Two conservative challengers were practically tied for the lead in Honduras’s presidential contest, with votes from about 55 per cent of polling places counted early Monday, according to preliminary and partial results.
The vote came just days after U.S. President Donald Trump intervened in a close race by endorsing one of those candidates and announcing he would pardon a former president.
The National Electoral Council said that Nasry (Tito) Asfura of the National Party had 40 per cent of votes in early counting, while Salvador Nasralla, of the conservative Liberal Party, had about 39.78 per cent. Rixi Moncada of the democratic socialist LIBRE, or Liberty and Re-foundation Party, trailed with 19.49 per cent.
Both Asfura and Nasralla said it was still early in the count and resisted declaring victory. After initial excitement at both parties’ campaign headquarters, the streets of the capital, Tegucigalpa, were generally quiet Sunday night as the count slowly advanced.
Asfura, the 67-year-old former mayor of Tegucigalpa who got Trump’s endorsement, ran as a pragmatic politician, pointing to his popular infrastructure projects.
Nasralla, a 72-year-old sportscaster, has campaigned with various parties over the years and even joined the ticket of current president Xiomara Castro four years ago.
As the preliminary results came in late Sunday, Nasralla said the race was still too close to call. He expressed confidence that the remaining vote tallies would favour him.
Nasralla tried to use Trump’s interference to bolster his own cultivated outsider status, even though it was his fourth bid for the presidency.
“I don’t answer to dark pacts, or corrupt networks or criminals who have killed our people,” he said.
‘Shocking’ pardon
Trump on Friday endorsed Asfura, saying he can work with him to counter drug trafficking and that “if he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,” without elaborating.
“I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists, and Nasralla is not a reliable partner for Freedom, and cannot be trusted,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Trump also shocked by announcing that he would pardon former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was one year into a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for helping drug traffickers move tons of cocaine to the United States.
Prosecutors said Hernández had used Honduras’s military and police to shepherd drug shipments through the country, earning him millions of dollars that fuelled his political rise from rural congressman to the presidency.
But Trump criticized Hernández’s prosecution, a wide-ranging case that also enveloped the former president’s brother, saying Friday that people he respects told him Hernández, who was with the National Party, was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”
The move angered Democrats in Washington as Trump has used the alleged flow of drugs to the U.S. as the legal underpinning justifying a series of strikes on vessels near Venezuela and in the eastern Pacific, which have killed more than 80 people since Sept. 2.
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called Trump’s decision to pardon Hernández “shocking.”
“He was the leader of one of the largest criminal enterprises that has ever been subject to a conviction in U.S. courts, and less than one year into his sentence, President Trump is pardoning him, suggesting that President Trump cares nothing about narcotrafficking,” Kaine said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
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Candidates make noises about not accepting result
Oliver Erazo, a law professor at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, said he didn’t expect Trump’s interference to have a big impact on voters’ decisions.
“The social and collective behaviour of the electorate was already defined a week or two ago, especially when it comes to the National Party and the Liberal Party,” he said.
Honduras, where six out of every 10 citizens live in poverty, suffered a coup in 2009 when an alliance of right-wing military figures, politicians and businessmen overthrew Manuel Zelaya, the husband of the current president.
In 2017, the first Trump administration endorsed Hernández’s re-election, even as the Organization of American States called for a redo due to widespread allegations of fraud. Hernández’s bid for a second term was contentious itself as he won a Supreme Court ruling to get around a prohibition for successive terms stemming from the country’s 1982 constitution.
The period between the end of the election and inauguration was marked by widespread protests.
In 2021, Hondurans voted massively for Xiomara Castro, ending more than a century of rule by the National and Liberal parties.
The final stages of this campaign were dominated by the three leading candidates trading accusations of election fixing, leading Honduran and international observers to warn that they could be undermine acceptance of the result.
Moncada, current President Castro’s handpicked successor, said in the days leading up to the election that she would not accept the preliminary tallies because she believed there was a plot to manipulate them.
She said she would not comment on the electoral council’s preliminary results until Monday.
Meanwhile, there was concern among the opposition that the governing LIBRE would use the levers of government to give Moncada an advantage in the contest.
Christopher Landau, U.S. deputy secretary of state, warned in a statement in the run-up that Washington would respond “swiftly and decisively to anyone who undermines the integrity of the democratic process in Honduras.”
Melany Martínez, a 30-year-old nurse, said she had heard talk in the street about the chance of trouble after the vote, and even suggestions to stock up on household essentials. She also was frustrated with the U.S. president intervention.
“I think the people’s decision must be taken here, because in the end, we’re the citizens,” she said.
Concerns about security and employment were top of mind for many voters.
The homicide and unemployment rates have both improved during the past four years under Castro, even as the International Monetary Fund applauded her administration’s fiscal responsibility, but Honduras still has Central America’s highest homicide rate.
Castro’s supporters point to the situation she inherited from ex-president Hernandez, whom her government extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges after he left office.
