Political procession in El Carmen de Bolivar, Colombia. Anna Vogt
Three Presidential Elections Planned on Sunday in the Americas
An election in Haiti, also on Sunday, lacks a front-runner. Legislative elections will also be held on the day, for the first time since being postponed in 2011 and 2013, leaving the country with just ten sitting senators along with current President Michel Martelly, The Economist notes. Three candidates stand a solid chance of winning, but if none earns a majority a runoff will be held in December. The eventual winner, if polling irregularities and violence do not force the appointment of a transitional government, will face myriad challenges, including low state revenues and a weak education system, according to The Economist.
What Guatemala can teach fragile states about cleaning up the justice system
Fragile states could also benefit from an external anchor to make finance ministries, anti-corruption agencies, and high-level courts more robust. Without an external anchor, states such as Nigeria, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are unlikely ever to hold their elites accountable for their misuse of state resources. Left to themselves, states such as Iraq, Libya, South Sudan and Somalia are unlikely to create legitimate national institutions that can peacefully arbitrate disagreements between ethnic, religious and clan groups. Across Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, protests have erupted against social exclusion, the misuse of state resources, and impunity, but they are unlikely to change much on their own. Guatemala’s quiet justice revolution shows the way forward.
Guatemala: Anti-corruption spirit ebbs ahead of elections. Can it be revived?
With less than a week to go before presidential runoff elections, some groups believe the election should be boycotted so that candidates outside the established political machine have a chance to enter the race, while others are pushing for everything from judicial reform to indigenous rights. But as the clock ticks down to the Oct. 25 election, scores of protesters from disparate groups are trying to overcome differences and unite in their search for the best path forward for their country.
How Colombia’s Judge Already Won Guatemala’s Elections
As opposed to previous CICIG commissioners, Velasquez was not seekingGuatemala‘s limelight. The judge is known for keeping his head down and taking on paramilitary-political networks inColombia, including family members of Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe. Ousting Perez Molina has given Velasquez incredible status in Guatemala, and those now lining up to pay homage include numerous former detractors of the CICIG, including the country’s economic elite who have all but knighted Velasquez even as he has skewered some of their own. But these cases did not appear from thin air. The CICIG has spent years honing (and significantly broadening) its mandate and retooling its shop to fit the needs and types of crimes it found in Guatemala. This meant breaking the commission into units that focus on five areas: drug trafficking, political financing, customs, corruption, and judicial corruption.
Recent Murders in Port-au-Prince Are a Bad Omen for Haiti’s Election
With a national election coming on Sunday, the legitimacy of the vote hangs in the balance. Sixteen of the nearly 2,000 candidates who participated in the August election have been sanctioned and removed from the electoral process, and the electoral commission has warned parties and their supporters that additional actions could lead to even harsher penalties this time around. From a human rights perspective, Esperance believes the actions didn’t go nearly far enough. “The sanctions are a selective process because many of the candidates who committed fraud, they are still involved in the electoral process… that’s unacceptable,” he said during an October event in Washington. “This sends a clear signal to those who are doing wrong to keep doing it.”
Haiti Elections News Roundup – October 16
On October 6, Secretary of State John Kerry stopped in Haiti to meet with President Michel Martelly and other high-level government officials. In remarks to the press after their meeting, Kerry said, “As President Martelly and I just discussed, violence and intimidation have no place in the election process. The Haitian people I know deserve much better than that. So the United States and other members of the international community will be working with the Provisional Electoral Council to support what we hope will be a smoother and more fully peaceful process than what took place on August 9th.” Kerry’s visit was a show of support for the electoral process, an unnamed senior State Department official told the press during a background briefing a day earlier. The official stated that “this is a Haitian election and they run it, they are in charge of it,” adding later that Martelly had a responsibility to provide security and the electoral council had to improve as well, so that “we don’t see the kind of disorder we saw on August 9th.” In response to Kerry’s visit and his call for October 25 to be a marked improvement over August 9, Frantz Duval, editor-in-chief of the Haitian daily Le Nouvelliste, wrote that“nothing is less certain.”
As Cholera Resurges in Haiti, the UN’s Commitment to Prevent It Fails
Cholera is not a hard problem to solve anymore; it is easily preventable with clean water and good sanitation. If it weren’t, we would still be getting sick with it regularly here in the United States, as we did until a little over a century ago. But most people in Haiti don’t have access to clean water and good sanitation infrastructure — things that a powerful organization like the UN could — and must — help them to get. So far, however, a UN-supported plan to eliminate cholera through water and sanitation remains drastically underfunded at only 18 percent. Over the summer, the office set up to coordinate the UN’s cholera response in Haiti closed. Meanwhile, Haitian families remain vulnerable. Cholera cases have been surging in 2015, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) reports a tripling in cases over 2014.
The Evolution of Criminal Influence in Colombia’s Local Elections
The blending of criminal and political actors also makes investigating these nefarious links extremely difficult, and Robayo stated that illegal campaign financing is a major area of concern for the MOE. Further complicating the picture is the changing nature of how criminal groups choose which politicians to support — or target. The Colombian underworld has undergone a transformation, and small, decentralized criminal groups have replaced the large, hierarchical networks that once maintained a national reach. Unlike their predecessors, these smaller criminal outfits are unlikely to have a political agenda that extends beyond the local level. “Now, you don’t see the influence… throughout the national territory, but rather in certain zones,” Robayo said.
Rigged Colombian Elections Could Be Good for Narcos and Bad for Peace
That logic bodes ill for Colombia’s peace process. President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC negotiators last month pledged to sign a treaty within six months to end the longest running guerrilla conflict in the hemisphere. Under the deal, the FARC would disarm within 60 days, form a left-wing political party and take start taking part in elections. If that happens, the new crop of mayors would be deeply involved in post-conflict programs, such as land reform and efforts to disarm guerrillas and reintegrate them into society. But some candidates in Sunday’s balloting are believed to have links to criminal gangs and large landholders who have little interest in the peace agenda. To run up their vote tallies, electoral officials say that hundreds of candidates have been busing in people from other towns and paying them to illegally register to cast ballots.
Colombia’s ‘$5 million dollar’ election sell-off
As Colombians prepare to go to the polls in the regional and local elections on 25 October, analyst Leon Valencia has revealed candidates are investing as much as 5 million dollars to fix the outcome. Few deny vote-buying is endemic in Colombia. Politicians stand accused of spending public money to corrupt an electoral process that authorities ultimately fail to police. But while President Santos’ government has labelled these elections, “the most transparent in history”, Mr Valencia, director of think tank, “Peace and Reconciliation”, has warned “huge walleted” politicians are buying their way to power.
[…] fervour is not just in Colombia. This Sunday, elections will also take place in Guatemala, and Haiti. There is a lot at stake in all three. […]