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Hondurans have begun voting in an election held amid threats by Donald Trump to cut aid to the country if his preferred candidate loses.
Honduras could be the next country in Latin America, after Argentina and Bolivia, to swing right after years of leftwing rule.
Polls show three candidates neck-and-neck in the race to succeed President Xiomara Castro, whose husband, Manuel Zelaya, also led the country before being toppled in a 2009 coup.
Trump’s favourite is 67-year-old Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the rightwing National party. His main challengers are 60-year-old lawyer Rixi Moncada from the ruling Libre party and 72-year-old TV host Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal party.
Polls opened at 7.00 am (1300 GMT) for 10 hours of voting, with the first results expected on Sunday.
Trump has conditioned continued US support for one of Latin America’s poorest countries on Asfura winning. “If he [Asfura] doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,” he wrote on Friday on his Truth Social platform, echoing threats he made in support of the Argentine president Javier Milei’s party in that country’s recent midterms.
In a dramatic move on Friday, Trump also announced he would pardon the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National party, who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for cocaine trafficking and other charges.
Despite making narco-traffickers the target of a significant military buildup in the Caribbean, Trump claimed the Honduran “has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly”, without elaborating.
Hernandez was convicted of turning Honduras into a “narco-state” while president between 2014 and 2022. He was convicted in Manhattan last year and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Some Hondurans have welcomed Trump’s interventionism, saying they hope it might mean Honduran migrants will be allowed to remain in the US. But others have rejected his meddling in the vote.
Nearly 30,000 Honduran people have been deported from the US since Trump returned to office in January. The clampdown has dealt a severe blow to the country of 11 million people, where remittances represented 27% of GDP last year.
Moncada has portrayed the election as a choice between a “coup-plotting oligarchy” – a reference to the right’s backing of the 2009 military ouster of Zelaya – and democratic socialism. Moncada has held ministerial portfolios under both Zelaya and Castro.
Nasralla also served in Castro’s government but fell out with the ruling party and has since shifted to the right. Asfura was a building entrepreneur before being elected mayor of the capital, Tegucigalpa, where he served two terms.
Pre-emptive accusations of election fraud, made both by the ruling party and opposition, have sown mistrust in the vote and sparked fears of post-election unrest.
Ana Paola Hall, the president of the National Electoral Council, told all parties “not to fan the flames of confrontation or violence” at the start of the single-round elections, in which Hondurans are also picking members of the unicameral Congress and local mayors.
Asfura has distanced himself from Hernandez, his party’s figurehead. “I have no ties [with Hernandez] … the party is not responsible for his personal actions,” he told AFP on Friday.
