Battle Himns Productions

Election Report for Guatemala - Democracy Council

The following report, written in 2003 after a trip to oversee election in Guatemala, demonstrates our experience with difficult, dangerous political situations and the logistics of performing complicated tasks in complicated places.

———————————-

GUATEMALA, 9 November 2003
By Kerry Candaele, Democracy Council Project Analyst

Democracy Council sent a three-member mission to the recent Presidential poll in Guatemala. I was joined by Professor Larry George (CSU Long Beach) and Professor Amy George (U. of Georgia) in representing the Democracy Council in Guatemala under the auspices of the Organization of the American States (OAS). Democracy Council was the only U.S.-based NGO invited by the OAS to send a mission.

DC members arrived a week before the Sunday elections. As part of our commitment and mandate with OAS, we had two days of election monitoring training, political analysis of the present situation, and various pre-election visits to several pueblos in and around the greater Guatemala City metropolitan area. During our daily visits to different pueblos throughout the week, we met with the local Acalde (Mayor), the electoral junta (committee) for each town, the local police, and with local party officers. We wanted, first and foremost, to make our presence known, and to let everyone know we would be there to observe and take complaints on election day. If there had been rumors of violence or disruption, we wanted to know about them; if there had been threats, veiled or otherwise, we wanted details to add to our report; if there had been a concerted effort to dissuade people from voting, we wanted names of offenders and the offended. The simple act of writing down information, taking notes, and talking with individuals about their concerns, lent an aura of serious international concern to the proceeding, and gave people a sense that something might actually be done if groups tried to muscle the election. The power that we possessed, however, was in fact quite minimal — more “therapeutic” than actual.

On the Sunday of the election, the pueblo to which we were assigned, San Pedro de Ayampuc, showed signs of what was about to happen all over Guatemala: there were lines of people blocks long waiting to vote. The day was hectic, and we received numerous complaints from people whose names did not appear on the official lists at each polling table. There were also rumors of tough guys, with machetes, threatening people coming into town to vote from other small villages in the area. But for the most part things were calm…until the late afternoon. The local mayoral election was contested vigorously, and it was tense, with accusations flying every which way. The leaders of the parties called us in to a private meeting at around 4 pm and
announced that they were ready to call the election null and void as a result of irregularities in voting. We figured that if they went through with the threat there would be riots, and our team talked of exit strategies if things got hot. As it turned out, they announced that polls would stay open until midnight, which settled the matter, although that night and for several days after, San Pedro was the scene of street battles with police and demonstrators.

One final and important note concerning our participation in the elections was the new process the OAS introduced for this election, the “quick count.” Ours was one of 50 nation-wide polling places where OAS observers were present at the counting of votes at one table. We immediately phoned in our numbers to the OAS headquarters at our hotel, where the numbers were checked against nation-wide figures to get a precise sense of how the vote would go. If our numbers did not match government numbers, we would have another very important factor with which to justify the fairness and transparency of the election. Thankfully, OAS numbers did fit closely with the government figures.

We issued final qualitative reports on the Monday following the election, and had a debriefing on the election as a whole. In general the results were seen as a positive step for Guatemala: Rios Montt was sidelined and, with some minor exceptions, election day polling was free of the kinds of violence that many had expected. The grotesque forms of class and ethnic inequality, the political corruption, the power of the military and their impunity from the rule of law, will not be settled by this one election. It is hoped that the election
will open up free space within civil society to move forward on these and other critical questions that effect daily life for the majority of Guatemalans.