Police crackdown on protestors in Honduras

Police beat and used tear gas against about 800 people demonstrating in support of Honduras' leftist presidential candidate, who claims victory though authorities say the conservative won. "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," charged 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. Garcia was among the mostly student-aged supporters of leftist Xiomara Castro, who has claimed victory in Sunday's presidential race though electoral officials say conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez beat her 34 to 29 percent, with 68 percent of polling stations tallied. 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. "We are fed up with these politicians who are thieves. They have stolen the election! We are going to keep this up out here," pledged Jose Luis, a computer student at national University, amid chants of "Xiomara -- President." "We get a (post-secondary) degree, we come out and still cannot find a job," grumbled the demonstrator, who said Castro's Libre party "makes it its business to be concerned with the poor." Local government institutions are so weak and the police so corrupt that Honduras is on the brink of becoming a failed state. 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. 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. 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's husband, the deposed former president Manuel Zelaya, told reporters earlier that her camp does not accept the results after claiming that the election was stolen. She has not been seen in public since claiming victory. Speaking on her behalf, Zelaya claimed "serious inconsistencies" in one-in-five polling stations. The ex-president, who was ousted in a military-backed coup, has said his wife's campaign does not accept results from corrupt institutions. "We will defend our triumph," Zelaya told supporters. Her party has yet to file a formal complaint against the electoral tribunal, which has not formally declared a winner. 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. He named a transition team to succeed President Porfirio Lobo, urging Castro to join him in a "great national pact" against violence and poverty. 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 showed signs of moving 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. The military ousted the democratically-elected president with no vocal or active opposition from the United States -- a fact that deeply undermined US credibility across all of Latin America ever since.