Honduras Starts Special Vote Count

Dec. 19, 2025

Honduras electoral officials launched a special count of the final set of votes, three weeks after the Nov. 30 election, after the U.S. Trump administration pushed for a final result, earlier this week.

The special count includes 2,792 ballot boxes — about 15% of the total votes — from the election. It’s unclear how long it will take, reports the Associated Press.

The hand count could easily change the election’s preliminary result, which gave Conservative Nasry Asfura of the National Party a razor-thin margin of 43,000 votes - out of more than 3 million cast - over center-right Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, reports Reuters.

Both leading presidential candidates say they will cut diplomatic ties with Beijing and re-establish relations with Taipei, reversing the 2023 decision by President Xiomara Castro to sensationally end Honduras’ 82-year relationship with Taiwan, reports the Guardian.

Donroe Doctrine

• The United Nations Security Council will meet next Tuesday at the request of Venezuela – backed by China and Russia – which urged an urgent meeting over the “ongoing US aggression,” reports AFP.

• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro spoke by phone, Wednesday, with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres over the “escalation of threats against Venezuela” from Washington. (AFP, see yesterday’s post)

• Colombian President Gustavo Petro rejected Maduro’s call for regional defense against Trump, saying Venezuela cannot give orders to Colombian armed forces, and that the only binational armed force is the illegal ELN. (Infobae)

• Trump claimed today he did not need lawmakers’ approval to strike suspected drug cartels on land in Venezuela, citing concerns over information leaks - Guardian

• “In justifying his administration’s boat strikes and its mounting pressure campaign on Venezuela, President Trump has regularly relied on assertions that distort the circumstances, carry contradictions and twist language,” writes Charlie Savage in a New York Times analysis.

• In an interview with NBC, Trump did not rule out war with Venezuela, and declined to say whether removing Maduro was his ultimate goal: “He knows exactly what I want,” Trump said. “He knows better than anybody,” Trump added, referring to Maduro. (Reuters)

• Trump announced a “blockade” against Venezuela — “complete blockades are illegal under international law. However, as described by Trump, the “blockade” on Venezuela applies only to vessels under sanctions, meaning it is not a complete blockade,” notes the Washington Post.

• “The Trump administration says its blockade is narrowly tailored and not targeting civilians, which would be an illegal act of war. But some experts say seizing sanctioned oil tied to leader Nicolás Maduro could provoke a military response from Venezuela, engaging American forces in a new level of conflict that goes beyond their attacks on alleged drug boats,” reports the Associated Press.

• U.S. prosecutors charged Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the alleged leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, accusing him of masterminding a violent criminal enterprise responsible for murders, kidnappings, sex trafficking and the movement of massive cocaine shipments into the United States, according to a federal indictment unsealed this week. (Miami Herald)

• The US military said it killed five more alleged drug traffickers aboard two vessels in the Pacific Ocean, yesterday bringing the total deaths so far to 104, according to AFP.

• Increasingly U.S. escalation against Maduro has oil-related aspects: this week Politico reported the Trump administration has asked U.S. oil companies if they’re interested in returning to Venezuela in a post-Maduro scenario. (Via CEPR)

• The Congressional Progressive Caucus deputy chair, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), issued a statement last night following the defeat in the House of two War Powers Resolutions: “Nearly a quarter-century ago, the American people were misled by a lawless president promoting lies about weapons of mass destruction, all to invade an oil-rich country that posed no threat to us. The result was a disaster that killed thousands of American servicemembers, hundreds of thousands in Iraq, and destabilized the entire region. Trump is pursuing the same course today in Venezuela, absurdly designating fentanyl a WMD while blockading Venezuela until the country gives him ‘all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets.’” (Via CEPR)

• Experts Ryan Berg and Kimberly Breier argue that Venezuela shouldn’t be compared to Iraq and Libia, but that “any transition from the iron grip of an authoritarian regime presents risks that must be mitigated by thorough and comprehensive planning and policy actions,” calling for the U.S. to “prepare humanitarian assistance and take other steps to help support a free Venezuela.” (Americas Quarterly)

• Trump’s fixation on attacking criminal organizations is contradicted by his administration’s “dismantling the very anti-corruption framework built over the last 50 years that attempted to prevent transnational criminal organizations from becoming so powerful in the first place,” argues Frank O. Mora in Americas Quarterly. “By treating anti-drug policy as a problem of force rather than governance, the administration is attacking symptoms while abandoning the structural conditions—specifically corruption, state capture, and impunity—that allow cartels to flourish.”

Regional Relations

• The EU has agreed to delay the signing of its trade deal with South American countries until early January after Italy and France said they needed more time to convince farmers to accept the pact. (Financial Times)

Mexico

• Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her security czar, Omar García Harfuch Harfuch, have overseen one of the most aggressive campaigns against criminal cartels in more than a decade, and it has shown early signs of success.

• “The government says it is arresting cartel members and destroying drug labs at nearly four times the rate of the previous government. As a result, government data show that homicides have fallen 22 percent so far this year from last, to their lowest level in a decade, and violent robberies are down 15 percent,” reports the New York Times.

• The New York Times interviews Harfuch, who credits immediate policies to strengthen security forces: “More legal capabilities. More manpower. Better conditions.”

• “Water management has become a ticking time bomb for the Mexican government, which is simultaneously battling on both the international and domestic fronts to prevent it from exploding,” reports El País.

Brazil

• Brazil’s lower house speaker decided to remove two lawmakers close to former President Jair Bolsonaro. One of Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro, and the former head of Brazil’s intelligence agency, Alexandre Ramagem — were stripped off their seats for different reasons, yesterday. (Associated Press)

Colombia

• Hundreds of former Colombian military personnel have been enlisted to fight with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group responsible for mass rapes, ethnic slaughter and the systematic killing of women and children. A Guardian investigation as found connections between the mercenaries hired to overrun El Fasher in October and addresses in London.

Regional

• “Chile’s dramatic swing towards Kast, a populist who has in the past praised the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, is the latest illustration of how surging crime and violence are pushing Latin American voters into the arms of rightwingers promising a mano dura, or hard line on lawbreakers,” according to a Financial Times editorial.

Chile

• José Antonio Kast’s electoral victory marks the first time an openly Pinochet-admiring candidate has won the presidency since Chile’s return to democracy — it “has left many around the world asking why the country chose as its next leader a defender of a brutal regime under which an estimated 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 killed,” reports the Guardian.

• Kast’s campaign successfully focused on concerns over public security and migration, but the president-elect also managed to “reactivate that dormant Pinochetism”, according to Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, a populism researcher and professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. (Guardian)

• The wild Cochamó valley in Chilean Patagonia “has been preserved for future generations and protected from logging, damming and unbridled development after a remarkable fundraising effort by local groups,” reports the Guardian. The 133,000 hectares of pristine wilderness in the Cochamó Valley was bought for $78m after a grassroots campaign led by the NGO Puelo Patagonia.

Haiti

• The U.S. government will be required to investigate and report on members of Haiti’s political and economic elite who have colluded with violent gangs, and to impose sanctions on those found to have done so, under legislation passed by the U.S. Congress - Miami Herald.

Does anyone else feel that one year of Latin America coverage in Trump’s second administration has delivered a decade’s worth of news? I hate to leave things on a cliffhanger, but the Latin America Daily Briefing is off for the holidays. See you in 2026—and thank you, as always, for reading.