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Conservative Candidate Leads in Presidential Race in Honduras
New Left-Wing Party in Honduras Cries Foul
(about 7 hours later)
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — The vote count in Honduras’s presidential election showed Juan Orlando Hernández, the conservative candidate of the governing National Party, with a clear lead on Monday, but leaders of the left-wing Libre party, whose candidate, Xiomara Castro, was trailing, said they would contest the results.
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Nine dejected foot soldiers of a would-be revolution were sitting on the stoop of a local campaign headquarters in the Colonia Kennedy neighborhood on Monday afternoon, drinking soda out of small plastic cups and debating what comes next.
Hondurans face days of political uncertainty and the prospect of unrest as the count from Sunday’s elections continues and the Libre party, led by the former president, Manuel Zelaya, determines its next move.
The vote count in the Honduran presidential election on Sunday was not going their way. Their new left-wing party, Libre, appeared to be headed for defeat, dashing their hopes for the transformative victory they thought would end the dominance of the country’s tight-knit political and business elite.
Just after 11 p.m., as a group of civic organizations at a hotel here checked the results of trends shown by a quick count based on a sample of votes, Mr. Zelaya, who is Ms. Castro’s husband, and several members of his party walked into a hotel conference area where reporters swarmed him. Making his way to television cameras, with soldiers standing by, Mr. Zelaya said that Libre rejected the work of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Honduras’s official electoral body.
“The laws they make in Congress only benefit their small groups,” said Hector Núñez, 43, a woodworker and handyman, listening to news of the election on a radio. “That’s why we need to re-found the country.”
There was no sign of Ms. Castro. Earlier in the evening, as television exit polls showed Mr. Hernández with a lead, Ms. Castro announced to supporters that her party’s count showed that she had won. “I will not let you down,” she said, in what sounded like a victory speech.
The totals from the electoral tribunal, with results from about 62 percent of polling places, showed the governing conservative party’s candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández, still leading Libre’s candidate, Xiomara Castro, by about six percentage points.
Mr. Hernández quickly followed, telling supporters that he had begun receiving congratulatory calls from Latin American leaders, promising to get right to work and releasing a Twitter picture of his family praying to give thanks for the electoral victory.
Libre, however, has rejected the official results as fraudulent. What happens next will hinge on decisions by the party’s leader, the former President Manuel Zelaya, who is Ms. Castro’s husband. It will depend, as well, on how supporters like those in lower-middle-class Colonia Kennedy, who have been loyal to Mr. Zelaya since he was ousted in a coup four years ago, respond to his summons.
A postelection challenge by Libre will reopen the divide between the Honduran political establishment and the opposition movement that emerged after Mr. Zelaya was ousted in a coup in 2009. Mr. Zelaya’s supporters, who organized months of protests after he was expelled from the country, later joined with labor and peasant groups to form Libre. Ms. Castro had led in all the early polls for the 2013 election, breaking open the country’s ossified political system, in which two parties had traded power and privilege for decades.
“If Xiomara doesn’t call us out onto the streets, we’re going to go anyway,” Mr. Núñez said.
Iris Medina, 40, voting in Comayagüela, near the capital, Tegucigalpa, said that this election was different. “There are a lot more people who have entered into politics, and we think maybe they can offer us something new,” she said Sunday.
Mr. Zelaya was defiant on Monday at a news conference that was packed with noisy Libre activists — all except for Ms. Castro, who was absent.
polling places counted, Mr. Hernández led Ms. Castro by more than five percentage points. The quick count, conducted by a Honduran group, Hagamos Democracia, along with church groups and the National Democratic Institute, an organization that is largely supported by United States government agencies, gave Mr. Hernández a bigger margin over Ms. Castro — 36 percent to 28 percent — and noted that both Libre and the National Party had representatives at almost all the voting places. The group’s quick count has proved accurate in past elections.
“We don’t accept the tribunal’s results until they show us otherwise, ballot box by ballot box, town by town,” he said, as supporters blew horns and cheered. Mr. Zelaya promised that “if it is necessary to take to the streets to defend our victory, then we will take to the streets.”
Enrique Reina, a Libre vice-presidential candidate, said there were “serious inconsistencies’ with at least 20 percent of the vote tally sheets. He said that the results had been “manipulated to favor certain candidates.”
