Colombian judges say paramilitary fighters forced vote fraud

19.05.06

www.centredaily.com

BY GERARDO REYES AND STEVEN DUDLEY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

EL DIFICIL, Colombia – Amid the biggest Colombian scandal since drug traffickers helped finance a presidential election, electoral judges and voters in this remote town are backing allegations of vote fraud in 2002 that favored President Alvaro Uribe.

Right-wing paramilitary fighters forced election judges to fill in uncast votes for the conservative Uribe and discard votes for his rival, Liberal Party candidate Horacio Serpa, three of the judges here told The Miami Herald.

The judges’ comments support recent accusations by Rafael Garcia, a former official at the security agency known as DAS, similar to the FBI. Colombia’s media and several non-government organizations have regularly made parallel allegations in recent weeks, and the Attorney General’s office opened an investigation into the fraud charges last week.

Coming ahead of balloting May 28 in which Uribe is expected to win a second term, the allegations have unleashed the country’s biggest scandal since the 1994 presidential race, when drug lords contributed $6 million to former President Ernesto Samper’s campaign.

The scandal also has highlighted Uribe’s strong support among the illegal and notoriously brutal paramilitary groups fighting against leftist guerrillas. More than 30,000 paramilitaries have put down their guns since 2004 as part of peace talks with the government, and Uribe has promised not to extradite some of their leaders – wanted on U.S. drug charges – if they stay with the peace process.

None of the allegations have linked Uribe directly to electoral fraud.

“The fraud was organized . . . to get the votes . . . and pass them to the president . . . I don’t think the president knew or even promoted it,” Garcia told The Miami Herald in a telephone interview from jail, where he’s facing charges of erasing drug smugglers’ records from DAS computers.

In the four provinces where Garcia alleged the vote fraud scheme was carried out – Magdalena, Bolivar, La Guajira and Cesar – Uribe garnered 337,075 votes. He won the 2002 elections with 5.8 million ballots, or 53 percent of the vote.

Uribe and his supporters have bitterly attacked Garcia as a liar, and the country’s media for publishing his accusations. They have also denied the charges of election fraud.

Most of Garcia’s allegations concern former DAS director Jorge Noguera’s relations with the paramilitaries and DAS involvement in the killings of union leaders. But other accusations are related to the 2002 elections.

Noguera headed Uribe’s campaign in the Atlantic coastline province of Magdalena at the time, and got help from his then friend Garcia. Uribe appointed Noguera head of DAS after his election, and Noguera in turn appointed Garcia director of information systems. Garcia was arrested last year, and Noguera resigned amid allegations that paramilitaries had infiltrated the DAS under his watch.

Uribe has continued to defend Noguera, and named Noguera to be Colombia’s consul in Milan, Italy, after his resignation from the DAS. Noguera has denied the vote fraud allegations to the Colombian media, and resigned that post last week after the attorney general’s office announced its investigation.

Among the many reports of election fraud that have appeared in the Colombian media in recent weeks was the case of the small town of El Dificil, the seat of the Ariguani municipality, with some 25,000 people overall, in Magdalena province. The region is a stronghold of paramilitaries who have regularly killed or threatened suspected leftist guerrillas and collaborators – between 1998 and 2003 the government registered 16 massacres of four or more people in Magdalena alone.

“Here they run everything,” said Ovier Gutierrez, a 55-year old lawyer and one of very few townspeople to speak on the record about the local paramilitaries, from a unit known as the Northern Bloc that controls many coastal villages.

In the telephone interview, Garcia alleged that in 2001, Northern Bloc commander Rodrigo Tovar began arranging the fraud for the upcoming legislative and presidential elections by obtaining lists of voters in the region through an electoral registry official in Bogota, Enrique Osorio. Tovar recently demobilized more than 1,000 fighters and is protected from extradition.

Osorio has denied Garcia’s accusations and threatened to sue him for defamation. Tovar has not commented on the case.

Garcia says he and Osorio passed the lists to local paramilitaries, who then made the rounds of voting places on election days and forced election judges to cast ballots in the names of people who had not yet voted, and to mark the ballots for the fighters’ favorites candidates. In the presidential elections, that was Uribe.

“There was one candidate . . . Everyone knew what they had to do,” one judge from El Dificil told The Miami Herald. Like the other judges and voters who spoke about the case, the judge asked for anonymity out of fear of the fighters. Colombian journalists have obtained similar complaints from the judges here.

One result of the fraud was that this region’s abstention rate, traditionally close to 60 percent, was much lower for 2002. In El Dificil alone, turnout doubled when compared to 1998. Four local voters told The Miami Herald that they arrived at the booths only to be told that the records showed they had already voted.

The judges also said they were forced to discard votes cast for Uribe’s rival and replace them with votes for Uribe; and to mark Uribe in any ballots that had no markings for the presidential race.

“They always had two or three people watching,” said one of the judges, referring to the paramilitaries. “There was a lot of fear.”

The results of the pressures showed up on the vote tallies. While Serpa garnered 4,212 votes in El Dificil in his losing 1998 presidential bid, he received only 1,102 in 2002. Uribe got 9,858.

Colombian journalists and non-governmental organizations such as New Rainbow, as well as independent electoral investigator Claudia Lopez, also have studied the 2002 balloting and concluded there was fraud in Magadalena and other provinces.

Lopez reported a strong correlation between the paramilitaries’ aggressiveness and the 2002 legislative election: more massacres meant less abstention and higher concentration of votes for paramilitary-favored candidates.

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