Reuters reports Monday morning: “Honduran [Libre Party] presidential candidate Xiomara Castro headed for a landslide win in Sunday’s election, declaring victory as supporters danced outside her offices to celebrate the left’s return to power 12 years after her husband was ousted in a coup.”
The New York Times writes that “The presidential vote is billed as Honduras’s last chance to avoid the abyss.”
The Center for Economic and Policy Research, which live blogged the election on Sunday, wrote that while “Libre Party supporters, and opponents of the governing National Party, celebrate, many observers are still voicing caution. While Castro’s lead in the preliminary results appears decisive, if indeed the 16 percent sample is representative of the total vote, it is worth remembering that early results in 2017 also gave the opposition a significant (although much smaller) lead. As our own Alex Main summarized:
“After a long, unexplained delay, the TSE [Supreme Electoral Tribunal] announced that Salvador Nasralla — candidate of the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship — was in the lead by 5 points with 57 percent of votes counted. But then the electronic vote count was delayed for more than 30 hours. Over the following days, additional “technical failures” occurred. When the count resumed, Nasralla’s lead gradually evaporated and, by late in the day on November 30, Hernández was ahead by 1.5 percentage points.
“Considering this precedent, as well as the many irregularities witnessed today (which we have attempted to document on this blog), continued scrutiny of the tabulation process and the official results is warranted. And irregularities should be investigated by credible authorities.”
CEPR notes that after the preliminary results were announced, Castro’s lead has remained steady as more votes have been counted. The group states that Hondurans seem to have had their votes and voices heard despite all the illegal attempts to affect the election outcome.
Contact: Alex Main, main@cepr.net, Dan Beeton, beeton@cepr.net
SUYAPA PORTILLO VILLEDA, Suyapa_Portillo@
Portillo Villeda is associate professor, Chicanx Latinx Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. She is also author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras from the University of Texas Press. On Saturday, she appeared on the accuracy.org news release: “’Momentous’ Election in Honduras Amid ‘Fear of Fraud and Unrest’ that Fuels Desperate Migration.”
She said late Sunday: “The Honduran people voted against corruption, bad government, and demonstrated their power. They voted in historic numbers — 3,221,264 million voters (62 percent of eligible voters) participated, giving Xiomara Castro Zelaya an early lead with the majority of votes at 53.44 percent. If the lead holds, Castro Zelaya is the winner of the presidential elections by a solid majority. Her party is also likely to win mayoral elections in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa. While the count is not final, her lead could make her the first progressive woman to sit in the executive branch in Honduras.
“Despite attempts at corruption by the Nationalist Party, including declaring themselves winners at 4 p.m. before the polls closed, young Hondurans voted in large numbers. Young Hondurans wanted a change of government, but more importantly, to remove from power the corrupt Nationalist Party and the Juan Orlando regime which has bled Honduran public coffers and destroyed the rule of law, stolen from the social security administration and other public offices. The JOH administration has presided over thousands of murders and violence from narcotrafficking, on top of deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic. Not to mention deaths from the post-2009-coup period.
“Many young Hondurans took to the streets immediately chanting #SiSePudo.”
