# Castro denounces election tampering in Honduras and accuses Trump of interference
*Event date: 2025-12-09*
Honduran President Xiomara Castro has accused opponents of tampering with the country’s still-unfinished election count and charged that US President Donald Trump interfered in the vote.
The allegations came as counting remained stalled by repeated computer failures after the Nov. 30 election. AFP via France 24 reported that the National Electoral Council had still not finished tallying the votes when Castro spoke, leaving the country without a final result and fuelling suspicion about the process.
According to the report, the CNE’s latest figures put Trump-backed conservative Nasry Asfura ahead with 40.53 percent, while right-wing rival Salvador Nasralla followed with 39.16 percent. Both were ahead of Rixi Moncada, the candidate from Castro’s left-wing Libre party. The gap among the top contenders was narrow enough that every update to the count carried political weight.
Castro’s criticism focused on the mechanics of the process. She said there had been threats, coercion, manipulation of the TREP preliminary results system and tampering with the popular will. In effect, she was arguing that the problem was not just delayed counting, but the integrity of the process itself.
Her accusation against Trump was equally direct. She said he had interfered by threatening Hondurans with consequences if they voted for Moncada. That charge must be read alongside Trump’s public support for Asfura, whom he described as a friend of freedom and contrasted with Nasralla. Trump also issued a surprise pardon to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, a move that added a further layer of foreign political involvement to the election’s final days.
Nasralla has also rejected the provisional numbers, calling the result theft and demanding a vote-by-vote recount. He said the tally showed a pattern of fraud and complained about the lack of biometric recognition. That means the dispute is not simply between the government and the opposition, but also among the leading non-government candidates.
The scale of the uncertainty was reinforced by the electoral authorities’ own difficulties. More than a week after the election, thousands of voting records with inconsistencies still needed review, according to election officials. That is a substantial administrative burden in a race where the top two candidates are already separated by little more than a percentage point.
The dispute has spilled into the streets and into party politics. Late Sunday, the Libre party demanded the total annulment of the election and called for protests and strikes, while warning officials not to cooperate with the transition. At the same time, the Trump administration said the election had been fair and that there was no credible evidence justifying annulment.
The legal deadline also matters. Honduran law gives the electoral council until Dec. 30 to declare a winner. That leaves a limited window for the country’s institutions to settle a contest that has already become a test of political trust, foreign influence and administrative competence.
Castro’s remarks therefore sit at the center of a wider crisis over legitimacy. The vote is still unresolved, the data are contested and the political stakes are rising. Whether the final tally confirms Asfura, Nasralla or another outcome, the election has already become a fight over the rules of the game itself.
Honduras is waiting on numbers, but the battle over meaning has already begun.
