Intimidation, fraud mark El Salvador vote

Tim Pelzer

SAN SALVADOR: Far from being a victory for democracy, El 
Salvador's March 21 presidential election made a mockery of free 
and democratic elections.

Antonio Saca, the US-backed candidate of the National Republican 
Alliance (ARENA), won the election, easily beating Schafik 
Handal, the candidate of the left-wing Farabundo Marti National 
Liberation Front (FMLN). Saca received 57.5 percent of the vote 
tally, and Handal received 35.6 percent.

While pre-election polls pointed to a closer race here, a 
campaign of fear, intimidation and blackmail carried out by the 
US and ARENA paved the way for Saca's victory.

The US Government sought to frighten voters into voting against 
the FMLN. Otto Reich, the Bush administration's special envoy for 
the Western Hemisphere, sent a subtle threat to the population 
when he told Salvadoran journalists on March 13, "We are worried 
about the impact that a FMLN victory would have on US commercial, 
economic and migratory relations with El Salvador. We would not 
have the same confidence with an El Salvador led by a person who 
is an admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez."

Reich suggested that "all Salvadorans ... reflect and think about 
under what flag or ideology could the country prosper or regress, 
and not to surrender power to a person with an autocratic vision 
[i.e., Schafik Handal]."

President Bush claimed without evidence that the FMLN was linked 
to terrorism.

Republican Congressmen Tom Tancredo, Dana Rohrabacher and Dan 
Burton visited on March 17 and threatened to revise the Temporary 
Protected Status that benefits 400,000 Salvadorans living in the 
US They also threatened to stop Salvadorans living in the US from 
sending money to their families in El Salvador.

"The citizens of El Salvador that live in the US also send close 
to $2 billion to homes in your country each year", Rohrabacher 
said. "A hostile communist FMLN regime could make the US 
reconsider our policies of sending remittances toward El 
Salvador."

Eduardo Ortiz, a glass worker living in San Salvador who resided 
in the US for 10 years and still has family living there, says 
that such threats frightened many Salvadorans into voting for 
ARENA.

"Many Salvadorans in the US, including my own father, were 
telling people here not to vote for the FMLN because they feared 
the money that they were sending would be cut off", he said.

Numerous employers warned their employees that they would close 
their businesses if Handal won the presidency.

ARENA and its allies also ran a well-funded, dirty advertising 
campaign in the mass media, portraying the FMLN as a violent 
terrorist group clinging to "failed communism".

There is also evidence that ARENA committed electoral fraud. 
Prior to the election, Salvadoran religious leaders announced 
that they had received information from churches in Nicaragua, 
Guatemala and Honduras that ex-members of the military were 
organising to bring thousands of people to vote in El Salvador, 
offering them money and voting cards to do so. Many busloads from 
these countries were in fact sighted on election day.

Efrain Tojada, an international election observer from Maryland, 
visited the Alameda Hotel in San Salvador on March 21 to 
investigate reports that two busloads of Nicaraguans had arrived 
to vote. Some claimed to be election observers, but none could 
produce appropriate credentials. Tojada then talked to the two 
bus drivers, who told him that ARENA had paid them US$300 to 
drive the buses to El Salvador, and that each of the Nicaraguan 
passengers had received US$200 to travel here.

Mary Parker, an election observer from Washington, DC, was at a 
voting station in San Miguel. She said that her group had seen 
and received reports of ARENA members buying votes from the poor.

"We repeatedly saw voters — who had been paid — flash their 
ballots after they had marked them to show ARENA people that they 
had voted for Tony Saca", she said. Similar irregularities were 
reported elsewhere.

While the initially flawed computerised voting system appears to 
have been fixed, there was wide latitude for fraud, especially 
with regard to the voting cards. For instance, two cameras used 
to take photos for voter IDs were stolen from the Supreme 
Electoral Tribunal, and the manufacture of the IDs was in private 
hands.

Despite the campaign of fear, blackmail and fraud by ARENA and 
the US, the FMLN nonetheless doubled its vote from five years 
ago.

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Tim Pelzer was aninternational election observerin El 
Salvador. He can be reached at tpelzer@sprint.ca.

People's Weekly World