Trump’s War on Democracy in Honduras

The people of Honduras had not yet made up their minds. So, Donald Trump intervened to help them. 

The major candidates in Sunday’s election were Rixi Moncada, the former defense minister of the ruling left-wing LIBRE party, who had promised to continue President Xiomara Castro’s agenda; Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a construction magnate who is running for the right-wing National Party on a free market platform; and Salvador Nasralla, formerly of the LIBRE party, who broke with them and moved to a centrist anticorruption platform.

In the lead-up to the election, the polls suggested a three-way race with no clear favorite. But Trump had a favorite.

Firing off two Truth Social posts within 18 minutes of each other, Trump dramatically intervened in the election. 

With Venezuela under threat of U.S. military intervention, Trump’s posts widened the focus of the threat to encompass Honduras. “Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?” Trump asked. The only way to remove themselves from America’s gun sights was, apparently, to vote for Asfura, the right-wing candidate. “The man who is standing up for Democracy, and fighting against Maduro,” Trump said, “is Tito Asfura, the Presidential Candidate of the National Party.” The threat was clear: a vote for Moncada is a vote for Venezuela that puts Honduras at risk of war; a vote for Asfura is a vote for America to fight against Maduro. “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists…. I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists,” Trump told the voters of Honduras.

And the threat was not only military but also economic. Right after hitting “post” on his first message, another thought struck Trump that Hondurans needed to hear: “If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive. If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.”

With the threat of military and economic intervention now clear, Trump declared, “Democracy is on trial in the coming Elections,” and he left it to the people of “the beautiful country of Honduras” to decide.

Moncada was not guilty of hyperbole or sensationalism when she complained that Trump’s posts, “three days before the election,” were “totally interventionist.”

This is not the first time the U.S. has lacked the patience to wait for an election before undertaking an intervention or a coup. The preemptive soft coup, whether by endorsement, diplomatic support, removal from the ballot, threat of sanctions, or smearing the vote as illegitimate ahead of its taking place, has recently been a popular page in the American interventionist handbook. Such interventions have been undertaken in several recent elections, including Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador, and Argentina.

One of the key congresspeople keeping tabs on the Honduran election is Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL). She is hardly averse to non-democratic transfers of power in Honduras. When Honduras’s President Manuel Zelaya, the founder of the LIBRE party, was ousted in a 2009 coup, Salazar said “thank God… Mr. Zelaya was out of office.”

The U.S. role in the 2009 coup has not given America a good résumé in Honduras. On June 28, 2009, Manuel Zelaya was seized at gunpoint and whisked away in a plane that, unsubtly, refueled at a U.S. military base. The U.S. knew it was a coup. A July 24, 2009 cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Honduras says, “There is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup….” As an exclamation point, it adds, “none of the . . . arguments [of the coup defenders] has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution.”

Nonetheless, when the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) called for the return of the elected president, the U.S. did not. And when the UN and the OAS refused to recognize the coup president, the U.S. did. Then-Secretary of State Clinton has admitted that she aided the coup government by shoring it up and blocking the return of the elected government: “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, a minister in the Zelaya government, told Democracy Now that “I know for a fact that CIA operatives and military personnel of the United States were in direct contact with the conspirators of the coup d’état and aided the conspirators.”

Trump’s current intervention in Honduran elections, which the codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Mark Weisbrot, has pointed out is “a violation of Article 19 of the Charter of the Organization of American States, to which the United States is a signatory,” seems to have borne some fruit.

Neck and neck among the three leading candidates before Trump’s social media posts, the preliminary results, after 57 percent of the votes had been counted, suggest Moncada no longer has a shot. Asfura had 39.91 percent of the vote, Nasralla 39.89 percent, and Moncada had disappeared from the race with 19.18 percent. Though there are still many ballots to be counted, including from remote rural communities that could change the balance, voters seem to have abandoned Moncada. Some polling had suggested that Nasralla held the edge among the large group of undecided voters. Trump’s influence, though, seemed to bump up Asfura as intended.

But by the time the first tranche of votes had been counted, Nasralla had closed the gap, leading Trump to return to Truth Social, claiming fraud in the vote count. Without a hint of evidence, Trump first insisted, “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election.” He then threatened, “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”

Trump’s claim was based on the fact that the National Election Commission “abruptly stopped counting” the vote. But, as The New York Times explains, it was an expected pause after digital results were counted and the slower-to-arrive hand votes were left to be tallied.

This whole affair is bad for America’s reputation in Honduras and Latin America, it is bad for the people of Honduras who were forced to vote under threat, and it is bad for Venezuela. It could also be bad for the stability of the region. The same La Palmerola air base at which the 2009 coup plotters refueled their plane is still operational. If it comes to war with Venezuela, there are U.S. personnel stationed there. Honduras could find itself drawn into the conflict.

The time has long passed for the U.S. to stop engaging in colonial-style interference in the elections of Latin American countries and to stop “defending democracy” when our candidate wins and subverting it when our candidate loses.