December 30, 2025
As Washington moves to recognize a deeply contested Honduran election, the Trump administration is reviving imperial tactics that corrode US credibility, damage long-term interests and entrench corruption across the region.
Honduras is once again at the center of a familiar and troubling pattern in US policy toward Latin America. In the aftermath of a deeply contested election, the Trump administration has intervened not to defend democratic process, but in ways that risk entrenching corruption, undermining sovereignty and weakening already fragile institutions.
In the weeks following election day, serious efforts were made to avoid a full and legally required review of vote tally sheets, known as actas, that contained inconsistencies. Honduran law is explicit: where discrepancies exist, each acta must be reviewed thoroughly and transparently. That did not occur. These deficiencies were clearly observed by Honduran electoral observers, political party representatives, independent civil society organizations and international monitoring missions during and after election day, raising serious doubts about the integrity of preliminary and aggregated results. The Centro de Estudio para la Democracia (CESPAD), a respected Honduran democracy and human rights organization, has documented how the absence of a complete acta-by-acta review foreclosed meaningful verification of the vote.
On Wednesday, Honduras’s electoral authorities moved to certify Nasry Asfura as the winner of the presidential election by an extremely narrow margin, despite these unresolved inconsistencies and ongoing legal and political disputes. The decision has not settled the crisis. Salvador Nasralla, the Liberal Party candidate, has not conceded and continues to publicly allege fraud, while dissent within the Liberal Party itself underscores how far the process remains from broad political acceptance. Certification under these conditions may close a legal chapter, but it does not resolve the underlying legitimacy deficit.
Rather than insisting on strict compliance with Honduran law before recognition, the United States—through public statements and diplomatic signaling by the State Department and the US embassy—has pressed for acceptance of the declared results and a rapid transition. Secretary of state Marco Rubio has urged “all parties to respect the confirmed results,” even as key verification steps required by Honduran law were never completed. International actors such as the Organization of American States and the European Union face a similar dilemma: certification without full review substitutes political expediency for democratic verification.
The consequences of this approach extend well beyond a single election. By empowering Honduras’s traditional elites—networks long linked to organized crime, narco-trafficking and an economic model that concentrates wealth while hollowing out public institutions—Washington risks reinforcing the very dynamics that have driven inequality, violence and outward migration. This does not stabilize Honduras; it deepens the conditions that have repeatedly destabilized it.
It is important to acknowledge that this is not a uniquely Republican failing. After the 2009 coup, the Obama administration, under then secretary of state Hillary Clinton, briefly revived old interventionist tactics in Honduras. The result was not democratic consolidation but the capture of the state by narco-political networks, culminating in the rise of Juan Orlando Hernández. That experience should have served as a warning about the long-term costs of subordinating democratic process to short-term political alignment.
Those lessons appear to have been ignored. Even as the Trump administration levels sweeping accusations of drug trafficking against regional adversaries, it has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president convicted in a US court of smuggling large quantities of cocaine into the United States. That pardon comes in the same period that Washington has intervened forcefully in Honduras’s electoral process. Across the region, the message is unmistakable: accountability is selective, and democratic principles are contingent.
Honduras is not an isolated case. From Venezuela to the Caribbean, the Trump administration has revived the belief that political legitimacy can be imposed through coercion, sanctions and military pressure. Lethal maritime attacks, aggressive interdictions and the disruption of oil trade are framed as law enforcement or democracy promotion, but increasingly function as instruments of pressure. We have seen this pattern before, and it has consistently produced deeper instability rather than durable democratic outcomes.
The damage, however, is less about immediate backlash than long-term decay. By abandoning democratic rules as the basis of its influence, Washington is eroding the only kind of power that has ever endured in the hemisphere: influence built on cooperation, shared democratic principles and respect for the rule of law, including the rejection of corruption and impunity. In the short term, authoritarian and right-wing forces may appear ascendant. Over time, institutions weaken, corruption is rewarded and credibility drains away. Regional actors quietly hedge and align elsewhere. The United States remains present, but its influence slowly rots—leaving it less able to shape outcomes that matter at the very moment it claims to be defending democracy.