Trump Bribing Honduran Voters To Restore Narcotrafficking Government to Power

Trump endorsed the nominee of the right-wing party, while pledging to pardon its most recent president, who sits in U.S. federal prison for drug trafficking.

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A banner of businessman Nasry Asfura, Honduran presidential candidate for the opposition National Party, displayed on a street in Tegucigalpa on November 27, 2025. U.S. President Donald Trump endorsed right-wing candidate Asfura in the upcoming presidential election, saying the two can work together against the region’s “narcocommunists.” (Photo by Orlando SIERRA / AFP via Getty Images)

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras—Days before Hondurans elect their next president this Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s unprecedented and overt endorsement of the right-wing candidate has injected a jolt of foreign intervention into an already competitive and polarized race.

In a social media post Wednesday to his Truth Social site, Trump expressed his support for Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the conservative National Party, while simultaneously taking the opportunity to sharply criticize the other two leading candidates. The boost to Asfura could paradoxically benefit the left-wing candidate, as it may undermine the closest challenger by further splitting votes.

Trump doubled down on his endorsement of Asfura on Friday, suggesting he would withhold U.S. cooperation and aid with Honduras if he did not win and furthermore committed to pardoning former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who sits in federal prison for narcotrafficking. Trump’s pardon of a major narcotrafficker comes as he threatens war with Venezuela and wages a campaign of extrajudicial killing of boats he claims are associated with drug trafficking. Trump’s message mirrors his strategy ahead of Argentina’s legislative elections in October where he offered a 20 billion dollar bailout to the country only if President Javier Milei’s party performed well.

Screengrab of U.S. President Trump’s Truth Social post (Source: Truth Social).

Trump’s late intervention in the election has dominated the conversation inside Honduras in the waning days of a contest that will see voters elect the president, the 128-seat unicameral congress, and local officials for four-year terms. Attention has largely been focused on the presidential race, with polls projecting an exceptionally close contest.

Voters will choose who will succeed outgoing President Xiomara Castro. Her 2021 win marked the end of the 12-year rule of the National Party, which included the two-term presidency of Hernandez, a controversial leader who was convicted in March 2024 in a New York court of a series of drug-trafficking related charges, including conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, and is currently serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States. Castro is constitutionally prohibited from seeking a new term.

“It’s a blatant form of intervention that we haven’t seen in U.S. policy for a long, long time,” Laura Carlsen, an international election observer with the Honduran Center for Democracy Studies (CESPAD) present in Honduras for the vote, told Drop Site. “It’s extremely worrisome in that context, but it’s also part of a much larger campaign on the part of the global far right of which Trump is a prime representative.”

Castro’s government presided over significant investments in public infrastructure such as hospitals and schools and made important advancements in stopping the efforts to privatize the country’s electricity grid, restoring it as a public good. Under her leadership, Honduras also rolled back the legal framework that once allowed the proliferation of special economic zones known as ZEDEs that would have created privatized autonomous city-states. Social movements in the country, however, criticized her security strategy that kept many of her predecessor’s militarized policies in place, despite her commitment to implement a more community-minded strategy. Meanwhile, campesino organizations and afro-descendent communities criticized the lack of progress on efforts to restore their control and access to land and their communities.

Running for the ruling LIBRE party is former Defense Minister Rixi Moncada, who has largely run as a continuity candidate, pledging to continue her party’s leftist agenda that helped bring down the country’s poverty rate from 73.6% in 2021 to 60.1% in 2025 and saw extreme poverty reduced by 15.4 points in the same period.

There are a total of five candidates seeking the highest office, with three dominating the headlines. In addition to Moncada—who enjoys a slight lead in polls—there is Asfura from the conservative National Party and Salvador Nasralla from the ideologically diverse Liberal Party.

Honduran experts, nonetheless, predict that the presidential contest will likely come down to Moncada and the Liberal Party’s Nasralla. Honduras has only one round, meaning that the candidate with a simple plurality will be declared the winner.

