President Trump has accused Honduras of “trying to change the results” of a presidential election after he vowed to pardon its disgraced former leader.
The US president said there could be “hell to pay” following an announcement that Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a businessman backed by Trump, was tied with his fellow conservative Salvador Nasralla, a television host.
Both hold just under 40 per cent of the vote in a tightly contested race, preliminary results show.
Trump had threatened to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid to Honduras if voters rejected Asfura, who belongs to the same party as Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-leader facing a 45-year prison sentence for cocaine trafficking.
On the eve of the election, Trump said he would issue a “full and complete pardon” for Hernández, who was convicted by a Manhattan court last year, after listening to “many people that I greatly respect”.
Interrupting his Thanksgiving golfing holiday in Mar-a-Lago, Trump said Hernández had been treated “very harshly and unfairly” and endorsed Asfura.
Juan Orlando Hernández is taken to a waiting aircraft in handcuffs as he is extradited to the United States in 2022
ELMER MARTINEZ/AP
On Monday, Honduras’s electoral body said Asfura was leading his rival by just 515 votes, making it a “technical tie” and necessitating a manual count.
Hours later Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!” Without providing evidence, the president said the “tally was stopped when only 47 per cent of the Vote was counted.”
Trump’s intervention is partly the result of intense lobbying by his friend Roger Stone, according to Axios. Stone had pointed Trump to a letter by Hernández, in which he said he “found strength” from the US president throughout Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The letter said Trump had shown “resilience to get back in that great office notwithstanding the persecution and prosecution”.
Hernández, a supposed US ally, once allegedly said: “We are going to shove the drugs up the noses of the gringos.”
Honduras, the original banana republic, suffered repeated invasions from its northern neighbour during the early 20th century when US marines were dispatched to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company. Now it is once again being closely watched by Washington.
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The country’s recent tumult began when Manuel Zelaya, its left-wing president, was ousted in a coup in 2009. Seizing on political instability, cartels began shipping cocaine through Honduras.
Amid the chaos, Hernández, a conservative from the National Party better known by his initials JOH, was elected in 2013 with a promise to end drug violence. In fact, US prosecutors allege Hernández had already developed a close relationship with some of the most feared gang leaders in the region.
He was photographed posing with a thumbs-up beside a notorious drug dealer at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Hernández with the trafficker Miguel Arnulfo Valle Valle, far right
Before the election in 2013, his brother, Tony Hernández, accepted a hand-delivered $1 million bribe from the Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, in exchange for which Honduras was expected to become a major hub for Colombian cocaine being shipped to the US.
During his eight years in power, Juan Orlando Hernández upheld his side of the bargain, it is alleged.
While presenting himself as a model ally of the US, offering to stop the migrant “caravans” heading to the US-Mexican border during Trump’s first term, he was in fact enriching himself through his dealings with the Sinaloa Cartel run by El Chapo and the MS-13 gang declared a terrorist organisation by the Trump administration earlier this year.
• Seventeen of El Chapo’s family enter US in ‘secret cartel deal’
Hernández’s brother, implicated in a number of brutal killings, wielded an Uzi engraved with “Presidente de la República” on his behalf, prosecutors later alleged. The initials JOH were found on ledgers for drug payments.
Police near a polling station in Tegucigalpa on Sunday
GUSTAVO AMADOR/EPA
Despite the Honduran constitution banning candidates from serving multiple terms, Hernández won re-election in 2017. The result triggered protests in which 23 people died.
Hernández’s luck ran out when President Biden replaced Trump in 2020. Under Biden, the US decided the man claiming to be a friend of Washington was no such thing.
When Hernández left office in 2022, Kamala Harris, the vice-president, was briefed on the corruption and drug-trafficking allegations facing the former Honduran president. “Let’s go get him now,” she supposedly said.
Hernández was arrested by US authorities in Honduras with the co-operation of the country’s new president, Xiomara Castro, who is the wife of Zelaya, the leftwinger ousted in the 2009 coup.
He was brought to the US in handcuffs in 2022 and, at the end of a humiliating trial, sentenced to 45 years on cocaine trafficking and weapons charges in June last year.
Hernández is escorted to Toncontin International Airport in 2022 after a US extradition request
TOMAS AYUSO/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
The president’s clemency towards Hernández contrasts with his wider approach in central and south America, where he has vowed to clamp down on “narco-terrorism”, most recently declaring the airspace above Venezuela closed as he edges towards approving airstrikes on the regime of President Maduro.
• Will Trump invade Venezuela — and what comes next?
Yet it also reflects his preference for right-wing strongmen leaders in the region — from Nayib Bukele, the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator” of El Salvador, to Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding president of Argentina — and his disdain for leftist governments like the one running Honduras.
“Democracy is on trial in the coming Elections in the beautiful country of Honduras on November 30th,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, shortly before posting a video of a successful chip on his Florida golf course. “Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?”