The people of Honduras have started voting in the elections amid Donald Trump’s threat to cut aid to the country if his favorite candidate loses.
Honduras could be the next country in Latin America, after Argentina and Bolivia, to swing to the right after years of leftist rule.
Polls show three candidates are neck-and-neck in the race to succeed President Xiomara Castro, whose husband Manuel Zelaya also led the country before being ousted in a 2009 coup.
Trump’s favorite is Nasri “Tito” Asfura, 67, of the right-wing National Party. His main challengers are 60-year-old lawyer Rixi Moncada, of the ruling Libre party, and 72-year-old TV host Salvador Nasralla, of the Liberal Party.
Polls opened at 7.00 am (1300 GMT) for the 10-hour vote, with the first results expected on Sunday.
Trump has conditioned continued US support for Asfura, one of Latin America’s poorest countries, on a victory. “If he (Asfura) does not win, the United States will not throw good money after bad money,” he wrote on his Truth social platform on Friday.
In a dramatic move on Friday, Trump also announced he would pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National Party, who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for cocaine trafficking and other charges.
Despite making narco-traffickers the target of a significant military buildup in the Caribbean, Trump claimed that “according to many people whom I respect very much, Honduras has been treated very harshly and unfairly”, without elaborating.
Hernández was convicted of turning Honduras into a “narco-state” while he was president between 2014 and 2022. He was convicted in Manhattan last year and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Some Hondurans have welcomed Trump’s interventionism, saying they hope it could mean Honduran immigrants will be allowed to live in the US. But others have rejected his interference in the vote.
Nearly 30,000 Hondurans have been deported from the US since Trump returned to office in January. The ban has dealt a severe blow to the country of 11 million people, where remittances last year accounted for 27% of gross domestic product.
Moncada has portrayed the election as a choice between “the oligarchs plotting a coup” – a reference to the right-wing’s support of Zelaya’s 2009 military ouster – and democratic socialism. Moncada has held ministerial posts under both Zelaya and Castro.
Nasralla also served in Castro’s government, but fell out with the ruling party and has since moved to the right. Asfura was a building construction entrepreneur before being elected mayor of the capital Tegucigalpa, where he served for two terms.
Pre-emptive allegations of election fraud made by both the ruling party and the opposition have created distrust in the vote and raised fears of post-poll unrest.
Ana Paola Hall, president of the National Electoral Council, called on all parties to “not fan the flames of confrontation or violence” at the start of the single-round elections, in which Honduras is also electing members of its unicameral Congress and local mayors.
Asfura has distanced himself from his party chief Hernandez. “I have no relationship (with Hernandez)… The party is not responsible for his personal actions,” he told AFP on Friday.
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