LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Election officials in Honduras have finally named the winner of the country's presidential election after more than three weeks of counting the votes. That winner is construction entrepreneur Nasry Asfura, a conservative candidate backed by President Trump. He won by less than 1% of the vote. The election has been clouded by claims of fraud, and the loser is refusing to concede. This is the latest swing toward the right in Latin America after Chile elected a far-right president earlier this month. For more on this, NPR's Eyder Peralta joins us from his base in Mexico City. Good morning.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Leila.
FADEL: So what were the dynamics at play in this race?
PERALTA: Well, look. The president in power now, Xiomara Castro, is a leftist who had promised to fight corruption and to make the lives of Hondurans better. And after four years, Hondurans are still struggling. Her party lost. The polls leading up to the election showed a preference for Salvador Nasralla. He's a centrist. He's a former TV show host, and he's widely seen in Honduras as the least corrupt of the politicians.
But Hondurans went to the polls on November 30, and that same night, the problems began. The counting software went haywire. At times, the counting would stop for days at a time, and it wasn't long before the candidates started claiming that the elections were being rigged. There were three electoral commissioners. One of them quit on Tuesday night, saying the process was fraudulent. And then last night on Noche Buena - Christmas Eve - which is a day where most Hondurans are out partying, not thinking about politics, the electoral commission got on Zoom. And they declared that Nasry Asfura had won the presidency.
FADEL: Oh, wow. I'm sure that was an unexpected Christmas present.
PERALTA: Yeah.
FADEL: So who is Asfura, and why did Trump support him?
PERALTA: I mean, Asfura is a former mayor of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and the candidate for the conservative National Party. You know, the U.S. doesn't tend to endorse candidates, but here, President Trump not only endorsed Asfura. He said if anyone else won, Honduras would face consequences. And look, in a lot of ways, this makes sense. Honduras is important to the U.S. The U.S. has a big military base in the country, and for decades, it has been a staging ground for U.S. operations in the region. The current president, Xiomara Castro, has a tense relationship with the U.S. When Trump began his immigration crackdown, she threatened to shut down the U.S. base in the country. And it seems that Trump made a cold calculation that the most robust U.S. ally in Honduras would be the National Party - Asfura's party.
And now, this may seem odd because the U.S. has had major problems with the National Party. The last National Party president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was extradited to the U.S. and convicted of drug trafficking. But just before this election, Trump pardoned Hernandez and endorsed his ally, Nasry Asfura. In a statement yesterday, the State Department congratulated Asfura and said that they looked forward to working with the new Honduran government.
FADEL: Meanwhile, the losing candidate, Salvador Nasralla, says he won't accept the results. Why?
PERALTA: He says this election was rigged. And let's be clear. When it takes more than three weeks to count some 4 million votes, it doesn't exactly create a whole lot of confidence. But do we know for sure that it was rigged? We don't. Nasralla was demanding a vote-by-vote recount, and he never got that. He says he doesn't accept the results, but he hasn't detailed what he plans to do about it.
FADEL: That's NPR's Eyder Peralta in Mexico City. Thank you, Eyder, and Merry Christmas.
PERALTA: Merry Christmas to you, Leila. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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