![]() The surprising strength of the vote for an anti-corruption candidate reflects a new intolerance for corrupt behavior. Ironically, the election process exhibits some of the more hopeful recent developments in Latin America. What does this electoral crisis tell us about the state of democracy in the region? Eleven people have reportedly been killed in election-related protests. On Friday, December 1, the government suspended some constitutional guarantees in the face of spreading protests, including a nighttime curfew for 10 days. Riot police responded to some of these protests with tear gas and beatings. On Wednesday, November 29, one NGO reported anti-fraud protests in 16 of Honduras’ 18 departments, and fires and rock-throwing occurred in the capital. However, the country now faces a possible extended governance crisis, potentially involving widespread violence. In fact, October tape recordings that The Economist obtained revealed plans by the governing party to skew the election (known as “Plan B”).Īs of today, the TSE is welcoming continued and direct international observation. Analysts speculated that the delay by the TSE-itself seen as biased with pro-government members-was designed to buy time for the ruling party to rig the outcome. Since the mysterious delay began-inexplicable, since the TSE received the results (if not the actual ballot boxes) from all the polling stations around the country within a day of the vote-opposition parties and journalists have criticized the long and strange silence. Nasralla agreed, but quickly reneged after the vote counting system mysteriously went down for five hours. The OAS and EU election monitoring missions appealed for calm until all the results were in on Wednesday, and sought assurances that the candidates would respect the TSE findings. ![]() ![]() On Wednesday, Hernandez pulled ahead, and by Monday December 4 was up by 1.6 percent with 99.96 percent of the vote counted, even as the opposition demanded a review and recounts. On Tuesday, the TSE started to update its figures, showing the sitting president gaining on Nasralla. TSE substitute magistrate Marco Ramiro Lobo said Monday afternoon that, based on what he had seen, the lead was “irreversible.” The opposition celebrated in the streets, and the media speculated on how Nasralla would govern. The third-place candidate of the Liberal party, which had alternated power with the governing National Party since 1980, conceded and congratulated the upstart Nasralla on his victory. Late Monday afternoon, the TSE finally announced that it would not update results until the last voting box was brought to the capital, likely Thursday. The president said that lagging rural returns favored him over the urban polls. To weather the crisis, he agreed to create a mission of the Organization of American States (OAS)-the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), staffed by international professionals to help prosecute and investigate corruption cases.īased on exit polls of a firm owned by one of his close advisers, the president declared victory Sunday night. Los indignados-the “outraged”-had taken to the streets across the country to demand the president’s resignation. Top officials of the Honduran Social Security Institute were found to have stolen over $300 million, some of which funded Hernandez’s 2013 presidential campaign. Nasralla, a former Pepsi executive and sports TV announcer, had capitalized on a 2015 wave of outrage against government corruption. Observers inside and outside Honduras concluded that the election had produced a historic upset. The results showed anti-corruption candidate, Salvador Nasralla, ahead of the sitting president Juan Orlando Hernandez by 5 percentage points. At 1:45am, the TSE finally issued preliminary results based on 57 percent of the polling stations. Polling stations around the country send the ballots to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal ( Tribunal Supremo Electoral, or TSE) on Election Day, but suspicions spread as the day passed without results. He has overseen GDP growth rates of over 3 percent annually, albeit with a drop in much-needed foreign investment. A law-and-order candidate of the conservative National Party, Hernandez has purged 30 percent of the police force, many for corruption, and brought Honduras’ homicide rate down from 79 per 100,000 in 2013-the highest in the world-to 42 in 2017. Most polls showed the sitting president Juan Orlando Hernandez ahead by double digits, and people expected the results to be announced by that evening (as has been the norm since democratization in 1980). ![]() The current crisis began with the Sunday, November 26 elections for president, Congress, and municipal governments. ![]()
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