Xiomara Castro is more than twenty points ahead of the official candidate
The counter stopped this Monday in Honduras, but not the euphoria of the followers of Xiomara Castro, the 62-year-old socialist candidate of the Freedom and Refoundation Party who on Sunday declared herself the winner of the presidential elections with 51.45% of the tally sheets.
The wife of former President Manuel Zelaya, deposed in 2009 in a Washington-backed coup while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, had a 20-point lead over construction businessman Nasry Asfura, candidate of the ruling National Party, which outlined her as the first female president of a country where few women hold public office. Quite a feat possible thanks to the extremely low popularity of the current president Juan Orlando Hernández, in almost single digits, implicated in several corruption and drug trafficking cases that are tried in the New York courts. Hence, Castro’s followers danced on Sunday shouting “Juanchi goes to New York!”
The government had asked that no candidate declare victory until all the results were obtained, but Castro announced that he is going to form a government, thanked Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for his early congratulations on the networks. That did not help to reassure those who think it will turn Honduras into another Venezuela, but there are many who see this leap as the only possibility of redemption left to a country with one of the highest levels of crime in the world. The pandemic has only exacerbated a borderline situation, from which tens of thousands of Hondurans flee in caravan to the US border.
The 68% turnout attested to the popular interest in these elections, marked by the specter of fraud that occurred in 2017. The ruling party promised its followers on Monday that when all the votes are counted, it will rise as the winner, as well as It happened then, something that didn’t help calm things either. Former Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís described the vote as “a beauty of civic expression”, which seemed to refer more to the high turnout than to the worrying breakdowns of the computer system.
During the 12 years that the National party of Honduras has been in power, the country has sunk further into organized crime, but Castro says he will ask the UN for help to banish it. “We will reverse authoritarianism, out with corruption, out with drug trafficking and out with organized crime!” Promised the potential winner of the elections. It is expected that, if she forms a government, her husband will play an important role.
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