Honduras may be a relatively small country but there is a huge amount riding on this Sunday’s election result — not just regionally but globally.
First, it was Brazil. In July, the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on many Brazilian goods and imposed sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice — all in a bid to keep former President Jair Bolsonaro out of jail for plotting an attempted coup. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, had reportedly lobbied Washington to impose the tariffs against his own country. He now faces criminal charges of coercion.
Then, just two months later, it was Argentina’s turn. As the Milei government faced the prospect of financial collapse and a humiliating defeat to the Peronists in the mid-term elections of late October, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent came to the rescue with a pledge to Argentina of “large and forceful” American support — but only if the country voted for Milei.
As Charlie Garcia wrote in a recent op-ed for Market Watch, Washington mobilised all its economic power to buy the election, rescued some Wall Street bigshots, and left everyone holding the tab:
One week later, the Treasury announced a $20 billion currency swap financed through America’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, which Argentina used to make its Nov. 1 IMF debt payment. The U.S. Treasury drew $900 million from America’s SDR account; Argentina’s holdings rose by the same amount.
Over subsequent weeks, the Treasury spent $400 million propping up the Argentine peso.
On Oct. 14, Bessent announced plans for an additional $20 billion private-debt facility, bringing the total package to a potential $40 billion.
U.S. President Donald Trump explicitly tied the bailout to Argentina’s election — widely viewed as a referendum on Milei. Said Trump: “If he wins, we’re staying with him, and if he doesn’t win, we’re gone.”
In the case of Argentina, the Trump administration’s election meddling paid off handsomely. On Oct. 26, Milei’s party won 41% of the vote versus 31% for the Peronists. In Buenos Aires province, where the libertarians lost by 13 points in September, they won by a half point. Milei’s coalition tripled its congressional representation.
In the case of Brazil, by contrast, the meddling has actually been counterproductive (from the Trump administration’s perspective) given that it has boosted President Lula’s approval ratings, as we warned would happen in July. Lula is now in pole position for all polls for next October’s presidential elections.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is in a prison cell, starting a 27-year sentence. And Trump — after a cosy meeting with President Lula last month on the side lines of the ASEAN summit — has effectively admitted defeat by removing the most important tariffs against Brazil. Asked a few days ago if he had any thoughts about Bolsonaro’s imprisonment, Trump said: “No, I just think it’s too bad.”
Now, it’s Honduras’ turn to face direct US meddling in its election process. With the country scheduled to go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, Trump just posted a long tweet endorsing Tito Asfura, the candidate of the right-wing National Party, while pillorying left-wing frontrunner Rixi Moncada and smearing centrist Salvador Nasralla as a “Communist.”
“Democracy,” Trump (or one of his speechwriters, or perhaps even Marco Rubio himself) writes, “is on trial in the coming elections. Will Maduro and his narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba. Nicaragua, and Venezuela?”
Trump descibes Asfura as “the only real friend of Freedom in Honduras”, and that “Tito and I can work together to combat narco-communists and provide the necessary aid to the Honduran people”.
Asfura is the leader of the National Party that governed Honduras with an iron grip from 2009 to 2021. Ironically (or perhaps not), its two presidents during that time, Porfirio Lobo Sosa and Juan Orlando Hernández, have both been accused of receiving bribes from Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. The latter was even extradited to the US on drug charges and is currently in prison.
Meanwhile, Trump warns that he “cannot work with (Rixi) Moncada”, the candidate of the governing Liberty and Refoundation Party, whom he describes as a “communist” who cannot be trusted. The other main candidate, Salvador Nasralla is, in Trump’s words “a borderline communist” who is “pretending to be an anti-Communist in order to split Asfura’s vote”.
It would be bad enough if this was just another episode of President Trump letting his mouth run on a topic he evidently knows little about. But that is clearly not the case.
