President
Carlos Reina became president in November 1993, with the Liberal Party of Honduras (PLH, Partido liberal de Honduras), after defeating Oswaldo Ramos, the candidate of the National Party of Honduras with 56% of the vote. He was accompanied by his vice presidential candidate: retired General Walter López, the politician Juan de la Cruz Avelar and the lady Guadalupe Jerezano Mejía.
On January 27, 1994 Reina replaced president Rafael Leonardo Callejas. Reina inherited a relatively difficult economic situation from the existing nationalist administration. Foreign debt weighed heavily on the economy of the country: debt service represented 40% of Honduran exports. Even though approximately 700 million dollars were condoned to Honduras, the debt 'was' still higher than that it had been at the beginnings of 1990.
In his first presidential speech Reina launched his moral revolution: " I pledge my word of honor before God, before the people and before history, that we will go forward in this enterprise that we have imposed upon ourselves. We will defeat corruption; we will give currency to social liberalism. We will see the moral revolution to its end." The issue of whether his plan was a success or a failure is still highly controversial.
One of Carlos Roberto Reina's main objectives during his government was the reform of the Armed Forces. His reforms were mostly realized by the end of his first year in office. The first one was the total transfer of all power in hands of military men to civilian authorities, followed by the abolition of compulsory military service in the country. These and other reforms to the military are also controversial to the ruling elites, they believed it fomented gangs, by eliminating a source of employment and education for young men.
Read more about this topic: Carlos Roberto Reina
Famous quotes containing the word president:
“... [Washington] is always an entertaining spectacle. Look at it now. The present President has the name of Roosevelt, marked facial resemblance to Wilson, and no perceptible aversion, to say the least, to many of the policies of Bryan. The New Deal, which at times seems more like a pack of cards thrown helter skelter, some face up, some face down, and then snatched in a free-for-all by the players, than it does like a regular deal, is going on before our interested, if puzzled eyes.”
—Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980)
“A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“In externals we advance with lightening express speed, in modes of thought and sympathy we lumber on in stage-coach fashion.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)