By Maria Robinson, TFA board member

  Leading up to election day I was contacted about violence in La Union and threats to the family of Rigo Matute. Rigo is a coffee farmer and activist whom I met during the Honduras election of 2012. He has since become head of the Consejo Municipal Electoral in La Union with authority to investigate voting irregularities. Rigo and his family had been threatened when someone tried to break down the door of the bedroom where he and his wife Demi and two young children were sleeping. It was necessary to accompany Rigo and his family during the election process. La Union is dominated by the Reyes family, prominent in National Party politics. Rigo is a known LIBRE supporter and he had learned that there was a plan to bathe him in gasoline and light him on fire!

  On Thanksgiving Day, I flew to San Pedro Sula where I was met by Demi and driven for four hours, some over gut-wrenching mountainous roads, to La Union. Staying at their home, I would 

 observe the election from the inside. It was a scary time. Since vote-rigging on election Day had been made difficult, the local Nacionalistas were applying pressure before the voting day. In the middle of the night, Rigo was called to an aldea (village) where two 4X4s had been driving around with loaded guns in a threatening manner for five days. The locals were meeting them with only rocks, brooms, and machetes. 

  During election day I accompanied Rigo to several aldeas. In one heavily LIBRE area, the election officials slowed down the voting so that the LIBRE supporters had to wait in the hot sun for hours to vote. Later, an alarmed election observer called to report that the President of the Mesa Electoral (a Nacionalista) was trying to invalidate LIBRE vote-counting by marking ballots with double entries!

  The actual vote-counting was slow and very public, each vote was read aloud, held up for all to see and stamped so it could only be counted once. In the end, the National Party candidate for mayor lost, thus ending the 100-year domination of the Reyes family in La Union.