The Battalion
WORLD
& NATION 9
Monday, November 27,1989
Mexican officials suspect foul play
Poll watchers discover signs of ballot stuffing at election sites
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MATAMOROS, Mexico (AP) — More than
1,000 suspected fraudulent ballots were im
pounded in Sunday’s state and municipal elec
tion after poll watchers found ballot boxes
stuffed with votes cast for the ruling PRI party
before the polls opened.
! At Matamoros precinct No. 35A, where only
18 people had signed in to vote by mid-morning
Sunday, election officials counted 562 ballots cast
in the race for state representative and 429 in the
separate box for the mayoral election.
Almost all of the extra ballots were for candi
dates of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary
Party, known by its Spanish initials as the PRI.
Mayoral candidate Jorge Cardenas with the
opposition Authentic Party of the Mexican Revo
lution (PARM) accused PRI officials of orches
trating “a huge fraud” throughout the state of
Tamaulipas.
“The people of Matamoros will not accept this,
and neither will the people of Tamaulipas,” Car
denas said.
At Precinct 35A, where 30 times as many bal
lots were cast as the number of people who had
voted, voting was suspended temporarily while
election officials counted the votes in front of
public notaries called in to record the evidence.
“Fraude, fraude, fraude (fraud, fraud,
fraud),” chanted a crowd gathered in the govern
ment health clinic, while the votes were being
counted.
Reymundo Padilla, precinct president, said he
did not know how the ballots ended up in the
boxes before polls opened.
“Somebody put them in the boxes,” Padilla
said.
At another precinct set up at a Matamoros el
ementary school, the PRI poll watcher called in a
complaint to denounce alleged ballot-stuffing by
his own party. Reynaldo Carrillo Nava, PRI pre
cinct representative, said he called after finding
380 ballots — all cast for the PRI — inside a box
before voting was to start at 8 a.m.
“There were ballots already inside,” Carrillo
said. “I protested, but they (other PRI officials at
the precinct) didn’t want to recognize it.”
After election officials emptied the 380 suspect
ballots into a garbage bag to await inspection by
the State Electoral Commission, a man ran off
with the bag, but threw it down before escaping,
said Mariano Aguilar Estrada, who helped re
trieve the bag of ballots.
Voting temporarily was suspended while nota
ries recorded the evidence.
PRI mayoral candidate Javier Muzquiz said
voting fraud would be impossible in Matamoros
because precinct officials would discover irregu
larities.
“They (PARM) are inventing stories of fraud
when they don’t need to invent stories of fraud,”
Muzquiz said Sunday. “I am not interested in
winning with fraud.”
PARM officials on Sunday turned over an
other 300 ballots marked for the PRI after dis
covering a man carrying them with him.
“They were to be used for tacos,” Valentin Ji
menez Mora, a PARM candidate for state rep
resentative, said.
A “taco” in a Mexican election is a ballot with
several additional ballots secretly folded inside,
making it possible for one person to cast more
than one vote for a candidate.
Cabrera said there had been no reports of vio
lence as of mid-afternoon.
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High winds delay Discovery’s return
after successful spy satellite launch
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)
— Blustery winds in the California
desert Sunday forced NASA to delay
space shuttle Discovery’s return to
Earth until Monday following a se
cret mission that put a spy satellite in
orbit.
Mission Control in Houston in
formed the five astronauts of the
“wave-off’ about three hours before
they were to fire rockets to drop the
craft out of orbit to start an hour-
long descent to a nighttime landing
at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in
the Mojave Desert.
“Discovery has been waved off
from its scheduled landing this eve-
Jining due to unacceptably strong
- winds,” a statement from the Na
tional Aeronautics and Space Ad
ministration said.
The statement said that condi
tions were forecast to be favorable
Monday night and landing was re
scheduled for 4:32 p.m. PST, mak
ing it a daytime rather than a night
landing, as had been planned for
Sunday.
Winds gusting to nearly 30 mph
sent small dust storms whipping
across the Edwards runways. Mis
sion rules dictate that a shuttle not
land at night if crosswinds are more
than 12 mph.
