Soldiers marching in the middle of the road, bullets whizzing through the air, protesters running for cover through thick clouds of tear gas. Unfortunate tourists venturing the streets of Tegucigalpa in December last year might well have wondered whether they’d stumbled onto a military coup, like the one that rocked Honduras in June 2009 when left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by troops and bundled onto a plane to Costa Rica.

The source of these latest scenes of chaos was an election gone wrong. On November 26, voters went to the polls in a tense climate, with many convinced that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), dominated by the ruling National Party, would stop at nothing to ensure the victory of the increasingly authoritarian incumbent, President Juan Orlando Hernández.

After a long, unexplained delay, the TSE announced that Salvador Nasralla ― candidate of the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship ― was in the lead by 5 points with 57 percent of votes counted. But then the electronic vote count was delayed for more than thirty hours. Over the following days, additional “technical failures” occurred. When the count resumed, Nasralla’s lead gradually evaporated and by late in the day on November 30, Hernández was ahead by 1.5 percentage points.