Convergencia Research, Consultoría especializada en Latinoamérica y Caribe
Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Vote on next Sunday could result in election of first woman as president of the country

Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, from the opposite party Libre, leads the preferences. In second place and at a certain distance appears the official candidate Nasry Asfura. The electoral campaign was marked by reports of corruption and collusion with drug trafficking.

On November 28, some 5.5 million Hondurans will vote for a new president, 128 representatives to the National Congress, 20 to the Central American Parliament and 298 mayors. Upon entering the voting booth, they will find 13 names for the election of the president, but polls indicate that only three are favored by the voters.

They are the candidate of theparty Partido Libertad y Refundación (Libre), Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, Nasry Asfura, representative of the conservative ruling party Partido Nacional, and Yani Rosenthal, who represents the Partido Liberal, which appears as the third political force in polls. Castro is the candidate with the highest adhesions, although the polls have marked a huge disparity. The Centro de Estudios para la Democracia (CESPAD) (Center for Studies for Democracy) awarded her 38% of the intention to vote. In her campaign closing speech last Sunday, she harangued her followers with her campaign slogan: "Let us shout from here to the world that in Honduras the best is yet to come, the government of the people". The candidate is the wife of former President Manuel Zelaya, ousted in 2009 by a coup.

According to CESPAD, Castro reached the first place of the preferences after Libre agreed on a single candidacy with the Unión Nacional Opositora (UNO), a social-democratic coalition that had nominated the popular television presenter Salvador Nasralla. That alliance consolidated the person who could be the first woman to reach the first magistracy in Honduras.

For its part, CESPAD gave Asfura 21% of the votes. His campaign got complicated in recent weeks, as the mayor of Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, has tried to detach himself from the national government, led by Juan Orlando Hernández, crammed with allegations of corruption and collusion with drug trafficking.

Castro ran in the 2013 elections, when she was defeated by Hernández. In 2017, she allied herself with Nasralla, who was also defeated by Hernández in a highly questioned election due to suspicions of fraud. Hence Asfura's insistence on the entities in charge of supervising the elections to carry out her work "correctly". She further assured that, if she loses, she will accept the result. In Honduras there is no ballot.

Dirty campaign. According to analyst Omar García, the political environment in Honduras is tense and the key of the candidates will be to attract the votes of undecided people, who according to him represent almost half of the electoral roll. But his colleague José Luis Moncada believed that the campaigns, instead of targeting the central problems of the population, were dedicated to attacking the opponents.

"A woman is needed to take over the presidency of the Republic and to handle funds with transparency. We are going to say no to corruption in Honduras", Castro has warned. "We are going to massively overthrow the dictatorship", she added, referring to the government of the Partido Nacional. Castro assured that she will seek "a government of reconciliation, a government of forgiveness." She promises to "rebuild" Honduras, through a "democratic socialism" that sows fears in conservative sectors.

Asfura maintained a somewhat moderate position throughout the campaign, but other top candidates did not do the same. David Chávez, the official candidate for mayor of Tegucigalpa, warned: "The time has come to defeat communism, the time has come to put an end to those planes and jets that 'Chapo' Guzmán sent to 'Mel' Zelaya," he said in the campaign closing act.

Yani Rosenthal, the candidate of the third force, the Partido Liberal, served a three-year sentence in the United States for laundering money from drug trafficking.

Hernández, who will leave office on January 27, has been identified by a prosecutor in New York as an accomplice in drug trafficking. For this crime, his brother, Juan Antonio "Tony" Hernández, is imprisoned and sentenced to life in prison in the United States. A drug lord also claims to have bribed Manuel Zelaya. Meanwhile Asfura is being investigated for misappropriation of funds from the municipality. They all deny the charges.

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