“Another problem is that we have
no upper-level wind data because
the winds keep breaking our
weather balloons,” NASA spokes
man Linda Copley said.
Discovery carries enough fuel and
other supplies to remain in orbit at
least through Tuesday. If conditions
remained bad at Edwards, the shut
tle could land at either White Sands,
N.M., or at Cape Canaveral.
Edwards landings are preferred
because of the long, wide-open run
ways.
Because the mission is classified,
no information is being reported by
NASA. So the reaction of the astro
nauts to the delay was not made pub
lic.
The statement did say the crew
“continued to be in excellent condi
tion.”
This was the sixth time in 32 shut
tle flights that a landing has been
waved off by bad weather.
Discovery was slated to be only the
third shuttle to land at night. Its
launch Wednesday was the third af
ter dark.
Most news about the flight was
blacked out on Pentagon orders
since Discovery blazed away from
Cape Canaveral, Fla. NASA was al
lowed to make only periodic
statements that the spaceship was
doing fine and to announce the
landing time.
The after-dark liftoff and touch
down were dictated by the need to
put the shuttle’s satellite in a specific
orbit and by the military experi
ments conducted by the astronauts.
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Deadliest battle in El Salvador’s civil war
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sets stage for more bloodletting in future
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SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador
; (AP) — The two deadliest weeks of
the 10-year-old civil war have served
only to set the stage for more blood-
letting.
The battle of San Salvador — at
least the first one — is over. The
huge rebel offensive that began Nov.
11 failed to achieve its principal ob-
Ijective of persuading the govern
ment to make significant concessions
in the quest for a negotiated solu
tion.
Indeed, with the administration
claiming victory and demanding
what amounts to the rebels’ surren
der, and the insurgents promising to
[finish off “the mortally wounded
yfascist beast,” Salvadorans can only
expect weeks or months more of
warfare of an intensity unseen since
early 1981, when the rebels’ first “fi
nal offensive” failed.
“This battle against ARENA is a
battle that cannot turn back, a battle
to sweep fascism once and for all
: from our country,” the rebel clan
destine Radio Venceremos said late
last week. ARENA is the rightist Na
tionalist Republican Alliance, the
governing party.
“They (the guerrillas) tried, and
they lost,” President Alfredo Cris-
tiani said, proclaiming the military
defeat of the Farabundo Marti Na-
[ tional Liberation Front, or FMLN.
The government contends its
forces killed or wounded a third of
the rebel army, estimated at about
7,000 full-time combatants. Most
foreign journalists who spent day af-
her day in the combat zones doubt
the official claim that more than
1,000 guerrillas were killed.
The Figure appears inconsistent
with the relatively few dead guerril
las seen by reporters who daily com
pared notes on what they saw where
and when.
Cristiani says the decimation suf
fered by guerrilla forces has been so
telling that they will be capable from
now on of only “terrorist” actions.
The contention is suspect, as the
[president, the defense minister and
[every colonel who went on record in
the months prior to the spectacular
push said the same thing: that insur
gent capacity had been reduced to
isolated terrorist activity.
Cristiani acknowledged in an in-
[terview after the fighting waned last
[week that the guerrillas “are doing
some things that look more like re
grouping than withdrawing.”
Radio Venceremos on Friday re
ferred to the 10-day concerted as-
, sault on the capital and several pro
vincial cities as “the first period of
offensive,” implying that others are
in the offing.
The war began in late 1979, but its
[roots go back decades.
El Salvador is the smallest country
on the Western Hemisphere’s main
land. With 5 million people in an
area the size of Massachusetts, it is
also the most densely populated.
The consolidation of land hold
ings by relatively recent immigrant
families — not of the centuries-old
Indian-Spanish mix that makes up
more than 90 percent of the popula
tion — disenfranchized hundreds of
thousands of peasants who raised
subsistence crops on collectively held
village lands. Landless peasants be
came migrant peons who went sea
sonally from the coffee harvest to
picking cotton to cutting cane — the
work force of an economy that was
almost completely dependent on the
export of those three products.
The agricultural export economy
made vast fortunes for a tiny elite.
