Honduran favorite aims for Brazil's support

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - The favorite in Honduras' weekend presidential election said on Friday he will try to persuade the world and especially Brazil to recognize him if he wins to end Central America's worst political crisis in decades.

Conservative Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, who has a clear lead over his closest rival in recent polls, urged Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to see a new Honduran president-elect as legitimate even though Sunday's vote follows a June coup.

"We will be knocking at president Lula's door and everyone else's to reestablish channels of friendship with all nations," Lobo, a wealthy farmer, told foreign correspondents.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said on Thursday recognizing the election would mean legitimizing the coup that toppled leftist President Manuel Zelaya.

Zelaya, thrown out of Honduras by soldiers on June 28, snuck back into the country to take refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa in September.

Security forces have clashed with pro-Zelaya protesters in the months since the coup and some analysts are worried violence could compromise the vote.

In the early hours of Friday, homemade explosives damaged four schools set up as voting centers in the northern industrial city of San Pedro Sula, police said. No one was wounded.

Honduras has been shut out by foreign donors since the coup, and Brazil, the United States and Europe initially pushed hard for Zelaya's reinstatement.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the election was "another critical step" toward restoring democracy in Honduras and involved "legitimate candidates representing parties with longstanding democratic traditions from a broad ideological spectrum."

"The holding of a free, fair and transparent election is necessary but not sufficient for Honduras to re-establish the democratic and constitutional order," he said in a statement.

Kelly said Washington, which condemned the coup, would continue to push for implementation of a U.S.-brokered power sharing deal struck in October but which subsequently collapsed, calling it "a democratic way forward for the Honduran people."

"The president-elect who emerges from an election deemed free and fair will have a unique opportunity to promote that vital mission," Kelly said.

DIVIDED REGION

The question of whether to back the vote and allow Honduras back into the international fold has divided the region.

Lula's foreign policy adviser said this week that the United States risked souring relations with most of Latin America if it recognized the Honduras election.

Neither Zelaya nor de facto leader Roberto Micheletti -- both from the Liberal Party -- can run in the race.

Lobo, 61, said he was determined to overcome resistance to the vote from Zelaya's close ally Venezuela, as well as the European Union, which has suspended aid to impoverished Honduras until the crisis is resolved.

"If I have to go and knock on the King (of Spain's) door I will, immediately," said Lobo, who is running for the opposition National Party but belongs to the country's ruling elite and hails from the same province as Zelaya.

Lobo, who narrowly lost the 2005 election to Zelaya, has a 16-point lead over Zelaya's former vice president Elvin Santos, according to an October CID-Gallup poll.

Both Peru and Costa Rica suggested on Friday they were ready to recognize the election process.

"If the elections in Honduras are carried out transparently ... we will recognize them," Peruvian Foreign Minister Jose Garcia Belaunde said in Quito.

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who mediated talks to try to end the Honduran crisis, urged regional leaders to welcome the elections as a way out.

(Additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg and Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa, Alex Leff in San Jose and Andrew Quinn in Washington; editing by Mohammad Zargham)