Nasralla had been courting Trump’s endorsement himself and his campaign has worked to position him as the only candidate who could stop the leftist LIBRE from being re-elected. Trump did not spare Nasralla from his criticisms in his post endorsing Asfura, calling the former a “borderline communist” who is being run as a patsy as part of an effort to “trick the people” of Honduras. Nasralla was elected alongside Castro as vice-president but broke with his running mate shortly following the election. The U.S. president’s decision to endorse Asfura over Nasralla has raised eyebrows, given that the latter is viewed as having a better shot of defeating Moncada.

Honduran news outlet Contra Corriente reported that a veteran consultant—Fernando Cerimedo, who works with right‑wing leaders across Latin America—orchestrated the strategy that saw Trump publicly endorse Asfura. Cerimedo had previously worked for Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. According to Cerimedo himself, he facilitated a connection with Trump advisor Dick Morris.

“I think many people were surprised that he came out specifically for Asfura, because the reading here among the people I’ve talked to is it actually benefits [LIBRE] by splitting more the vote, since it was really Nasralla who was looking to be the more dangerous candidate in terms of the perspective of the government candidate,” said Carlsen, who also serves as director at the MIRA Feminisms and Democracies NGO in Mexico City.

The Changed Honduran Political Landscape

José Mario López from the Jesuit Reflection, Research, and Communication Team in Honduras told Drop Site News that concrete policy proposals were largely absent until the final weeks of the campaigns. Instead, the contest has revolved around unfulfilled promises from the last election and campaign messaging that focused on discrediting parties and candidates instead of substantive criticisms of the rival party’s programs.

“We can say it’s a fairly empty campaign in real or objective terms, in terms of things that could actually be carried out, and on the other hand a campaign focused on discrediting the little that the current government did—or didn’t do,” said López.

According to López, the 2021 win by LIBRE reconfigured the Honduran political landscape, shifting the country from a bipartisan system to a three-party system. While the three leading parties each have their bases of support, none have been able to break away from the pack and consolidate majority support. As a result, López argues that the race will come down to undecided voters and young people who are voting for the first time, who amount to nearly half a million new voters.

“The speeches, the proposals, the places they campaigned were focused on where the non-voters or new voters are; that is, people without party affiliation—around 40% of the population,” said López.

The opposition parties, in concert with their allies in private media outlets, have also heavily featured Cold-War style “red scare” tactics aimed at the ruling LIBRE party candidate. This rhetoric is expected to have an impact on the older generations who lived through a heavy propaganda campaign in the 1980s during the height of the Cold War in Central America but is not expected to impact younger voters.

“It’s a discourse that doesn’t really land, in my view,” said López. “I think what can move votes is the economic issue, because historically one of the main problems identified in public opinion polls is unemployment and lack of economic opportunities.”

The issue of migration and the bilateral relationship with the U.S. is also a major issue in this election. Honduras has seen high numbers of emigration to the United States, with remittances accounting for more than 25% of Honduras’s gross domestic product.

U.S. officials such as Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau have expressed concerns about the integrity of the vote, which has also cast a shadow over the election.Honduras will host various international observation missions who will accompany the vote and report irregularities, including one led by CESPAD, an Honduran organization focused on democracy and human rights.

“We have a robust methodology, grounded in the law, which will allow us to observe—with evidence and direct channels with the electoral institutions—enabling us to address any inconsistencies. We respect the role of the electoral authority and are committed to ensuring that this process is legitimate,” said CESPAD member Lucía Vijil in a press release.

There is concern that any irregularity will be used by foreign actors like the U.S. state department to undermine confidence in the result.

“There have been the congressional hearings, the statements from far-right members of the U.S. Congress, and even some statements from other parts of the international community indicating that there will be a discrediting of the elections, even before the people have a chance to vote, which is of course a subversion of a democratic process,” Carlsen told Drop Site.

Carlsen says observers expect an orderly election, but the real test will come on election night Sunday, when the political parties will determine if they ultimately respect the outcome.