Honduras’s political crisis takes an unexpected turn

FOR a few days, Honduras felt like a country on the brink of chaos. People queued for hours at banks, supermarkets and petrol stations, as they had before a hurricane in 1998 and a coup in 2009. Shopkeepers shut early to prepare for looting. Thousands of people took to the streets in protest; some banged pots, burned tires and hurled Molotov cocktails. Security forces killed a dozen people; the government imposed a curfew. On December 4th two elite police units denounced “repression” by the government and disobeyed orders to enforce the curfew.

The trigger for the turmoil was a general election held on November 26th, and the drawn-out, erratic vote count that followed (see article). With all the votes tallied by December 5th, Juan Orlando Hernández appeared to win re-election as Honduras’s president. The opposition refuses to accept that. “There is no longer going to be democracy in Honduras,” thundered Salvador Nasralla (pictured above), a sports broadcaster who came surprisingly close to defeating Mr Hernández.