By Victor Amaya
SAN SALVADOR — With some reluctance, the right-wing ARENA party has been forced to concede there will be a second round in the election.
The technical fraud denounced by the FMLN has been recognised by the world. The two biggest delegations of international observers of the March 20 election put paid advertisements in the newspapers, describing the "irregularities".
For the United Nations and its observers, nevertheless, the elections were "acceptable". How can this be explained?
The UN observers came with the aim of preventing violence, in an election which was seen as being very polarised, particularly by the dirty campaign of ARENA. The expected violence didn't occur, except in some isolated cases. Consequently, the UN declarations were measured by the need to stop a social explosion that could have eventuated from declaring a fraud.
In the first place, ARENA wanted to win in the first round and to place the FMLN as the third party, behind the Christian Democrats. Second, they wanted to control the Legislative Assembly in an alliance with the PCN (the party of the military), and third, to win every single one of the town councils (mayors), including those in the former conflict zones.
These last two objectives would have allowed them to maintain a corrupt electoral system. It is in the townships where they registered as many dead people as the living, and in the assembly they could change the electoral law at whim.
Massive support for the FMLN derailed this plan. Now, with the manipulation of the laws, ARENA are pretending to tackle the fraud.
We have now disputed the vote for 35 townships and the whole province of La Union, in which the fraud was simply outrageous.
How was the electoral fraud of the century planned? The strategy centred on three main areas.
1) More than 400,000 people were excluded from the electoral roll, although they had fulfilled all the prerequisites, because the TSE (Supreme Electoral Tribunal) "didn't have sufficient time". It will be necessary to remove 600,000 names of dead people and people who migrated to the USA from the lists.
2) The electoral voting card. Excluding voters took four forms: a) those who did not receive the card; b) those who had a card but were not on the roll (the UN received 25,000 protests, but thousands of people didn't know how to make a complaint); c) those who were denied enrolment by exclusion of geographic areas; about 74,000 people were removed from the roll in the north of Morazan, Chalatenango, the co-operatives, those enrolled by ASPAD, (an NGO of the FMLN); d) on the day itself, those who were inside the polling booths couldn't vote because they closed it at 5pm, in violation of the law.
3) There were thousands of false voting cards. Colonel Cruz, chief of logistics of ARENA, was seen voting three times in Gotera. In Santa Ana, the township was lost by 500 votes. It would be enough to have 100 members of ARENA vote five times to achieve this win. This was easy since the ink used to stain the little finger after voting was not absolutely indelible.
Before March 20, we had denounced the fact that the TSE asserted that it had destroyed 600,000 voting papers because of printing errors. It is no surprise that the voting papers were printed on a press owned by the family of General Vides Casanova, ex-minister of defence and implicated in the assassination of the Maryknoll nuns. The supposed destruction took place without the supervision of anybody when the law states that the contending political parties must be present.
The FMLN, moreover, has a video that shows a group of people introducing voting papers into a ballot box at Jucuapa.
Many ARENA people were seen using a special bracelet to deface and thus nullify ballot papers. In the province of La Union, where there was no possibility of putting observers at all the voting centres, 4000 votes were annulled. The fraud was so brazen that in one of the ballot boxes, with a maximum number of 400 votes, 1200 votes were counted.
In a meeting on March 26, the FMLN agreed to participate in the second round on the condition that all the "irregularities" be corrected. But this cannot be done in three weeks.
We find ourselves in a fight for electoral reform that can take the next three years. For this, it is vital that we maintain a majority in the Legislative Assembly and recover the disputed townships.
This was a scandalous fraud, whose fundamental objective was to violate the right to vote of the Salvadoran people. Only we can guarantee the development of an authentic democracy in our country. ARENA has shown in great depth its anti-democratic goal. [The author is a member of the Secretariat for International Relations of the FMLN in El Salvador. The article was translated by Robyn Marshall.]