Honduras election tally spurs curfew
Votes have still not been fully counted after a week.
MEXICO CITY — Honduran government imposed a curfew Friday and ordered security forces to move against protesters blocking roads and bridges, escalating a political crisis over the disputed count of votes from the presidential election last weekend.
The announcement late Friday came after what began as peaceful demonstrations by supporters of the opposition candidate, Salvador Nasralla, turned violent in some places. The government said the curfew would go into effect for 10 days, during which time anyone found outdoors between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. could be arrested.
The move by the government of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is seeking a second term, prompted fears that he might try to find a way to stay in office even if the final vote count went against him.
Edmundo Orellana, a former justice and defense minister, said on Twitter that to issue such a decree while votes were being counted was “the same thing as a coup d’état.”
Despite the government’s announcement, the opposition planned to resume negotiations with the country’s election commission Saturday aimed at restarting the stalled ballot count and reviewing the results.
The commission, which is dominated by Hernández’s allies in the conservative National Party, has behaved erratically since the polls closed Sunday. It waited almost 10 hours to release the first results, which showed Nasralla ahead by 5 percentage points with 58 percent of the polling places counted.
But the count then stalled until Tuesday afternoon, and after it resumed, Hernández steadily closed the gap and eventually overtook Nasralla. The shift led to allegations that the commission was counting only those polling places where Hernández had won and was setting aside for special review the tally sheets from areas where he had lost.
The commission agreed to count the remaining tally sheets under pressure from international observers.
In a sign of how widespread distrust of the electoral commission has become, Honduras’ conservative main business group joined the call for a full count.
“At the end, there is a lack of confidence in the commission from all sectors,” said Rodolfo Pastor, a strategist for the left-wing Alliance Against the Dictatorship, Nasralla’s coalition. “The perception that there was manipulation has been created.”