By Emily Green
TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 4 (Reuters) – Honduran presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla said last-minute interference from U.S. President Donald Trump in the country’s closely fought election had damaged his chances of winning and left him trailing as vote counting dragged on.
Nasralla, a three-time presidential hopeful who describes himself as center-right, said in an interview with Reuters that Trump’s surprise endorsement last week of the conservative candidate Nasry Asfura had flipped the race.
“It hurt me because I was winning by a much larger margin,” Nasralla said at a hotel in downtown Tegucigalpa, rejecting Trump’s label of him as a “borderline communist.”
The latest results released on Thursday by the electoral authority showed Nasralla narrowly trailing in the election, with 39.38% of the vote to Asfura’s 40.27%, with around 87% of the ballots counted.
That slim margin could easily flip. Roughly 17% of ballots have “inconsistencies” and will be reviewed, according to Honduras’s electoral authority.
Nasralla also criticized Trump’s pardon on the eve of the election of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year jail term for drug trafficking in the United States.
“I think he deserves punishment in Honduras. I don’t know for how long, but he deserves punishment and the Honduran justice system has to prosecute and punish him,” Nasralla said.
Asfura’s conservative National Party forged a close partnership with Washington under Hernandez, who governed from 2014 to 2022 and was arrested shortly after leaving office.
Trump has made no secret of his goal to forge a bloc of conservative allies in the region, stretching from Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to Javier Milei in Argentina.
ALLEGATIONS OF FRAUD
Amid disruptions in the counting of ballots from Sunday’s election and allegations of fraud, Nasralla has accused rivals of plotting to steal the election.
Nasralla said his suspicions of election tampering flared around 3:00 a.m. (0900 GMT) on Thursday when his team reported the election website suddenly went dark. When it came back online, “everything had flipped,” he said. His narrow lead had vanished, leaving him slightly behind.
“That suggests some algorithm changed that shouldn’t have,” he added, though he acknowledged he has no proof of wrongdoing.
Fraud allegations haunted Honduras in the fiercely contested 2017 presidential election, with widespread accusations of manipulated vote tallies and irregularities.
Honduras’ election officials this week urged calm as they work to resolve complications with its rapid count system, technical issues affecting a web portal designed to display real-time results, and unannounced system maintenance.
On Monday, with Asfura ahead in the vote count, Trump hurled allegations of possible fraud without proof and said there will be “hell to pay” if results were changed.
The Organization of American States has so far not documented any manipulation and other experts chalked up the vote count delays to incompetence rather than fraud.
“They all had a hand in building a pretty weak and broken electoral system and this is a byproduct of all that infighting that went on for weeks and months,” said Eric Olson, a senior policy advisor at the Seattle International Foundation and expert on Honduran politics. “This process is not great but it happens all the time in the case of Honduras.”
(Reporting by Emily Green; Editing by Cassandra Garrison and Michael Perry)
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