As lead changes in knife-edge Honduran election, will Trump fail to get his way?

With a little over two-thirds of the ballots in the Honduras election tallied, the lead has changed hands.

The former vice-president, Salvador Nasralla, has a small but potentially significant lead over his rival, the conservative former mayor of Tegucigalpa, Nasry Asfura. Yet Asfura’s National Party continues to brief journalists that they have the numbers for an eventual win.

The race remains on a knife-edge.

In Washington, President Donald Trump has staked his hopes on nothing less than an outright Asfura victory and has tried to directly influence the race in support of his favoured candidate.

Whether it’s been intimating that funds could be withheld from the impoverished Central American nation or making unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud, many in Honduras see the US president’s fingerprints all over this election.

To Honduran political analyst, Josue Murillo, it smacks of the kind of treatment Honduras expected from Washington during the Cold War.

“No government should come here and treat us as a banana republic. That is a lack of respect,” he says in a coffee shop in Tegucigalpa.

“Donald Trump saying who we should elect violates our autonomy as a nation, and it affects our elections as well.”

Irrespective of whether the National Party go on to victory, one of their key figures is already celebrating.

On Monday, ex-President Juan Orlando Hernandez walked out of jail in Virginia a free man having served just one year of a 45-year sentence for drug-smuggling and weapons charges.

His release came after Trump urged Honduran voters to cast their ballots for Asfura.

Hernandez was unexpectedly pardoned by Trump, despite having been found guilty last year by a court in New York of running a drug conspiracy which had brought more than 400 tonnes of cocaine into the United States.

His time in office had also been marred by allegations of serious human rights violations by the police and security forces, particularly against government critics.

So, when Hernandez was arrested in 2022, then extradited to the United States and eventually jailed, most Hondurans celebrated it as a rare moment of justice in a nation riddled with institutional impunity, especially for the political elites.

Trump has claimed the opposite, telling journalists on Air Force One that “the people of Honduras really thought (Juan Orlando Hernandez) was set up and it was a terrible thing”.

Journalists in Honduras who have covered the rise and fall of Hernandez – from the moment he rose to national prominence following a coup in 2009 to his extradition – struggle to recognise that description of a roundly detested former president.

However, he does still have his supporters, particularly in the National Party. And none have been more vocal in maintaining his innocence or calling for his pardon than his wife, Ana Garcia Carias.

I sat down with the former First Lady, who described Mr Hernandez’s release as “like being in a dream, a dream made reality”.

“We spoke to him this morning (Tuesday) and he is in a safe place. We were so happy, we got all the children onto the phone together with my mother-in-law, and shared a moment of happiness, laughter and prayer together.”

In terms of the future, the question now arises as to whether Mr Hernandez will attempt to return to Honduras. Ms Garcia Carias says that his potential return depends less on the outcome of the election and more on whether the authorities will guarantee his safety.

“It depends on the security guarantees they give him in this country”, she says.

“Day after day, this government – which thank God is on its way out – used a discourse of hate about my husband that they spoke of persecution against him. And that’s very dangerous for an ex-president – to return to a place where they’ve cultivated hatred against him from the very top, the president, down to the lowliest functionary.”

Ms Garcia Carias claimed Mr Hernandez had been a victim of “lawfare”, of “the deep state” and of a “politically motivated witch-hunt” by the Biden administration. I put it to her that the case against her husband had largely been drawn up by the Drug Enforcement Agency and the US Department of Justice during Trump’s first term, not President Biden’s.

It was a point she quickly dismissed.

“That’s what the prosecutors claimed but I think it’s so illogical,” she argues. “In whose mind would it make sense to bring a man they say was a co-conspirator into meetings with the CIA, the DEA, to give classified information on national security?”

“There was a political campaign (against him) involving figures in the Biden administration,” she insisted, “and I think there was manipulation of the facts after the event.”

Ms Garcia Carias publicly recognised the role of two key MAGA figures in securing her husband’s pardon: the influential conservative political advisor Roger Stone – himself the beneficiary of a Trump pardon – and the former Florida Congressman, Matt Gaetz.

“They both got involved with the case”, she says. “I recognise and thank them for their contribution. In fact, I spoke to Mr Stone on his radio programme on Sunday and he said that he had taken a letter from Juan Orlando, which he had written on his birthday to ask for a pardon and delivered it directly to President Trump.”

Meanwhile, the vote count in Honduras carries on into another night.

As the ballots continue to be tallied, it should soon become clear whether Trump will get his way in Honduras and see a new ally elected in the country just as he pardons an old one.​​