HONDURAN ELLECTIONS AFTER US OCCUPATION...MILITARIZATION AT THE BALLOTS! http://quotha.net/node/2607
After a moment, when I had taken possession of my position as president
of Voting Station 2686, in the Minerva School, there was a verbal
altercation between the police officers and Mr. Pinto that reached the
point where Mr. Pinto and his cronies ended up intimidating and kicking
out the members of the community police force.Once
we were without police protection, they began to threaten my compañeros
and me, telling us we should leave the voting stations and the polling
place. They confiscated the national identity card and electoral worker
credential of one of my compañions
by threatening to kill her, and they tried to intimidate me at gunpoint
to sign the tally sheets and ballots before leaving the table, which I
did not agree to, and finally they forced me to give them my electoral
worker credential and national identity card.We
managed to leave the community. In the door of the school there were
people asking voters whom they planned to vote for, and if it was not
for the National Party candidate they simply were not allowed to enter.
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http://soaw.org/about-us/equipo-sur/263-stories-from-honduras/4162-novelections
Another issue is the financial incentives used by the National Party to
get people to vote for them. For instance, just outside a large voting
center in Danli, the National Party was
distributing its “La Cachureca” discount card, shown in the photo at
right. This card provides people who register with the National Party
discounts for cell phone use, medical care, and other needs. The
International Federation for Human Rights reported on how the La
Cachureca card is used to shift votes to the National Party. We also
have received reports of a government program that is supposed to
provide aid to people in poverty being manipulated by the National
Party, which is currently in power. One woman denounced that she had
received one of these checks before the election that was dated the
Tuesday after the election; she was told that there would only be funds
to cash it if the National Party won.We
are extremely concerned about statements by the US State Department
that observers found the process to be "generally transparent." There
are reports by numerous international observers of dead people able to
vote, vote buying, and problems with vote
counting, not to mention that the TSE has selectively tallied the vote
reports while leaving many votes uncounted. The above examples is just
part of what our delegation saw; delegations across the country reported
fraud, including vote buying, which is described in the Honduras
Solidarity Network preliminary report. http://www.hondurassolidarity.org/report1/
The
State Department's statement goes on to encourage Hondurans to "resolve
election disputes peacefully through established legal processes" but
fails to mention the fact that the ruling parties control the highly
politicized Honduran justice system. Just
a few months ago, the National party's presidential candidate, in his
role as president of the Congress, led an extremely irregular process to
name a new Attorney General in the middle of the night, stacking the
Justice Department in his favor just prior to the elections. Prior to
that, he also led Congress in the firing of 4 Supreme Court justices who
had gone against his interests, and replaced them with 4 new Supreme
Court justices.
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