The Latin American Report # 667: Deep dives on current affairs in Cuba and Honduras

Cuba was a country plunged into a humongous crisis at the start of the last quarter of the year, caught between runaway inflation and increasingly severe power blackouts, which are both the result of a very poorly managed economy, without foreign currency, comprehensively sanctioned by Washington, and scarcely supported by external capital. The crisis, in fact, is bigger than the sustained increase in prices of food, medicine, and other basic products, or the power outages close to or exceeding 24 hours experienced in many localities, because it is also reflected in other critical socioeconomic areas like food production, transportation or water supply services.

With all this nightmare on top, two more problems befell us Cubans in October, both known, but reinforced and quite inopportune. The first was the escalation in cases of people infected with dengue and chikungunya, although the first signs of this health crisis occurred in July, and then Hurricane Melissa landed at the end of October, hitting hard the eastern part of the country, and worsening the epidemiological situation. At the end of the first half of November, the authorities finally acknowledged that the country was suffering an epidemic of the referred arboviruses, and last Monday they also reported for the first time its connection to more than 30 deaths, the majority being minors.

Chikungunya in particular is impacting with levels of contagion and severity totally unprecedented compared to other periods. "The behavior of arboviruses in the coming weeks will be unfavorable," forecasted a reknowned scientist during a meeting of experts last week. Add to this one the crisis with our national power system. The level of nationwide blackouts has exceeded 2,000 megawatts in the last days, a record benchmark equivalent to, at the time of peak demand, approximately 6 out of every 10 megawatts not being served due to insufficient generation capacity.

That figure combines the megawatts not generated due to breakdowns in the dilapidated, poorly maintained thermal power plants, and those that are not generated due to the unavailability of fuel to start up a network of engines distributed throughout the country that run on diesel and fuel oil. The government has bet on solar photovoltaic energy as the great alternative, but after contracting the installation of 1,000 megawatts of generation capacity for this year, in practice not even 600 MW have been generated yet in a single day.

However, it was recently stated by the head of the Energy and Mines portfolio that the deployment will be completed, as planned, for this December, equivalent to 40% of the 55 conceived solar parks. It is a risky commitment. All this pressures the political power, which, however, in my opinion is far from performing the best possible statecraft to have actual options to overcome the crisis, whose financial component we have addressed in other reports.

Honduras

The vote counting process for the Honduran general elections embodies the clearest antithesis of how a serious electoral process should be conducted and developed, one characterized by the integrity of political institutions and transmitting organic confidence to the electorate. The nonsensical aspects have been too crude, starting with the hiring of a foreign, Colombian company to manage the processing of electoral records and the dissemination of preliminary results. Exactly one week after we addressed it in our Latin American report, hundreds of records are still unprocessed, while many others present "inconsistencies."

Except for the Trump-backed candidate Nasry "Tito" Asfura, the other two candidates who had real chances of reaching the presidency are denouncing the process with increasing force, turning the spotlight towards a possible manipulation of the preliminary results transmission system (TREP in Spanish). "The corrupt have halted the electoral process because they do not accept the people's decision. I will be the president, but they refuse to acknowledge the results and have manipulated the data update to create uncertainty," said the Liberal Party candidate in a direct reference to the Colombian company and its alleged contacts in Honduras. "What is happening is a clear attempt at theft," he added, also claiming that his real difference with Asfura is or will be "100,000 votes" according to his team's accounting.

His X profile in general is right now a large repository of denunciations of indications of fraud. In this sense, early in the morning he stated that while he cannot speak of fraud without documentary evidence, "the behavior of the [data] upload is highly irregular and statistically improbable". And then we have the position already officially adopted by the ruling party, which has effective control of the critical political institutions, of not recognizing the results of the National Electoral Council. Its political operators speak regularly of "mysterious withholdings of records," or inconsistencies between the biometric registry and the total sum of votes in about 9,900 records disclosed on election night itself.

