Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Nasry Asfura del National Party, Xiomara Castro de Libre and Yani Rosenthal of the Liberal Party will run for the presidency of Honduras after winning the March 14 primary and domestic elections, the National Electoral Council (CNE) said on Tuesday, confirming the trend. which transcended the same day.
For the ruling National Party, founded more than a century ago, the presidential candidate in the November 28 general election, the winner was Nasry Asfura, who served as mayor of Tegucigalpa for two terms, and defeated Mauricio Oliva , President. Parliament since January 2014.
Asfura obtained 681,701 votes, the equivalent of 70.12%, the commissioner of the CNE president, Ana Paola Hall, declared on the national radio and television network, which was delayed by two hours.
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The candidate from Freedom and Refoundation Party (Libre), the main opposition force, is Xiomara Castro, the wife of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was overthrown on June 28, 2009, after taking power on January 27, 2006, under the banner of the Liberal Party.
Castró, a former candidate for the presidency of Libre in the 2013 general election, received 404,238 votes, which represents 79.08%, in a choice in which he competed with three other competitors.
Libre emerged as a party in 2011 after returning to the country of Manuel Zelaya, who had been in exile in the Dominican Republic for more than a year following his 2009 overthrow.
The candidate of the centennial liberal party, according to the final report of the CNE, is Yani Rosenthal, who was minister of the presidency in the government headed by Manuel Zelaya, with 339,001 votes, representing 49.97%.
Rosenthal defeated Luis Zelaya, a former Liberal Party presidential candidate in the 2017 general election, and MP Ángel Darío Banegas.
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The March 14 elections were punctuated by several complaints of alleged corruption of popularly elected candidates, with a higher incidence in the free and liberal parties, mainly in the presidential formula.
Luis Zelaya assures that Yani Rosenthal, who returned to the country in August 2020 after serving a three-year prison sentence in the United States for money laundering related to drug trafficking, which he confessed to, committed election fraud.
Rosenthal rejects allegations of fraud and now urges the Liberals, whose party collapsed after the Manuel Zelaya coup, to unite and seek alliances to remove the government from power. National Party, who led the Executive for three consecutive terms.
In the March elections, three presidential candidates, 29 vice-presidents, 298 municipal mayors, 20 deputies in the local parliament and 20 in Central America were elected.
The NEC has also been questioned by politicians who feel affected in the primary and domestic elections.
Hall said the election was “the most peaceful, democratic and transparent in the recent history of our country” and that the NEC worked “transparently, responding to commitment to people and the truth ”.
He added that the primary and domestic election process was managed despite multiple difficulties, including the covid-19 pandemic, which affected the Central American country in March 2020, with a balance of about 5,000 deaths and 200,000 infections.
The result of the election exercise will take effect when it is published in the official newspaper La Gaceta.