Honduran Constituent Assembly election, 1956

A legislative election was held in Honduras on 7 October 1956. The people elected 58 deputies to the Constituent Assembly.

The President Julio Lozano Díaz decided to hold rigged elections for a new legislature in October 1956. With the Liberals exiled and the Carías faction of the Nationals boycotting them, the elections were an easy victory for Julio Lozano Díaz Lozano. Nonetheless, blood ran in the streets when a group of protesting Liberals were fired on by police in Tegucigalpa.

The fraud was transparent. With both traditional parties denouncing Julio Lozano Díaz Lozano’s already illegal and increasingly unpopular regime and the prospect of further violence quite manifest, the army was obliged to intervene.

“On 21 October a military coup led by the younger officers unseated the seventy-one-year-old dictator, who was hustled into exile without bloodshed and without ceremony. Having won power…they began to set in motion the machinery for truly free elections to give the country a constituent assembly which in turn would choose a new president”.

The top conspirators included Colonel Héctor Caraccioli, head of the air force; Major Roberto Gálvez Barnes, minister of development; and General Roque J. Rodríguez, director of the military academy in Tegucigalpa. These officers then organized a military government with General Rodríguez as its apparent leader, primarily because of his seniority.

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