Presidential in Honduras: left candidate is in lead

With 53% of the votes, Xiomara Castro has a comfortable advance on his right opponent, Nasry Asfura, at 34%. But the stripping is far from over in this country where the threat of fraud and flat disorders.

Le Monde with AFP

The left candidate Xiomara Castro (freedom and refounding, free, left) takes the advantage for the presidency of Honduras against the dolphin of the coming right president, in a country with the violence of drug traffickers, who extended their corruption to the highest level of the state.

Voter participation has been established at the “historic” level of 62%, announced, on Sunday, November 28, the National Electoral Council (CNE), giving the first partial results.

With the votes of 16% of the polls stripped, Xiomara Castro, wife of the former President Manuel Zelaya, overthrown in 2009 by a coup d’etat, obtains more than 53% of the vote, while his opponent of Right, Nasry Asfura, only gets 34%. The CNE, however, emphasized the provisional nature of these results and urged candidates and voters to wait for the final results. The threat of fraud and plane disorders on voting and counting.

42,000 soldiers and police mobilized

“They will try to provoke the people. We know that there is despair, especially among those who have been governing for twelve years,” warned M me Castro after voting, While at least 31 people were killed during the campaign. The candidate of the party in power was committed to respecting the result of the vote and requested that “not a drop of blood”. The authorities mobilized 42,000 soldiers and police officers to monitor the 5,755 polling stations in the country and pare any disorders.

In addition to their president, voters had to elect deputies and mayors. Honduras has been headed for more than ten years by the National Party (PN), under the ferrule of Juan Orlando Hernandez, suspected by the United States to be involved in drug trafficking.

Feeling the wind turning, the PN had hardened the tone of his campaign, treating the leader of free of “communist” and viliphending his proposals for legalization of abortion and homosexual marriage.

In 2013, Mr. Hernandez had beaten a short M Castro and then passed the Constitution for a second term, in 2017. His doubtful re-election on the wire Faced with the star of Salvador Nasralla television had unleashed violent events.

New riots would not do Washington’s business, who “wants to avoid a repetition of [election] of 2017 and an increase in migration pressure,” says Michael Shifter, President of the Think Tank Inter-American Dialogue.

Violence and misery

Tens of thousands of Hondurans are trying to join the million of their compatriots every year having fled violence and misery, with their crushing majority in the United States. More than half of the ten million inhabitants live below the poverty line, that the pandemic due to the coronavirus only accentuated. Unemployment has almost doubled in one year, from 5.7% in 2019 to 10.9% in 2020.

With a homicide rate of 37.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020, Honduras is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world outside conflict areas.

In the last two years, the Parliament dissolved an anti-corruption commission and adopted a new penal code providing for lower penalties for the facts of corruption or drug trafficking. Many parliamentarians were targeted by the investigations of this commission.

Drug traffickers held in the United States questioned President Hernandez, including the brother, Tony, was sentenced by a US federal court to life implication for his involvement in the traffic of 185 tonnes of cocaine .

/Media reports.