Elvin Santos Has A Secret

On December 19, Elvin Santos Ordóñez told the press in Tegucigalpa that at any moment he might reveal some well protected secrets about the November 2009 election held by the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti, in which Porfirio Lobo Sosa was pronounced the winner.

El Tiempo quotes Santos:

"some day we will tell the reality of how those elections were."

Santos was non-specific about what secrets he was guarding, but left clear, El Tiempo reports, that he was talking about the results of the election, especially how many votes each candidate won. Until now he's kept silent, he says, because he wanted the wounds from the coup d'etat to heal, and Hondurans to reconcile.

On November 30, 2009, Arturo Valenzuela, commenting officially for the State Department said that he

"would like to commend the Honduran people for an election that met international standards of fairness and transparency..."

At the time we wrote several posts in our other blog (for example here, and here) about how untransparent the elections were, and how the official numbers literally didn't add up.

Enrique Ortez Sequeira, head of the Election Court (Tribunal Supremo Electoral), when asked about Santos's claim to know secrets, said

"That secret only he knows, but I also have other secrets, and if we discuss secrets, let's tell all of them."

Sequeira was approved to his post on the TSE while a political candidate for the Central Executive Council of the Liberal Party, and an operative for Santos's election campaign, according to El Tiempo.

What comes next depends on the relative strength of the different political actors, and the strength of the threat the secrets each holds constitutes for other actors on the Honduran political scene.