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Otto Trujillo wins National party primary, putting him in position to be the country’s first president in a quarter of a century without a military background
Honduras poised for presidential runoff with Castro-backed candidate ahead of elections
A leftist Cuban-backed candidate in Honduras was on Monday in a commanding position in a presidential runoff as the first-round winner was set to hold a slim lead over his closest challenger in the first post-Hugo Chávez-era race in the Central American country.
Victor Manuel López Solís, a former mayor of the capital city of Tegucigalpa, polled at 42.1% of the vote and would get half of the votes, although a slim majority in the second round as is expected, according to the electoral council’s (CNE) final vote count.
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Victor Callejas, the former treasurer of the ruling National party who withdrew from the contest in the run-up to the final round, was in second place with 24.5%. Enrique Pineda, a career military man who came third in the first round, won 22.1%.
Otto Trujillo, a former National party governor from the coastal area of Nueva Esparta, was in third place, polling 20.5%.
In the initial round, in March, Trujillo won more than 27% of the vote, while López Solís took around 26%. Callejas’s share of the vote was a bit over 23%, while Pineda was roughly 19%.
The 45-year-old López Solís will face former boxing champion and Panama strongman Manuel “Nanny” Noriega in the second round on 11 June.
The two had the same winning percentage in the first round, though he won a lot more votes in the second round.
The result is a big win for the 46-year-old president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who enjoyed political support from governments across Latin America, and was closely identified with Hugo Chávez, the late socialist leader who died of cancer in 2013.
Hernández had managed to avoid some of the more unpleasant aspects of Venezuela’s socialist experiment in Honduras, such as its dire economic woes.
But he did not show gratitude, and even offered an initial presidential run-off that López Solís rejected because of what he called the candidate’s lack of experience.
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Callejas also had run for president in 2008, but suffered the bitter disappointment of not making it to the runoff.
As the communist economy has soured in Venezuela, Nicaraguan, Ecuador and Brazil, leftist governments in Central America have sought to replicate Chávez’s non-interventionist policies and raised concerns about the former president’s revolution spreading.
But the candidates differ greatly on their political visions, from strict fiscal policies to social welfare and investment in agriculture and the environmental sector.
Callejas is a trained economist who spoke with foreign diplomats about their concerns about potential instability in Honduras.
Pineda seems to see the help of the military in this election and put together a coalition with the coast of Nueva Esparta. He, like López Solís, has been a dissident within the party, and often says he is a past ally of the general whom he feels is responsible for the crimes committed by drug cartels.