FACTBOX: Key facts about crisis-hit Honduras

(Reuters) - Honduras chooses a new president on Sunday in an election that has been touted by the United States as the way to end a political crisis sparked by President Manuel Zelaya's ouster in a June coup.

Zelaya, a leftist former logging magnate, has been holed up in the Brazilian embassy since sneaking back to the country from exile in September and denounced the vote organized by the de facto government as illegitimate.

His supporters are boycotting the ballot and some Latin American countries say they might not recognize the winner.

Here are some facts about Honduras:

* Honduras has a long history of military coups. The army overthrew presidents in 1956, 1963 and 1972 and proceeded to head a series of governments virtually uninterrupted until 1982, when power was handed over to civilians.

* In the 1980s, the United States used Honduras as a staging ground for its proxy war against the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, training and funding thousands of Contra soldiers and providing millions of dollars in military aide to the Honduran army.

* Honduras is the second most populous country in Central America after Guatemala with 7.7 million people, mostly of mixed Spanish and native decent. Before the Spanish conquest, the Maya built elaborate temples and sculptures at city of Copan in the jungle near the border with Guatemala. The Garifuna people -- descendants of Arawak Indians and shipwrecked African slaves -- live near the Caribbean coast.

* One of the poorest countries in Latin America, Honduras suffers high levels of violence from youth street gangs and drug traffickers moving South American cocaine to consumers in the North. The largest source of foreign currency is money sent home from the more than 1 million migrants living in the Unites States. Heavily dependent on foreign aide, Honduras had a setback when international lenders pulled funding to condemn the de facto government after Zelaya was toppled.

* Honduras' economy was dominated, until the mid-20th century, by foreign-owned banana companies that wielded outsized influence in politics and controlled wide swaths of land. Still a major exporter of the fruit, Honduras is also Central America's No. 2 coffee producer. Part of a regional free trade deal with the United States, Honduras developed its textile industry to diversify away from dependence on agriculture.

(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg and Gustavo Palenciain Tegucigalpa; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)