Honduran leftist candidate cries fraud, calls for demos

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TEGUCIGALPA: Claiming there was a ‘monstrous fraud,’ leftist candidate Xiomara Castro late Friday rejected the results of Honduras’s presidential election and called for mass protests in the crime-stricken Central American country.

Castro fears that she will be kept from office because of her politics just like her husband, former president Manuel Zelaya, deposed at gunpoint in June 2009 after he aligned with the leftist governments of Cuba and Venezuela.

Conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez declared the winner of the Nov 24 presidential election on Wednesday.

“Our position is irreversible: so long as we are not allowed to enter the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s (computer) system, we are not going to accept the result,” Castro said at a late night press conference.

Pre-vote polls suggested it would be a very tight race, but when the votes were counted Hernandez beat Castro 36.56 to 28.85 per cent – a difference of nearly eight percentage points.

“This triumph is being stolen by those who have turned the electoral system into a farce,” said Castro, who claimed she had “proof of the disgusting monstruosity.”  Castro said that she would not recognize the legitimacy of a Hernandez administration if her rival takes office.

She spoke just moments after her leftist Libre party called a peaceful mass protest for Sunday.

“We all know that in this process, there were major irregularities, that fraud was committed,” said Castro.

“The people elected us.

And it is necessary to deliver proof decisively,” Castro said, promising to rally supporters to flood the country’s streets starting yesterday in protest at the alleged fraud.

Castro was vying to become the Central American country’s first woman president.

Top election official David Matamoros told local media that the data “shows that the winner of the general elections is Juan Orlando Hernandez.”  European Union and Organisation of American States observers had called the elections transparent.

So did the US-based Cartre Centre.

But renowned Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who witnessed the voting, said there was in fact electoral fraud using various means and methods. — AFP