Honduras’s leading presidential candidates, with elections less than a month away, accused each other this weekend of preparing alleged electoral fraud. On Thursday, left-wing President Xiomara Castro claimed the opposition is plotting to deliver an “electoral coup” in the November 30 vote.
Her allegation came after Attorney General Johel Zelaya, an ally of the government, released audio recordings in which Electoral Council member Cossette López, opposition lawmaker Tomás Zambrano, and an unidentified military officer allegedly discuss “altering the popular vote” to hurt the ruling party.
The opposition, however, also accuses the government and the ruling leftist Libre party’s candidate, Rixi Moncada, of seeking to rig the election.
“The audios are legitimate, the audios are real. The oligarchy was planning fraud (…) their conspiracy to steal the election from me has been uncovered,” Moncada said Sunday at a rally in Talanga, about 50 kilometers northeast of Tegucigalpa.
“They will not steal the popular will,” she added, as hundreds chanted “Cossette out.” Moncada called for nationwide protests to demand clean elections, a move rejected by the opposition.
“We are in a very serious situation for Honduran democracy. The current government knows it doesn’t have the votes to compete against the opposition,” said candidate Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party (PL, right) in a video on Saturday.
According to Nasralla, the government, the armed forces, and President Castro “are obstructing” the electoral process and “threatening” “all of us who defend democracy.” The Latin American NGO Transparencia Electoral reported that the head of Honduras’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Roosevelt Hernández, requested “access to the tally sheets.”
That request “would violate the army’s principles of neutrality and subordination to civilian authority,” it said. It could also be seen “as a form of undue interference” in the elections and create “unnecessary risks of confrontation.”
Several right-leaning former Ibero-American presidents, including Spain’s José María Aznar, Colombia’s Iván Duque, and Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, expressed “deep concern” this week about a “possible electoral coup in Honduras.” Polls show Moncada, Nasralla, and Nasry Asfura of the right-wing National Party in a statistical tie amid a highly tense campaign.
About six million Hondurans are called to vote in elections that do not include a presidential runoff.
