Tag Archives: Honduras

Senior Honduran official rejects new election call amid protests

Senior Honduran official rejects new election call amid protests

By Gustavo Palencia

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) – A senior Honduran government official ruled out a new presidential election on Monday, the day after the Organization of American States called for one following a contentious vote that has sparked violent protests.

Electoral authorities said on Sunday that U.S.-friendly President Juan Orlando Hernandez won the Nov. 26 election after partial recounts of voting tallies did not tip results in favor of his opponent, TV host Salvador Nasralla, despite widespread allegations of irregularities.

Hours later, however, the OAS said the process did not meet democratic standards.

First Vice President Ricardo Alvarez flatly rejected the call for another vote. “The only other elections there are going to be in this country will be on the last Sunday of November 2021,” he said.

“This is an autonomous and sovereign nation,” Alvarez told reporters. “This is a nation that is not going to do what anybody from an international organization tells it to do.”

Hernandez, who is mourning the death of his sister in a helicopter crash over the weekend, has not yet commented on the call for new elections.

Nasralla leads a center-left coalition that seemed headed for a surprise upset in the hours after the election, but results suddenly stopped coming in. When they restarted, the outcome began to favor the incumbent.

Opposition politicians hurled accusations of voter fraud at the government, and Honduran military police fired tear gas at protesters, who burned tires and attacked buildings.

Adding to the confusion, European Union election observers on Sunday said the vote recount showed no irregularities. Like the OAS, the EU observers monitored the electoral process in Honduras.

EU chief monitor Marisa Matias said on Monday it was beyond her team’s mandate to say whether there should be a new election, saying that up to two months would be needed to finish a final report.

NASRALLA SAYS HE WILL WIN AGAIN

Nasralla met with OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro and a senior State Department official in Washington on Monday. Nasralla said he was ready for new elections, even though he claimed to have won the first time by half a million votes.

“I’m sure I will win again,” Nasralla said, after handing more material purportedly showing fraud to Almagro.

John Creamer, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, told Nasralla the State Department was studying both the OAS and EU reports and did not speak in favor of or against new elections, Tony Garcia, an adviser to the candidate present in the meeting, told Reuters.

The U.S. State Department issued a statement urging Honduran political parties to raise any concerns about the election using what it said was a legal provision establishing a five-day period for presenting challenges to the results.

“We call for all Hondurans to refrain from violence,” it said.

Honduran rights groups say 20 people have been killed in the protests, almost all by bullet wounds.

Furious that Hernandez had been declared the winner, protesters clashed with police in Tegucigalpa, the capital, blocked roads around the main port and partially burned a courthouse and bank branch in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second-largest city.

Honduras has been roiled by political instability and violent protests since the election. The count has been questioned by the two main opposition parties, including Nasralla’s Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship, as well as a wide swath of the diplomatic corps.

The OAS statement described irregularities, including deliberate human intrusions in the electoral computer system, pouches of votes opened or lacking votes, and “extreme” improbability around voting patterns it analyzed, making it “impossible to determine with the necessary certainty the winner.”

(Reporting by Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa, Anthony Esposito, Lizbeth Diaz and Gabriel Stargardter in Mexico City, and Mohammad Zargham in Washington; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Leslie Adler)

Honduras awaits presidential vote count as army enforces curfew

Honduras awaits presidential vote count as army enforces curfew

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) – Honduras enforced a curfew on Saturday while still mired in chaos over a contested presidential election that has triggered looting and protests in which at least one person has died.

The government’s move on Friday evening to enact the nationwide curfew for 10 days and expand powers for the army and police was criticized by opposition leaders as a move to stifle protests over a presidential vote count that stalled for a fifth day without leaving a clear winner.

President Juan Orlando Hernandez has clawed back a thin lead over his challenger, TV-host Salvador Nasralla, but thousands of disputed votes could still swing the outcome.

Since last Sunday’s election, at least one protester has died, over 20 people were injured and more than 100 others were arrested for looting after opposition leaders accused the government of trying to steal the election by manipulating the vote count.

“The suspension of constitutional guarantees was approved so that the armed forces and the national police can contain this wave of violence that has engulfed the country,” said Ebal Diaz, member of the council of ministers, on Friday.

Under the decree, all local authorities must submit to the authority of the army and national police, which are authorized to break up blockades of roads, bridges and public buildings.

A 10-day dusk-to-dawn curfew started Friday night.

International concern has grown about the electoral crisis in the poor Central American country, which struggles with violent drug gangs and one of the world’s highest murder rates.

In the widely criticized vote count, Nasralla’s early lead on Monday was later reversed in favor of President Hernandez, leading Nasralla to call for protests.

The count stalled on Friday evening when the electoral tribunal said it would hand-count the remaining ballot boxes that had irregularities, comprising nearly 6 percent of the total vote.

The electoral tribunal said it was set to resume the vote count at 9 a.m. local time on Saturday, but Nasralla’s center-left alliance has refused to recognize the tribunal’s authority unless it recounts three regions with alleged vote irregularities.

