Honduran President Xiomara Castro has declared an “electoral coup” is underway, accusing the United States of orchestrating a sophisticated manipulation of the country’s presidential vote to install a preferred right-wing ally.

For observers in Nairobi, the scenes playing out in Tegucigalpa are uncomfortably familiar: opaque tallying, crashing websites, and the heavy hand of foreign influence tilting the scales of democracy.

The crisis erupted after the November 30 election, where the vote count has dragged on for over a week. Preliminary results show a statistical dead heat between two right-wing candidates: Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a construction magnate backed by Donald Trump, and Salvador Nasralla, a television host.

The ‘Server’ Goes Dark

The parallels to Kenya’s own electoral ghosts are striking. The Honduran electoral council’s website—the primary window for public transparency—has suffered repeated “interruptions and outages,” leaving the nation in an information blackout.

With 99.4% of tally sheets reportedly counted, the margin is razor-thin:

• Nasry Asfura (National Party): 40.52%
• Salvador Nasralla (Liberal Party): 39.48%

The gap stands at just 42,000 votes in a nation of 10 million. Yet, it is the exclusion of the ruling party’s candidate, Rixi Moncada, and the alleged manipulation of the transmission system that has triggered President Castro’s fury.

“The Honduran people must never accept elections marked by interference, manipulation and blackmail,” Castro declared, asserting that “sovereignty is not negotiable.”

The Trump Card: A Drug Lord Freed?

In a move that has sent shockwaves through the Global South, the chaos is compounded by a direct intervention from Donald Trump. The US leader openly endorsed Asfura, warning that American support for the next government was conditional on his victory.

Most explosively, Trump announced a pardon for former President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), a staunch Asfura ally who was serving a 45-year sentence in a US federal prison for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine.

Hernández, who was released last week according to reports, had been accused of creating a “cocaine superhighway” to the United States. His sudden liberation is being viewed by Castro’s administration not as an act of mercy, but as a calculated geopolitical weapon to embolden the right-wing establishment.

Castro condemned this as “interference,” citing threats made against voters who supported her party’s candidate, Rixi Moncada. “Democracy is not surrendered,” she warned, signaling that the battle for Honduras’s future is far from over.