Honduran Vote Recount Urged as Tally Shows President Is Ahead<br />4, 2017<br />MEXICO CITY — Honduran election officials said Monday<br />that President Juan Orlando Hernández had won a small majority in a preliminary vote count, but international election monitors backed opposition demands for a partial recount, arguing that there were too many irregularities to be sure of the result.<br />Marisa Matias, the leader of the European Union mission, urged the election board to accede to the opposition’s demands in order "to have transparent<br />results, to have confidence, to regain confidence in a system where the Honduran people do not have much confidence right now.<br />"The narrow margin of results, as well as the irregularities, errors and systemic problems<br />that have surrounded this election does not give the mission certainty over the results,’’ Jorge Quiroga, a former president of Bolivia who is leading the O.A.S.<br />But as results came in the night of the election on Nov. 26, Salvador Nasralla, a former sportscaster running<br />at the head of an alliance coordinated by Mr. Zelaya, led the count by almost 5 percentage points.<br />The political crisis took a new turn late Monday when members of the elite Cobras police unit in<br />Tegucigalpa, the capital, refused to leave their hillside barracks to enforce a 6 p.m. curfew.<br />" Mr. Hernández’s government imposed a 12-hour nighttime curfew on Friday<br />and said it would last for 10 days after peaceful protests by the opposition spilled into violence and looting in a few areas.
