Honduras election results a “technical tie” as Trump launches a dramatic intervention, including a threat

Tegucigalpa, Honduras — A businessman who has President Trump’s backing for the presidency of Honduras was locked in a “technical tie” with a rightwing TV host after a preliminary vote count, the Central American country’s electoral body said Monday. Nasry Asfura, 67, led 72-year-old rival Salvador Nasralla by just 515 votes, making it a “technical tie,” National Electoral Council (CNE) head Ana Paola Hall said on X after a partial digital tally of Sunday’s down-to-the-wire ballot. She called for “patience” as the CNE starts a manual count in a vote that left the ruling left-leaning party out in the cold in one of Latin America’s most impoverished and violent countries.Trump backs candidate, claims effort to “change the results”Days before the vote, former Tegucigalpa mayor Asfura won Mr. Trump’s backing — as the U.S. president sought to put his finger on the scale of another Latin American election.In a Monday post on his own Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump accused the Honduran electoral body of “trying to change the results” of the vote, adding: “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”He claimed that the CNE had “abruptly stopped counting” ballots on the night of the election when the initial count “showed a close race between” Asfura and Nasralla, noting the slight lead that tally showed for Asfura. “It is imperative that the Commission finish counting the Votes. Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans must have their Votes counted,” he said in the post, which he published before the CNE chief urged patience for a manual count. The U.S. president has become increasingly vocal about his support for allies in Latin America, threatening to cut aid to Argentina and Honduras if his picks do not win. Ally Javier Milei came out on top in Argentina’s mid-term elections, but it is not yet clear if Mr. Trump’s endorsement will be enough to secure victory for Asfura, whose campaign slogan was: “Grandad, at your service!” Could Trump help swing Honduras back to the right?The election is a clear defeat for ruling leftists trailing far behind in the vote count. A swing to the right could help build U.S. influence in a country that under leftist government had looked increasingly to China. The election campaign was dominated by Mr. Trump’s threat and the surprise announcement that he would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez of Asfura’s National Party.Hernandez, who has always maintained his innocence, is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States, where he was convicted of belonging to one of “the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”During his trial, U.S. federal prosecutors said Hernandez turned his Central American country into a “narco-state” during his 2014-2022 presidency. Some Hondurans have welcomed Mr. Trump’s intervention, saying they hope it means migrants will be allowed to remain in the U.S.Many Hondurans have fled north to escape grinding poverty and violence, including minors fearing forced recruitment by gangs. This escape route has been made more difficult by Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, and nearly 30,000 Honduran migrants have been deported from the U.S. since his second term started in January.The clampdown has dealt a severe blow to the country of 11 million people, where money sent home from abroad accounted for 27% of GDP last year.Others reject what they see as meddling by Mr. Trump. “I vote for whomever I please, not because of what Trump has said, because the truth is I live off my work, not off politicians,” Esmeralda Rodriguez, a 56-year-old fruit seller, told AFP. Michelle Pineda, a 38-year-old merchant, hoped the winner would see the country “as more than just a bag of money to loot.” Preemptive accusations of election fraud from the ruling party and the opposition have sparked fears of unrest. The vote count has progressed slowly, and final results could take days. Lawmakers and hundreds of mayors were also elected in the fiercely polarized nation, which has swung back and forth between nominally leftist and conservative leaders. Long a transit point for cocaine exported from Colombia to the U.S., Honduras is now also a drug producer. But the candidates barely addressed drug trafficking, poverty or violence on the campaign trail. “I hope the new government will have good lines of communication with Trump, and that he will also support us,” said Maria Velasquez, 58. “I just want to escape poverty.”

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