Honduras may be a relatively small country but there is a huge amount riding on this Sunday’s election result — not just regionally but globally.
First, it was Brazil. In July, the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on many Brazilian goods and imposed sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice — all in a bid to keep former President Jair Bolsonaro out of jail for plotting an attempted coup. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, had reportedly lobbied Washington to impose the tariffs against his own country. He now faces criminal charges of coercion.
Then, just two months later, it was Argentina’s turn. As the Milei government faced the prospect of financial collapse and a humiliating defeat to the Peronists in the mid-term elections of late October, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent came to the rescue with a pledge to Argentina of “large and forceful” American support — but only if the country voted for Milei.
As Charlie Garcia wrote in a recent op-ed for Market Watch, Washington mobilised all its economic power to buy the election, rescued some Wall Street bigshots, and left everyone holding the tab:
One week later, the Treasury announced a $20 billion currency swap financed through America’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, which Argentina used to make its Nov. 1 IMF debt payment. The U.S. Treasury drew $900 million from America’s SDR account; Argentina’s holdings rose by the same amount.
Over subsequent weeks, the Treasury spent $400 million propping up the Argentine peso.
On Oct. 14, Bessent announced plans for an additional $20 billion private-debt facility, bringing the total package to a potential $40 billion.
U.S. President Donald Trump explicitly tied the bailout to Argentina’s election — widely viewed as a referendum on Milei. Said Trump: “If he wins, we’re staying with him, and if he doesn’t win, we’re gone.”
In the case of Argentina, the Trump administration’s election meddling paid off handsomely. On Oct. 26, Milei’s party won 41% of the vote versus 31% for the Peronists. In Buenos Aires province, where the libertarians lost by 13 points in September, they won by a half point. Milei’s coalition tripled its congressional representation.
In the case of Brazil, by contrast, the meddling has actually been counterproductive (from the Trump administration’s perspective) given that it has boosted President Lula’s approval ratings, as we warned would happen in July. Lula is now in pole position for all polls for next October’s presidential elections.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is in a prison cell, starting a 27-year sentence. And Trump — after a cosy meeting with President Lula last month on the side lines of the ASEAN summit — has effectively admitted defeat by removing the most important tariffs against Brazil. Asked a few days ago if he had any thoughts about Bolsonaro’s imprisonment, Trump said: “No, I just think it’s too bad.”
Now, it’s Honduras’ turn to face direct US meddling in its election process. With the country scheduled to go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, Trump just posted a long tweet endorsing Tito Asfura, the candidate of the right-wing National Party, while pillorying left-wing frontrunner Rixi Moncada and smearing centrist Salvador Nasralla as a “Communist.”
“Democracy,” Trump (or one of his speechwriters, or perhaps even Marco Rubio himself) writes, “is on trial in the coming elections. Will Maduro and his narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba. Nicaragua, and Venezuela?”
Trump describes Asfura as “the only real friend of Freedom in Honduras”, and that “Tito and I can work together to combat narco-communists and provide the necessary aid to the Honduran people”.
Asfura is the leader of the National Party that governed Honduras with an iron grip from 2009 to 2021. Ironically (or perhaps not), its two presidents during that time, Porfirio Lobo Sosa and Juan Orlando Hernández, have both been accused of receiving bribes from Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. The latter was even extradited to the US on drug charges and is currently in prison.
Meanwhile, Trump warns that he “cannot work with (Rixi) Moncada”, the candidate of the governing Liberty and Refoundation Party, whom he describes as a “communist” who cannot be trusted. The other main candidate, Salvador Nasralla is, in Trump’s words “a borderline communist” who is “pretending to be an anti-Communist in order to split Asfura’s vote”.
It would be bad enough if this was just another episode of President Trump letting his mouth run on a topic he evidently knows little about. But that is clearly not the case.
Honduran politicians, including presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla, converged on Washington last week to attend a Western Hemisphere Subcommittee hearing in the US Congress. The subcommittee is chaired by Representative María Elvira Salazar, another Floridian lawmaker who is gagging for the US to intervene wherever necessary in Latin America.
As the Observatory of the Progressive International reports, the hearing was titled “Democracy in Danger: The Fight for Free Elections in Honduras”:
The hearing was framed in Washington as an “urgent” assessment of the situation in Honduras. In reality, the hearing sought to preemptively question the legitimacy of Honduras’s electoral institutions, to cast doubt on the democratic process, and to prepare the ground for claims of fraud before a single vote has been cast. This represents a dangerous escalation of foreign interference — one that threatens the integrity of the upcoming elections and echoes a long history of external interference in the country’s political life.
The playbook bears clear echoes of what happened last year with the presidential elections in Venezuela. Just as now, senior local opposition figures, including, ahem, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado, and US lawmakers began sowing doubts about the election process even before a single vote had been cast. If the opposition parties ended up losing, they said, it would be due to fraud. As such, there was no question of accepting the results.
Now, over a year later, Venezuela is facing the threat of US invasion on a whole host of pretexts that keep changing day by day, including last year’s supposedly “illegitimate” elections. Even the New York Times just reported that Machado is “pushing false claims about Maduro”, including that he helped rig the 2020 US presidential elections and controls two “narco-terrorist” organisations, Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles.
When the New York Times is calling you out for spreading lies aimed at justifying a new US-led military misadventure, it means you’ve overstepped the mark. One of the experts cited by the Times piece, John D. Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama, said of Trump officials relying on Venezuelan opposition figures for information:
“It’s unbelievable how these guys are too stupid to read their own history and know that they’re headed for the same thing” [in reference to Iraq 2.0].
Small But of Global Significance
While Honduras may be a much smaller country than Venezuela, there is still a lot riding on Sunday’s election result — not just regionally but globally…
Nick Corbishley 