By Emily Green
SAN ANTONIO DE FLORES, Honduras, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Residents in a rural Honduran town cast their ballots on Sunday in a delayed vote that could help decide the closest presidential contest in the nation’s history and whether U.S. President Donald Trump’s preferred candidate can hold onto his razor-thin lead.
At dawn on Sunday, hundreds of soldiers patrolled the streets and residents of San Antonio de Flores lined up at the polls – a full week after the rest of the country voted – in this
farming region about a three-hour drive on dirt roads from the capital Tegucigalpa.
The delayed election is the result of local officials shutting down the polls on Nov. 30 amid accusations of sabotage and fraud. But in an extraordinary twist, that decision has now turned San Antonio de Flores and its 4,996 registered voters into the epicenter of Honduran politics, as nationwide results show the two front-runners separated by the slimmest of margins.
“Every vote, no matter how insignificant they seem, matters,” said presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla of the center-right Liberal Party, who touched down in San Antonio de Flores by helicopter on Saturday for a last-minute campaign push.
Nasralla is trailing Nasry Asfura of the conservative National Party by fewer than 20,000 votes, with some 88% of the ballots tallied as counting stretches into its second week.
This town could also play a major role in what is shaping up as a litmus test of President Donald Trump’s influence as he seeks to consolidate a bloc of conservative allies across Latin America.
The U.S. president publicly has thrown his weight behind Asfura and threatened earlier this week that “there will be hell to pay” if Honduras changed preliminary results showing Asfura narrowly ahead of Nasralla, even as ballots were still being counted.
“There’s a concerted effort to turn Latin American countries to the far right and create an unconditional allegiance to the U.S. government,” said Laura Carlsen, a political analyst who was in Honduras as an election observer. “Honduras is a test case.”
LITMUS TEST OF TRUMP'S INFLUENCE
In San Antonio de Flores, where residents don cowboy hats and buildings are decorated by murals of horses, Trump’s influence loomed large over the weekend.
Ramon Avila, a farmer, said that he was keen to vote for Asfura and secure the U.S. as an ally. “The U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world,” he said.
But Kathy Osorio, a school principal, said that her support for Asfura soured after Trump’s intervention, which she said felt to her like a bullying effort from Washington. While she declined to say who she was voting for, she said it wouldn’t be Trump’s preferred candidate.
“We should be able to elect who we want without fear,” she said.
Sunday’s delayed vote in San Antonio de Flores caps a week of electoral chaos in the country, which has included ballot processing delays and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud by the leading candidates.
The town is a microcosm of Honduras’ fractured politics. For two years, the town had no mayor at all, after a dispute over the 2021 election turned into a protracted legal battle, ending only when the nation’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the center-right Liberal Party.
But on Nov. 30, tensions flared again. Normally, poll watchers of all three parties are accredited to sit at a table inside polling stations and review voters’ credentials. The process is designed to ensure a fair electoral process. But when the Liberal Party never received the credentials for its poll watchers, it called foul.
“As we were at a disadvantage, the town decided we shouldn’t have elections,” said Mayor Pedro Caceres of the Liberal Party, who is running for reelection.
He blamed the National Party for the misplaced credentials. But his opponent and the town’s former mayor, Alex Garcia of the National Party, said his party was not to blame and that the original vote should have proceeded regardless.
“They committed crime after crime until it got too late in the day,” he said.
Despite the turmoil, the town’s voters flocked to the polls on Sunday, many turning out for the second time.
Benicio Ramos, a native of San Antonio de Flores, said he traveled eight hours by bus from his farm in order to cast his ballot – just as he’d done last Sunday before learning the polls were closed.
“It’s a sacrifice, but I’m happy to be here voting,” he said.
(Reporting by Emily Green; Edited by Laura Gottesdiener and Nick Zieminski)
