Ricardo Maduro Joest of the National Party won the 2001 presidential elections. During his time in office, Honduras received debt relief and ratified the implementation of the Central America–Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA–DR) with the United States. Manuel Zelaya of the Liberal Party took over the presidency in 2006, after defeating the National Party’s candidate, rancher Porfirio Lobo Sosa, in the 2005 presidential election—one of the closest races in the country’s history.

Zelaya focused on fighting crime and the ongoing drug trade in the country. His administration extended the protection that allowed hundreds of thousands of Hondurans to continue working legally in the United States. Remittances from workers there accounted for about one-fourth of the Honduran gross domestic product. A longtime boundary dispute with Nicaragua was settled in 2007 by the United Nations, and it resulted in Honduras gaining sovereignty over four Caribbean islands. In 2008 Honduras joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas [ALBA; Alternativa later changed to Alianza (“Alliance”)]), a leftist alliance formed in 2004 by Venezuela and Cuba.

On June 28, 2009, President Zelaya was ousted in a military coup for having forged ahead with a national referendum that, if passed, would have allowed him to revise the constitution and serve a second presidential term. The military and the National Congress had opposed the referendum, which also had been declared illegal by the Supreme Court. Later that day, after the military flew Zelaya to Costa Rica, the National Congress voted him out of office and elected congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as acting president. The international community quickly condemned the ouster. The United Nations passed a resolution that recognized Zelaya as the rightful president of Honduras. Likewise, the Organization of American States (OAS) demanded that Zelaya be restored to the presidency. In response, Honduras withdrew from the latter organization. The OAS, declaring the withdrawal illegitimate because it did not recognize Honduras’s interim government, then unanimously voted to suspend Honduras from the group.

In July Costa Rican Pres. Óscar Arias Sánchez began mediating the Honduran political crisis, but Zelaya and Micheletti rebuffed his proposed solutions. Zelaya, who had been in exile mostly in Nicaragua, furtively reentered Honduras on September 21 and sought refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. In early November a U.S.-brokered attempt to form a unity government failed, and Zelaya continued to take refuge in the embassy. As Honduras remained in political isolation, the National Congress decided not to vote on Zelaya’s reinstatement until after November 29, the date of the country’s scheduled national elections. Neither Zelaya nor Micheletti participated in this presidential race, in which Zelaya’s old rival Lobo emerged as the winner. More than three-fifths of voters reportedly participated in the election, a higher than average turnout for the country. Instances of voter intimidation were reported, however, and several countries in South America refused to recognize the election results. On December 2 the National Congress voted overwhelmingly against reinstating Zelaya, whose term had been set to end in late January 2010. On January 27, the day that Lobo was sworn in as president, Zelaya went into exile in the Dominican Republic. In May 2011, however, Lobo and Zelaya met in Colombia and signed an agreement that set the stage for the former president to return home and for Honduras’s reinstatement in the OAS.

In the early 2010s Honduras was afflicted with one of the world’s highest per capita homicide rates as violent gang-related crime reached epidemic proportions, largely as a result of Mexican drug cartels’ use of the country as a transit point. In November 2011 an emergency decree granted the military broad police powers in an attempt to staunch the crime, killing, and police corruption. Violence and death were also much in evidence in the long-running battle between peasants and large landowners in the Bajo Aguán region, where farmworkers had occupied land that wealthy landowners had purchased in the 1990s from farm cooperatives under circumstances the peasants claimed were illegal. Hopes for an end to gang-related violence ballooned in May 2013 when Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street Gang (Mara 18)—two gangs that were at the centre of the violence in Honduras and elsewhere in the region, especially in El Salvador—agreed to a truce.

In late November 2013 Juan Orlando Hernández of the National Party was declared the winner of the presidential election held on November 24. He captured more than 36 percent of the vote, while about 29 percent was for the second-place finisher, Xiomara Castro, the candidate of the Freedom and Refoundation (Libertad y Refundación; Libre) Party, which had been founded by Zelaya, her husband. The remaining votes were divided between six other candidates. Claiming that the election results were “a fraud of incalculable proportions,” Castro demanded a recount, and her supporters took to the streets in protest. Though international observers declared that the election process had been transparent, they said that there had been election irregularities.

On January 27, 2014, Hernández was inaugurated as president. Because his National Party held just 48 of the 128 seats in the National Congress, it was forced to make legislative concessions to the Liberal Party to win its support for the National Party’s candidate for the chamber’s presidency, Mauricio Oliva. Most notably, it agreed to remove a 15 percent retail sales tax on basic consumer goods from a highly controversial economic-reform law (“paquetazo azul”) that had been enacted in 2013.

Hondurans took to the streets in 2015 to protest Hernández’s alleged embroilment in a corruption scandal involving the bilking of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds by Social Security Institute officials, who then allegedly doled out inflated contracts to suspect and dummy companies. Hernández admitted to having accepted contributions to his 2013 presidential campaign from some of the companies involved but claimed ignorance of the origin of the funds.

