The Struggle for Honduras

Hondurans went to the polls on November 30 in a high-stakes election amid brazen U.S. intervention. More than a week later, the race remains too close to call, clouded by reports of widespread technological failures and outright fraud.

Whoever is declared the winner, the process is already being contested. The outcome will also represent a jarring rightward shift away from the left-wing Liberty and Refoundation (LIBRE) Party, which has held power for the last four years but now sits at a distant third, though the party has petitioned for the presidential vote to be annulled. The implications are profound, for Hondurans and for the international community. As voters in one of the most impoverished countries in Central America had to decide whether to embrace a nascent progressive agenda or revert to conservative rule, U.S. influence cast a long, dark shadow—as it has done historically.

The contested election is emblematic of crises being created and inflamed around the world by Trump’s bellicose foreign policy.

Indeed, the contested election is emblematic of crises being created and inflamed around the world by Trump’s bellicose foreign policy. Washington’s ramped-up meddling in hemispheric affairs goes beyond illegal strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific as it seeks to bolster right-wing populists throughout Latin America to project U.S. hegemony and extract economic benefits. This weekend, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, told the Reagan Defense Forum that “over the last few years, we haven’t had a lot of American combat power in our own neighborhood.” “I suspect that’s probably going to change,” he added.

The administration has encapsulated these priorities in its new National Security Strategy, claiming the absolute right of the United States to enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The stakes of all this were palpable during my trip to observe the election as a member of an accredited mission with the Honduran Center for the Study for Democracy (CESPAD) and Global Exchange, an international human rights organization.

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Prior to 2021, Honduras was ruled by two right-wing parties that alternated in power for decades: the more moderate Liberal Party and the more conservative National Party. LIBRE, a third-party alternative, grew out of a social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the 2009 coup, which ousted President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya of the Liberal Party. The subsequent period of repressive and corrupt rule under the National Party finally came to an end in 2021 when Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, running as a member of LIBRE, became the first woman elected to the Honduran presidency—as well as the first presidential candidate to prevail on an explicitly progressive platform.

Since Honduras’s constitution limits presidents to a single term, Castro threw her support behind Rixi Moncada, former finance and defense minister in her administration. Moncada was challenged by Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, a former TV broadcaster, who served as Castro’s vice president before breaking with her; he ran on a platform of anti-corruption and hard-line security policies. The third candidate was the National Party’s Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a former mayor of Tegucigalpa who supports increased militarization and a favorable climate for foreign investment.

In the run-up to the election, stark polling discrepancies bred uncertainty about how the race would unfold, with all sides claiming the others were scheming to steal the election. After fraud marred the 2017 election, the country enacted several measures to instill confidence in the voting process, including biometric identification and a preliminary reporting system, Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results (TREP). Still, logistical failures in the planning stages and discord among the electoral bodies tasked with overseeing the vote have fostered doubt about this election’s integrity.

On election day, some of those fears played out. In some voting centers the biometric monitoring system functioned only intermittently, and technological glitches plagued the TREP system; these failures were criticized by the National Electoral Council (CNE), Nasralla, and the LIBRE party before and during the vote counting process. Moreover, concerns are mounting about Grupo ASD, the company responsible for administering the TREP, which has been denounced in Colombia for vote manipulation and destruction of evidence. While observers hailed robust turnout and enthusiastic participation, it remains unclear how such allegations will impact the result and whether the Honduran people will be satisfied with the election’s legitimacy. Distrust of the process and ongoing rancor about results are likely to further destabilize a country still roiling from previous electoral crises.

There is no doubt, however, that Trump eagerly put his thumb on the scale in the days before the election. On November 28, he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social:

If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive. If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.

Three days later, he followed up: “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!” His comments followed reporting that Nasralla had pulled slightly ahead in the vote count. By then news of TREP interruptions had been released, but the ambiguity of Trump’s accusation is in keeping with his strategy around the 2020 election. Needless to say, Washington’s push for a quick resolution—instead of supporting a methodological and transparent assessment of the vote and any irregularities—undermines Honduran self-determination.

