Regional Round-Up: Asfura Wins Honduras Election; Police Commander Arrested Fleeing Brazil; Colombian Mercenaries; Amazonian Stingless Bee Afforded Legal Rights

Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio with analysis of stories from the region. 

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Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome back to the regional round-up, the last one for the year, in which we’re going to look at the elections in Honduras - where we finally have a result - goings-on in Brazil and also we’re going to touch on the issue of Colombian mercenaries, which are increasingly popping up everywhere.

But let’s start with Honduras, where Trump’s favored candidate Nasry ‘Tito’ Asfura has been declared the winner of the Honduras presidential election, almost a month after the poll was held - a delay which has struck at the heart of electoral credibility in the country - a widespread fear leading up to the election. Asfura won 40.27% of the vote, winning from Salvador Nasralla by less than a single percentage point. It was Asfura’s second bid for the top office in Honduras, and the result was met with anger by his opponent Nasralla, who not only had run for the presidency multiple times before, but in 2017 had lost to conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez in a poll widely considered to have been stolen. Nasralla said that the election result was fraudulent and “a betrayal of the Honduran people.”

Asfura will take office on 27th January, leaving almost another month of what is expected to be a turbulent transition. The big questions relate to Asfura’s policies, of course, but also to how the Trump administration will react to the win. Marco Rubio has already congratulated Asfura on the victory, but sooner rather than later Donald Trump will be reminded of what has happened in Honduras, and will likely use it as a case-study for his ongoing attempt to re-shape the region. 

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In Brazil - well, actually in Paraguay - Silvinei Vasques, the former director of Brazil’s Federal Highway Police and former police commander, was arrested after entering Paraguay using false documents (it’s a thing this, and has nabbed many a Brazilian in the past, including Ronaldinho a few years ago), and deported to Brazil. Vasques had been trying to board a flight to El Salvador - a politically aligned country to the Brazilian right - and was escaping after being convicted in his home country of participating in the coup plot to keep ex-president Jair Bolsonaro in power after losing the last election. 

As a result of the arrest, Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes issued orders for the house arrest of another 10 individuals who had also been convicted of participation in the same plot, and were awaiting sentencing. 

All of this plays out very publicly with Brazil now less than a year away from its next presidential election, amid a regional drift to the right for administrations across Latin America.

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Now, Colombian mercenaries. This is something we’ve touched on in the ‘Changing Landscape of Cocaine’ series, at least as a root cause, because the proliferation of Colombian mercenaries across the world is - as with the increase in cocaine production in Colombia - derives in part from the relative success of the peace process in Colombia. Soldiers who have known nothing else but paid employment at the end of a gun, all their lives, now find themselves out of work, and with limited employment opportunities in Colombia. For the most part these individuals are highly trained professional soldiers, often trained by the US military, who need to ply their trade somewhere, and global economic systems know this. Laura Lizarazo, a national security expert at the consultancy Control Risks, has said that these soldiers “have been training under a counterinsurgency doctrine for 60 years, and they have actually fought.” And, she continues, “that  is why they are so sought-after by foreign armies and private security companies.”

In the last few years, they have increasingly been appearing: among cartels in Mexico, on both sides of the Ukraine/Russia war, in Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course were also implicated in the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise in 2021. 

Dr. Sean McFate, Senior Fellow at think tank the Atlantic Council, and regular advisor to the Pentagon and CIA, has said that Colombian mercenaries can be found “anywhere there’s a conflict market,” adding that they are predominantly recruited by countries who “want to wage war but don’t want to bleed themselves.” 

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But let’s finish with some good news! The Amazonian stingless bee has been granted legal rights! The laws, passed in two Peruvian regions, means that they are the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world. Of course these bees are considered key pollinators across the Amazon rainforest, and key to the health of the ecosystem, but are under threat from the usual list of pesticides, habitat loss, climate change and so on. The hope is that the legal recognition will not only practically help the bee to survive, but may also provide an impetus to similar laws being passed elsewhere on the planet.

And with that, in what is the last podcast this side of New Year, best wishes to all of you, from everyone here at Latin America Correspondent. We wish you all the best for 2026, and look forward to connecting early in the year.