Honduran presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla said President Trump’s endorsement of his opponent, conservative candidate Nasry Asfura, hurt his chances of winning the country’s election.
“It hurt me because I was winning by a much larger margin,” Nasralla told Reuters.
The latest election results on Nov. 30 showed Nasralla slightly behind at 39 percent compared to Asfura’s 40 percent, according to the country’s National Electoral Council. After Nasralla’s campaign team said the election results website briefly went down early Thursday morning, his narrow lead “had flipped,” he said.
“That suggests some algorithm changed that shouldn’t have,” Nasralla said, noting to Reuters that he has no proof of meddling with the results.
On Monday, Trump warned on Truth Social that if Asfura loses the election, “there will be hell to pay!” and claimed “Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election.” Trump previously called Nasralla, the centrist candidate in the race, a “borderline communist.”
Nasralla also criticized Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. The former president was released from prison on Monday after being sentenced to 45 years behind bars in July 2024 for collaborating with drug traffickers seeking to move cocaine into the U.S., according to The Associated Press.
“I think he deserves punishment in Honduras,” Nasralla said. “I don’t know for how long, but he deserves punishment and the Honduran justice system has to prosecute and punish him.”
Following his release, Hernández thanked Trump and maintained his innocence. He wrote in a post on the social media platform X that Trump “recognized the injustice” of his prison sentence.
“I was set up by the Biden Harris administration and the deep state through a rigged trial,” Hernández wrote. “There was no real evidence, only the accusations of criminals who sought revenge. Yet the truth of my innocence prevailed.”
He again thanked Trump and said the U.S. president has his “enduring respect and gratitude.”
Hernández’s pardon was met with condemnation from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who said in a Senate floor speech that “pardoning one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers is egregious, shameful, and dangerous even for Donald Trump.”
“Let’s be clear of the facts: the person Donald Trump just pardoned was convicted of helping move 400 tons of cocaine to the United States, all while Trump blows up alleged drug boats to prevent drugs from getting to America and risks leapfrogging the U.S. into war with Venezuela,” Schumer added.
Trump claimed that “many of the people of Honduras” requested he pardon Hernández.
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” the president said. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
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