Rival sides claim electoral victory
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS >> Honduras’ dominant political parties proved unwilling to resist declaring their candidates victorious late Sunday despite electoral officials’ orders, while at some polling sites voters remained in line as partisan crowds tussled over when to cut off voting.
From their official accounts, the conservative National Party and leftist Liberty and Re-foundation party, announced that their respective presidential candidates, Nasry Asfura and Xiomara Castro, had won.
“WE WIN!” Castro’s husband former President Jose Manuel Zelaya said via Twitter.
The announcements came only a couple of hours after the National Electoral Council reminded parties that such announcements were prohibited and violators would be fined.
Sunday’s vote could end the National Party’s 12-year reign. Castro, in her third presidential run, rode a wave of discontentment with the current government to a lead late in the race, but the National Party has a formidable political machine and all of the levers of government at its disposal.
More than 5.1 million Hondurans were registered to vote at nearly 6,000 polling sites across the country. In addition to a new president, they chose a new congress, new representatives to the Central American Parliament and a bevy of local races.
In the capital’s violence-prone Reparto Abajo neighborhood at least 200 voters remained in a line wrapping around the block waiting for their chance. Polls were originally scheduled to close at 5 p.m., but the National Electoral
Council and international observers called for all of those still in line to be allowed to vote.
At the gate of the Republic of Chile school an increasingly animated crowd fought over whether voting should continue.
Some shouted: “We want to vote!” Others screamed: “Time to close!” The sides appeared partisan with National Party militants wanting to stop voting and their LIBRE counterparts wanting it to continue.
Kevin David Hernández, a 37-year-old cab driver, was one of those shouting at the gate. He said they had locked it right after he voted and exited. “There has been a line here all day,” he said.
A woman dressed in the blue of the National Party, threw her weight against the gate to close it after some voters were allowed to exit. She said her side’s voters had been kept out and those trying to get in now had not respected the line.
Finally, poll workers allowed 100 voters to enter. A handful of riot police with plastic shields and teargas launchers arrived as tensions rose.
All day long, electoral observers and the candidates had called for peaceful voting and respect for the process.
On Sunday afternoon, the National Electoral Council had ordered poll workers to keep voting locations open until all of those waiting in line were able to vote. Electoral authorities said they would begin releasing preliminary results at 8 p.m.
Luis Guillermo Solis, Costa Rica’s former president and leader of the observation mission of the Organization of American States, said late Sunday morning: “We have been in various (voting) centers already and we are seeing more or less the same, long lines of people exercising their civic right.”