Hondurans vote in controversial election

TEGUCIGALPA: Honduras’s six million voters cast ballots in a controversial election yesterday, in which President Juan Orlando Hernandez sought a second mandate despite a constitutional one-term limit.

His conservative National Party, which controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, contends that a 2015 Supreme Court ruling allows Hernandez’s re-election.

The opposition, though, has denounced his bid, saying the court does not have the power to overrule the 1982 constitution.

The country in the heart of the “Northern Triangle” of Central America, where gangs and poverty reign, has one of the highest murder rates in the world, which fell during Hernandez’s four years in office. What credit he claims from that progress is counterbalanced by tensions from a 2009 coup.

That year, then-president Manuel Zelaya was deposed by the armed forces for nudging closer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

Zelaya was notably accused of wanting to change the constitution to vie for a second term.

Hernandez, 49, who came to power in 2013, was seen as the frontrunner in yesterday’s election out of nine candidates.

His closest rivals are Salvador Nasralla, 64, a TV anchor-turnedpolitician who represents the leftwing Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship coalition, and Luis Zelaya (not related to Manuel Zelaya), 50, who is the candidate of the right-leaning Liberal Party.

“For the first time, it’s not a race between conservatives and liberals, but between a dictatorship and democracy,” said Victor Meza, a political analyst at the Honduras Documentation Centre. AFP