Democracy is hard! Ask Honduras.

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Honduras is a small country in Central America.

According to a CIA report, it is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, with a high murder rate.

The U.S. Department of State has issued several travel alerts, especially in the area of San Pedro Sula, a metropolitan area that has the second highest city murder rate in the world.

Most experts believe that the surge in violence is related to the drug cartels.

According to InSight Crime, a good website, it is around 80% of the total violence.

As a Mexican journalist told me a few years ago, pushing the cartels down to El Salvador and Honduras may have been the result of the Mexican Army pounding cartels in Mexico. I think he is right.

In other words, be careful if you travel to Honduras any time soon. Make sure you plan well, and stay away from large crowds.

How do you have an election in today's Honduras? The answer is that it is very hard, as we see in this update:

Honduras was on the edge of political turmoil on Thursday, with the opposition candidate accusing vote counters of trying to "steal our victory" in an election whose results are sharply contested.

The candidate, Salvador Nasralla, said Wednesday that he would not accept the count of the country's electoral commission, whose computer tally showed that President Juan Orlando Hernández had closed a gap that initially put Mr. Nasralla ahead in the voting that ended Sunday.

Mr. Nasralla's statement that he would not accept the count represented an about-face from a letter he had signed a few hours earlier along with Mr. Hernández.

Brokered by the Organization of American States, the agreement committed both men to respecting the commission's results.

With ballots counted at about 80 percent of polling places, the candidates' vote totals were almost even when Mr. Nasralla backtracked on the agreement.