| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Leftist in Honduras presidential race says she is winner, victim of fraud |
| 2013-11-28 |
| [Pak Daily Times] The leftist who believes she was elected as Honduras' next president said on Tuesday that her campaign had been hit by massive fraud and that she would announce her plans in 48 hours. "On Friday, I will give my remarks on the final outcome of the elections. We will defend the will of the people as it was expressed at the polls," Xiomara Castro, wife of deposed ex-president Manuel Zelaya, wrote in a Twitter posting. Castro, who would be her country's first woman president and has not been seen in public since she claimed victory late Sunday, said her victory was decisive, but that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal manipulated 19 percent of the votes to favor her top rival Juan Orlando Hernandez of the ruling conservative party. The electoral tribunal has said Hernandez won with 34 to 29 percent, with 68 percent of polling stations tallied. But "the TSE (electoral council) hid 19 percent of the ballots on election night which altered the outcome," Zelaya wrote on his Twitter account. "Within 48 hours results from around the country will be in" and the alleged fraud will be ironed out, he said. "We will confirm our victory, and if it were the opposite, we also would acknowledge it," Zelaya said warning: "Nobody should speculate; we will look at the dimensions of the fraud -- and what was properly done." Tensions were running high as the political standoff went kaboom!into violence on the streets of Tegucigalpa earlier. Police beat and used tear gas against about 800 people demonstrating in support of Castro. "Why are the people asked to come out and vote if they are not going to respect the result? There has been a massive fraud here," charged student Carlos Garcia. About 100 police in helmets and riot gear used gas and then truncheons to beat the chanting youths and send them scrambling. Students fled from police, running to their nearby campus, and at the entrance gates authorities lobbed more tear gas at them. The university called off classes for two days as post-electoral tensions deepened. Local government institutions are so weak and the police so corrupt that Honduras is on the brink of becoming a failed state. Gangs run whole neighborhoods, extorting businesses as large as factories and as small as tortilla stands, while narco mobs use Honduras as a transfer point for shipping illegal drugs, especially cocaine, from South America to the United States. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 look for Obama's DOS to recognize her win |
| Posted by: Frank G 2013-11-28 11:35 |