Hondurans back opposition leader

Ruling party candidate Elvin Santos conceded defeat early this morning, saying it is time for “unity, the only path to confront the future and ensure the victor of all Hondurans.’’

Preliminary results showed Lobo with 56 percent of the vote. More than half of the ballots had been counted, officials told the Associated Press.

Perhaps more importantly, election officials said more than 60 percent of registered voters cast ballots - a victory for interim leaders who hoped a large turnout would bolster the vote’s legitimacy.

The international community and the Honduran public have been divided over whether the elections should be recognized after the coup, in which Zelaya was deported June 28.

Zelaya called for his supporters to boycott yesterday’s vote.

“These elections are illegitimate,’’ he said in an interview from the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, where he took shelter after sneaking back into the country Sept. 21. He had been deported to Costa Rica.

It was difficult to determine turnout. Army patrols were seen in some poorer neighborhoods, where support for Zelaya is strongest.

The only pro-Zelaya candidate pulled out of the race, leaving two conservative factions with close ties to the military as the front-runners.

Despite the political and diplomatic chaos that has engulfed Honduras, yesterday’s vote was relatively peaceful. In San Pedro Sula, police fired tear gas and water cannon at several hundred pro-Zelaya demonstrators, injuring and detaining an undetermined number of people, witnesses said.

The international community, which failed in its efforts to reverse the first coup in Central America in 16 years, is split over whether to recognize the results of the vote - with the United States at odds with much of Latin America.

After initially condemning the coup, the United States decided to support elections with the hope that the country could move on. But many other countries argued that a de-facto regime like the one that replaced Zelaya could not be trusted to conduct fair elections. No major international election-monitoring agency attended the vote.

Voters expressed hope they could pull their country out of the isolation and economic sanctions imposed by the international community to punish instigators of the coup.

“This election is a first step toward peace,’’ Wilfredo Andino Vanegas, a 65-year-old businessman, said after casting his ballot at a downtown sports center. “But politically it will not resolve the situation because there will always be great divisions here.’’

Another voter, Juan Antonio Castro, an accountant, said he thought the vote would improve Honduras’s international standing but not completely resolve it.

“I hope whoever wins forms a unity government that makes the social changes this country needs,’’ he said.

Pharmacist Roman Meza, who said he was voting for Lobo, said he wanted to see Zelaya in jail. “These elections will put a stop to Mel Zelaya,’’ he said, using the ousted leader’s nickname.

Lobo voiced hope that the election would “consolidate a government that can bring us together’’ and end months of division. Zelaya’s supporters, who accuse the old guard of perpetuating a system of economic disparity, were having none of it.

“This is an electoral farce,’’ said Rafael Alegria, a leader of the protest movement that rose in the deposed president’s defense. “How can you have legitimate elections if the regime is not legitimate?’’

Zelaya, a timber tycoon whose shift to the left alienated Honduras’s well-entrenched elite, was deposed as he explored the possibility of changing the constitution, an effort courts deemed illegal. His enemies accused him of attempting to find a way to remain in power, which he denied.

Much of the international community had demanded he be reinstated before the election to finish out a term ending Jan. 27. But intransigence by the de-facto rulers who replaced Zelaya, as well as by Zelaya himself, thwarted progress.