Honduras

Porfirio Lobo Sosa, known as Pepe Lobo has been on Twitter only since 4 April 2011, on the eve of re-joining the Organisation of American States (OAS). His Twitter activity was sparse, with only 24 tweets in 2011, but has picked up since May 2012 with almost one tweet/day. Pepe Lobo who came to power in the wake of the Honduran constitutional crisis, which culminated in the removal and exile of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, has not established Twitter relations with any other regional and world leaders. The overarching themes of his Twitter feed are national reconciliation, safety and criminality: “The most important is Honduras and Our reconciliation, we need the Honduras family to be united in order to go ahead as a nation.”

@CommunicadosHN, set up on the same day as Pepe Lobo’s account is the official account of the government. The account is mostly used to broadcast communiques on government activities and pictures uploaded to Facebook. The main topics of the government account are national reconciliation, public safety and the fight against poverty. However, its 600 tweets have only ever been retweeted 20 times and the account never tweeted an @mention or @reply.

The Honduras ‘Peace’ account was launched on 23 September 2009 at the height of the constitutional crisis by acting president Roberto Micheletti, who assumed power following a coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya. When Zelaya returned to Honduras the account tweeted in English: “Manuel Zelaya and his followers have been vandalizing houses and cars near the Brazilian embassy at Tegucigalpa.” During the crisis the de facto government declared “peace and calm state in the country” and tried to raise awareness by @mentioning Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus and Barak Obama via Twitter: “@BarackObama Mr: Obama we are the official Honduran Government twitter and we were asking if you realized that Honduras is in a calm state.” Since August 2010 the account has mainly retweeted tweets from the Diario de la Prensa, a local newspaper.

@PresidenciadeHN was the official account of the presidential administration keeping the general public abreast of the activities of the president and the first lady, the government and the cabinet. The account has been dormant since June 2011. From March until June 2011 the tweets focused on public hearings, encouraging the public to participate by sending their questions by phone.