The electoral councilor representing the LIBRE party, Marlon Ochoa, denounced in a press conference last week that this could be "the least transparent election" and "the most manipulated in history," in a country where there is broad consensus on previous massive electoral frauds. For Ochoa, the TREP system, is a "trap," and in that sense he has made several allegations that call into question the probity of the process, claiming, for example, that just hours before the election the already infamous Colombian company was still making modifications in the software, and that even other critical functionalities related to contingency scrutinies were also being finished in a rush.

And everything, in truth, indicates that there is some manipulation or very suspicious engineering in the flow of results. But, at the same time, I think that, ultimately, given the circumstances, a decision will be reached to transparently recount the votes deposited in all electoral ballot boxes whose records have been marked by any of the parties as inconsistent. I expect so. This, in any case, will not clear up doubts such as whether in those ballot boxes delivered by polling stations where the biometric identification device failed or was simply not used—it is mandatory—there are illegal votes deposited and consequently recorded. This is one of the strongest arguments of the ruling party, which, as I have explained, suggests a reasonable suspicion but not evidence of fraud per se, with the added note that they also manipulate the math with somewhat crude overestimations.

The most dangerous aspect in the stance officially adopted by LIBRE yesterday Sunday, voiced by its presidential candidate Rixi Moncada—relegated to the third place according to the official count—, is the call not to cooperate in a potential transition process "with the enemies of the people," and also the open call for protests from its electoral base. According to the two electoral councilors associated with the opposition parties leading the drip-by-drip count, the completion of the scrutiny will develop in three phases: 1) a first one named "Contingency 2", in which about 7,800 records that were not transmitted by the polling stations will be incorporated into the system; 2) a second one to review numerical inconsistencies and records disclosed with errors; and 3) the so-called special scrutiny process, aimed at resolving records with the most serious inconsistencies.

I find it interesting, in this sense, the call made by these two female opposition councilors not to introduce appeals to annul the election, especially at the presidential level, because "that would open a scenario of institutional uncertainty" before the need to repeat the elections. In this regard, I wonder: does the legal framework not understand how to proceed in such a scenario regarding the maintenance of an operational institutional structure? Although since Sunday they, who, in practice, form a majority in the electoral authority in contrast to Ochoa, had stated that the transmission—interrupted since Friday—would restart, only this Monday morning have the results been updated again, albeit symbolically more than representatively. At 12:05 Honduras time, the media outlet El Heraldo reflects that Asfura continues to lead, with a gap in his favor of over 21,000 votes compared to Nasralla. Only the media and political parties have access to the TREP, a dynamic also criticized, correctly, by Ochoa, who has advocated for public access to the system, as it should be.

Breaking: The TREP went down again 👇. However, it seems to be online now.

A bloody country

I continue moving through the local Honduran press, in the electoral context, and finding many reports of homicides, which give an account of a very serious problem that does not tend to transcend in the mainstream media. The media outlet HCH Digital reported this Monday morning the discovery of two lifeless bodies, one corresponding to a young man of about 20 years in the violent department of Yoro, with many bullet impacts, and another in the municipality Los Poetas de Juticalpa, in the department of Olancho. El Heraldo, for its part, reports that two individuals were found dead in a car with signs of violence in Copán, while yesterday Sunday, a woman was shot to death in a small grocery store in the department of Cortés, where, furthermore, on Saturday the corpse of a man who had been kidnapped by heavily armed men, who tortured him and allegedly hanged him, appeared in a sugarcane field.

Also on Saturday, and in the same department of Cortés, neighbors discovered a corpse inside garbage bags, and in total, there is talk of seven young people whose corpses have appeared dismembered in some cases, all placed in bags, sheets, and sacks, in the Central District and the northern Honduran zone the past week. In Tegucigalpa, the capital, last Sunday night two more young murdered men were reported. In a peripheral village, a 24-year-old man was allegedly intercepted by members of the "Mara 18" gang when returning from a Christmas dinner; the gang members beat him and took him in his own car to the edge of the Sabacuante river, where they shot him dead. The other case was that of a very young man returning from a party, who was ambushed and stabbed to death. Lastly, other reports inform of a 43-year-old man found dead in an area with a ravine in Lempira. Honduras is the country with the highest homicide rate in Central America.

This is all for today’s report.