TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 4 - Honduran presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla said last-minute interference from U.S. President Donald Trump in the country's closely fought election had damaged his chances of winning and left him trailing as vote counting dragged on.

Nasralla, a three-time presidential hopeful who describes himself as center-right, said in an interview with Reuters that Trump’s surprise endorsement last week of the conservative candidate Nasry Asfura had flipped the race.

“It hurt me because I was winning by a much larger margin,” Nasralla said at a hotel in downtown Tegucigalpa, rejecting Trump’s label of him as a “borderline communist.”

The latest results released on Thursday by the electoral authority showed Nasralla narrowly trailing in the election, with 39.38% of the vote to Asfura's 40.27%, with around 87% of the ballots counted.

That slim margin could easily flip. Roughly 17% of ballots have “inconsistencies” and will be reviewed, according to Honduras's electoral authority.

Nasralla also criticized Trump's pardon on the eve of the election of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year jail term for drug trafficking in the United States.

“I think he deserves punishment in Honduras. I don’t know for how long, but he deserves punishment and the Honduran justice system has to prosecute and punish him,” Nasralla said.

Asfura's conservative National Party forged a close partnership with Washington under Hernandez, who governed from 2014 to 2022 and was arrested shortly after leaving office.

Trump has made no secret of his goal to forge a bloc of conservative allies in the region, stretching from Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to Javier Milei in Argentina.

ALLEGATIONS OF FRAUD

Amid disruptions in the counting of ballots from Sunday's election and allegations of fraud, Nasralla has accused rivals of plotting to steal the electi...