By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Bukele's Stealing the Presidency of El
Salvador
The dispute over the
wrongful deportation and imprisonment of Kilmar
Abrego Garcia is not only about one man but about Donald Trump's disregard of
the American judicial system as well, Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Friday as he
returned from a three-day trip to El Salvador to press for the detained man's
release.
U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged in a court filing earlier this month
that Abrego Garcia's deportation was an “administrative error.” The
government’s acknowledgment generated immediate uproar from immigration
advocates, but White House officials have stuck with the allegation that he’s a
gang member.
Hence, Abrego
Garcia's status after Van Hollen left was not known, and there was no
indication that Van Hollen’s trip pushed him any closer to release, which is in
line with Bukele's illegal behavior, which includes stealing the
presidency of El Salvador.
Pictures underneath White House press secretary
Karoline Leavitt supporting
Bukele's illegal
behavior added that Abrego Garcia will “never live in the United States of
America again.”
Bukele's Coup
Two weeks after
Election Day, the TSE’s results, contested as they are, show NI with
just under 71 percent of legislative votes, securing fifty-four of sixty
legislators, a supermajority. ARENA holds two seats; the right-wing National
Coalition Party (PCN) holds another two, and the last two seats are divided
between the right-wing Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and a new, center-right
opposition party, Vamos.
The TSE’s
numbers show the FMLN increased its vote share from the 2019 midterms by
some twenty thousand votes. Using the previous formula, the party would have
grown its legislative group from four to five. Now, they will have none for the
first time since laying down arms.
Had the diaspora vote
not been directed to San Salvador, the FMLN would have secured a seat despite
the formula change. But Bukele was thorough: the legislature that will be sworn
in on May 1 will have no left representation at all.
Given the
extraordinary failures of the TSE to guarantee free elections and deliver
reliable results, El Salvador’s leading grassroots opposition movement, the
Popular Rebellion and Resistance Bloc, called on the public to “reject this electoral farce”
and demanded the elections be reconvened pending a restoration of democratic
conditions. Opposition parties have submitted claims to annul the election
results.
The official numbers
aren’t trustworthy, but they reveal a substantial gap between the president’s
popularity and that of his legislators. In the populous coastal department of
La Libertad, for example, opposition parties were awarded less than 19 percent
of presidential votes but 31 percent of legislative ballots. For all Bukele’s
support, Salvadoran voters were not enthusiastic about one-party rule.
Time and again, the
president has demonstrated a mistrust of his base, taking extraordinary
measures to insulate his reign from democratic controls. These elections
appeared to confirm his suspicions: Bukele’s much-touted popularity is more
contingent than he would prefer to admit.
At its best, El
Salvador’s postwar electoral democracy has thrived on mutual mistrust. The
three most-voted-for parties in the last presidential election each named a
magistrate to the TSE. On Election Day, all competing parties supply volunteers
to staff polling centers, ensuring representatives of every participating party
are at each of the thousands of voting tables across the country. Credentialed
party monitors each receive official copies of the preliminary vote count
tallies on election night from every voting table at centers across the
country.
This carefully
calibrated system had already suffered major setbacks before Bukele. Following the FMLN’s rise to the
presidency in 2009, the traditional, oligarchic right launched a campaign to
weaken the political role of parties as a means of undermining the governing
left.
With support from
the United States, the
right-wing-dominated Supreme Court worked to depoliticize politics, prohibiting
party members from serving in a host of public positions, including staffing
voting tables on Election Day. They introduced independent political
candidates, mandated the inclusion of individual photos onto paper ballots, and
authorized citizens to split their votes across legislative candidates from
multiple parties.
In the end, Bukele
profitably deployed the new postpartisan discourse
against both the Left and the right-wing parties. But the damage to the
political system was already done.
The law still
required political parties to supply voting-table volunteers, but it was
difficult for them to find unaffiliated sympathizers to work the polls. The
vote count, especially for the legislature, became a nightmare. Exhausted poll
workers — many now selected by a TSE lottery from an unwilling and disaffected
pool of citizens after the prohibition on party members eliminated the most
committed and experienced volunteers, were forced to wrestle with convoluted
calculations across a series of spreadsheets into the early hours of the
morning, eroding public confidence in a hard-won system.
After Bukele starved
the opposition parties of campaign funds, they struggled to mobilize both
voting-table workers and party monitors on February 4. Only NI managed to
ensure representation at each voting table across the country. In many cases,
voting-table volunteers that the opposition had accredited were swapped out at
the last minute for NI-supplied personnel. In the absence of competition, the
tense, partisan atmosphere that previously characterized Salvadoran elections
was replaced by an eerie calm.
The day was not
without incident. In one San Salvador voting center, Salvadoran Canadian writer
Carlos Borja staged a protest by reading aloud the six articles of the
constitution that prohibit presidential reelection, for which he was
promptly thrown in jail for three days. For the most part, however,
voting proceeded as usual. At 5:00 p.m., the polling centers closed, and the
voting-table volunteers began the work of breaking down the ballot boxes,
sorting out the ballots, tallying up their results, and inputting them into the
TSE-supplied IT system where they would appear in real time on the TSE
preliminary results portal.
In years past, the
TSE instructed polling centers to get the more complicated count, the
legislative ballots, out of the way first, leaving the presidential votes for
last. This year, the orders were reversed. Bukele did not want to delay news of
his triumph.
So eager was the
president to declare victory that, at 7:00 p.m., Bukele took to social media to
announce that “according to our numbers,” he had won reelection with “more than 85 percent”
of the vote, and that his party had secured fifty-eight of sixty legislative
seats. This news was received with confusion by NI volunteers at polling
centers across the country, most of whom had yet to begin reviewing legislative
ballots.
