Two right-wing candidates vying to become president of Honduras were locked in a"technical tie" after a preliminary count of votes cast in a weekend ballot, the country's electoral body said Monday.

Nasry Asfura, a businessman backed by US President Donald Trump, led rival Salvador Nasralla, a TV host, by just 515 votes, making it a"technical tie", National Electoral Council (CNE) head Ana Paola Hall said on X after a partial digital tally.

She said the CNE will now begin a manual count in a vote that left the ruling left-leaning party out in the cold in one of Latin America's most impoverished and violent countries.

In the runup, Trump weighed in on the tightly contested race to throw his support behind Asfura, a 67-year-old former mayor of Tegucigalpa, in a series of social media posts, saying he can work with him to counter drug trafficking and that"if he doesn't win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad."

On Friday, Trump also said he will grant a pardon to former Honduras president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking and firearms charges. Hernandez, who led Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was also from the National Party.