Honduran politicians, including presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla, converged on Washington last week to attend a Western Hemisphere Subcommittee hearing in the US Congress. The subcommittee is chaired by Representative María Elvira Salazar, another Floridian lawmaker who is gagging for the US to intervene wherever necessary in Latin America.
As the Observatory of the Progressive International reports, the hearing was titled “Democracy in Danger: The Fight for Free Elections in Honduras”:
The hearing was framed in Washington as an “urgent” assessment of the situation in Honduras. In reality, the hearing sought to preemptively question the legitimacy of Honduras’s electoral institutions, to cast doubt on the democratic process, and to prepare the ground for claims of fraud before a single vote has been cast. This represents a dangerous escalation of foreign interference — one that threatens the integrity of the upcoming elections and echoes a long history of external interference in the country’s political life.
The playbook bears clear echoes of what happened last year with the presidential elections in Venezuela. Just as now, senior local opposition figures, including, ahem, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado, and US lawmakers began sowing doubts about the election process even before a single vote had been cast. If the opposition parties ended up losing, they said, it would be due to fraud. As such, there was no question of accepting the results.
Now, over a year later, Venezuela is facing the threat of US invasion on a whole host of pretexts that keep changing day by day, including last year’s supposedly “illegitimate” elections. Even the New York Times just reported that Machado is “pushing false claims about Maduro”, including that he helped rig the 2020 US presidential elections and controls two “narco-terrorist” organisations, Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles.
When the New York Times is calling you out for spreading lies aimed at justifying a new US-led military misadventure, it means you’ve overstepped the mark. One of the experts cited by the Times piece, John D. Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama, said of Trump officials relying on Venezuelan opposition figures for information:
“It’s unbelievable how these guys are too stupid to read their own history and know that they’re headed for the same thing” [in reference to Iraq 2.0].
Small But of Global Significance
While Honduras may be a much smaller country than Venezuela, there is still a lot riding on Sunday’s election result — not just regionally but globally.
Honduras is strategically important due to its geographic location with regard to migration routes, DEA operations, as well as the US’ redoubled efforts to contain left-wing, sovereign-minded governments in Central America.
Honduras is also one of the last governments in Latin America to be on the receiving end of an old school-style US-sponsored coup d’état. In 2009, the Honduran military kidnapped the country’s democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, and forcefully removed him not just from office but from the country.
Zelaya’s biggest crime was to push forward a land reform decree that would have redistributed large tracts and granted titles to long-established farmer cooperatives. He also raised the country’s desultory minimum wage by 60%. That was in 2008. The following year, the country’s military – with at least tacit support from the Obama administration – led a coup against him.
Following that coup, the National Party won repeated elections until 2021, when Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro (no relation to Fidel), won by a landslide, becoming Honduras’ first female president. Since coming to power she has officially established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China after formally breaking ties with Taiwan.
In her first ever speech to the UN General Assembly, Castro condemned the violent US-sponsored military coup in Honduras in 2009, which overthrew her husband, and more generally US attempts to intervene in the affairs of other countries.
“The poor nations of the world can no longer stand coups d’état; we cannot stand the use of lawfare, nor colour revolutions, usually organised to plunder our vast natural resources,” she declared.
The Uncertain Future of Prospera
As readers may recall, Honduras has also served as an open-air lab for a controversial experiment in corporate governance: the legal establishment of semi-autonomous charter cities owned and run by foreign companies — all made possible by the two National Party presidents, Lobo Sosa and Orlando Hernández.
In fact, it was in his role as leader of Honduras’ Congress, when Lobo Sosa was president, that Orlando Hernández staged what he called a “technical coup” against the country’s Supreme Court of Justice by dismissing four magistrates from the Constitutional Chamber. From Foreign Policy in Focus:
The reason? One ruling that found regulations to create Special Development Regions (REDs) — an initiative that would allow for the creation of private cities on Honduras’ territory — to be unconstitutional.
