When Hondurans vote for president this week, many fear that polls will close not with a clear winner but with chaos: accusations of fraud, mass protests and even the threat of a military crackdown.
“We are terrified,” said Polo Cruz, 53, a worker at the medical examiner’s office in Tegucigalpa, the capital. People have been saving cash, he said — anticipating days or weeks when it might not be safe even to go outside.
Ahead of the election on Sunday, Mr. Cruz and others in the Central American nation said they feel like they’re living in a tinderbox.
Violent crime and extortion are daily facts of life, and corruption is widespread. The race is wide open between three candidates — a former finance minister, handpicked by the president; a sportscaster, running for the fourth time; and a conservative former mayor just endorsed by President Trump. Allegations of fraud are rampant even before ballots have been cast.
The last time an election took place with this kind of volatility, in 2017, Election Day spiraled into disputed results, demonstrations and a military-enforced curfew. About two dozen people were killed in the vote’s aftermath.
In a new, unpredictable factor, the United States has taken a keen interest in the race.
Mr. Trump, endorsing the former mayor, Nasry “Tito” Asfura, this week, echoed the opposition’s claim that Honduras was at risk of becoming another Venezuela, an authoritarian state racked by crises. “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists,” Mr. Trump posted on social media.
Before that, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau had vowed that U.S. officials would “respond swiftly and decisively to anyone who undermines the integrity of the democratic process in Honduras.”
The U.S. interest comes after the two right-wing candidates, Mr. Asfura and Salvador Nasralla, spent much of the race in Washington, signaling their alignment with the Trump administration as it tries to assert its dominance over the hemisphere.
Mr. Trump has already moved to support regional leaders on the right — and to punish leftists who defy him. The Trump administration may regard the vote in Honduras, which has been led by a left-wing party since 2021, as an opportunity to gain another conservative ally in the region, experts say.
Still, the party now in power, Libre, has proved cooperative to Mr. Trump already. Honduras’s president, Xiomara Castro, unexpectedly went from scrappy defiance against him to eager collaboration, becoming a key player in his deportations.
Some U.S. Republicans, including Representative María Elvira Salazar of Florida, have framed the race in ideological terms, as Mr. Trump did. “I am not telling you who to vote for,” she said in a speech in Congress this month, addressing Hondurans. “All I am saying is do not elect a communist.”
“We are not communists,” said Enrique Reina, a high-ranking Libre official. “We have our own vision of democratic socialism.”
Rights groups have warned that the election could be tied up by a host of issues and disputes, and that prosecutors or the military could become involved. Mr. Reina said that his party’s candidate had the support to win fairly and that it did not control the electoral authorities.
President Castro chose Rixi Moncada, her former finance and defense minister, to succeed her. But Ms. Moncada faces many voters’ deep frustration with Ms. Castro over issues like high prices, underemployment, safety concerns and allegations of corruption.
Many Hondurans juggle two or three jobs while also battling extortion threats from organized crime groups, which they say sometimes conspire with security forces. On top of that, post-pandemic inflation has hit poor Hondurans particularly hard.
“We make enough to eat, and that’s all,” said Lenin Sacasa, 21, who sells used clothes and bottled water, usually earning just enough to feed himself and his parents.
Honduras’s staggering murder rate dropped under Ms. Castro — a major achievement — but many voters say they don’t feel safer. Mr. Cruz, who collects bodies for the medical examiner, said the government can’t hide that violence persists.
“We are in a bad place,” he said, as a man waited nearby to retrieve the body of his 23-year-old son, who had been hacked to death with a machete.
One of Ms. Moncada’s opponents, Mr. Nasralla, the sportscaster, has tried to seize on the simmering anger, splitting with the Libre party to make his fourth bid for president.
He has cast himself as an anticorruption candidate who will break the grip of a leftist political clan. And although his campaign has a Cybertruck — a car sold by the Trump ally Elon Musk — and his wife has donned a MAGA hat, Mr. Nasralla characterizes his approach to Washington as pragmatic.
“As long as we are not an independent, self-sufficient country,” he said, “we have to adapt to the situation of the country that protects us as our main ally.”
At a recent campaign rally for Mr. Nasralla in Tegucigalpa, dozens of people waved flags and blew vuvuzelas before a screen glowing with the candidate’s nickname, “Salva,” which translates to “Saves.”
“He’s the change,” said Julissa Poleth Vásquez, 22. Asked what changes she wanted to see, she said, “Better quality of life and jobs.”
In his endorsement message, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Nasralla of being “not a reliable partner” and of being in league with the left-wing party to split the vote.
Mr. Asfura, the candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump, is a construction entrepreneur and former mayor of Tegucigalpa from the conservative National Party. Mr. Asfura, who declined to be interviewed, has also run on his differences from Ms. Castro — and, like Mr. Nasralla, he has made fiery speeches accusing her party or the military of planning to “steal” the election.
Those allegations have dominated much of the race. Mr. Nasralla said that he had already told his supporters to protest if the government tried to interfere in voting or claimed victory prematurely. “We’re taking to the streets — people have already been alerted,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Reina, the Libre official, denounced such accusations, saying the warnings — and a flood of disinformation on social media — had stoked violence, much of it targeting Libre candidates and supporters.
Honduras’s main nonpartisan tracker of violence has recorded six politically related killings during the race, four involving Libre candidates. This month, masked men opened fire on a Libre march in a rural, coffee-growing province, killing a 5-year-old.
Having lived through decades of political wrangling, some Hondurans expressed cynicism over the election. María Isabel Rodríguez, a resident of the capital, said she expected Election Day to be peaceful, accusing opposition candidates and the business class of deliberately stoking fear.
“Things are going to go smoothly,” said Ms. Rodríguez, 64. “Here, the rich, the big businesspeople, they control the media and they create that fear.”
But others said the risks — especially of military involvement — were too high even to venture out to vote. “They’re going to turn repressive,” said Gabriel Arcángel Flores Medina, a 66-year-old security guard who said he felt too old to face a crackdown.
“You say to yourself, if I go out, they’re going to gas me. What happens if they hit me with tear gas? My heart will stop,” he said. “Fear is what we feel.”
Annie Correal is a Times reporter covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
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