Two messages on social networks from US President Donald Trump. The preliminary count of the National Electoral Council, with 44.23% of the votes counted, gives an advantage to the candidate of the conservative National Party, supported by Trump. Asfura, whom the polls placed in third place, has so far received 40.39% of the vote, closely followed by the liberal candidate, television presenter Salvador Nasralla, with 39.20%. In a distant third place is Rixi Moncada, from the ruling Libre party, with 19.42% of the vote, which marks a strong setback for the movement founded by the former president, overthrown by a military coup in 2009.
Trump burst into the final stretch of the election campaign on Wednesday to endorse Asfura, former mayor of Tegucigalpa and with whom he said he could work to “fight the narco-communists.” Two days later, the , sentenced in the United States to 45 years of pressure for drug trafficking. Asfura then turned his campaign around, showing himself close to Trump and other ultra leaders in Latin America, such as the Argentine Javier Milei. He proclaimed himself as Washington’s candidate in a country whose politics have always been supervised by the United States.
In Honduras, a strong social and political conservatism has historically predominated, interspersed with moments of reforms and internal tensions. The former and although the United States claimed that the action was illegal, it avoided formally declaring that it was a military act. Washington has defended its interests in the country, seen as a base to maintain its influence in Central America. In the mid-1980s, it built the Palmerola military complex on Honduran soil (an hour and a half drive from Tegucigalpa), which served as a logistics platform to deploy its troops in the region. “The country most loyal to the United States, the American aircraft carrier, the headquarters of SouthCom (Southern Command),” the current vice chancellor Gerardo Torres sarcastically defined it last week.
The preliminary results of Sunday’s election are still a surprise and the main topic of conversation on Honduran television talk shows was the extent to which Trump’s comments had influenced the electorate. “We have to wait for the results of all the votes. Hopefully we don’t end up like a banana republic,” lamented journalist Thelma Mejía, a respected voice in the country. “What happened to Juan Orlando Hernández is an affront to Hondurans,” he added. According to the CNE count, Asfura has so far obtained 597,184 votes, while Nasralla obtains 579,626 and Moncada 287,166 votes.
Voting began Sunday morning without major incidents. The voting stations opened at seven and from early on long lines of voters filled the centers. The three candidates attended to vote with the call for active participation of the electorate, which also elected the 128 members of parliament, whose results are not yet known, and the authorities of the country’s 298 municipalities. President Xiomara Castro voted at noon with her husband, former President Zelaya. “We have already begun a refounding process in the country and that is what is important,” Castro said without imagining the collapse that his movement would suffer hours later. “These elections are so important for our democracy. What the people deserve is peace and tranquility, attending the polls freely and being able to vote,” added the president.
Nicolás Carrasco went to the vote at a school in Tegucigalpa, the capital, with one concern on his mind: the rampant corruption that eats away at this Central American country. “The people wanted it to be known, it was one of our priorities, because there is a lot of corruption, everything is very contaminated,” he stated in reference to the international anti-corruption commission, which was not formed during the current Government. It was a promise that President Castro leaves unfinished. In fact, the president resigned herself on the issue after voting: “I want to be very clear with the media. Everything that was in my hands for the CICIH to come to our country, we brought here,” she said. Castro’s family was marred by corruption scandals. .
The first to react to the preliminary results was former President Zelaya, who wrote on the social network that the people ordered at the polls and that we cannot ignore.” Hours earlier, Zelaya had criticized Trump’s meddling in the election and his decision to pardon Hernández. “Protect the looter of the State,” he had said. After the electoral hangover, Zelaya must think about how to redirect a movement that aims to be the first left-wing experiment in decades in a conservative country that has voted right most of the time.
Hernández is a figure repudiated by broad sectors in Honduras, where in addition to his links with drug trafficking, he is accused of terrible government management, poor management of the health crisis generated by the covid-19 pandemic and an embezzlement of close to 200 million dollars from social security. Asfura, however, was not shy about riding Trump’s wave and defending his decision. On the social network X, where he goes by his nickname, Daddy on orderpublished montages alongside the New York tycoon. “The pardon is a power of the president of the United States. For the family, the pardon leaves their sadness behind and allows them to recover the tranquility and happiness they deserve,” Asfura justified.
Nasralla, for his part, clings to the tally table to boost his figure, with only two points difference against Asfura. The candidate had criticized the delay in the presentation of the preliminary results and called on his supporters to pay attention to the transmissions of the electoral records to avoid, he said, “fraud.” Moncada, meanwhile, announced that he will appear before the press on Monday, after learning of the progress in the official count.
What is clear is that Monday’s election results mark a shift to the right in conservative Honduras. Car horns sounded stridently early Sunday morning in the streets of Tegucigalpa, with many celebrating the defeat of the socialist project created to re-found a country ravaged by corruption and impunity, issues that are two of the great pending issues of the Castro Government and for which it seems that the electorate took a toll. That, in addition to Trump’s intervention.
