Honduras Political Climate

Question 1 (150-200 words): Describe the political climate in your chosen country. Does your country’s leadership demonstrate a credible commitment to health services? If yes, how? If no, why not?
Honduras was run by military dictatorships from 1963 to 1972. For nearly two decades the authoritarian Honduran military was in control of the country, however in 1980 the first democratic government was voted in to office, in 1982 the Honduran constitution was enacted and allowed Honduras from 1982 to 1990 to be a weak but strengthening democracy. Then in 2009 another military coup took over the government, halting the progress of democracy in the country. After the transition to democracy (and two and a half years after the rupture of that democracy),
(Dal Roz, et al., 2015) In other words there is weak human resources for health information systems, and the governance of the human resource for health is fragile and weak. Another constraint is that, as it was illuminated in the previous question, Honduras lacks the political will and devoted support from their president Juan Orlando Hernández. This is a major issue because the president has control over the ability to maintain and regulate health care of the people of Honduras. Honduras also lacks the financial support and has been on a structural adjustment plan since the 1980s, this is also a result of previous presidencies and the current president Hernández’s unsuccessful use and development of the country’s economic and financial policies. Other reasons health services in Honduras are inhibited is the difficulty of training human resource health officials and difficulties in hiring and retaining health professionals in the public sector because of their allocation in remote and rural
President Juan Orlando Hernández, during his first campaign promised to do “whatever he needed to do” to confront these challenges. Among the many pledges in his governance plan, the so-called “Vida Mejor” plan, he committed to continuing endorsing the decentralization process. Yet, upon taking office, the President seems to have changed his priorities, and as people interviewed for this evaluation reported, “placed the decentralization agenda on the backburner.” As many of his detractors fear, his promise to do whatever he needs to do to improve the security situation and alleviate poverty might include re-centralizing power in the hands of the presidency (citation). In his second campaign it was yet again placed on the back burner, better yet badly taken advantage of, “…reported that President Juan Orlando Hernández that millions of dollars of public funds from the country’s health care system had been funneled to the ruling National Party and his election campaign” (Main, 2016). Past and present actions of the Honduras government officials continually lack the genuineness and dedication to addressing any public health