Just to be clear, until 2009 Honduras had one of the most stable governments in Central America. My experience was in 2008. I found that while Hondurans are generally warm, anyone I interacted with in an official capacity was officious and unpleasant. It's like an entire country run by the DMV.

My closing comments when I left Honduras are here: http://www.advrider.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8366876&po...

(you can browse a few posts earlier for more pics - sadly I didn't take a lot during my customs experience)

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not clear you can separate "the people" from "the government" here. The cruft that is the Honduran civil system just accumulated over decades - it wasn't imposed by a dictator or anything like that.