The president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, denounced this Tuesday what she called an ongoing “electoral coup”, amid a chaotic vote count in the November 30 presidential election.
The election was marked by technical failures, unfounded allegations of fraud and the shadow of intervention by the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
“We are seeing a process marked by threats, coercion, manipulation of the TREP (vote transmission system) and tampering with the popular will,” said Castro, from the left-wing LIBRE party, at a press conference.
She also condemned Trump’s intervention in the dispute in favor of conservative Nasry Asfura, from the National Party.
“These actions constitute an ongoing electoral coup and we will denounce them,” he said.
Castro’s comments could further inflame an already explosive moment in Honduras, as election authorities urge calm.
Asfura leads the count with an advantage of 1.32 percentage points, or around 40 thousand votes, with 99.4% of the minutes counted.
But 14.5% of these minutes present inconsistencies and will be reviewed in a special count by the Honduran electoral authority, together with party representatives and international observers.
Trump strongly expressed his , 67-year-old former mayor of Tegucigalpa, and signaled that he could cut funding to the Central American country if the conservative loses.
Salvador Nasralla, a 72-year-old TV presenter and candidate for the center-right Liberal Party, comes in second place. In a distant third comes former Defense Minister Rixi Moncada, from the ruling LIBRE party, with 19.29% of the vote.
Inconsistent minutes became the focal point of the ongoing electoral chaos. They could contain hundreds of thousands of votes — enough to reverse the result — fueling uncertainty in the country.
Results will remain preliminary until the review is completed. The National Electoral Council (CNE) has until December 30 to declare a winner, who will take office in January for the 2026–2030 term.
Both major candidates declared victory based on their own tallies. Nasralla alleged irregularities in the investigation, while the LIBRE Party called for protests and .
On Tuesday, the streets of Tegucigalpa and other Honduran cities were calm, although many remember the 2017 election, when about 30 people died in protests after then-President Juan Orlando Hernández of the National Party won re-election in a vote widely denounced as fraudulent.
Problems in counting votes
The November 30 vote passed peacefully, according to independent observers. But the release of results has been chaotic, with delays adding to frustration over the tight race. Electoral authorities blamed ASD, a private Colombian company responsible for the counting platform, for the slow count.
The company was involved in a new scandal this week, when the CNE reported that a person linked to the ASD had requested a printout of the passwords for the vote transmission system. The CNE said it ordered that the passwords be changed immediately.
The CNE reported two more technical problems with the counting system on Monday night, but said they were quickly resolved. ASD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“The system was not compromised and, in both cases, adjustments were made in the following minutes,” said the president of the CNE, Ana Paola Hall, this Tuesday. “We will remain firm, taking care of your votes, democracy and the peace of our country.”
Hall previously promised to deliver final, verified results by the legal deadline of December 30.
The US government said it was closely monitoring the process and warned that it was ready to respond to any irregularities “quickly and decisively”.
Days before the vote, Trump asked Hondurans to support Asfura, criticized his rivals and said he would pardon fellow candidate Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking.
Although Hernández is now free, his wife told Reuters he would not return to Honduras for security reasons. On Monday, Honduras’ attorney general said he had issued an arrest warrant for Hernández and asked Interpol to detain him.
On Tuesday, Hernández said on social media that he was “the victim of a radical left conspiracy.”
In the run-up to the election — which also chose 128 members of the unicameral Congress and thousands of other positions — both the ruling party and the opposition traded accusations of fraud, while presenting few concrete plans to address Honduras’ serious problems: drug trafficking, corruption and poverty, which affects six in ten Hondurans.
