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US Escalation in the Caribbean and Latin America – Live Updates

December 24, 2025:

4:45 PM:

Ahead of the December 30 deadline to declare a winner, Honduras’s National Electoral Council (CNE), which oversees elections, declared Nasry Asfura, the National Party candidate, the winner of the November 30 presidential election. Late last night, two of the council’s three members — Ana Paola Hall of the Liberal party and Cossette Lopez of the National party — voted to move forward with issuing the declaration. Although they did not specify when it would be made, the declaration was issued a couple of hours ago. The ruling LIBRE party’s councilor, Marlon Ochoa, protested last night’s decision and said he would file a complaint with the Attorney General, as all the tally sheets needed to be counted before the results could be announced. Ochoa alleged that an “electoral coup” was underway. He refused to sign today’s declaration, which was instead signed by an alternate councilor.

Honduras’s November 30 elections, which were marked by intense interference by the Trump administration in favor of National Party candidate Nasry Asfura, did not produce a clear winner. A virtual tie between Asfura and Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, combined with technical problems in the preliminary results transmission system (TREP) and last-minute changes that left thousands of tally sheets processed with inconsistencies, prevented an official declaration of the outcome until today. As a result, the legitimacy of the process has been undermined. The LIBRE party, Ochoa, and Nasralla had called for a vote-by-vote recount as the only way to ensure the election’s credibility, a request the National Party’s vice presidential candidate also appeared to be open to supporting. LIBRE councilor Marlon Ochoa alleged that approximately 13,000 tally sheets contain inconsistencies, while Nasralla cited a figure of more than 8,000. And although senior LIBRE figures have alleged fraud and said they would not recognize the results, they maintain that their own internal tallies show Nasralla won the election.

Nevertheless, on December 13, the CNE voted to conduct a special review of 2,792 tally sheets. The review did not begin until December 19, however, due to disagreements among the parties that prevented them from sending CNE staff to carry out the process. To resolve the impasse, the National and Liberal parties reportedly reached an agreement under which they would also support the review of an additional 7,795 tally sheets. During this time, CNE Councilors Hall and Lopez also issued a memo rejecting requests for a vote-by-vote recount on legal grounds.

Once it began, the special review process was further delayed by staff boycotts and by confrontations between party supporters outside the center where the review was taking place. Marlon Ochoa and Salvador Nasralla also alleged that Ana Paola Hall and Cossette Lopez voted to reduce the number of tally sheets under special review by 691. Additionally, on December 19, the US imposed visa restrictions on Ochoa and another LIBRE electoral official, citing their alleged efforts to impede the vote count.

In this context, on the night of December 23, Councilors Hall and Lopez voted for the CNE to issue an official declaration of a winner “with the data available at this time,” even though 395 tally sheets and several legal challenges remain pending review. In response, Nasralla called for a vote-by-vote recount, requested that the CNE extend the declaration deadline to January 10, and said that the council’s decision may be illegal. Ochoa contends that the decision is invalid, as he had left the plenary meeting before the vote, meaning the body lacked the necessary three-member quorum for holding the vote.

Although the CNE had not indicated when it would issue its declaration, the official announcement came just hours ago. Nasry Asfura was declared the winner with 40.27 percent of the vote, a margin of just over 27,000 votes ahead of Nasralla. The CNE’s declaration stated that while the special review process is “recognized as a mechanism of review and control,” it should not “paralyze the expression of the sovereign will of the electorate.”

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