Former Honduran president freed from drug trafficking case under Trump pardon
His wife, Ana Garcia, thanked President Trump for pardoning Hernández on social platform X early Tuesday morning.
scripps news
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – After weeks of delays, technical issues and allegations of fraud, Honduras’ presidential election was finally declared the winner on November 30th, with the electoral body announcing on December 24th that Nasri Asfura, the conservative National Party candidate backed by President Donald Trump, had won.
The election agency, known as the CNE, said Asfulura won 40.3% of the vote, beating center-right Liberal candidate Salvador Nasrallah, who won 39.5%. Rixi Moncada, a candidate from the ruling Libre party, came in a distant third place.
The results were so close, and the voting processing system was so chaotic that about 15% of the tally of hundreds of thousands of ballots had to be counted by hand to determine the winner. The results were certified by two election officials and one deputy, despite continued controversy over the close vote.
A third City Council member, Marlon Ochoa, was not seen in the video declaring the winner.
“Honduras: I am ready to rule. I will not let you down,” Asufura said in a post to X after the results were confirmed.
The president of the Honduran Congress rejected the CNE’s declaration, describing it as an “electoral coup.”
“This is completely outside the law. It has no value,” Luis Redondo, president of the ruling Libre party, wrote about X.
President Trump expressed his support for Asufura, a 67-year-old politician and businessman and former mayor of the capital Tegucigalpa, calling him “the only true friend of freedom in Honduras” and calling on Asufura to vote for him in a post on Truth Social before the election.
President Trump also threatened to cut off U.S. financial aid to Honduras if Asufura did not win, and pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández, also of the Asufura National Party, who was serving a 45-year sentence in the United States on drug trafficking and weapons charges.
As vote counting slowed, President Trump again became cautious about the election, alleging fraud without providing evidence and saying Honduras would “pay a hell of a price” if it changed the preliminary results that gave Asufura the advantage.
Experts say Trump’s support for Asfura is part of his push to build a conservative bloc across Latin America, from El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele to Argentina’s Javier Milei.
Both Nasrallah and the ruling Libre party have accused Trump of election interference. Nasrallah told Reuters that Trump’s last-minute intervention hurt his chances of victory.
(Reporting by Leonel Estrada, Laura Garcia and Iñigo Alexander; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer)
