Dr. César Gaviria
Secretary General
Organization of American States
17th and Constitution Avenue, Office 6
Washington, DC 20006
Dear Ambassador Gaviria,
I write to express Human Rights Watch's grave concern at the failure of the government of President Alberto Fujimori to take the steps considered essential by Peruvian election monitoring groups and by the international community to ensure the fairness and credibility of the second round of Peru's presidential election. Although a month has passed since the widely questioned April 9 poll, President Fujimori has yet to take any significant action to comply with the recommendations of national and international observers, including the Electoral Observation Mission of the OAS and the National Democratic Institute/Carter Center. Moreover, negotiations between the parties contesting the elections to establish fair rules for the second round have run into severe difficulties due to the refusal of the coalition backing Fujimori's candidacy to accept more than cosmetic changes.
Since the official electoral body, the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE) has now fixed the date for the presidential run-off for May 28, time is rapidly running out for the Peruvian government to rescue the credibility of the electoral process before it is too late. An election held without reforms to ensure basic conditions of fairness and a competent and impartial vote-counting process would entirely lack validity. As the National Democratic Institute/Carter Center pre-electoral delegation reported in their May 5 statement:
"Unless immediate and comprehensive improvements are made to the political environment surrounding the presidential runoff election, as well as to administrative and technical procedures required for election day and the consolidation of results, Peru's election process will ultimately fail to meet minimum international standards for democratic elections."
We believe that the OAS should set a deadline for the implementation of its recommendations, and announce its intention to convene an emergency meeting of member states under General Assembly Resolution 1080, to discuss measures to be taken if this deadline is not met.
Evidence of gross incompetence and still uninvestigated claims of fraud by the main vote-counting body, the Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales (ONPE), have continued to accumulate since the April 9 vote, and have been documented in detail by Peruvian nongovernmental monitoring groups and the national press. The delays in the transfer of the votes from polling centers to the ONPE's counting centers, the instability and breakdowns of the computing system, as well as its alleged vulnerability to outside manipulation, were all widely commented on during and following the vote. The ONPE's loss of credibility prior to the elections was compounded by its failure -despite OAS insistence- to promptly investigate allegations of the forgery of signatures for the registration of the pro-Fujimori electoral alliance Peru 2000, in which ONPE officials were alleged to have been involved. The JNE and the special prosecutor, Mirtha Trabucco Cerna, have failed to publish the results of their investigations into these serious allegations, and the prosecutor has now announced a 30-day extension of her investigation, so that the results are unlikely to be known before the May 28 election.
More than one thousand irregularities documented by the nongovernmental observer group Transparencia, and the Peoples Defender before and during the April 9 vote remain to be investigated. Many of these reports concerned the improper use of state resources or the involvement of public officials in campaigning activities on behalf of President Fujimori's candidacy. Moreover, the ONPE has still given no satisfactory explanation of the fact that the number of votes recorded in the elections exceeded by more than one million the number of registered voters. These unclarified irregularities inevitably cast a deep shadow over the credibility of the institutions charged with supervising the second round.
Government officials have downplayed the seriousness of the deficiencies in ONPE. The recent formation of working groups, including opposition party members as well as representatives of the Defensoria del Pueblo and the OAS observation mission, which are tasked with remedying the worst defects of the computing system, and the training of polling officials and party poll watchers, are not sufficient to restore confidence in the election institutions. By itself, the formation of these task groups does not mean that the ONPE is now competent and impartial enough to compute the May 28 results accurately and fairly. Under these circumstances, we believe it is essential that the OAS obtain authorization, access, and facilities, to directly supervise the vote-counting process.
Another grave defect in the conditions prior to the April 9 vote was the opposition candidates' lack of access to the mass media, especially television, and the extremely biased and vituperative television coverage of the campaign. Since the April 9 vote, opposition efforts to obtain fair television coverage for their candidate's electoral campaign in the weeks leading up to the May 28 run-off have been singularly unsuccessful.
