Challenger ahead in Honduras presidential vote
Some 12 hours after Honduras' electoral court released partial results Monday showing a surprise lead for the leftist challenger in the country's presidential election, the ruling party continued to claim victory and ready its supporters to take to the streets.
David Matamoros, president of the electoral court, announced around 2 a.m. that with 57 percent of the vote counted, Salvador Nasralla was polling at 45.7 percent to President Juan Orlando Hernandez's 40.2 percent.
But since announcing the partial results, the country's electoral court has gone silent, leaving many to worry whether attempts were being made to change the outcome.
Julio Navarro, a sociologist and political analyst in Tegucigalpa, criticized the electoral court. "It keeps failing us," he said. "Last night it promised official results early and didn't give them to us until dawn and still hasn't offered more information."
Nasralla called for his supporters to celebrate in front of the electoral court's offices Monday afternoon, while Reynaldo Sanchez, president of the ruling National Party, sent a recorded message to party members saying that it was time "to prepare our people to defend the triumph in the streets."
Nasralla, a 64-year-old sportscaster and one of the country's best-known television personalities, is making his second bid for the presidency. He has a reputation as conservative, but is running as the candidate of an alliance formed with the leftist party of former President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted by a military coup in 2009.
Experts suspect that should Nasralla prevail, forming a coalition government with Zelaya's party could be complicated.
"There will be serious problems in the future and it is likely that Zelaya will win (those disagreements) because of his broad political experience," Navarro said.
The alliance has campaigned on eradicating corruption and bringing in a new economic model, but has offered few details beyond its interest in moving away from privatization and other neoliberal economic policies.
The preliminary result "suggests Hondurans are more unhappy than we might have expected with the corruption of this government and some of the human rights issues," said Geoff Thale, vice-president for programs of WOLA, a nonprofit Latin American human rights organization in Washington.
Honduras already has an anti-corruption mission backed by the Organization of American States, which has worked for more than a year to help strengthen the country's crime fighting institutions. But Nasralla has said he wants a body more akin to that of Guatemala, where a United Nations-supported commission has worked for more than a decade to prosecute corruption that has even reached the president's office.
Nasralla has also vowed to continue extraditing drug traffickers, a widely popular policy in Honduras.
Hernandez, however, built his support largely on a drop in violence in this impoverished Central American country, whose homicide rate was once among the world's worst. Honduras' National Autonomous University says the rate has fallen to 59 homicides per 100,000 people, from a dizzying high of 91.6 in 2011.
But corruption and drug trafficking allegations cast a shadow over his government.
A convicted drug trafficker testified in a New York courtroom this year that he met with Hernandez's brother Antonio to get Honduras' government to pay its debts to a company that the trafficker's cartel used to launder money. Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, ex-leader of the cartel known as the Cachiros, testified that Antonio Hernandez asked him for a bribe in exchange for government contracts. Hernandez's brother has denied that allegation.
In September, the son of a former president from Hernandez's party, Porfirio Lobo, was sentenced in New York to 24 years in prison after revealing his role in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Fabio Lobo, 46, had pleaded guilty in May 2016, admitting he worked with drug traffickers and Honduran police to ship cocaine into the United States.
The electoral court's late announcement of preliminary results suggests a close vote between Nasralla, the candidate of the leftist Opposition Alliance Against Dictatorship, and Hernandez, a conservative U.S. ally.
Turnout in Sunday's vote appeared to be heavy across the country, with relatively minor irregularities reported.
In 2009, a re-election bid by Zelaya fueled charges that the National Party was seeking to entrench itself in power by trampling the country's institutions with court approval for the president to seek a second term.
Fears of that sort of consolidation led Hernandez's party to back a military coup against Zelaya, who it accused of plotting to violate Honduras' seemingly iron-clad constitutional ban on re-election.
But the current court is packed with Hernandez's supporters, and it ruled in 2015 that the constitutional ban was overridden by a citizen's right to seek re-election.
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Sherman reported from Mexico City.
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