The Latin American Report # 674: Honduras, the electoral nightmare continues

The institutional breakdown is very severe in Honduras, where, by the end of Monday afternoon, the special scrutiny process from which the country's next president must emerge had still not begun. The president of the National Electoral Council (CNE in Spanish) already speaks of the real possibility of losing the electoral process, given the opposing stances within the body, the fraud narrative hovering over the process, and the threat of constitutional vacancy depending on how the LIBRE government ultimately decides to face the transition process.

Candidate Salvador Nasralla is openly speaking more and more of fraud by the conservative National Party, whose candidate "Tito" Asfura is ahead in the count, but with a non-irreversible margin of over 43,184 votes compared to the more than 500,000 ones that are potentially at stake as part of the special scrutiny. And I say potentially because one of the tensions Nasralla is raising is that the CNE has not accepted to review "vote by vote" the 100% of records that present "inconsistencies," deciding, for the moment, to start only with the verification of much less than 50% of that total.

From what Nasralla declared this Monday, I understand that he is blocking the accreditation of his party members who must integrate the boards for the special scrutiny, until the CNE decides to review the 2,773 records that were initially marked for presenting inconsistencies. The electoral councilor representing the ruling party LIBRE, who is in minority on the electoral authority against the councilors from the opposition parties, speaks of conducting a vote-by-vote count of 100% of the polling stations set up last November 30, "given the scandalous documented inconsistencies." This is much bigger than what Nasralla demands, but he understands it somehow.

In this sense, the liberal candidate has acknowledged that, prior to the election, he agreed with Asfura to mutually defend each other in the electoral process to ensure the political end of the Zelaya-Castro clan, but is now demanding his representative on the CNE to vote in favor of all records marked with inconsistencies or challenged entering the special scrutiny, even if it means coinciding with LIBRE. He also says that Asfura betrayed him. Both the Liberal Party and the National Party assert that their candidate won the election, and, truthfully, at this point I have no idea who is lying here.

When it starts, if it starts, it is planned for the scrutiny to be televised and monitored by international observers. In this regard, the OAS mission has ruled out—with suspicious ease—that the general scrutiny data is tainted so far, although it has urged the CNE to assume full responsibility for the process's development. "At this point, it is unacceptable to blame the software or the provider company; the population needs and deserves certainty," declared the head of its Electoral Observation Mission for Honduras.

LIBRE militants have been called to protest "peacefully" by the party's general coordinator, the ousted former president Manuel Zelaya, but it is reported that their so-called "collectives" are throwing stones and burning tires in front of the building where the electoral material is kept. The party's position on recognizing the results has been irregular. While Zelaya himself has indirectly acknowledged defeat, and also councilor Ochoa, they ultimately do not recognize the official count, and engage in delaying practices. We have a very concerning development here.

Chile

Gabriel Boric will leave The Palace of The Mint as a representative of a timid left with a chronic lack of identity. Although since 2006 every Chilean election involves the punishment vote against the political force in power, the right's blow yesterday was too resounding, showing the distance between Boric's government and the people's needs, or how hopeful the citizenry is that a far-right government can solve their most immediate problems, in line with a global electoral trend that also runs through Latin America, now under the thick shadow of Donald Trump.

Insecurity and the struggling economy are the critical points of the Chilean political sphere, which President-elect José Antonio Kast intends to resolve with a heavy hand by aggressively going after illegal immigrants—largely blamed for the surging violence in a nation that was once considered a very pacific one—and representatively closing the state budget tap. Kast, an ultracatholic lawyer who does not renounce the Pinochet dictatorship—although for this campaign he avoided speaking about it—, defends that "Chile needs order - order in the streets, in the state, in the priorities that have been lost." Everything indicates that, like other nations such as Costa Rica, Kast will opt for a Bukele-like frontal fight against organized crime, copying classic aspects like megaprisons and the isolation of gang members within them.

Thus, his policy of mass deportations would be a sort of Chilean copy of Donald Trump's, while from Milei—whom he will meet as soon as tomorrow—he would take the chainsaw to cut branches from the state tree, valued at 6 billion dollars so far. After a public telephone call broadcast yesterday to acknowledge Kast's victory, outgoing president Boric received his successor this Monday at The Mint to prepare the transition. At the meeting, the leader of the murky Chilean left called on Kast to maintain certain state policies like the implementation of the pension reform, which was his last major success. For his part, the first Pinochet-like president since the return to democracy, who, incidentally, does not have a majority in Congress—an interesting but not insurmountable handicap—reaffirmed that the country is plunged into a crisis that demands an "emergency government." Chile will undoubtedly give much to talk about during the nascent Kast era.

Regional news brief

• According to official figures, El Salvador's "strategic reserve" of bitcoins amounts to 7,502, with a value exceeding 647 million dollars at the current price. Bukele's bet to promote the critical crypto-asset never caught on, and, as EFE reports here, he also had to adjust it due to the IMF's reservations on the matter.
  

• In one of those unusual moves for standard politics, President Donald Trump has declared fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction," attributing to it lethality rates higher than or similar to the bloodiest armed wars.
  

This is all for today’s report.