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Honduras

LIVE BLOG — Honduras election results coming in: both Juan Orlando, Xiomara declare victory

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Good morning from Jerusalem, where it’s 5 a.m. Monday morning.honduras flag icon

1:17 am — On Facebook, some activity from both Hernández and Villeda.

Hernández is thanking Villeda for a telephone call congratulating him for his victory; Villeda is thanking his supporters for two years of support, in what amounts to something of a concession (though Villeda doesn’t actually concede in the post).

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12:39 am — With 54% of the results reported from the TSE, Hernández retains a 90,000-vote lead:

Hernández now leads with 556,333 votes (34.27%), followed by Castro de Zelaya with 466,537 votes (28.67%), Villeda with 339,919 (20.94%) and Nasralla in fourth with 251,224 (15.47%).

Vásquez has fallen back — he’s still in fifth place, but just barely and with hardly any material support with 3,339 votes (0.21%).

To recap, however, both Hernández and Castro de Zelaya have declared victory, Nasralla has alleged TSE fraud, and there’s not exactly a lot of public trust in Honduran public institutions, so don’t expect this to end anytime tonight.

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12:17 am — The fourth candidate in the race, Villeda, is obviously not declaring victory, but neither is he alleging fraud.  In character, he’s cautioning patience on Twitter and awaiting more communications from the TSE.

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12:08 am — Nasralla is now calling the vote’s integrity into dispute, arguing that 25% of tallies from the TSE ‘have different totals than when transmitted to parties’ according to Honduras Culture and Politics, per Twitter.  Nasralla has now called the results fraudulent — remember that though Nasralla’s the fourth-place candidate, he pulls a lot of support from relatively conservatives voters who might otherwise support Hernández.

It seems increasingly likely that this won’t be sorted out tonight, even if the TSE reports more than the 43% of provisional results that it’s already announced.

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11:21 pm — One reason why I’m not quite convinced that fraud won’t be an issue is that there’s been a fair amount of intimidation against certain parts of the electorate throughout the campaign, especially LIBRE activists and candidates.  As La Prensa reported earlier and the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes, two LIBRE candidates were assassinated late Saturday outside the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa:

Yesterday, Saturday two leaders of the Libre party were assassinated after leaving a party meeting in the community of Carbón in the municipality of Canta Rana, department of Francisco Morazán.

The incident occurred at 8:50 pm. Braulio Almendares, general secretary of the National Agricultural Workers Central PNPP, denounced, on Globo TV, that the leaders were ambushed by two individuals wearing ski masks and heavily armed.

The now deceased individuals are the Hondurans Julio Ramón Araujo Maradiaga (67) and María Amparo Pineda Duarte (52), who is a leader of the campesino cooperative group Carbón.  “The woman had already received death threats which leads us to believe that the crime had a dual meaning”, said the complainant. Wilmar Alexander Solórzano, son of María Ampara, assures that she and her family have enemies and that they don’t know where the killing comes from.

While it doesn’t mean that Hernández’s lead, if it holds up, is fraudulent, the vast campaign of intimidation against LIBRE and the Honduras left (among others, including journalists) certainly means that an eventual victory for Hernández will always be tainted with unfairness.  That’s especially troubling in light of the human rights abuses that have increased with greater impunity since the June 2009 coup.

If Hernández does win with a 5% or 6% margin over Castro de Zelaya, it may well be that he could have won the election, even in conditions more openly ‘free and fair’ than the current conditions.

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10:59 pm — No word yet on which party will win the National Congress, and by what margin. That’s almost as important as the presidential election.  If Hernández does win the election with around 32% or 34% of the vote, he’ll do so with the smallest mandate since the return of regular democratic elections to Honduras since 1981 (though that outcome has been almost a certainty since the summer, if not earlier). There’s no guarantee that the National Party will win a majority in the 128-member congress, especially given the open-list proportional representation system, so Hernández will likely have to find a way to form an alliance.

