DF

There’s an opposition candidate named Salvador Nasralla, and he is the candidate of the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship. The alliance is a partnership between the center-left LIBRE party, and Nasralla, who was the leader of the conservative Anti-Corruption Party, or PAC. The PAC is largely made up of conservatives fleeing the two traditional parties in horror of their mass corruption. So LIBRE has united in alliance under the candidacy of Nasralla.

Coming into the November 26 elections, it was widely assumed that Hernández would win, simply because he controlled the electoral process and his party a long history of committing fraud.

But when the electoral results were first being announced,with 57 percent of the votes counted, Nasralla was ahead with 45 percent of the votes, while Hernández had 40 percent and Luis Zelaya (no relation to Manuel, the former president) from the conservative Liberal Party had 13 percent. At that point, Luis Zelaya conceded to Nasralla and a member of the electoral commission said that the remaining results were consistent with that pattern. (In Honduras, you don’t need to have the majority, you just need to be the largest vote-getter to win.)

The electoral commission then stopped releasing results altogether, later claiming that the computers had shut down. This led to massive alarm from Hondurans and from all over the world about what was going on. The commission didn’t release any results for two days and then started to release results 5 percent at a time. Gradually, by the end of the week, the results showed that Hernández was ahead by 1.5 percent. They have now said that the results show that Hernández has the most votes, although they have not officially declared him to have won the election.

We are now at a very intense moment of outrage against this pattern that so clearly seems to indicate fraud on the part of the National Party. In response, there have been tremendous protests and demonstrations in the streets by Nasralla and the Opposition Party. We’ve seen road blockages, all kinds of peaceful protests, and also provocateur activity that many are saying is being elicited by the ruling party, in which people who are not of the opposition have been looting and burning things.

This was the pretext for martial law, which was declared on December 1, and tremendous state repression of peaceful protesters. A curfew has been imposed. Most terrifyingly, state security forces are using live bullets against peaceful protesters from the opposition. The number of confirmed deaths at the hands of security forces is at least fourteen, of whom twelve were killed by the military police, according to COFADEH, the leading Honduran human rights group.

Then, on December 4, four hundred special police forces from the elite Cobras unit refused to work. They said that they would not repress the Honduran people, that they were of the Honduran people too and that their families had asked them not to do this and refuse to work.

The Honduran government is trying to cast this as just a rebellion about pay and has thrown pay raises at all of the police — clearly trying to buy them off, but also because it knows that this is an important elite unit, not just any unit, and other police have also refused to obey orders if it involves repressing the opposition.

This is absolutely unprecedented in Honduran history. We do not know if it is spreading, but it appears to be. It shows the deep illegitimacy of this government at the grassroots level.

I think right now it is very clear, to international observers as well as the Honduran people, that the election is being stolen and the government is cracking down with terrifying repression, and there are no signs of it letting up.