Having pointed in 2014 to the desire to escape crime-related violence as the main reason why Honduran minors by the thousands attempted to migrate illegally to the U.S., Hernández welcomed the arrival of the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras. Sponsored by the Organization of American States, the mission, which included international judges, prosecutors, and legal experts, was charged with working with the Honduran Supreme Court and prosecutors to investigate corruption. Meanwhile, in April 2016, more than two dozen high-ranking police officials were fired as part of the latest effort to eradicate the alleged influence of organized crime on the national police force. The purge came in response to newspaper reports earlier in the month of a cover-up of internal police investigations that allegedly revealed that the top police commanders, acting at the behest of drug lords, were responsible for the 2009 murder of the leading antidrug official and that of his top aide in 2011.

Shrouded in mystery and awash in widespread accusations of fraud, the Honduran presidential election on November 26, 2017, plunged the country into weeks of uncertainty and fatal violence. In April 2015 allies of Hernández had persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the law that prevented presidents from seeking a second term, the very same aspiration that had led to the ouster of Zelaya from the presidency in 2009.

Thus, in November 2017 Hernández stood for reelection, against his principal challenger, onetime sportscaster Salvador Nasralla, the candidate of the opposition Alliance coalition. Nasralla stunned observers when, with some 57 percent of the vote counted, he led the incumbent by 5 percent. At this point, Luis Zelaya, the candidate of the Liberal Party, conceded and called on Hernández to do the same. Some international media outlets began presenting Nasralla as the imminent winner. Then, suddenly, public announcements of the election results went silent for more than a day. When they resumed, Nasralla’s lead had shrunk. Ultimately, the electoral commission announced that Hernández had overtaken Nasralla to win by a small margin.

A tremendous outcry ensued. Thousands took to the streets to protest, resulting in violence that caused more than 20 deaths. The Alliance presented the electoral commission with a list of 11 demands to be met if the opposition were to accept the outcome of the election as fair and transparent. The commission responded by pledging to recount 1,000 polling tallies. On December 17 the commission announced its final official count, declaring Hernández the winner with 42.95 percent of the vote to 41.42 percent for Nasralla. Although European Union election observers said that they had found no irregularities in the recount, the Alliance immediately called for new elections, as did the Organization of American States. Nevertheless, Hernández was eventually confirmed as the winner. In the aftermath of the election, the United Nations brokered an agreement between the National Party, the Liberal Party, and Nasralla that established a set of electoral reforms that were intended to restore the Honduran public’s faith in the country’s elections.

At the centre of Honduran political life during this period was the issue of emigration. For more than two decades there had been a steady increase in the flight of Hondurans to the United States. The exodus began in 1998 in response to the toll taken on Honduras by hugely destructive Hurricane Mitch. It escalated in the 21st century as economic opportunities disappeared and crime-related violence mushroomed, and it spiked following the 2009 coup, the 2013 election, and especially the 2017 election, which gave rise to the first mass caravan of Honduran migrants the next year. Tellingly, in 2009, 850 Hondurans requested asylum in the United States, and by 2019 that number had grown to more than 41,000. The tide swelled again after Hurricanes Etas and Iota clobbered Honduras in late 2020, disrupting the lives of four million Hondurans and causing some $1.9 billion in damage. At the same time, life in Honduras, like elsewhere around the world, was turned upside down by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic, which became another important push factor for emigration. Between October 2020 and September 2021, 320,000 Honduran migrants were taken into custody on the U.S. border, the highest annual total to date.

Meanwhile, Hernández’s second presidential term was tainted by accusations of corruption, including allegations that he was involved in cocaine trafficking. Hernández stridently protested his innocence, but he was identified as a coconspirator in several criminal prosecutions, most notably that of his brother, who was convicted in the United States of drug trafficking and in March 2021 received a life sentence. Because the prospect of extradition to the U.S. on criminal charges hung over Hernández once he was out of office, the results of the November 2021 legislative and presidential elections threatened important consequences for him.

As the presidential campaign season progressed, Nasry Asfura, the mayor of Tegucigalpa and the standard-bearer for Hernández’s National Party, sought to distance himself from the incumbent. His principal competitors in a field of more than a dozen candidates were Yani Rosenthal, the candidate of the Liberal Party, who himself had served time for money laundering, and Castro, whose run as the Libre candidate was guided by husband Zelaya and supported by Nasralla. When the results were in, Castro had tallied more than 51 percent of the vote to become the country’s first woman president. Asfura finished second, with nearly 37 percent of the vote, and Rosenthal third, with about 10 percent.

On February 15, 2022, some three weeks after Hernández left office, Honduran officials responded to a U.S. request for his extradition by arresting the unpopular former president at his home. He stood to face charges of colluding with drug cartels to facilitate the transportation of hundreds of tons of cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela to the United States via Honduras in return for millions of dollars that he used to fund his political rise. At the end of March, the Honduran Supreme Court rejected Hernández’s legal efforts to block the extradition request, and in mid-April he was extradited to the United States.