levels of exploitation and sexual harassment. Honduras is known to have in store rich reserves of forest resources and mineral deposits. Silver, lead, zinc, iron, gold, cadmium, antimony, and copper are some of the possessions the country preserves in its stocks.
Several industries that are located in the area of San Pedro Sula are chiefly based on sugar, coffee, textiles, clothing, lumber, and wood products.
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| Lenca woman and child |
The poorest of the poor live in the country’s rugged rural highlands. Here, 2.6 million of Honduras’ poorest live on highly forested, remote mountains. Intibucá, the mountainous province in southwest Honduras, is further behind in its economic development, in part due to the social isolation of the Lenca indigenous group. The Lenca Indians are one of the largest indigenous groups in this beautiful but impoverished country. In the Intibucá region, where the Lenca have lived for centuries, illiteracy and childhood malnutrition rates are twice the national average and the Lenca are among the most marginalized among Hondurans. As many as 70% of the women in these barely accessible areas are illiterate; only 20% have had secondary level schooling. In Intibucá the illiteracy rate is double that in Honduras as a whole.
Many are the head of their household and must work long hours on steep slopes to provide for their families, in which there are an average of seven children. These hardy people live hours from the nearest towns, most have no transportation, and the prized decorations in their humble homes are a wedding photo, religious image and their children’s third or sixth grade diplomas.
In 1998, Honduras was severely hit by Hurricane Mitch, which devastated the nation’s infrastructure and economy. Mitch caused such massive and widespread damage that Honduran President Carlos Roberto Flores claimed it destroyed fifty years of progress in the country. An estimated 70–80% of the transportation infrastructure of the entire country was wiped out, including nearly all bridges and secondary roads; the damage was so great that existing maps were rendered obsolete. About 25 small villages were reported to have been entirely destroyed by the landslides caused by the storm. Damages to the transportation and communication network totaled to $529 million (1998 USD, $619 million 2006 USD). 
The extreme flooding and mudslides killed over 6,500, with several thousand missing. Many of the unidentified were buried in mass graves, resulting in great uncertainty over the final death toll. Over 20% of the country's population, possibly as many as 1.5 million people, were left homeless. The severe crop shortages left many villages on the brink of starvation, while lack of sanitation led to outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever, and cholera. In all, at least 7,000 were reported dead and damage was pegged at $3.8 billion in Honduras.As a result, Honduras remains one of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. 
Honduras: 7000 dead, 8300 missing Nicaragua: 3000 dead, 2200 missing
Guatemala: 258 dead, 121 missing
El Salvador: 272 dead, 100 missing
RELIGION
The constitution guarantees religious freedom and the separation of church and state; however, the Roman Catholic Church has been a powerful institution in Honduras since colonial times. As a result of various tensions between the church and the state throughout the centuries, in the 1880s the Roman Catholic Church was stripped of some of its economic and political power. Nevertheless, in the twentieth century the church has remained an important social actor, and the vast majority of Hondurans have remained Roman Catholic. Church schools receive government subsidies, and religious instruction is part of the public school curriculum. The Roman Catholic Church reports a membership that comprises slightly more than 80% of the country's total population. 
The Roman Catholic Church in Honduras launched an ambitious evangelical campaign in the 1950s. The program's aim was to invigorate church membership and encourage more active participation in church activities. By the 1960s and 1970s, this activism had grown among certain sectors of the church into denunciations of the military's repression and the government's exploitation of the poor. This social activist phase in the Roman Catholic Church ended after large landowners in Olancho brutally murdered ten peasants, two students, and two priests in 1975. After this incident, the government took measures to dissuade the more activist factions in the church from continuing their actions. Expulsions and arrests of foreign priests took place, and some peasant centers with ties to the church were forced to close. The Roman Catholic Church retreated from its emphasis on social activism during the last half of the 1970s but resumed its criticism of government policies during the 1980s. Protestant, especially evangelical, churches have undergone a tremendous growth in membership during the 1980s. The largest numbers are found in Methodist, Church of God, Seventh Day Adventist, and Assemblies of God denominations. These churches sponsor social service programs in many communities, making them attractive to the lower classes. The evangelical leadership generally exerts a conservative influence on the political process.
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| A Catholic Procession |
Although Protestant membership was estimated at only 100,000 in 1990, growth of Protestant churches is apparently seen as a threat by Roman Catholic leaders. Instances of criticism leveled at evangelicals by Roman Catholic leaders have increased; however, such criticisms have generally been ineffective in stemming the rise of converts to Protestant denominations.
(Data as of December 1993)
SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND CONTROL
Until the 1990s, civilians were policed by a branch of the army, but this force has been replaced by a civil police force. Most crime tends to be economically motivated. In cities, people do not leave their homes unattended for fear of having the house broken into and robbed of everything, including light bulbs and toilet paper. Many families always leave at least one person home. Revenge killings and blood feuds are common in some parts of the country, especially in the department of Olancho. Police are conspicuous in the cities. Small towns have small police stations. Police officers do not walk a beat in the small towns but wait for people to come to the station and report problems. In villages there is a local person called the regidor , appointed by the government, who reports murders and major crimes to the police or mayor of a nearby town. Hondurans discuss their court system with great disdain. People who cannot afford lawyers may be held in the penitentiary for over ten years without a trial. People who can afford good lawyers spend little time in jail regardless of the crimes they have committed.
Until after the 1980s, crimes committed by members of the armed forces were dismissed out of hand. Even corporals could murder citizens and never be charged in court. In 1991, some military men, including colonels, raped and murdered a university student. Her school and family, the press, and the United States embassy exerted pressure until two men were sent to prison. This event was the start of a movement to modernize and improve the court system.
M EDICINE AND H EALTH CARE
Sickness or an accident is a nightmare for people in the countryside and the urban poor. It may take hours to get a patient to a hospital by traveling over long dirt roads that often lack public transportation. Doctors may be unable to do much for a patient if the patient's family cannot afford to buy medicine. If the patient is an adult, the household may have to struggle to make a living until he or she recovers. Some traditional medical practitioners use herbal medicines and set broken bones.
GOVERNMENT
The most important political offices are the national president, members of congress ( diputados ) and city mayors. In addition to the executive branch (a president and a cabinet of ministers) and a unicameral congress, there is a supreme court.
Honduras is governed under the constitution of 1982 as amended. The president, who is both head of state and head of government, is popularly elected for a four-year term. The unicameral legislature, the National Congress, has 128 members, also elected for four years. Administratively, the country is divided into 18 departments, namely Atlántida Choluteca, Colón, Comayagua, Copán, Cortés, El Paraíso, Francisco Morazán, Gracias a Dios, Intibucá, Islas de la Bahía, La Paz, Lempira, Ocotepeque, Olancho, Santa Bárbara, Valle and Yoro.
Honduras still has the two political parties that emerged in the nineteenth century: the Liberales and the Nacionalistas. The Liberales originally were linked to the business sector, and the Nacionalistas with the wealthy rural landowners, but this difference is fading. Both parties are pro–United States, and pro-business. There is little ideological difference between them. Each is associated with a color, red for Liberals and blue for Nationalists.
People tend to belong to the same party as their parents. Working on political campaigns is an important way of advancing in a party. The party that wins the national elections fires civil servants from the outgoing party and replaces them with its own members. This tends to lower the effectiveness of the government bureaucracy because people are rewarded not for fulfilling their formal job descriptions but for being loyal party members and for campaigning actively (driving around displaying the party flag, painting signs, and distributing leaflets).
Members of congress have criminal immunity and can literally get away with murder.
