Electoral frauds are neither left nor right. They are frauds. And the people of Venezuela cry out today for respect for their thwarted will.
By Sergio Ramirez (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The unfortunate definition of “banana republic,” which has so plagued the history of Latin America, is based on two elements: the coup d’état, sometimes bloodless and sometimes bloody, but always with buffoonish overtones; and electoral fraud, sometimes so subtle it becomes credible, and most often so crude it is impossible to hide.
In 1947, the old Somoza ordered the electoral ballot boxes seized and locked in the basements of the National Palace until his electoral judges published results he had himself crafted, pencil in hand. For frauds to be accomplished, it matters little whether there are sophisticated systems to count votes or not, biometric or non-biometric.
In 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won the presidential elections in Mexico by a landslide as a dissident candidate emerging from the left rib of the old and eternal PRI. Shortly after those elections, Cuauhtemoc showed me the tabulation sheets in Mexico that demonstrated how he was winning at all the polling stations. Suddenly, “the system went down,” controlled by the PRI, and when it was restarted, he appeared to be losing at all the polling stations. Fraud by gunpoint had given way to electronic fraud.
The latest buffoonish scenario, the elections in Venezuela, brings us back to the classic times of banana republics in hot lands, a scene that seems to have come from the pen of Ramon del Valle Inclan, an expert in grote
