Trump Endorsement Turns Honduran Election into Referendum on Narco-President JOH
<p>The Honduran ruling party Libre claims Donald Trump's endorsement of Tito Asfura and announced pardon of convicted narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández points to an opposition plot to steal the election, while Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla denies that he fell from Trump’s good graces.</p>
Roman Gressier Yuliana Ramazzini
On Friday evening, just hours before the national elections in Honduras, U.S. President Donald Trump drew immediate charges of interventionism by endorsing National Party candidate Tito Asfura and deriding his opponents for the second time in two days. Trump, whose government is carrying out military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats, wrote on social media that “democracy is on trial” in Honduras: “Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?”
In a second post minutes later, announced that he would also pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president and ally convicted last year in New York to over four decades in prison on drug trafficking charges. Trump wrote that Hernández “has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly” by the U.S. justice system. Political advisor and lobbyist Roger Stone wrote that he had been “framed by Biden on the basis of the testimony of two convicted drug traffickers,” adding to his February claim that Hernández “stood in the way of the authoritarian socialist government of Honduras and their globalist plans to end freedom.”
The trial of Hernández, one of a select handful of former foreign heads of state sentenced to prison by U.S. courts, revealed evidence of drug trafficking ties against all three major political parties in Honduras. Trump’s unexpected pardon announcement for the most consequential and controversial politician in the last decade in Honduras breathed last-minute energy into the campaign of Asfura, who has trailed in most polls and lost the presidency four years ago to Xiomara Castro. Trump described Asfura as an accomplished mayor of Tegucigalpa —he sidestepped the ongoing $1 million-dollar embezzlement charges Asfura has faced for years. He ended with an appeal to “make Honduras great again.”
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National Party leaders were ebullient. Head legislator Tomás Zambrano celebrated the announced pardon as the righting of a historic wrong, echoing rhetoric from the Hernández wing of the party, which began to make this exact appeal to Trump within hours of his victory in the U.S. election in November 2024. Zambrano claimed that the pardon would buoy the National Party to victory, and that it would lay the groundwork for renewed discussion of Temporary Protected Status for Hondurans in the United States, which the Biden administration declined to renew right before leaving office. It expired in September, leaving 51,000 Hondurans vulnerable to deportation.
Allies and Opposition
Staking out a stark position after months of ambiguity, Trump was harshly critical of opposition leader Salvador Nasralla, who before breaking with Castro became her vice president in 2021 in alliance with Libre, formally under his own party named after himself, Salvador de Honduras, or “Savior of Honduras.” In March, he won the traditional Liberal Party primary. Since last year, Nasralla spent as long as the National Party did courting MAGA support, even mimicking Trump’s dancing on social media videos. But the president of the United States dismissed Nasralla as a two-timer, pointing out that his former alliance with the Castro-Zelaya family had helped deliver the presidency to Libre.
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Nasralla tried to minimize the blow. “It’s not Trump saying that, it’s the communications team around him, not the political team,” he said on television on Saturday. At the same time, he casts the election as a recall on both Juan Orlando Hernández and the Castro-Zelaya family. His inner circle, including his wife, congressional candidate Iroshka Elvir, posted videos to social media on Friday wearing shirts reading “JOH never again” and “Familión get out”, the latter in reference to the ruling family.
The defiant tone is familiar to Nasralla, who made his name as the leading sportscaster in Honduras. In 2017, on a platform denouncing corruption, he protested in the streets as the National Party claimed victory over him in an election marred by fraud accusations, the unconstitutional reelection of Juan Orlando Hernández, and the killing of dozens of protestors at the hands of security forces. ““We can’t forget nor let go unpunished the robbery and murders, nor the martyrs that died in 2017 when we won the elections,” Nasralla told El Faro in a 2021 interview.
Meanwhile, Trump’s endorsement fueled the Libre party's narrative about how their opponents want to steal the election from them. Both Rixi Moncada and Roosevelt Hernández, an ally and chief of the Joint General Staff, have asserted that they will not accept preliminary results until the review of vote tallies is complete. Libre has claimed for months that the two chief opposition parties are mounting a joint fraud effort to sabotage the Preliminary Results Transmission System, or TREP. Attorney General Johel Zelaya, a Libre loyalist illegally installed by the party two years ago, has announced investigations into the National and Liberal Party representatives to the National Electoral Council, which will certify the results. On Friday, the party’s official X account tweeted #NoVolverán (“they won’t return”), with pictures of Hernández and Asfura and a rat emoji.
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Hours before the polls open, the Juan Orlando Hernández effect has no clear outcome. “The electoral process has taken a dramatic turn with the interference of D. Trump,” wrote Gustavo Irías, executive director of the Center for the Study of Democracy (CESPAD). “30N will be a referendum for or against the pardoning of JOH, currently a U.S. prisoner for drug trafficking crimes.” Human rights lawyer Joaquín Mejía argued that a pardon would set up “a historic opportunity for the national justice system to determine his responsibility for crimes documented by the [U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights] in the context of the [2017] post-electoral crisis, and for grave acts of corruption.”
“Trump seems to be defining the election: Either people go out and vote for SN [Salvador Nasralla] or for Liberty and Refoundation [Libre],” wrote journalist Thelma Mejía. “I don’t think what he [Trump] did will pan out for Papi [Tito Asfura], as it undercuts his rhetoric against the narcos. Quite the turn of events!”