Trump’s first post on the election also announced his pardon for former president and National Party leader Juan Orlando Hernández, in office between 2014 and 2022 and convicted last year in U.S. court on drug trafficking and weapons charges, for which he was sentenced to forty-five years in prison. “According to many people that I greatly respect,” Trump wrote, Hernández “has been treated very harshly and unfairly.” The pardon even drew the ire of some Republican lawmakers.

While in office, Hernández was a close ally of Washington, despite the U.S. government’s clear knowledge of his corruption, repression, and ties to narcotrafficking. The strong relationship was grounded in Hernández’s cooperation on harsh measures to deter immigration and his efforts to ensure a favorable climate for U.S. investors. While Hernández enjoyed the support of both the Obama and Biden administrations, it was Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, who fully embraced the strongman, calling Hernández a “great guy” and a “great friend.” Hernández understood that his utility to the United States helped insulate him from accountability for domestic scandals, yet behind closed doors he allegedly bragged, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”

Trump’s pardon subverted the painstaking construction of an unassailable case against the former leader, whom prosecutors characterized presiding over “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” The Department of Justice pursued this case under both the Biden and former Trump administrations and had worked for years to overcome the reluctance of the Biden administration to demand the extradition of Hernández from Honduras. The reticence was perhaps to avoid questions about how Washington could have turned a blind eye to his lawlessness and ruthlessness. Trump’s seemingly sudden interest in the Hernández case has puzzled some observers. But behind the scenes, Hernández’s supporters had been engaged in a lobbying campaign for months. Among those championing a pardon was Trump stalwart Roger Stone, also a pardon recipient, and Hernández sent Trump a fawning missive in October. Paul Krugman attributes the pardon at least in part to Trump’s affinity for the “crypto/tech broligarchy”—the likes of Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen—and their investments in Próspera, a charter city off Honduras’s northern coast. The region is the most prominent of the country’s Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs—private enclaves created under a 2013 law that carve out Honduran territory for the benefit of foreign investors, existing largely outside the reach of Honduran law. Historian Quinn Slobodian has deemed Próspera “something very close to the anarcho-capitalist fantasy.” Stone, unsurprisingly, is a proponent. Opposition to ZEDEs grew over time and extended beyond the Honduran and international left; even the United Nations expressed alarm about their impact on democracy in 2021. The following year Honduran lawmakers repealed the ZEDE law, but the country soon faced a flood of lawsuits through the Investor-State Dispute System. Próspera filed a claim for almost $11 billion, a staggering sum that would have swallowed two-thirds of the government’s budget, before dropping the claim to under $2 billion. Following years of legal wrangling, the country withdrew from the international arbitration system, and the Honduran Supreme Court declared the ZEDE law unconstitutional in 2024 during Castro’s tenure. In the eyes of investors, the move was surely another sign that LIBRE was bad for business.

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Even before Trump’s posts on social media, several American conservative lawmakers and diplomats worked to tip the scales against the incumbent administration. Among the most prominent Moncada detractors was Florida U.S. Representative María Elvira Salazar, who endorsed the 2009 coup. At a hastily arranged congressional hearing on Honduran election integrity in late November, Carlos Trujillo, former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, alleged that LIBRE was trying to manipulate the outcome. Yet he failed to disclose his own work as a paid lobbyist for several Honduran companies and for Próspera, which stands to benefit from a more business-friendly administration. The connections between the Honduran right wing and U.S. Republicans also include Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager before being replaced, who provided assistance to the Asfura campaign. Of course, Honduras’s election has also come at a moment of heightened U.S. aggression and militarization in the Caribbean. Washington initially justified its extrajudicial murders in the waters off the coast of Venezuela—and accompanying saber-rattling about an imminent invasion—as part of a so-called “war on fentanyl,” though the drug does not transit through Venezuela, and only Congress can declare war. With Washington so far unmoved by escalating condemnation of the strikes, Hondurans headed to the ballot box may have feared the country could face retributive economic or even military action if LIBRE holds the presidency.

