Podcast: Honduras Appeals to Trump Weeks Before Transfer of Power

The following is the transcript of episode 57 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

CASTRO: I will respect, I repeat, even in these difficult circumstances, whichever winner the National Electoral Council declares.

GRESSIER, HOST: That’s Honduran President Xiomara Castro accepting her party’s presidential defeat in December. At the time, they were trailing in third place with only around 20 percent of the vote. A week later, on Christmas Eve, conservative Trump ally Tito Asfura was declared president-elect.

But three weeks before the transfer of power, Castro signed a controversial order for yet another recount. And last week an explosive device put a legislator from Asfura’s National Party in the hospital.

All the way to inauguration

The ruling party Libre has gone from claiming that the election was stolen from them to asserting that second-place candidate Salvador Nasralla was the real winner.

Now, as they prepare to leave power, they’re doubling down on old claims that both opposition parties are part of a “bipartisan fraud” conspiracy. The Honduran Army, whose chief is a close ally of Castro, says they will respect the results.

Castro has ordered the transition to occur, while calling the incoming Asfura administration a “de-facto government.”

Last Friday, she signed an order for the National Electoral Council to hold yet another recount, even though there are less than two weeks left before Asfura takes office on January 27.

In a post on X, Castro claimed the CNE had failed to count all the votes and to resolve almost 300 legal complaints. The vote count was notoriously chaotic, with two out of the three big parties claiming fraud. The electoral magistrates failed to resolve a number of complaints.

And then there’s the Trump factor. Two days before the election, Trump called on Hondurans to vote for Asfura and granted a pardon to former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was imprisoned for drug trafficking in the United States. Weeks later, he invaded Venezuela, an ally of the Honduran government.

That helps explain why, in the same post, Castro publicly invited the U.S. administration to a dialogue to “address the electoral situation in Honduras with responsibility, mutual respect, and transparency.”

As for President-elect Tito Asfura, he’s proceeding as if the transfer of power were a settled matter. He met in Washington this week with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and also appeared in pictures with Israeli ambassador Yechiel Leiter and Florida congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, one of his major boosters in Congress.

Washington is closely watching the Honduran Congress. This latest recount order was originally proposed by President of Congress Luis Redondo from Libre. In December, just days before the official presidential results were announced, the Trump administration revoked Redondo’s visa.

Redondo proposed the recount on January 8. Here’s where things get convoluted in true Honduran fashion: The ruling party Libre and the opposition tend to convene separate competing sessions on major decisions, splintering Congress and both claiming legitimacy.

[rel1]

One thing is certain: Congress is in recess from the end of October until inauguration in January, and this means that they don’t have quorum to pass decrees like the recount.

But back in late October, a month before the election, Redondo went ahead anyway and unilaterally installed a temporary commission controlled by the ruling party. The opposition held a separate session and ruled Redondo’s commission illegal.

Now, right before inauguration, Redondo and his commission convened Congress to vote on the last-second recount. This, of course, led the opposition to claim that Libre tried to do an end-run around Congress to impose the recount.

Fátima Mena, a deputy from the Salvador de Honduras party (PSH), told El Faro English that Libre’s recount order is illegal because it was never recognized with full quorum. Castro claimed the opposite: that they had obtained quorum to pass it.

But the president of Honduras has a growing credibility problem: Eight countries including Costa Rica and Guatemala jointly rejected her recount decree as illegal.

That hasn’t stopped the ruling party from ratcheting up the temperature. Colectivos, or groups of aggressive Libre supporters organized by party leadership, gathered outside Congress. Gladis López, a deputy from the National Party, was attacked with an explosive device and was sent to the hospital.

[newsletter]

The opposition claims that the colectivos authored the attack. Redondo condemned the violence and ordered an investigation of security cameras. The head of the National Police called the act premeditated.

The president of the National Electoral Council dismissed the recount order, while Castro’s party called on the Supreme Court of Justice to get involved. The dispute over the future of Honduras will likely take us all the way up to inauguration day.

From the Honduran playbook

Now, to Costa Rica. Two purportedly private citizens filed an injunction with the country’s electoral tribunal to prevent a visit from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who arrived in Costa Rica to inaugurate the construction of a new mega-prison inspired by Bukele’s Terrorist Confinement Center in El Salvador.

This is all going down just weeks before the first round of the Costa Rican presidential and legislative elections on February 1.

President Rodrigo Chaves is the Central American president who has most supported Bukele, applauding his “security model” and awarding him state honors. The affinity is mutual. Back in September, Bukele announced in a video that if the next administration “continues with this government’s projects, I have no doubt that Costa Rica’s best days are yet to come.”

[rel2]

In 2024, Bukele and Chaves even announced that they would create a new “League of Nations.” Chaves has said that he needs extraordinary powers like Bukele in order to govern.The complaint before the Supreme Electoral Tribunal argued that Bukele’s visit this week could tip support toward ruling party candidate Laura Fernández. The opposition echoed these claims.

But the TSE rejected the petition, ruling that the two citizens hadn’t shown concrete personal harm to their rights. But the magistrates did warn that there should be no illegal interference from other presidents in the electoral process.

Presidential candidate Claudio Alpízar claims that his party, Esperanza Nacional, has information that during Chaves’ visit to El Salvador and now during Bukele's visit, public resources are being used toward Laura Fernández's campaign.

In response, the ruling party, Pueblo Soberano, called for Alpízar to be investigated for mounting a “disinformation campaign” against them. The irony is that President Chaves has faced prosecutors’ scrutiny since his first days in office for alleged violations of campaign finance law. He claimed on January 7 that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and Judiciary are persecuting those close to his government.

From Costa Rica to Honduras to Guatemala, electoral tribunals have become political minefields. By seeding doubts before election day, the right-wing president of Costa Rica appears to be drawing from the leftist president of Honduras’s playbook.

This episode of Central America in Minutes was produced with support from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. It was written by Yuliana Ramazzini and edited by Roman Gressier. Sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, and YouTube.