The 64-year-old Nasralla is one of Honduras’ best-known faces and backed by former President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist ousted in a coup in 2009. He said on Friday that government infiltrators had started the looting and violence to justify a military curfew.

Hernandez, speaking to reporters after the curfew went into effect, said the government put the measure in place at the request of concerned citizen groups.

“As far as the curfew, I want to clarify that various sectors requested it…in order to guarantee the safety of the people,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz, Ana Isabel Martinez, Adriana Barrera and Daina Beth Solomon; Writing by Dave Graham and Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Michael Perry)

Mexico buckles under migrant surge to U.S.

A resident walks by a section of the border fence between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Tijuana

By Gabriel Stargardter and Julia Edwards

TAPACHULA, Mexico/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mexico is struggling to stem the flow of Central American migrants traveling to the United States ahead of the U.S. presidential election, causing major concern in Washington, which is weighing sending more agents to help.

In 2014, Mexico moved to strengthen its southern border when a surge in child migrants from Central America sparked a political crisis in the United States.

Last year, Mexico detained over 190,000 migrants, more than double the number in 2012.

But official data examined by Reuters shows that fewer migrants have been captured in Mexico this year even as the number caught on the U.S. border has soared.

The slowdown in detentions on Mexican soil is frustrating U.S. officials who feel that Mexico could be doing more, according to a source familiar with internal briefings on the topic at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Illegal immigration is stoking a fierce debate ahead of the U.S. election on Nov. 8 with Republican candidate Donald Trump vowing to deport millions of people and build a wall along the Mexican border if elected president.

Mexico says its National Migration Institute (INM), which regulates migration in the country, is already working flat out to contain the problem, but it has a fraction of the resources that U.S. agencies have.

“We’re at the limit of our resources,” Humberto Roque Villanueva, Mexico’s deputy interior minister responsible for migration, told Reuters.

The number of families stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border jumped 122 percent between October 2015 and April 2016 from the same period a year earlier, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The number of detained “unaccompanied minors” – children traveling without relatives – was 74 percent higher. Most of the Central Americans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Despite those increases, fewer migrants are being caught as they move through Mexico. Over the same period, Mexico detained and deported about 5 percent fewer people than in 2014/15. So far this year, 3.5 percent fewer unaccompanied minors have been stopped.

The DHS is considering sending more agents south to train Mexican officials on how to track human traffickers and stop migrants crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border, according to an internal briefing document obtained by Reuters.

U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, who sits on the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said DHS officials told him they hope to help Mexico strengthen its southern border.

“When you’re constantly working at full speed and don’t have all the resources because your primary mission is to fight the drug cartels, yeah, you’re going to be stretched,” Cuellar said.

DHS spokesman Daniel Hetlage declined to say whether it aimed to send more officers to work with the INM, but said the DHS and CBP have an “excellent” relationship with the INM and Mexico’s government.

Roque Villanueva attributed the migrant surge to people finding new routes past checkpoints. He said he was unaware of any U.S. plan to send reinforcements, and that there are already U.S. agents at Mexico’s southern border, albeit only for training.

LEAKY BORDER

In 2014, Mexico launched the “Plan Frontera Sur” to tighten border controls, register migrants and stop them using the perilous network of trains known as “La Bestia”, or “The Beast”.

But migrants quickly adapted.

Elisabel Enriquez, Guatemala’s vice-consul in Tapachula, said migrant smugglers now rent trucks and shuttling migrants from southern Mexico all the way to the U.S. border over 2,000 km away for up to $8,000 per person.

Two such trucks were stopped in recent weeks, she said, one stuffed with about 115 migrants and the other about 60.

Some migrants immediately apply for asylum on arrival in Mexico. Once granted a refugee visa, they can travel through Mexico without fear of being deported, said Irmgard Pund, who runs the local Belen migrant shelter.

So far this year, asylum applications with Mexican refugee agency COMAR are up over 150 percent compared with 2015, and could reach 10,000 by the end of the year, said Perrine Leclerc, head of the Tapachula field office for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The rise in families heading north is partly due to a 2015 U.S federal court decision limiting the time mothers and children can be held in detention, which has created the mistaken impression they can stay in the United States, U.S. officials say.

A regional drought in Central America has also increased pressure to leave, while some migrants are trying to cross ahead of the election in case Trump wins and follows through on his campaign promises, making it more difficult for them in the future.

Compared to their U.S. counterparts, Mexico’s migration authorities get by on a shoestring. The INM spent 4.14 billion pesos ($228.37 million) in 2015, less than 2 percent of the CBP’s budget request for 2016.

The United States has tripled its border force under President Barack Obama to 60,000 staff, while the INM has 5,383 employees.

Roque Villanueva said the fall in the price of oil, which funds about a fifth of Mexico’s federal budget, makes it even harder to put new resources into the INM.

Nonetheless, he said Mexico and the United States would continue to work closely together as Washington has plenty of reasons for wanting a robust southern Mexican border.

“The Americans are not so worried by how many Central Americans get through, but rather about making sure nobody with even the slightest chance of being a terrorist does,” he said.

($1 = 18.1287 pesos)

(Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Kieran Murray and Ross Colvin)