Legislative Decree No. 283-2010 promoted by then President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa to create the special administrative areas that would be essentially governed by private companies…
One such area, going under the name Próspera, was established in 2021 on Roatán, an island 40 miles off Honduras’ northern coast. Backed by US investors including Peter Thiel, Prospéra was described by the tech news website Rest of World as a “crypto-libertarian paradise”.
One of Xiomara Castro’s first acts as president, in 2021, was to repeal the 2013 law passed by Lobo Sosa and the Hernández-controlled Congress that had allowed foreign investors to create charter cities in designated semi-autonomous ZEDEs (“employment and economic development zones”).
”As we reported last year, the amount of autonomy that Lobo Sosa’s government had granted to the owners of the ZEDEs was simply mind-boggling:
[T]he 2013 law clearly established that “each ZEDE will have its own internal security bodies (…), including its own police, crime investigation bodies, intelligence, criminal prosecution and penitentiary system.” The cities will also have an independent financial regime, and will not be subject to the exchange control of the Central Bank of Honduras; they are empowered to develop their own internal monetary policy.
Even before Castro’s election, local businesses were complaining that the law had granted too many privileges to foreign investors to the detriment of domestic capital. The US economist Paul Rohmer, the godfather of international charter cities who had initially worked with the Lobo Sosa government to develop ZEDEs, had disowned the project, warning that Honduras’ ZEDEs system was undemocratic, opaque, destined for collapse and shrouded in lies. As an article in The Intercept explains, the legal showdown between the Honduran government and the investors behind the charter cities presents an “almost impossible-to-believe scenario”:
A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.
In its ISDS suit, Próspera Inc. alleges that Honduras owes it more than $10 billion for breaking a “50-year legal stability guarantee” granting it sovereignty over Próspera, including the ability to create its own laws, courts, authorities and taxes.
In February 2024, Castro decided to withdraw her country from ICSID, the World Bank’s arbitration panel, arguing that the court was infringing illegally on Honduran sovereignty. By doing so, Honduras became the first Latin American country to walk away from ICSID, the world’s most important forum for the settlement of differences between investors and States, with a total of 149 government signatories.
The outstanding cases are still pending, though. The people and companies behind Próspera, including tech bros close to Trump, want their pay out — all eleven billion dollars of it. That is why what happens on Sunday is of such import. Eleven billion dollars for an economy the size of Honduras (estimated GDP: $37 billion) is a crippling sum.
One of the witnesses called to testify at the hearing was Carlos Trujillo, a former US Ambassador to the Organisation of American States whose lobbying firm represented Próspera. Look what happens when Representative Joaquin Castro begins questioning the legitimacy of testimony by a “registered foreign agent” and “a registered lobbyist” whose former clients have “much at stake in Honduras’ elections”:
[It gets really interesting at the one-minute mark]
It’s worth highlighting Salazar’s words as she interrupted Castro’s questioning of Trujillo’s potential conflicts of interest:
Thank you, member. I’m sorry for interrupting. I think we are here for just one purpose: to ensure there are clean and fair elections in Honduras. Ambassador Trujillo may have many clients in Honduras but that does not mean he does not want the best outcome on November 30th, so I think we should just concentrate on finding out what’s really happening right now and preserve the integrity of those elections.
Lastly, while we’re on the subject of Salazar, below is another of her recent interventions, this time on the topic of Venezuela. Below that is a short clip of an interview by John Pilger of former CIA chief for Latin America Duane Claridge, who oversaw some of the agency’s worst exploits in the region during the Cold War.
It is a reminder that what is happening in Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia has been going on for a long time, almost as long as the US is old. But never before, or at least not for a long time, have the lies been so brazen and the narrative so disjointed.
Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar babbles some laughable falsehoods about Venezuela🇻🇪 supplying uranium to Hamas, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Iran…
Before excitedly getting to her main point: "And I'm telling you, that these people, the Venezuelans, have the largest reserves of oil… https://t.co/hvYQG5VSln pic.twitter.com/x6vWbF746X
— Going Underground (@GUnderground_TV) November 26, 2025
