Myda Ergmajer, 24, watched as her father, Milan, was fatally shot by pirates Dec. 9 while their boat was anchored off the coast of Honduras. He had been living on his boat for two years and his daughter flew to join him two weeks prior to his death.

After they shot her father, Myda scared them off with a flare gun and then had to spend 18 hours alone on the boat with her father’s body, waiting for the Honduran coast guard to save her. In the end, it was the U.S. Coast Guard that came to her rescue.

“It does have a bad effect on the country,” Cerrato said of the incident. “We are very deeply concerned about what happened.

“There’s danger everywhere we go, of course, and we feel terrible. I expect to go and pay my condolences to the daughter who had to see everything that happened.

“That must have been terrible and I can’t imagine being in her place and seeing that happen to my father.”

She said the local police are working hard to find those who are responsible for the death, and, she said, the minister of tourism has been in touch with her from the moment the news broke.

“We’ve been trying to resolve it and to give the family the comfort to know that the people who did this won’t be doing that to someone else,” said the ambassador, who presented her credentials in Canada three months ago.

She said she hopes it won’t affect the number of Canadians who are considering visiting Honduras or buying a retirement home there, as some already have.

This is hopefully an isolated case, Cerrato said.

“We will be working to show the better side of our country. Those cases do tend to black out everything positive that can be shown.”

Honduras, which has among the world’s highest murder rates, has been politically unstable since the ouster of president Jos Manuel Zelaya in 2009, but Cerrato says the country’s new government has been working hard on security.

The country has economic problems as well as education deficiencies, but one of the main things Hondurans want is security, she said. “They want to be able to go out and feel safe. (The government) has been working on this.”

She said officials have visited South American countries such as Chile and Colombia to study their police training systems. Cerrato, meanwhile, has been doing the same thing in Canada.

“I had a couple of meetings to talk about sharing the experience on the security issues,” she said. “We want to try to take advantage of that. We’ve had very positive responses.”

In addition to that, the ambassador, who comes to this diplomatic posting from the world of banking, is emphasizing that Honduras is a good place to do business.

Cerrato is holding a “Honduras is Open for Business” trade and information session next year and is telling her country’s story to Canadian companies.

Honduras is also negotiating a free-trade agreement with Canada and Cerrato says it’s close to being completed. She expects it will be finalized in the first quarter of 2011. “That will help me a lot,” she said.

From: Ottawa Citizen