PROFILE: Porfirio Lobo: usurper, or a way out for Honduras?

Nov 30, 2009, 3:44 GMT

   Tegucigalpa - Porfirio 'Pepe' Lobo was the apparent winner of Sunday's disputed presidential election election in Honduras.

   As such, his status was yet to be defined: is he the man set to take the Central American country out of a serious political quagmire, or is he to become another problem?

   Ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya and a fair portion of the international community have rejected the election as illegitimate, and it was uncertain whether Lobo would get the chance to overcome the legacy of both Zelaya - his democratically elected predecessor - and coup leader Roberto Micheletti.

   Lobo, 61, is a agri-businessman from Olancho, one of Honduras' main regions for production of beans and corn. Although he also studied in Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union, he would rather emphasize his degree from the University of Miami.

   Lobo is a conservative who proudly displays in his ranch near Tegucigalpa photos of his audience with Pope Benedikt XVI.

   He first ran for president four years ago but lost to Liberal Party candidate Zelaya by a small margin.

   He got a second chance, albeit in uncertain circumstances. The Liberal Party - to which both Zelaya and Micheletti belong - fell apart in the campaign. Its young candidate Elvin Santos, who had been regarded as the favourite prior to the June 28 coup that ousted Zelaya, got dragged into a major institutional crisis and dramatically lost ground.

   Like Zelaya, Lobo was born into a rich landowning family from Olancho. After flirting with communism in his youth - and travelling to Moscow in the process - he went back to his roots.

   He has been in politics since 1990, a representative of the National Party, the most conservative in Honduras, which has alternated in power with the Liberal Party for decades. Lobo was Congress speaker 2002-06, Micheletti's predecessor in the position.

   He has kept himself out of the power struggle of recent months, without saying whether he intends to pull Honduras out of the left-wing alliance led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

   But he did promise social reform, better education and more jobs for Honduras, the third-poorest country in the Americas after Haiti and Nicaragua.