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10:54 pm — Now Hernández is declaring victory, and promising, once again, ‘Voy a hacer lo que tenga que hacer para devolver la paz y la tranquilidad en Honduras,’ or ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to return peace and tranquility to Honduras.’ His military police force has been at the center of the National Party’s campaign. Continue reading LIVE BLOG — Honduras election results coming in: both Juan Orlando, Xiomara declare victory →

Honduras

Will the Honduran general election be conducted fairly?

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TEGUCIGALPA — In the shadow of the June 2009 coup that ousted leftist president Manuel Zelaya from office, Hondurans will vote on Sunday to determine whether Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya will become the Central American country’s new president.honduras flag icon

Despite a polarizing three-way campaign that pits the Zelayas against the two traditional Honduran political parties, with stark divisions over economic and security policy, how secure can Honduras and the region be that the vote will be essentially free and fair — and that the ballots will be counted fairly?

Candidates on both the left and the right bluster that they don’t fear electoral fraud, confident that their mandate will be strong enough for a clear victory.  But though international observers and representatives from each of Honduras’s political parties will be on hand to observer the counting on Sunday, there remains a nagging fear that a narrow election victory by any of the major presidential candidates would cause a political crisis, given the low level of public trust in Honduran public institutions.  Recently, U.S. congressmen Raúl M. Grijalva, Mike Honda and Hank Johnson wrote a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry warning of possible fraud:

“We are particularly alarmed to learn that the ruling party, and its presidential candidate Mr. Juan Orlando Hernández, now dominates all the key institutions of the government, including the country’s electoral authority and the military, which distributes the ballots,” they wrote, “leaving scarce recourse for Honduran citizens should fraud be committed in the electoral process, or human rights violations continue to threaten open debate.  This is particularly troubling given the long history of electoral fraud in Honduras, including allegations of widespread fraud during the primary elections in November of 2012.”

In those primary elections, Hernández narrowly defeated popular Tegucigalpa mayor Ricardo Álvarez for the presidential nomination of the conservative National Party, but refused to brook the ballot recount that Álvarez’s campaign requested.  Though the two candidates have long since united, no one can say with certainty that Hernández actually won the vote, and that’s left some doubt about the capacity of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to guarantee ballot sanctity in Sunday’s general elections.

Though Central America isn’t necessarily always on the front pages, Honduras’s election is especially important to the United States.  The 2009 coup was one of the first foreign policy crises for U.S. president Barack Obama, and the United States has devoted increasing military aid in the attempt to combat drug trafficking in Honduras.  Moreover, Honduras’s general election is the first of four that will be held over the next six months in Central America – El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama will all choose new presidents between now and May 2014.

Dr. Leo Valladares, a former Honduran commissioner of human rights and a former member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, agreed with the warnings about potential ballot abuse.  “There are possibilities for fraud,” Valladares admitted. “In theory, the National Party could win without fraud. But they’re not secure, so they might commit fraud. Whatever the outcome of the election, it will be very conflicted.”

Hernández’s chief rivals in Sunday’s vote are Mauricio Villeda, the candidate of the more centrist Liberal Party, a Tegucigalpa attorney and the son of former president Ramón Villeda Morales (1975-63), and Castro de Zelaya who, with her husband, left the Liberal Party to form the new leftist Party of Liberty and Refoundation (LIBRE) in 2011.

Jacobo Hernández Cruz, a former vice president and former TSE head, however, argued that over the past decade, Honduran electoral authorities have made great strides toward enhancing electoral transparency.

“The only way there can be fraud [previously] is in null votes,” Hernández said.  “But now when they count, everyone can see.  This has been the case for eight years.  Open doors and open windows, everyone can see.  It’s out in public.”

Historically, transparency and observation of the vote count represents the greatest check against vote fraud in Honduran elections.  But other concerns remain, especially over how the ballot boxes arrive to the polling stations.

“The boxes come with the electoral custodian,” Hernández said. “The armed forces bring them. There is always trust in the armed forces.  The ballots are going to be scanned. There’s a procedure for how this will be done.” Continue reading Will the Honduran general election be conducted fairly? →