Do we like them?

Do we like Manuel Zelaya?

Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up and he backed some good policy, but a family scandal and a contested past leave the record mixed.

Manuel Zelaya was Honduras' president from 2006 until soldiers removed him in June 2009. He was elected as a Liberal and moved steadily left, joining Venezuela's regional alliances and pushing a poll on rewriting the constitution. That poll is what his opponents say crossed the line, and it set off the crisis.

Honduras' own Truth Commission looked at the 2009 crisis and found two things at once. It said Zelaya broke the law by defying the Supreme Court, and that his removal was also illegal and amounted to a coup. So where you land depends on whether you see him as a president wronged or a president who pushed his luck. Both can be true.

On the harm test, I couldn't find anything he has said or done against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. In September 2022 he called on Libre's grassroots to march with the LGBTQ+ community at the Pride-style civic events. My research was thin here, and I couldn't open every page, so treat that as a gap, not a clean bill of health.

The shadow over him is the family one. In 2024 InSight Crime published a 2013 video of his brother Carlos meeting men described as drug traffickers, and Manuel publicly denied receiving drug money. Reporting says Carlos then resigned his posts so an investigation could proceed, and one early-2026 report said no charge had followed. It is a serious accusation by association, not a finding against Manuel.

Lately he has still been in the political fight. In December 2025 he rejected a National Party accusation that he was obstructing the official declaration of the election results. That is one side's claim against another in a bitter count, so I'd read it as politics, not proof of anything.

The good stuff is real. In 2009 he lifted the minimum wage by 60 per cent, which business leaders accepted while calling it disproportionate. It was a rare move for workers, and plenty of Hondurans still credit him for it.