Election results in Honduras

Tegucigalpa, Honduras — A businessman who has President Trump’s backing for the presidency of Honduras was caught in a “technical tie” with a right-wing television host after a preliminary vote count, the Central American country’s electoral body reported Monday.

Nasry Asfura, 67, led his rival Salvador Nasralla, 72, by just 515 votes, making it a “technical tie,” the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Ana Paola Hall, said on X after a partial digital recount of Sunday’s vote.

He asked for “patience” as the CNE begins a manual count in a vote that left the leftist ruling party in the dark in one of the most impoverished and violent countries in Latin America.

Trump endorses the candidate and claims he is trying to “change the results”

Days before the vote, former Tegucigalpa mayor Asfura won Trump’s endorsement, as the US president sought to signal the scale of other Latin American elections.

In a Monday post on his own Truth Social platform, Trump accused the Honduran electoral body of “trying to change the results” of the vote, adding: “If they do it, they will pay!”

He claimed that the CNE had “abruptly stopped counting” votes on election night when the initial count “showed a close race between” Asfura and Nasralla, highlighting the slight advantage the count showed for Asfura.

“It is imperative that the Commission finish counting the Votes. Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans must count their votes,” he said in the post, which he published before the head of the CNE asked for patience for a manual count.

The US president has increasingly expressed his support for his allies in Latin America, threatening to cut aid to Argentina and Honduras if their candidates do not win.

Ally Javier Milei emerged victorious in the midterm elections in Argentinabut it is still unclear whether Trump’s support will be enough to ensure the victory of Asfura, whose campaign slogan was: “Grandpa, at your service!”

Could Trump help move Honduras back to the right?

The elections are a clear defeat for the ruling leftists who are far behind in the vote count. A shift to the right could help strengthen American influence in a country that, under a leftist government, had increasingly looked to China.

The election campaign was dominated by Trump’s threat and the surprise announcement that I would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández of the National Party of Asfura.

Hernández, who has always maintained his innocence, is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States, where he was found guilty of belonging to one of “the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

During his trial, US federal prosecutors said Hernández turned his Central American country into a “narco-state” during his 2014-2022 presidency.

Some Hondurans have welcomed Trump’s intervention, saying they hope it means immigrants will be allowed to remain in the United States.

Many Hondurans have fled north to escape extreme poverty and violence, including minors who fear forced recruitment by gangs.

This escape route has been made more difficult by Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdownand almost 30,000 Honduran migrants have been deported of the United States since he began his second term in January.

The repression has dealt a severe blow to the country of 11 million people, where money sent from abroad represented 27% of GDP last year.

Others reject what they consider Trump’s meddling.

“I vote for whoever I want, not for what Trump said, because the truth is I live from my work, not from politicians,” Esmeralda Rodríguez, a 56-year-old fruit seller, told News.

Michelle Pineda, a 38-year-old merchant, hoped the winner would see the country “as more than just a bag of money to be looted.”

Preemptive accusations of electoral fraud by the ruling party and the opposition have sparked fears of unrest.

Vote counting has progressed slowly and final results could take days.

Legislators and hundreds of mayors were also elected in a fiercely polarized nation, which has oscillated between nominally leftist and conservative leaders.

Honduras, long a transit point for cocaine exported from Colombia to the United States, is now also a drug producer.

But the candidates barely addressed drug trafficking, poverty or violence during the election campaign.

“I hope that the new government has good lines of communication with Trump and that he also supports us,” said María Velásquez, 58. “I just want to escape poverty.”