The following is the transcript of episode 54 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
OCHOA: Automated fraud and transferring of votes between candidates and parties. The system would skip over boxes, transferring votes from one candidate to another, and from one party to another, confirming the manipulation of the results that I denounced in the audio recordings.
GRESSIER, HOST: On Thursday night, Marlon Ochoa, the Honduran ruling party Libre’s representative to the National Electoral Council, cried fraud in the national elections.
That makes two of the three major parties in Honduras to denounce irregularities in the digital preliminary vote tally system, TREP. The physical votes, meanwhile, have trickled back into the capital, Tegucigalpa, for a physical count, which by law has to end by December 30.
This is a special December episode of our weekly podcast, Central America in Minutes, based on two weeks of reporting in Tegucigalpa. The scenario of disputed results and multiple accusations of fraud that we warned of in our September episode, Six Threats to the Election in Honduras, has arrived.
Disputed results and fraud claims
Yesterday, the Liberal Party candidate, Salvador Nasralla, denounced irregularities in the vote count. According to preliminary results as of Friday morning, he was in second place, right behind the Donald Trump-endorsed frontrunner Tito Asfura.
Comparing the situation to the 2013 elections, he reported a blackout of the TREP in the early hours of the morning on Thursday. He said that when it came back on, the data had been swapped to favor Asfura with over 20,000 votes. That’s a lot when the margin between the candidates has stayed around one percent since Sunday.
In 2017, when Juan Orlando Hernández claimed victory over Nasralla, there was a blackout in the transmission system. When it came back on, the trend was reversed and Hernández was ahead. Nasralla and Mel Zelaya, the head of Libre, called for an audit of the entire system, and led large protests that were violently repressed by security forces.
But here’s Nasralla on Thursday at a press conference, after denouncing the most recent blackout.
NASRALLA: Everyone be calm, let’s not make a stink. We’re gonna win, it’s a matter of patience.
GRESSIER: On the other hand, Libre —Nasralla’s old ally— has slowly escalated its own accusations against the process since Sunday, when top government officials and party leaders claimed without evidence that Libre presidential candidate Rixi Moncada had “already won.” They cited a purported exit poll illegally published in aligned media before voting centers closed.
Opposition parties then released their own polls, fueling a fire of disinformation before the first results were announced. But as we chronicled in a Wednesday night dispatch from Tegucigalpa, the first results were a bucket of cold water for Libre, leaving Moncada trailing with only 20 percent. Prominent party members began to concede that the gap was indeed large.
In her first reaction on Monday, Moncada denounced flaws in the biometric fingerprint system to verify voters’ identities. She claimed that the “elimination of the validation of the records of biometric readers” enabled “inflated records, especially at the presidential level.”
At the time, Moncada didn’t say the word fraud, even though party supporters at the press conference yelled out for her to do so, and to take the fight to the streets. Instead, she called for the careful review of ballots. Three days later, it was the party’s electoral councilor, Marlon Ochoa, who claimed fraud.
Ochoa says his allegations are proof that the audio recordings he gave to prosecutors in recent weeks, and immediately announced to the public, are real. We covered the audio in our November 25 newsletter, Honduras Heads to Election Day Amid Infighting, Lawfare, and Fraud Accusations.
But in short: Ochoa alleges that Cossette López, the National Party electoral councilor, plotted to manipulate the results with a legislator from her party and a member of the military.
López countered the allegations. “All the information disclosed in the system is fully verifiable in physical form, and each political party has its copies signed by its representatives” at polling stations, she said.
Meanwhile, questions about the CNE’s performance are growing. “So much money was invested in the electoral process, yet the CNE was unable to provide a system that works without interruptions,” wrote constitutional lawyer Joaquín Mejía on Wednesday. “Is it really a technical issue? Will anyone take responsibility?”
Negotiations behind the scenes
In Honduras, electoral disputes have been waged with violence for almost two decades. Why has that not happened yet?
While Honduran political elites publicly deny that they’re negotiating electoral agreements apart from the preliminary results, they accuse each other of doing so behind closed doors.
As El Faro English reported on Wednesday night, seven political, electoral, and diplomatic sources, including legislators from Libre and the opposition, pointed to a not-so-secret negotiation between the political parties to avoid violence, and to secure a majority alignment in Congress.
These sources conclude that, as early as Monday, negotiations began at different levels of party leadership, also including national business leaders. For Libre, this means preserving influence despite the unfavorable preliminary figures. If certified, the results could see them out of power in the Presidency and in need of alliances in Congress.
On Monday afternoon, El Faro witnessed Libre party leader Gerardo Torres leaving an isolated wing of the Hotel Maya where the Liberal Party and Nasralla set up their election HQ.
We also saw Nasralla and Asfura that same afternoon at the offices of the business association COHEP, reportedly for a meeting with election observers. Nasralla told us in the hallway that his party wasn’t negotiating with the others, while the circles of Asfura and Mel Zelaya —the coordinator of Libre’s campaign— didn’t return our messages.
Keep in mind: In Honduras, struggles for control of institutions tend to have political solutions and deadlock is a feature of the political system. All three big parties decided to slice and dice the National Electoral Council with their own partisan representatives, instead of appointing technical experts.
Behind the scenes, with disputed results, the first accusations of fraud, and escalating tensions, part of what’s at stake now is the new balance of power in Congress, a decisive political lever. According to the preliminary results, the National Party is poised to take the largest chunk of seats, but neither of the three parties can secure a majority without negotiating.
The sources consulted by El Faro English say that a key goal of the talks has been to avoid unrest, or a rupture like the one that occurred in 2009, when Zelaya suffered a coup d’état.
Possible escalation
Then there’s Trump stirring the pot. On Sunday morning, as polls opened, El Faro English ran a story on how his endorsement of the National Party turned the election into a referendum on convicted narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández, who’s now out of prison and posting from his personal account on X.
Zelaya and Libre seized the repeated intervention of the president of the United States on behalf of the National Party to claim that the U.S. government and opposition are in cahoots to deal an “electoral coup” to Moncada and Libre, who performed way down in the preliminary results.
Trump Endorsement Turns Honduran Election into Referendum on Narco-President JOH
But apart from their claim of generalized rigging, the figureheads of Libre have sidestepped the question of how Moncada is also losing to Nasralla, a former ally of Libre who Trump condemned as a traitor, by 20 points.
The coming days could test whether Nasralla and Libre are interested in locking arms in yet another election, this time to dispute the National Party’s preliminary lead.
As we reported on Wednesday: Not a tire was burned in Tegucigalpa in the first days after the election. But if the public outcry persists and attempts at a negotiated solution fail, an escalation in the streets is likely.
This episode of Central America in Minutes was written by Yuliana Ramazzini and Roman Gressier, with additional reporting from Sergio Arauz. Sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.