President Xiomara Castro’s party in Honduras rebelled against the presidential elections of November 30, whose results have not finished being scrutinized a week later, amid a chain of “technical failures,” according to CNE authorities.
The candidate of the ruling Libertad y Refundación party (Libre, left), Rixi Moncada, who occupies third place with 19.30% of the votes, stated on Sunday that the ruling party “does not recognize” the results of the elections.
“Unanimously, the Free Party disavows any public official who puts himself in charge and announces that he is cooperating in a government transition with the enemies of the people, authors of this ongoing electoral coup,” he said at a press conference.
Likewise, Moncada pointed out that the Libre party “orders the candidates elected in this fraudulent system not to join any organization without authorization from the party.”
Moncada, designated by the ruling party to inherit the left-wing government of Xiomara Castro, warned of “possible direct connections” between the National Party, of Nasry Asfura, and the data transmission system of the electoral body for “the manipulation of the results.”
Therefore, he insisted, the ruling party demanded the “total annulment of the elections” and asked to investigate the alleged “acts of electoral terrorism committed through the transmission system.” In addition, he urged everyone to consider any electoral rigging as a “crime of treason against the country,” which he will denounce “before the UN, OAS, CELAC and others.”
Once its arguments were presented, the Free Party called its militants on December 13 “to mobilizations, local and departmental assemblies, protests, strikes and sit-ins,” in what it called an “extraordinary assembly of national dignity.”
“To the streets,” chanted the Libre militants who accompanied the appearance. In the streets, Moncada’s followers burst into joy upon hearing that the elections were not known, while waving flags or lighting flares.
US interference?
Rixi Moncada directly accused the president of the United States, Donald Trump, of exercising “interference and coercion” that is “altering popular sovereignty.”
In the run-up to the elections, the republican leader expressed his sympathy for the National Party candidate, Nasry Asfura, whom he called “the man who defends democracy.”
Trump then asked Hondurans to vote for Asfura to stop “the communist advance” and even warned of “serious consequences” in case of “changing the results” of the presidential elections.
The left-wing candidate showed her disagreement with Trump’s statements, stating on Saturday before the vote: “They call me a communist to hide the truth.”
And on Sunday, December 7, seven days after the elections, Moncada once again rejected “the imperial narrative of communism, used as an attack against us.”
Moncada also disapproved of the pardon granted by Trump, “in the framework of the electoral process”, to former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, a National Party activist, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison in the US for drug trafficking crimes. He only served one year behind bars before being released on December 1, news that was known a day later after being announced by the former president’s wife.
“Order his international capture,” Moncada urged this Sunday.
The CNE prepares to give a name
The president advisor of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Ana Paola Hall, reported on Sunday night of the “immediate” restart of the scrutiny, stopped, once again, since Friday, December 5 due to “technical problems.”
These types of delays began on the same day of the elections, with the delay of the first official preliminary report, which sparked criticism from candidates such as Nasry Asfura.
However, the National Party candidate toned down the rhetoric after the first result, which gave him the lead in the electoral race, over Salvador Nasralla, of the Liberal Party, who demanded a “clean count.”
Since then, both candidates have alternated the leadership of the count, always with a slight margin, now close to 20,000 votes in favor of Asfura, with 88% of the minutes counted.
Asfura accumulates 1,132,321 votes (40.19%), while Salvador Nasralla, candidate of the opposition and also conservative Liberal Party, registers 1,112,570 votes (39.49%).
Marlon Ochoa, Libre’s representative before the CNE, appeared alone before Hall to denounce a change in the security code of two modules of the system with which the scrutiny is carried out.
The counselor explained that the company responsible for the preliminary transmission of the votes recognized that in the module for disseminating the electoral results there was a variation in the “hash” (label or numeral), although it assured that the source code “had not been modified.”
“The irregularities that I share with you today are additional to those that had already been found on Thursday and every day we are finding new ones,” Ochoa emphasized to journalists at the CNE headquarters in Tegucigalpa.
Honduras – which in 2017 experienced days of violence after elections marred by allegations of fraud that left dozens dead and millions in losses – has remained calm during the week that has passed since the recent elections, in the face of repeated calls for patience from the authorities.
But failures and delays in the electoral system have undermined the trust that some residents had in the country’s electoral body. “Honestly, I don’t trust the CNE,” university student Josué Laínez, who voted in Tegucigalpa last weekend, confessed to Reuters. “I want to believe in the democratic process of the country… but deep down I am always worried about fraud.”
Dentist Gabriela Osorio added to the British agency: “It’s frustrating… the vote count hasn’t changed in days, and it’s been a week since the elections and we still don’t know anything,” she added.
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