The Honduran presidential elections on Nov. 30 have not yet yielded definitive results. On the evening of Nov. 30, after the National Electoral Council (CNE) had done a preliminary count of 57% of votes, it was announced that businessman Nasri Astura of the National Party and Salvador Nasrallah of the Liberal Party were in a “technical tie” with 39.91% going to Astura and 39.89% to Nasrallah. CNE President Ana Paola Hall announced that the final results would be determined through a manual count, which could take up to 30 days, and urged citizens to be “patient and prudent,” and above all, to remain peaceful.
Prior to the election, U.S. President Donald Trump had named Astura, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa, who was running for president for a second time, as his favored candidate—the only one he claimed wasn’t a communist and with whom he could work to defeat the country’s narcoterrorists, whom he said were linked to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump warned he “wouldn’t throw good money after bad” if his candidate didn’t win, the New York Times reported. Of course, a gross contradiction in all of Trump’s ravings about narcoterrorists and wanting to protect the U.S. from them was his pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was prosecuted and sentenced in 2024 to 45 years in prison for flooding the U.S. with cocaine. On Dec. 2 Hernández walked out of a West Virginia prison a free man.