This much is clear: political participation alone, without the sustained mobilization of and respect for social movements, will not realize the project of liberation, justice, and dignity for all Hondurans.

Trump’s gunboat diplomacy may be set to expand as the administration sets its sights on Colombia’s upcoming elections. “I hear Colombia, the country of Colombia, is making cocaine,” Trump mentioned at a Cabinet meeting last week. “Then they sell us their cocaine. . . . anybody that’s doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack. Not just Venezuela.” After many years of cooperation, Colombia-U.S. relations have frayed under Trump’s blustering rhetoric, and he may feel emboldened after his efforts around the recent off-year election in Argentina. President Javier Milei enjoyed a boost from Trump’s massive economic bailout just before the country went to the polls, all while Republicans were eviscerating social benefits at home. Milei, in turn, pledged his full support to Asfura and argued that freedom on the continent required a “resounding defeat of narco-socialism that has held Honduras hostage since 2022.” On top of it all, the U.S. immigration crackdown has also been roiling Honduran domestic politics. Some voters said they would not vote for Castro because she failed to protect migrants against Trump. In July, his administration gave notice that Temporary Protected Status for Hondurans would be terminated in sixty days, with the grave result of reducing critical remittances that provide a quarter of Honduras’s GDP. As the election neared, a Honduran student in Boston who was flying to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving was summarily deported in defiance of a judge’s order. Earlier this year, Castro suggested that she might end military cooperation in response to Trump’s threats of mass deportations, but she folded in the face of vociferous dissent from rival parties about the price that Hondurans living in the United States would pay. She similarly backpedaled on ending an extradition treaty with the United States, though some critics saw her initial stance as less a matter of principled resistance than a veiled effort to protect her brother-in-law, who had been caught on video meeting with drug-trafficking leaders. Yet there is no clear formula to mitigate the impact of Trump’s racist truculence on immigration. Indeed, Castro’s eventual capitulation did little to ensure any respite for the Honduran diaspora in the United States.

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LIBRE’s loss will have resounding consequences. Under Castro, the party delivered on several promises, making cost-of-living improvements such as electric subsidies, rolling back privatization of the energy sector to tamp down high energy costs, proposing a distributive tax reform, and making infrastructure upgrades including road repairs. Despite presiding over an economy reeling from the pandemic, LIBRE succeeded in restoring some social and economic indicators to their pre-pandemic levels, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That is not to say the Castro administration was without domestic critics, including those on the left; some expressed disappointment at the lack of progress against corruption, and for Hondurans who dared to imagine an easier life, the pace of economic relief could seem far too slow. Moncada’s platform of democratizing the economy may have failed to assuage those struggling to make ends meet. But LIBRE’s shortcomings must be analyzed in the context of the worldwide maldistribution of resources and opportunities. Deeply entrenched structural impediments to progressive social and economic priorities make enduring political transformation difficult, especially in the face of internal power dynamics that are resistant, sometimes violently, to reform.

Unfortunately, there is no sign that conditions—especially foreign interference—will become more favorable anytime soon. Trump’s unprecedented, cavalier, and overt exertion of U.S. power in Honduras and elsewhere is unrestrained by any sense of comity, humanity, or law. And as the right reasserts its grip on power inside Honduras, life is poised to get decidedly worse for many Hondurans, especially the most vulnerable. It will take concerted action to avoid a disastrous new cycle of desperate exodus and brutal backlash.

This much is clear: political participation alone, without the sustained mobilization of and respect for social movements, will not realize the project of liberation, justice, and dignity for all Hondurans. Transformation will require global solidarity, including the long tradition of resistance from anti-imperialist activists in the Global North, to push back against the transnational forces that conspire to buoy the elite and disempower the rest, both in Honduras and elsewhere. As the Honduran left’s mantra reminds us, la lucha sigue: the struggle continues.

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