Sunday, December 1, 2013

This interview given by Leo Gabriel, an Austrian member of the EU electoral observation mission, is quite revealing and courageous.  He stated "the vast majority of the members of the mission were in strong disagreement with the preliminary report" on the election, and another EU observer told Adrienne Pine "the majority of the members on the EU observation delegation were not in agreement with the official statement claiming the elections were transparent and fair, but were afraid of losing their jobs and/or future lucrative observation opportunities if they spoke out."  Baltasar Garzón alleged to AFP "electoral fraud by different mechanisms and avenues."

Gabriel told Opera Mundi (English version here) "..We arrived at conclusions that stand in diametric opposition to the EU-EOM leadership..

"During the transmission of the results there was no possibility to find out where the tallies where being sent and we received reliable information that at least 20% of the original tally sheets were being diverted to an illegal server that they kept hidden..

"To speak of transparency after everything that happened last Sunday is a joke and I believe that, first and foremost, we observers have to be honest and portray what we have really seen..

"The 2009 Coup d’État harmed the image of Honduras around the world, slowing down progress on the Association Agreement signed by the European Union and the Central American region (EU-CA AA). Presenting [an image of] a clean and transparent electoral process helps the European Union to clean up Honduras’s image around the world and set this commercial project into motion..

"In the general evaluation meeting, the majority of my colleagues who observed the elections 'on site,' on the ground, were in agreement about the irregularities I just laid out. No one defended the content of the report or the idea that there had been transparency in the process, and that brought us up against the intransigence of the EU-EOM team leaders, who did not want to cede even one millimeter. We argued for a serious discussion of the topic, taking into account what we had witnessed and suggesting changes to the text, but they firmly refused..

"I believe the TSE pulled the results out of their sleeves according to a predefined political calculus..

"Yes ('it was all a set-up'), because these results don’t have any basis and the speed with which they came out with the early data demonstrates that."

(emphasis mine)