The rich have mansions on their
plantations, sumptuous homes in the
capital’s posh western sector and
houses or apartments in Miami, New
York or Los Angeles. They tune in
to U.S. television stations with their
satellite dishes and send their chil
dren to U.S. universities while two-
thirds of the population lives in dire
poverty.
Peasants and workers organized
widely in the 1970s. By the end of
the decade, left-leaning federations
demanding profound structural re
form to more equitably distribute
wealth were regularly putting tens of
thousands of people in the street.
They probably constituted, if
counted together, a plurality of Sal
vadorans.
The growing left threatened the
privileged, who reacted ferociously.
About 30,000 people — most of
them real or perceived leftists — are
estimated to have been slain by gov
ernment troops or right-wing death
squads between 1979 and 1984,
when such murders began to de
cline.
Repression combined with the
vast majority’s manifest lack of eco
nomic opportunity to create a fertile
field for revolutionary harvest.
The government and its U.S. pa
tron contend a fledgling democracy
is on its feet.
Gorbachev supports European reform;
Czech leader believes Soviet president
endorses socialism with ‘human face’
MOSCOW (AP) — Mikhail S.
Gorbachev displayed solid support
Sunday for reform in Eastern Eu
rope by endorsing socialism with a
“human face” — the slogan used by
the Czechoslovakian progressives
toppled by a Soviet-led invasion in
1968.
In the Czechoslovakian capital,
Alexander Dubcek, leader of the ill-
fated “Prague Spring” reforms of 21
years ago, read Gorbachev’s remarks
at a rally as proof of the Soviet presi
dent’s backing for change.
Two days earlier, the Czechoslo
vakian Communist Party dumped
party chief Milos Jakes and some
other leaders associated with hard
line policies in an attempt to stem
the political crisis that has rocked the
country.
With the East bloc in upheaval,
the Soviet Communist Party daily
Pravda published a 2 1 /2-page compi
lation of Gorbachev’s thoughts on
the future of socialism and his own
program for “perestroika,” or re
construction of the economy and so
ciety.
Pravda said the article was a syn
thesis of recent remarks by Gorba
chev.
The Soviet leader’s major theme
seemed to be that socialism must
modernize — even adopt traits of
capitalism if necessary — or risk be
coming irrelevant. He offered no
quick answers but said the process
would take years, “into the 21st cen
tury.”
He also said achievements at
tained under capitalism, like “equal-
Mikhail Gorbachev
ity of all before the law” and general
prosperity, should not be dismissed
because of ideology.
“In the hullabaloo of our constant
confrontation with capitalism, we
clearly underestimate the impor
tance of much that has been done by
humanity over the centuries,” the
Kremlin leader said.
On the need for Soviet reform,
Gorbachev said: “The people are
tired of waiting.
“Many words have been spoken
about the interests of man, but they
have been little reinforced with
material resources and genuine
deeds. As a result, in becoming a
great and mighty power, the country
did not create for the masses of the
people the conditions of life that are
natural for any civilized state.
“The new face of socialism is its
human face; this fully corresponds
to the thought of Marx,” Gorbachev
said. “Because its creation is the
chief goal of restructuring, we can
with full justification say we are
building humanitarian socialism.”
For Communists, the phrase “so
cialism with a human face” is insepa
rably linked to Dubcek and his ill-
fated reform movement. Gorbachev
has previously supported economic
and social reform in Eastern Europe
and pledged the Soviets would not
interfere there, but by appropriating
Dubcek’s words, he made his point
dramatically.
Some in Prague even took Gorba
chev’s comments as a public admis
sion that the 1968 intervention,
which led to Dubcek’s overthrow,
was a mistake. The Soviet Union has
not yet renounced the 1968 inter
vention, as it has the 1979 invasion
of Afghanistan.
In the Pravda article, Gorbachev
sounded a note of alarm about so
cialism by contrasting its present
woes with the adaptibility of capital
ism.
Karl Marx was wrong, Gorbachev
acknowledged, when he predicted
capitalism’s imminent demise.
Gorbachev defended the 1917
revolution that brought the Commu
nists to power in the former Russian
Empire as a “world-historical break
through to the future,” but said so
cialism has often been perverted
since.
Tl\ M /F7
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