Almost a million people had voted for the party’s proposal to rewrite the Constitution, he said, citing unconfirmed figures, “and we do not expect, nor do we want, nor will we renounce, what people are demanding at the polls.”
Omar Rivera, the director of the pro-democracy Civil Society Group, said that Libre’s distrust stemmed in part from the political composition of the electoral tribunal. The suspicion is that “the other parties have conspired to manipulate the process.”
International and national observers closely watched the election, and the parties themselves were in charge of the vote counting. Although Ricci Moncada, Libre’s secretary of electoral affairs, said Sunday night that at least 1,900 of the vote-tally sheets showed “irregularities,” the party offered no additional proof of fraud on Monday.
It would take time for the tribunal to finish its count and for the parties to match it up with their own, he said. Past elections have sometimes taken a week to resolve. “It’s always been this way in Honduras,” Mr. Rivera said.
The coup that removed Mr. Zelaya, a scion of the Honduran landed elite, revealed a vast divide in Honduras, one of Latin America’s poorest countries, with vast economic disparities. For decades political and economic power was concentrated in two parties, the National and Liberal Parties, and their business allies. But the labor, peasant and student groups that backed Mr. Zelaya articulated the demands of the dispossessed for a greater say in the country’s affairs.
The race between Ms. Castro and Mr. Hernández, a former president of the national Congress, was dominated by personality and ideology rather than specific proposals.
Leo Valladares, a former human rights commissioner and a pro-democracy activist, said that the election results — despite Mr. Hernández’s advantage as a candidate of the governing party and the power he exerted as a former president of Congress — had turned Libre into the country’s second political force.
One of Latin America’s most economically unequal countries, Honduras is besieged by crime that has decimated the slums of its major cities, where residents face constant gang violence, police corruption and drug trafficking.
“They are no longer outside the system,” he said.
Ms. Castro, 54, ran as a candidate of change, renewing her husband’s promise to rewrite the Constitution to give the country’s impoverished majority a greater role. Mr. Hernández, 45, focused on security, pinning his campaign on a new military police force that began to patrol the most violent neighborhoods five weeks ago.
But that was not how Libre supporters in Colonia Kennedy saw it on Monday. Ms. Castro won overwhelmingly in this neighborhood, where laundry hangs outside small concrete houses. The group clustered outside the party’s campaign headquarters was convinced that there had been election fraud.
The rest of the vote was divided among six other candidates, led by Mauricio Villeda, a leader of the traditional Liberal Party, who had about 21 percent of the vote in early results. Salvador Nasralla, a television host running on an anticorruption platform, was in fourth place. He said in a radio interview late Sunday that he rejected the official results.
Alba Xiomara Fúnez, 35, a psychologist, sounded as if she was ready to give up on voting altogether. “We accepted to go through this process democratically, to show we want to live in democracy,” she said. But the traditional political elite “showed no respect for our decision.”
It was clear that Honduran politics was entering a new, potentially messy, period, when multiple parties would have to negotiate to get laws passed and new voices representing the country’s marginalized poor would get a hearing.
Nicholas
Phillips reported from Tegucigalpa, and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City.
Although there were irregularities reported in Sunday’s vote, including intimidation by armed men in some rural areas, the postelection dispute may raise questions about campaign spending. The leading candidates held giant rallies, flooded television with ads and blanketed cities with posters. With no campaign finance oversight, it was unclear how the candidates — particularly Mr. Hernández, with the largest presence — were paying for it all.
Behind the music and noisy flag-waving at political rallies, there was also violence and intimidation. The National Autonomous University of Honduras said last week that 17 members of Ms. Castro’s Libre party and 16 people from the two traditional parties — the National Party and the Liberal Party — had been killed since May 2012.
Human rights groups said Sunday that two rural organizers, both Libre activists, were ambushed and killed Saturday night on their way home from electoral training in Cantarranas, a municipality in the central department of Francisco Morazán. Both victims were involved in a struggle over land rights.
There is no second round, so Honduras’s next president will have a weak mandate, having probably captured less than 40 percent of the vote. Voters also cast ballots for 128 members of Congress, and the results, which have not yet been announced, will most likely return a fractured legislature.
Nicholas Phillips reported from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City.
