“Are Election Observers Observing Anything?” By Farid Kahhat

In your article “Vote ‘good’ and vote ‘bad’”Published in El Comercio, Mario Vargas Llosa says the following about electoral observation missions in our region: “I think that what happened in Peru and in other Latin American countries casts too many doubts on the validity of those electoral surveillance missions, which often only serve to cast a layer of supposed validity on suspicious elections”. Is there evidence in favor of that claim?

If it were so easy to dupe these electoral observation missions, the Nicaraguan and Venezuelan dictatorships might not ban them. The last general elections in Nicaragua did not have independent observers and, until the recent regional elections, neither did the electoral processes in Venezuela. And the recent electoral observation mission of the European Union in Venezuela (after 15 years of absence) explains the reason for these prohibitions: according to its first report, the Venezuelan regional elections suffered from “structural deficiencies”, such as “arbitrary political disqualification” of candidates, the “widespread use of State resources in the campaign and unequal access to the media,” “the lack of judicial independence and disrespect for the rule of law,” among others. Precisely for pointing out these deliberate irregularities, the Maduro government expelled the EU electoral observers from Venezuela before they released their final report.

By the way, the EU mission to a left-wing government like Venezuela was headed by a Portuguese socialist, in the same way that the OAS mission to a right-wing government in 2017 in Honduras was headed by the Bolivian conservative Jorge Quiroga. Despite this affinity, said mission concluded that “the accumulation of irregularities and deficiencies are such that they do not allow the mission to have full certainty about the results.”

In the same way that an OAS mission to a left-wing government in Bolivia concluded in 2019 that “the manipulations and irregularities indicated do not allow for certainty about the margin of victory of the candidate Morales over the candidate Mesa.” And when Alberto Fujimori sought a second reelection in 2000, the OAS mission concluded that, “according to international standards, the Peruvian electoral process is far from being considered free and fair.”

But, in those same countries, the OAS missions validated the electoral processes in which Xiomara Castro in Honduras, Luis Arce in Bolivia (candidate of the party that the OAS mission accused of the irregularities of 2019) and presidents were elected. Pedro Castillo in Peru. Therefore, it does not seem true that these missions often validate suspicious processes.

If you are one of those who believe that the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, has a bias in favor of leftist governments, you have not been paying attention to the news. Almagro was reelected in 2020 to the position with the unanimous backing of right-wing governments in the hemisphere. In addition, Almagro said in 2018 the following about Venezuela: “Regarding military intervention to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro regime, I believe that we should not rule out any option”; And in 2019 he said the following about Bolivia: “In Bolivia there was a coup when Evo Morales committed electoral fraud.”

In the Peruvian case, we have seen Pedro Castillo to enter the familiar Breña house, changing his hat for a cap, believing that he would thus go unnoticed, or to one of his advisers “depositing” his money in a Government Palace bathroom. Do you really believe that they are characters capable of devising a master plan to perpetrate a fraud that would have involved thousands of board members without today knowing the identity of even one of them?