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The Significance of the Vote in Honduras


 On November 28 the people of Honduras voted. They appear to have voted for Xiomara Castro, of the Liberty and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), as their new President. 

The election may well be stolen. We may soon find that the ruling party has manufactured enough votes to keep itself in power. Then there will arise the question of what, if anything, the Biden administration can do about that. But the margins of victory seems to be large, so the creation of later 'found' votes will have to be on a big scale.  

There were three significant candidates for the office. In addition to Xiomara Castro, there was Nasry Asfura, the candidate of the ruling National Party and the mayor of the capital city, and Yani Rosenthal, of the Liberals. The nominees had each been chosen by party primaries in March.

There is a fourth major party, known as the Savior Party, but its candidate, Salvador Nasralla, withdrew on October 13 to become Castro’s running mate. The Castro-Nasralla was part of a broader consolidation of the opposition forces that helped bring about the defeat of the National Party.

Let's back up to Rosenthal, of the Liberal Party, whose photo you see here. He has come in a distant third. He is an enigmatic figure. At one point in his life he was a rather daring newspaper editor, working with investigative reporters. While the Diario Tiempo was publishing a series of articles about military hit squads, reports prepared under his direction, Rosenthal actually opened his home: it became a place of shelter for a witness to a hit squad's killing. In 1993 his home was firebombed.  

But since then Rosenthal has quite arguably become corrupted. I won't get into the particulars of that now. The point is that Rosenthal's ill repute as a corrupted figure matters because it figures into a disinformation campaign waged by the National Party.

In October, several twitter accounts simultaneously carried a misleading message. Each purported to be from a follower of Castro, disappointed at (alleged) news that she was going to make a deal for the support of Rosenthal.

With minor variations in wording the accounts expressed worry that Castro would “forget about the people to do business with Yani Rosenthal.”

There was no reason to believe there was ever a Castro-Rosenthal deal under discussion. Furthermore, the supposed disenchanted Castro admirers all had profile photos pasted in from the Facebook accounts of unsuspecting Peruvians. The misinformation is apparently the work of someone who very much wanted the National Party to prevail.

It is heartening that they were unsuccessful. 

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