Vote counting had
gotten off to a slow start. Key materials, including the official results
forms, were missing at voting centers across the country and took hours to
deliver. Once most tables had finished counting their presidential ballots and
the legislative numbers started to come in, however, something strange
happened.
Those refreshing the
TSE portal found impossible
discrepancies in
the data; at 10:00 p.m., with 31.49 percent of presidential votes registered,
the system showed more ballots cast than eligible voters in the country. At the
voting centers, poll workers spent hours trying to upload their data to no
avail. The system was down.
Finally, the
TSE directed the voting tables to fill out their results
forms by hand. With 70.25 percent of presidential results registered and 5.06
percent of legislative results, the preliminary count had failed.
The Recount
On February 5, the
TSE held a press conference and announced it would convene a full,
ballot-by-ballot recount of the remaining 30 percent of presidential votes and
all legislative votes. The magistrates gave no explanations for the technical
debacle and took no questions.
Alarms began to go
off that evening when TSE delegates for the capital department of San Salvador reported they had never received their corresponding
ballots and called on their superiors to immediately produce the boxes. The TSE
insisted the chain of custody for the ballots was never broken, but the press found boxes had been stored outside TSE properties,
including an Armed Forces depot and private warehouses. Additional reports of stray ballots found in schools, and boxes
delivered with visible damage and broken seals, further undermined confidence
in the integrity of the votes to be reviewed in the final count.
The final
presidential count began on the evening of February 7. By then, the TSE had
qualified their decision: the presidential recount would only review
preliminary results forms. Ballots would be examined only for tables where no
forms were registered. The presidential count was fraught and full of
irregularities, but Bukele’s victory was a foregone conclusion. The legislative
results, on the other hand, remained a mystery.
But for as many as
half of the voting
tables, no original forms were found, and the TSE authorized the count to
proceed on the basis of copies. The suppression of opposition parties in the
process meant that often only NI party monitors and government agencies had
obtained copies of the forms, leaving no independent means to verify the
numbers.
The presidential
recount concluded on February 9, with Bukele awarded 82.66 percent of the vote. The FMLN came in a distant second,
with 204,167 votes against NI’s 2,701,725, followed by the right-wing
Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, with 177,881.
The presidential
count was fraught and full of irregularities, but Bukele’s victory was a
foregone conclusion. The legislative results, on the other hand, remained a
mystery. NI was sure to have secured the most seats, but the margin of that
victory was far from certain; Bukele’s supermajority was on the line.
The legislative count
began on the evening of February 11. It was chaos from the outset. Once again, the TSE walked back
its decision to perform a full recount, this time announcing the preliminary
classification of ballots would not be altered, meaning valid votes that had
been disqualified by NI-dominated voting tables could not be reconsidered, and
invalid votes that had been deemed admissible could not be discarded. As the
count was set to begin, four of the five TSE alternate magistrates broke with
their colleagues,
declaring they were “no longer in a position to accept decisions that have not
been issued according to law.”
NI party monitors and
uncredentialed partisans swarmed the stadium where the count was held,
harassing opposition representatives and international
observers and threatening journalists.
Soon, reports multiplied of reams of ballots being counted
that showed no creases from being folded and inserted into the narrow
slot of the TSE ballot boxes. Others had been marked with
pen, instead of the TSE-issued crayons
given to voters on Election Day. Discrepancies emerged between the number of people who signed
in to vote and ballots marked at a given table; some tables were missing
ballots, while others had too many.
On February 12, the
ARENA party withdrew in protest, warning that “the TSE is not
providing conditions for a transparent process.” The following day, TSE
magistrate Julio Olivo issued a statement demanding his colleagues guarantee equal
representation for party monitors, admit credentialed personnel only, and
address the credible claims of irregularities in the count.
On Friday, February
16, as the count turned to ballots from the most populous departments, police flooded the building in what FMLN legislator Anabel
Belloso denounced as a clear “act of intimidation.” The next day,
the Organization of American States’ (OAS) observation mission warned that the process had been commandeered by
partisan interests and called on the TSE to “take control of the count.”
The Results
Two weeks after
Election Day, the TSE’s results, contested as they are, show NI with
just under 71 percent of legislative votes, securing fifty-four of sixty
legislators.
NI with just under 71
percent of legislative votes, securing fifty-four of sixty legislators — a
supermajority. ARENA holds two seats; the right-wing National Coalition Party
(PCN) holds another two, and the last two seats are divided between the right-wing
Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and a new, center-right opposition party,
Vamos.
The TSE’s
numbers show the FMLN increased its vote share from the 2019 midterms
by some twenty thousand votes. Using the previous formula, the party would have
grown its legislative group from four to five. Now, they will have none for the
first time since laying down arms.
Had the diaspora vote
not been directed to San Salvador, the FMLN would have secured a seat despite
the formula change. But Bukele was thorough: the legislature that will be sworn
in on May 1 will have no left representation at all.
Given the
extraordinary failures of the TSE to guarantee free elections and deliver
reliable results, El Salvador’s leading grassroots opposition movement, the
Popular Rebellion and Resistance Bloc, called on the public to “reject this electoral farce”
and demanded the elections be reconvened pending a restoration of democratic
conditions. Opposition parties have submitted claims to annul the election
results.
The official numbers
aren’t trustworthy, but they reveal a substantial gap between the president’s
popularity and that of his legislators. In the populous coastal department of
La Libertad, for example, opposition parties were awarded less than 19 percent
of presidential votes but 31 percent of legislative ballots. For all Bukele’s
support, Salvadoran voters were not enthusiastic about one-party rule.
Time and again, the
president has demonstrated a mistrust of his base, taking extraordinary
measures to insulate his reign from democratic controls. These elections
appeared to confirm his suspicions: Bukele’s much-touted popularity is more
contingent than he would prefer to admit.
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