More than one week after the November 30 national elections in Honduras marked by an unprecedented level of intervention and intimidation from Washington, there is still no clear winner.
As of Monday, after the vote count remained frozen for more than two days due to what election authorities described as “technical difficulties,” the margin separating the candidates of Honduras’ two traditional right-wing parties, Nasry Asfura of the National Party and Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party, fell to as little as 11,000 votes. Rixi Moncada, candidate of the incumbent Libre Party was running a distant third, with less than 20 percent of the vote.
The National Party’s Asfura was the chosen candidate of US President Donald Trump, who labeled Moncada a “communist” and Nasralla a “borderline communist,” while threatening that there would “be hell to pay” if the election did not turn out to his liking.
On the eve of the election, Trump sought to further plant his thumb on the electoral scales by pardoning former National Party President Juan Orlando Hernández, who in 2024 was convicted in a US Federal Court for his leading role in what prosecutors described as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison, famously told his co-conspirators that he wanted to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He was credited with facilitating the importation of a staggering 500 tons of the drug into the US.
The pardon has given the lie to all of the pretensions by the Trump administration that its ongoing killing spree in the Caribbean and its massing of an unprecedented armada off the shores of Venezuela are directed at halting the flow of drugs from Latin America. Its aggression against Venezuela, which is responsible for a negligible share of this flow, and the pardon for Hernández, the archetype of a narco-dictator, are both rooted in the drive by US imperialism to reconquer its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and reverse the ever-growing influence of its strategic rivals, in particular China.
Asfura had been placing third in the polls before Trump’s intervention. While Trump’s intervention on behalf of the National Party candidate and his pardoning of Hernández enraged many Hondurans, his threats nonetheless carry considerable weight. There are well over a million immigrants of Honduran origin in the US, and there are no doubt fears that they could suffer the US president’s wrath, as well as concerns about the future of the remittances they send to Honduras, which account for roughly 25 percent of GDP in what is one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. Trump also threatened to cut off US aid to Honduras if Asfura fails to win, saying that Washington would “not be throwing good money after bad,” referring to the roughly $200 million in annual loans and aid that the US has granted Honduras.
Both Nasralla of the Liberal Party and Libre candidate Moncada have charged election rigging during the long drawn-out vote count. Moncada delivered a statement on behalf of her party declaring that it refused to “recognize elections held under the intervention and coercion of Donald Trump and the allied oligarchy.”
Moncada said that the Preliminary Transmission of Electoral Results (known by its Spanish acronym TREP) had produced “inconsistencies” in 95 percent of the voting lists counted. She said that no member of her party would participate in a government transition flowing from an “electoral coup.” The party issued a demand for the nullification of the election and called for demonstrations to be held on December 13.
For his part, Nasralla pointed to an incident in the early morning hours Thursday, after his vote total had surpassed that of Asfura, when the web page of the National Electoral Council went down. When it came back up, the vote totals for the two candidates were reversed, placing the National Party candidate back in the lead. He has accused the National Party of falsifying vote tally sheets to maintain its thin lead and charged that the Colombian company that created the TREP is closely allied with leading National Party figures. He has called for his supporters to rally on Tuesday. Unlike Libre, however, Nasralla has made no condemnation of Trump, whose support he courted with visits to Washington before the election.
US interventionism and electoral fraud have a long and filthy history in Honduras. The country was used as a staging ground for Washington’s imperialist interventions in the region for decades, from the 1954 CIA coup that overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Venezuela to the US-backed counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador and CIA-organized “contra” war against Nicaragua that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1980s. During this period, it was ruled by a succession of right-wing regimes and military dictatorships that unleashed death squads against their opponents.
The country continues to host the most important overseas US military base in the region, the Enrique Soto Cano air base, where at least 1,500 US troops operate the country’s largest airstrip, a critical hub for the projection of military power throughout the hemisphere.
The present electoral crisis traces its immediate history back to the US-orchestrated 2009 coup that overthrew President Mel Zelaya, then of the Liberal Party. A conservative businessman, Zelaya had aligned his administration with the so-called “Pink Tide” of bourgeois nationalist Latin American governments that utilized windfalls from the commodities boom of the first decade of the century to fund minimal social assistance programs and achieve a semblance of independence from Washington based upon economic ties with Beijing. In the case of Honduras, a key attraction was the supply of discounted Venezuelan oil by the government of Hugo Chávez.
The coup, supported by the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, brought the National Party back to power, with the gunpoint election of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who ushered in more than a decade of intense repression and rampant corruption. In 2014, Lobo was succeeded by Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran again in the 2017 election, riding roughshod over Honduran constitution, which prohibits any more than a single term.
Both the 2013 and the 2017 elections were marred by well-founded charges of fraud on behalf of the National Party. The Liberal Party had split following the 2009 coup between elements who supported the deposed Zelaya—who founded Libre—and those who allied themselves with the National Party in backing his overthrow.
Nasralla, a former Pepsi Honduras CEO and sports journalist, ran for president in both 2013 and 2017, placing fourth in the first contest and narrowly losing to Hernández in the second, which he and his supporters claimed had been stolen.
In 2021, Nasralla dropped out of the race to become the running mate of Xiomara Castro, the wife of Mel Zelaya and the candidate of Libre. This reactionary alliance underscored the bourgeois character of Libre and its incapacity to fundamentally challenge the domination of Honduras by US imperialism and the rule of the traditional oligarchy. The failure of the Castro government to enact any significant changes in the prevailing conditions of impoverishment, mass unemployment and social inequality paved the way to its debacle at the polls in the current election and the return to power of the right.
The brutish intervention of the Trump administration in the Honduran election is part of a broader strategy spelled out in the 2025 National Security Strategy document released last week. This openly fascist document announces the advent of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. It is aimed at extending the 200-year-old US foreign policy statement, first drafted to oppose European recolonization of newly independent countries in Latin America, beyond anything ever seen before in the long and bloody record of US interventionism.
Eschewing any of the previous pretenses of promoting “democracy” or a “rules-based order,” the new Trump doctrine asserts US imperialism’s “right” to intervene wherever it sees fit “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” as well as to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
This policy has found direct expression not only in the Caribbean boat murders and the buildup to a war for regime change against Venezuela, which boasts the world’s largest petroleum reserves, but also in ever more blatant intervention in the domestic politics of Latin American nations. This ranges from the imposition of 50 percent tariffs on Brazil over the trial of fascist ex-President Jair Bolsonaro for attempting a coup, to the threat to end all US support for Argentina if it failed to back the party of far-right President Javier Milei in recent parliamentary elections, and the current threats against the electorate in Honduras.
Whatever temporary successes achieved by Washington through this policy of violence and intimidation, it cannot reverse the historic decline of US economic and political dominance in Latin America or, more importantly, overcome the deep social crises that prevail in this, the most socially unequal region on the planet.
The burning question is that of revolutionary leadership. No section of the Latin American bourgeoisie, including the left-talking populists of the Pink Tide, is capable of mounting a genuine resistance to the pressures of US imperialism and the capitalist world market. That task falls to the Latin American working class, which must unite its struggles with those of workers in the United States and internationally to put an end to the profit system and oligarchic rule through the socialist reorganization of society.