Election officials: Conservative rancher leads post-coup Honduran presidential vote

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Conservative leads post-coup Honduran election

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Election officials say conservative opposition candidate Porfirio Lobo has a wide lead in presidential elections shadowed by a June coup.

Supreme Electoral Tribunal officials says preliminary results give Porfirio Lobo 56 percent of votes, compared to 38 percent for ruling party candidate Elvin Santos.

The official says more than 60 percent of vote tally sheets had been counted. They spoke at a news conference hours after polls closed Sunday.

The tribunal say more than 60 percent of registered voters had cast ballots.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Hondurans on Sunday elected a new president whose first challenge will be defending his legitimacy to the world and ending a crisis over a June coup that has isolated one of Latin America’s poorest countries.

Porfirio Lobo and Elvin Santos, two prosperous businessmen from the political old guard, are the front-runners. No official results had been released by late Sunday, but Channel 5 television and HRN radio said their exit poll indicated that Lobo was leading with nearly 56 percent of the vote, trailed by Santos with 38 percent.

But the candidates’ campaigns have been overshadowed by the debate over whether Hondurans should vote at all in an election largely shunned by international monitors.

The dispute has split Western Hemisphere countries, and voter turnout could determine how widely the next government is recognized. Rivals sides offered widely different estimates of turnout in subdued voting.

The United States, hoping to resolve its first major policy test in Latin America, is defending the election while leftist governments allege it whitewashes Central America’s first coup in 20 years.

Washington’s support matters most in Honduras, which sends more than 60 percent of its exports to the United States, from bananas to Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear, and relies heavily on money sent home from the 1 million Hondurans who live in the U.S.

President Barack Obama’s government suspended development aid and anti-narcotic cooperation with Honduras over the coup. But U.S. diplomats say Hondurans have the right to choose their next leader in regular elections that were scheduled well before President Manuel Zelaya’s ouster. Neither Zelaya nor the man who replaced him — interim President Roberto Micheletti — are running in Sunday’s election.

Zelaya, the left-leaning president ousted in a June 28 coup, said that overwhelming abstention would discredit the election and the U.S. would regret its stance.

“The United States made a mistake,” Zelaya said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from the Brazilian Embassy where he took refuge since sneaking back into the country from his forced exile. “If they are democrats in their country, they should be democrats in Latin America.”

After polls closed, he claimed in a statement that he had information from 1,400 polling stations indicating that abstention was as high as 65 percent.

“As president of Honduras I declare this process illegitimate,” he said.

Electoral official Denis Gomez, however, said he thought turnout was robust, although there were no official projections. He said his most optimistic estimate was for a 70 percent turnout.

Election workers in the slums of Tegucigalpa said turnout was slow, with some saying only about a third of registered voters had arrived by mid-afternoon. But turnout was higher in affluent neighborhoods where resentment against Zelaya runs highest.

Police fired tear gas at several hundred pro-Zelaya protesters in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, and at least one person was injured and required stitches on his head. Some protesters sat down as police approached, and other later hurled rocks back at police. Police spokesman Orlin Cerrato said protests are banned on election day.

Zelaya has support among many poor Hondurans who believed in his promises to shake-up a political system dominated by two political parties with few ideological differences and influenced by a few wealthy families.

Mauro Romero, 59, had no intention of setting foot in a polling station.

“Zelaya is the president that we elected. We don’t want the same dinosaurs in power, people who have been there for 30 years, only getting fat,” said Romero, sitting on the steps of the Tegucigalpa’s peach-colored 18th century cathedral, now covered in graffiti saying “No to the coup!”

But many Hondurans simply want to end a crisis that has eroded an already stagnant economy. Tourists have disappeared from Mayan ruins and rain forests, multilateral lending agencies have blocked the country’s access to credit.

Opponents say Zelaya’s efforts to change the constitution were a ploy to extend time in power by eliminating presidential term limits, as his ally Hugo Chavez has done in Venezuela.

“We don’t want a monarch here who is going to stay here forever in this country,” said Rolando Barahona, a business manager. “The crisis is behind us and now we all need to unite and work.”

Human rights activists accuse the interim government harassing groups promoting abstention. On Saturday, about 50 masked soldiers and police raided the offices of Red Comal, a farm aid group in the northern town of Siguatepeque that has opposed the coup, said Miguel Alonso, the program director. He said police seized computers and documents.

“It’s no secret that we are members of the national resistance movement against the coup,” Alonso said. “So the raid order doesn’t surprise us.”

Cerrato said the security forces were acting on a court order as part investigations into homemade bomb attacks that have exploded nearly every day in Honduras.

Lobo, 61, and Santos, 46, promise to encourage private investment to create jobs while increasing social benefits in a country where 70 percent of the 7 million people are poor.

The National Party’s Lobo, a rancher who lost to Zelaya in 2005 elections, had a double-digit lead in recent polls. He has benefited from divisions within Santos’ Liberal Party, which largely turned against Zelaya and supported his ouster.

If elected, Lobo says he will talk with Zelaya and has suggested the deposed leader may be allowed to leave the Brazilian Embassy without fear of arrest. Zelaya faces abuse of power charges for ignoring a Supreme Court order to cancel a referendum on changing the constitution.

Under a U.S.-brokered pact, Congress is set to decide Wednesday whether Zelaya should return head a unity government until his constitutional term ends Jan. 27. Despite its support of the elections, the United States insists it still supports Zelaya’s reinstatement.

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Associated Press Writers Juan Carlos LLorca and Freddy Cuevas in Tegucigalpa and Olga Rodriguez in Mexico City contributed to this report.