Latin America’s election-packed “Super November” came to an end yesterday with a resounding victory for the left in Honduras, which will reclaim power for the first time since the 2009 coup against former President Manuel Zelaya.
Mr. Zelaya’s wife Xiomara Castro won 54 percent of the vote, comfortably beating government-backed candidate Nasry Asfura and erasing most fears of a contentious post-election scenario like Honduras saw in 2017, when outgoing right-wing President Juan Orlando Hernández was accused of fraud, leading to dozens of deaths in street protests.
Although both candidates initially said they were confident of winning immediately after polls closed and Mr. Asfura has yet to concede, the conservative candidate did send a moderate message on Twitter later in the afternoon, calling for “patience, peace, and calm” until “all the votes are counted across the country.”
Only 51 percent of the votes have been uploaded to Honduras’ election monitoring system so far, but third-party candidates such as Yani Rosenthal have also declared Ms. Castro the winner.
“We won,” Ms. Castro told a jubilant crowd last night, as her victory trend already seemed irreversible. “Twelve years of resistance have not been in vain because today the people have manifested their will. We have overcome authoritarianism and we have overcome continuísmo,” she said, referring to allegations that the conservative National Party attempted to perpetuate itself in power by way of constitutional revision.
Since the ousting of...
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