As the OAS election observation mission and other international observers such as the NDI/Carter Center noted during the April 9 campaign, free-access television coverage of the campaigns of President Fujimori's opponents was almost non-existent, and what there was slanted and denigratory. This could be seen most clearly on the final day of the campaign when president's closing rally was being transmitted simultaneously by all seven free-access television channels, but those of opposition candidates did not appear at all. A reporter for a major United States cable network told Human Rights Watch that police barred her and other international reporters from attending a Toledo rally held at the Sheraton hotel. Only one television station carried live the official results announcing a second round. The government's control of the output of the major open television channels has been achieved by a combination of board-room intervention and financial inducement provided by massive public advertising. The effects before, during, and following the April 9 elections amounted, in the words of the chief of the OAS observation mission, Eduardo Stein, to an "information blackout," (cerco informativo) depriving Peruvians of the knowledge they needed to make an informed choice.
Government officials subsequently called on private Peruvian television stations to provide time at reasonable rates for opposition electoral broadcasts, but they have categorically rejected imposing regulatory provisions to ensure reasonable air-time to the opposition contender. Under present conditions a voluntary agreement is very unlikely to bring results, since there appears to be no interest or will on the part of television owners to provide an impartial public service. In a recent editorial, a leading member of the Association of Radio and Television of Peru, Daniel Linares Bazán, described Toledo's campaign as a "methodology of social agitation," and as part of an obscure conspiracy backed by unnamed international lobbies interfering in Peruvian affairs. Although according to recent surveys the vast majority of Peruvians want more balanced coverage of the issues, election broadcasting continues to be highly unequal and slanted. Except for channels 8 and 11, access for the opposition party Peru Posible to private stations has been either prohibitively expensive, denied outright, or coverage is hostile and misleading. Effectively, therefore, the opposition candidate is denied airtime to reply to the numerous personal attacks leveled against him on prime time programs, such as the accusation made recently on Channel 2 that Mr Toledo was "violent, a liar and a provocator" (violento, mentiroso y provocador). Recent negotiations between representatives of Peru 2000 and Peru Posible to discuss reforms to level the playing field in the May 28 run-off have failed to bring any improvements on the question of television access and coverage. An example of continuing bias was the failure of the free access channels, including the state-owned Channel 7, to cover the well-attended electoral rally held by Toledo on May 3 in Arequipa. Peru Posible's disillusionment with this lack of progress on media access caused it to break off the negotiations on May 4.
Mr. Secretary General, the persistence and professionalism of the Electoral Observation Mission headed by Amb. Eduardo Stein deserve recognition and congratulation from democrats throughout the continent. The mission has done much to bring the gravity of the problems described in this letter to world attention, and to seek practical solutions so that the will of the Peruvian people can be respected in the forthcoming elections. In order for the Mission to be successful, however, firm pressure is needed from the OAS member states. I would urge you to set the government of Peru a deadline with which to comply with the mission's recommendations.
I would also urge that you announce in advance your intention to convene an Ad-Hoc Meeting of OAS foreign ministers under General Assembly Resolution 1080 in the event that Peru fails to meet that deadline. The "Santiago Commitment to Democracy and the Renewal of the Inter-American System" – Resolution 1080 – provides for an emergency meeting of the OAS foreign ministers to decide upon specific collective action when democracy is threatened. In its preamble, Resolution 1080 exhorts member states of the OAS to make operative the principle enshrined in the Charter that " the solidarity of the American states and the high aims which it pursues require the political organization of those states to be based on effective exercise of representative democracy." It is essential that the OAS member states honor this commitment to the hemispheric protection of democracy. They should show their resolve now to persuade the government of President Fujimori to introduce immediately the reforms necessary to permit free and fair elections in Peru.
Thank you for your attention to these important matters. I look forward to opportunities to discuss these and other human rights issues with you in the future.
José Miguel Vivanco
cc: Amb. Eduardo Stein, Chief of the OAS Electoral Mission in Peru
