Following Honduras’ primary elections on Sunday, March 9, the country’s three major political parties have elected their presidential candidates ahead of the general election on November 30.
The three presidential candidates have emerged as Rixi Moncada of the ruling left-wing Liberty and Refoundation Party, Salvador Nasralla of the centrist Liberal Party, and Nasry Asfura of the conservative National Party. The candidates received 92.5%, 58.4%, and 76.3% of their party’s vote respectively, according to Honduran newspaper El Heraldo.
This year’s primaries faced major logistical challenges. Many polling stations experienced significant delays due to unequal provision of electoral materials, with some delays lasting up to 16 hours, according to CNN. Long queues started forming early in the day, there were delays in the arrival of ballot boxes, and many polling stations were understaffed.
At some polling stations, ballot boxes had still not arrived nine hours after elections were supposed to have begun, news agency EFE reported.
Cossette López, the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) and representative of the National Party said on Sunday, “We’re not looking for culprits, but for solutions” before adding that the 10 trucks which were supposed to be distributing electoral resources had been replaced at the last minute by 90 buses.
One Honduran woman, who waited over three hours to cast her vote in the neighborhood of Miraflores claimed, “The government wants to steal the elections from us. The military is also to blame because they failed to properly distribute the ballot boxes.”
Two days after the primaries took place, the results were still unclear and delays continued to persist. El Heraldo reported that CNE employees had still not been permitted to receive the first of the 24,858 ballot boxes because the Public Ministry was still investigating what had led to the delays.
Bus drivers transporting ballot boxes to INFOP (the National Institute of Vocational Training), where the votes were to be counted, were left in their vehicles for two days as they waited for CNE workers to be given the green light to collect the ballot boxes.
One bus driver who had been responsible for transporting ballot boxes from polling stations to INFOP told El Heraldo: “It’s already Tuesday; we’ve been waiting with our ballot boxes on the buses for two days, and we haven’t delivered them.”
The delays sparked controversy among politicians, with the leader of the National Party, Tomás Zambrano, accusing the current government and the armed forces of boycotting the election. He claimed, “This was not an accident; it was part of a strategic plan to delegitimize the process,” implying that the left-wing government had collaborated with the Armed Forces.
Moncada has also been accused by Nasralla of orchestrating the delays. The centrist candidate described Moncada as “the culprit of everything that has happened in the electoral process,” claiming she “directed the Armed Forces” and “did everything to delay the process.”
Moncada rejected such accusations, saying, “I have always been strictly respectful of the exercise of public office,” adding that such allegations were “grotesque, malicious, and even criminal” according to Honduran newspaper Tiempo. Moncada added that it is the CNE’s responsibility to “have the courage to go out and explain to the Honduran people what happened regarding the 1.4% of ballot boxes they couldn’t deliver in a timely manner.”
The Armed Forces have also denied any wrongdoing, with the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying, “If there is an attempt at fraud, that’s what the Public Prosecutor’s Office is there for,” adding that the military has no political interests and that its role is simply to “guarantee that elections are clean, transparent, and reliable.”
Concerns about corruption are nothing new to Honduran politics. In September 2024, a video surfaced showing Carlos Zelaya, brother-in-law of current president Xiomara Castro, meeting with top drug traffickers, discussing financial contributions to Castro’s 2013 presidential campaign. While Zelaya confirmed that he was at the meeting, he denied that either he or the campaign received money from traffickers.
Honduras is ranked 154 out of 180 in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, with a score of 22/100.
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