Honduras roiled by claims of fraud in presidential vote

Opposition charges of fraud roiled Honduras Wednesday as the official count in the country's presidential elections showed a clear victory for conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez over leftist candidate Xiomara Castro. The electoral tribunal has said Hernandez won, scoring 34 percent compared to the 29 percent of his rival, with 68 percent of polling stations tallied. Castro and her husband, deposed ex-president Manuel Zelaya, allege that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal manipulated 19 percent of the votes to favor Hernandez. They gave 48 hours for the situation to be resolved. "We will defend the will of the people as it was expressed at the polls," Castro wrote in a Twitter posting. "We will confirm our victory, and if it were the opposite, we also would acknowledge it," Zelaya said on Twitter,warning: "Nobody should speculate; we will look at the dimensions of the fraud -- and what was properly done." Tensions were running high as the political standoff exploded into violence on the streets of Tegucigalpa on Tuesday. Police beat and used tear gas against about 800 people demonstrating in support of Castro. "Why are the people asked to come out and vote if they are not going to respect the result? There has been a massive fraud here," said student Carlos Garcia. About 100 police in helmets and riot gear used gas and then truncheons to beat the chanting youths and send them scrambling. Students fled from police, running to their nearby campus, and at the entrance gates authorities lobbed more tear gas at them. The university called off classes for two days as post-electoral tensions deepened. Hernandez is a law-and-order conservative who has promised a militarized program to improve public safety in the world's deadliest nation, also among the poorest in Latin America. Gangs run whole neighborhoods, extorting businesses as large as factories and as small as tortilla stands, while drug cartels use Honduras as a transfer point for shipping illegal drugs, especially cocaine, from South America to the United States. The clash between Hernandez, of the National Party, and Castro of the Libre party, brought new uncertainty to a deeply troubled country, also reeling from the wounds of the coup just four years ago. Castro running mate Juan Barahona said "we won't be here with our arms crossed. ... We will defend our victory legally, diplomatically, and also in the streets." But Hernandez, who is also speaker of the legislature, said the people had spoken at the ballot box. The governments of Colombia, Guatemala, Panama and Costa Rica congratulated Hernandez. Nicaragua's leftist President Daniel Ortega also recognized Hernandez as the winner. European Union and Organization of American States observers called Sunday's voting process transparent and non-problematic. The election's winner will inherit a country of 8.5 million people with 71 percent of the population living in poverty and a soaring homicide rate of 20 murders per day. Castro, who proposes "Honduran-style democratic socialism," wants to rewrite the constitution and "re-found" the country -- a move similar to the one that led to the coup that ousted her husband in 2009. Zelaya was elected Honduran president as a PL candidate in 2005. But when he moved to the political left and tried to reform the constitution, the military abruptly deposed him with support from Congress and the Supreme Court in 2009.