Tegucigalpa
Reuters
—
Honduran presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla said US President Donald Trump’s last-minute interference in the country’s close election hurt his chances of victory and left him at a disadvantage as vote counting dragged on.
Mr. Nasrallah, a three-time presidential candidate who describes himself as a center-right candidate, said in an interview with Reuters that Mr. Trump’s sudden endorsement of conservative candidate Nasri Asfullah last week turned the race around.
“I was hurt because I was winning by a huge margin,” Nasrallah said at a hotel in downtown Tegucigalpa, rejecting Trump’s label of him as a “marginal communist.”
The latest results released by election authorities on Thursday showed Mr. Nasrallah narrowly leading with 39.38% of the vote and Mr. Asfullah with 40.27%, with about 87% of votes counted.
That slim margin can easily tip over. Honduran election authorities said about 17% of the ballots had “inconsistencies” and would be reconsidered.
Nasrallah also criticized President Trump’s decision on the eve of the election to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking in the United States.
“I think he deserves to be punished in Honduras. I don’t know for how long, but he deserves to be punished. The Honduran justice system must prosecute and punish him,” Nasrallah said.
Asufura’s conservative National Party forged close ties with Washington under Hernández, who ruled from 2014 to 2022 and was arrested shortly after leaving office.
President Trump has made no secret of his goal of building a bloc of conservative allies in the region, from El Salvador’s Nayib Boucle to Argentina’s Javier Milei.
Mr. Nasrallah accused his rivals of plotting to steal the election amid confusion and allegations of fraud in Sunday’s election.
Nasrallah said suspicions of election fraud flared around 3 a.m. Thursday when his team reported that the election website suddenly went black. When he came back online, “everything turned upside down,” he said. His narrow lead disappeared and he fell slightly behind.
He acknowledged there was no evidence of wrongdoing, but added: “It suggests that the algorithm was changed, which it shouldn’t be.”
Suspicions of fraud dogged Honduras during the hotly contested 2017 presidential election, with widespread accusations of vote counting manipulation and fraud.
Honduran election officials this week called for calm as they grapple with the complexities of a rapid counting system, technical problems affecting a web portal designed to display real-time results, and unannounced system maintenance.
On Monday, Mr. Trump tossed out unsubstantiated claims of possible fraud due to Mr. Asfulura’s lead in the vote count, saying he would “pay a hell of a price” if the result changed.
The Organization of American States has so far not documented any manipulation, and other experts say the delays in vote counting are due to incompetence rather than fraud.
“They’re all involved in building a pretty weak and broken electoral system, a byproduct of weeks and months of internal conflict,” said Eric Olson, a senior policy adviser at the Seattle International Foundation and an expert on Honduran politics. “This process is not great, but it happens all the time in Honduras.”
