TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Amanda Durón García supports herself and her 74-year-old mother with the roughly $7 she earns daily selling soft drinks, chips and gum on the campus of Honduras’ national university.
Her four adult children are married and out of the house, but every day is a struggle for the 57-year-old Durón, and she has little faith that the winner of Sunday’s presidential election will generate tangible changes in her life.
The homicide and unemployment rates have both improved during the past four years under outgoing President Xiomara Castro — even the International Monetary Fund applauded her administration’s fiscal responsibility — but whether voters will reward Castro’s handpicked successor, Rixi Moncada, from the democratic socialist Libre party for that incremental progress remains an open question.
From Durón’s perspective, the cost of food and seemingly everything else only grows. Inflation has hovered between 4% and 5% for the past two years. One of her sons emigrated to the United States three years ago because he could not find work in Honduras and now fears deportation, she said.
“In this country, one administration leaves and another arrives and the economic situation is the same or worse,” she said. “The politicians only want to take power to get rich; the people are the least important for them.”
The candidates
After 12 years of the conservative National party, whose last president Juan Orlando Hernández is serving a prison sentence in the U.S., and now four years of Castro’s democratic socialist Libre, Hondurans have tried both ends of the political spectrum and neither has satisfied their basic demands for jobs and safety.
In addition to Moncada, 60, who served as Castro’s finance and later defense secretary before leaving to run for president, polls indicate two other candidates have a chance to win Sunday when Hondurans will also elect a new Congress. The now perennial candidate, Salvador Nasralla, is making his fourth bid for the presidency, this time as the candidate for the Liberal Party. And former Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry “Tito” Asfura, carries the mantle of the National Party.
The candidates have all been light on policy specifics during the campaign, instead spending their time preemptively accusing their rivals of manipulating the vote.
Moncada talks about “democratizing” the economy with things like a more progressive tax structure and easier access to affordable credit.
Nasralla, 72, who joined Castro’s ticket in the last election and briefly served as a vice president, has focused on rooting out corruption in his campaign discourse. The former television personality still casts himself as the outsider despite having allied himself with various parties over the years. He too has warned of fraud ahead of Sunday’s vote.
Asfura, 67, is making his second run for president for the conservative National Party. He ran Tegucigalpa for eight years as mayor and presents himself as a practical builder who can address Honduras’ infrastructure needs. But he has previously been accused of embezzling public funds, allegations that he denies.
Preemptive attacks on the electoral system
After irregularities were reported during a test run of the preliminary election results system earlier this month, which allows electoral authorities to present preliminary results within hours of polls closing, Moncada said she would not recognize them.
The rhetoric undermining the election’s legitimacy has worried observers.
The Organization of American States electoral observation mission in Honduras said earlier this month that it “has also observed actions and statements, practically daily, that generate uncertainty and destabilize the electoral process.”
“They’ve all talked about fraud,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, director for Central America at the nongovernmental human rights-focused Washington Office on Latin America. “They create more uncertainty in the environment when we see a political class that resists subjecting itself to popular will, but also to the work of electoral institutions.”
Falling homicides
Castro took office in January 2022, with high expectations as Honduras’ first woman to be elected president and a radical departure from Hernández’s thoroughly discredited National party.
Among her campaign promises was reversing the trend of relying on the military for domestic security and giving more responsibility back to the police. That appeared to be happening initially, but by the end of 2022, she declared a state of emergency to deal with gang violence and suspended some constitutional rights.
Most of Honduras’ municipalities are now operating under that emergency order and the military once again is playing a central role. Last year, Honduras recorded its lowest homicide rate in 30 years — it had been declining before she entered office and is still the highest in Central America — but what that is attributable to is hotly debated.
There are signs that while violence has dropped dramatically in Honduran cities like Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, it has risen in more rural areas.
Tiziano Breda, senior analyst for Latin America and the Caribbean at the conflict monitor ACLED, said the gangs were displaced and “adapted to this new reality.” Their violence became less public and as homicides fell, forced disappearances rose, he said.
Migdonia Ayestas, director of the National Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental organization tracking Honduras’ violence, said the state of emergency is unnecessary, in part because it generates its own civil rights violations.
“What is needed is public security and justice policy and not one that suspends constitutional rights,” Ayestas said.
Leydi Coello lives in a rough Tegucigalpa neighborhood and is constantly afraid of being robbed in the street or worse.
“They’ve assaulted me several times, stolen everything I had in the street and on public buses,” said the 54-year-old homemaker.
She does not believe the candidates’ promises for public safety anymore. “Those governing now said the same thing and the situation has gotten worse.”
Trump weighs in
The election has the attention of the U.S. government, which has taken a renewed interest in the region under the Trump administration.
On Wednesday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told the Organization of American States that “events leading up to these Honduran elections deeply concern me; it appears Honduras is already in crisis. Members of the National Electoral Council have been chilled by the threats; the armed forces have been rumbling.”
He has repeatedly expressed concern that the election’s legitimacy is being undermined.
Despite Castro’s leftist rhetoric, she has appeared pragmatic in her relationship with the Trump administration, receiving visits from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and U.S. Army Gen. Laura Richardson, when she was the commander of U.S. Southern Command. Castro quickly backed off threats to end Honduras’ extradition treaty and military cooperation with the U.S.
Jake Johnston, director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, credits Castro's administration with making progress on the economy and social protections for Hondurans. He noted that the one thing the IMF dinged the government on this year was falling below its social spending target.
He also said that Honduras has received its citizens deported from the U.S. and acted as a bridge for deported Venezuelans who were then picked up by Venezuela in Honduras.
“The current Honduran government has gone to extraordinary lengths to try and maintain a positive relationship with the Trump administration,” he said.
Still, U.S. President Donald Trump was unambiguous on what he wants to see, writing on social media Wednesday his endorsement of Asfura while linking Moncada to Fidel Castro and describing Nasralla as a “borderline Communist.”
“The only real friend of Freedom in Honduras is Tito Asfura,” Trump wrote. “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists, and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras.”