Noriega’s Foes Charge Vote Fraud : Panama Results Expected Today; Protests Planned

Panamanian opposition politicians charged that military strongman Manuel A. Noriega’s government henchmen had carried out massive fraud in the country’s national elections Sunday, and they called for mass protest demonstrations.

Guillermo Endara, presidential candidate for the Democratic Alliance for Civic Opposition, told reporters Sunday afternoon that “while the people have voted massively for the opposition, and our victory is indisputable,” there were serious irregularities in the electoral process.

Ricardo Arias Calderon, the opposition’s candidate for first vice president, then read through a list of alleged irregularities that included the shooting of a foreign priest observing the balloting, the use of fake names in voter identification, the refusal of government officials to open voting facilities and military and government officials voting several times in different places.

Calls for Demonstration

“Therefore, we have called for a massive demonstration through the streets of Panama City starting at 12:30 Monday afternoon,” Endara said.

Guillermo (Billy) Ford, the anti-Noriega coalition’s other vice presidential candidate, said in separate remarks, “We don’t want violence, but I don’t know if the young people can be told nonviolence is the way to meet this massive fraud.”

Official results from the Noriega-controlled Electoral Tribunal are not expected until today, at the earliest, and Panamanian officials said that any preliminary or unofficial vote counting is illegal and would be actively prevented. Nearly all opinion polls showed Endara favored by a 2-to-1 margin over Noriega’s candidate, Carlos Duque.

From the beginning of the campaign to elect a president, two vice presidents and 525 other officials, the opposition and the Bush Administration have charged that Gen. Noriega would rig Sunday’s vote to ensure a victory for Duque, a key business associate whom the general picked to head a pro-military grouping of eight parties called the Coalition for National Liberation, or Colina.

There was evidence of widespread irregularities in the early hours after the polls opened Sunday, although the opposition and many foreign observers said the most effective cheating, if carried out, would come later.

For instance, former President Jimmy Carter, heading a 15-member international observer group here, said Sunday afternoon: “So far OK; it’s the counting that is the problem.”

Indeed. While all 4,000 balloting sites were monitored by opposition party members who observed the initial counting, the tally sheets from the local precincts were kept in pencil and held under the exclusive control of the government-appointed Electoral Tribunal.

Opposition parties and independent observers said the fraud that gave victory to Noriega’s candidate in the 1984 elections occurred when the tribunal changed the outcome by altering the tally sheets.

Still, foreign journalists touring several precincts saw obvious efforts to control or restrict opposition supporters who, random interviews indicated, formed a large majority of people waiting to vote.

In all of the voting stations, people waited as long as three to four hours to vote. Hundreds claimed that when they finally reached a voting table, their names were not on registration lists, although they had been legally enrolled.

According to Sens. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), both members of an American observer team named by President Bush, many people were leaving polling sites without being allowed to cast ballots.

Slow Voting Pace

Adona de Monterrey, an opposition election official, said that was the reason behind the very slow voting pace.

“The people are having to wait so long that they are getting angry and leaving,” she said.

Issac Aaron, a 25-year-old Endara supporter who was voting at a school in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of San Miguelito, said: “I think they are hoping we will give up and go home.

“I expect fraud,” he said, “but we will vote anyway, because we don’t want to give them anything for free.”

Arias Calderon said that it was important that the opposition turn out large numbers of voters “in order to force the government to use obvious and massive fraud to win.”

Another anticipated government device used Sunday was the employment of government workers and troops of the 15,000-member Panama Defense Forces to pump up Duque’s total.

Mack said he was approached by a man wearing a Duque hat and carrying a handful of blank ballots. “He told me he had been instructed by Colina officials to pass out the fake ballots to government workers to stuff the ballot boxes,” the Florida senator said.

He and McCain also described witnessing a large group of people, mostly women, wearing obviously new military uniforms. “They carried brand new identity cards,” Mack said. And McCain added: “When we asked them what unit they belonged to, they didn’t know.”

Opposition leaders also said that rules allowing members of the Defense Forces, which Noriega commands, to vote whenever and wherever they wanted without any checking of identities permitted soldiers to cast several ballots in different places.

Reporters saw between 50 and 60 uniformed members of the 2,000 Battalion march into the voting area at the Ernesto T. Fevre School in Juan Diaz City. They were divided into three groups by officers and put at the head of voting lines.

One soldier, who would not give his name, said he had been told to vote for Duque and two pro-Noriega legislative candidates. When asked how anyone would know for whom he had voted, the soldier said: “Oh, they know.”

The government’s determination to maintain its control over the final vote count was evident in the way it moved to prevent any challenge.

Besides prohibiting opposition parties, the Roman Catholic Church and other private groups from conducting exit polls or releasing their own calculations of the outcome, the government threatened foreign reporters with arrest and deportation for disseminating any unofficial result.

However, opposition officials said that their parallel vote-counting operation would continue and that the results would be released as they were compiled.

There are about 1.2 million registered voters in Panama, according to government figures, a statistic the opposition claimed indicated a serious potential for fraud, since this represents a 29% increase at a time when the rate of growth among voting-age citizens is far less.

Both the government and the opposition appeared prepared for violence. Opposition vice presidential candidate Arias Calderon said that if his ticket lost, it would be due to massive fraud.

“In that case,” he said, “I expect large-scale demonstrations. The people are fed up.”

The preoccupation with fraud was made clear by the attention both the government and its controlled media gave to the presence of American election observers. Noriega reluctantly approved the 15-member group headed by Carter but limited its size and refused to give it access to the official canvass of the votes by the Electoral Tribunal.

Denied Entry Visas

The other U.S. observer group, appointed by President Bush, was denied entry visas. However, the group, headed by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), flew into U.S.-controlled Howard Air Base on Saturday afternoon and spent the night at another American military facility.

And while incumbent President Manuel Solis Palma said on national television Saturday night that Murtha’s delegation is in Panama illegally and has no permission to observe the elections, the group was permitted to travel in Panama City and the nearby countryside without serious interference Sunday.

In fact, Murtha, Mack and McCain all said they had been cheered by voters in several precincts, and Murtha said that when pro-government officials protested his presence, the people waiting to vote shouted down the Duque forces.

Even before the polls opened, troops, police and plainclothes military security agents, popularly known as sapos-- Spanish for toads--appeared in large numbers throughout Panama City.

Sitting near the military headquarters of Noriega were mobile water cannon, their menacing appearance unsoftened by the large pictures of the cartoon characters known as Smurfs that are painted on all sides.

Both the opposition and the government, as well as the United States, say that the election is really a referendum on Noriega. In line with the failed U.S. efforts of the past year to force Noriega out of power, Bush has said several times that Washington will not recognize any Panamanian administration that includes Noriega.

Bush has promised to continue U.S. economic sanctions that have contributed mightily to the worst depression in Panama’s history. He has suggested there might even be more pressure, including a trade embargo. He also has refused to rule out military intervention, although most defense experts and Administration officials say that is unlikely.

Looming behind the campaign and all of its elements of character assassination, accusations of fraud and even the issue of whether Noriega should remain in power is knowledge of the importance of the United States and the Panama Canal to this nation.

Panama was created in 1903 by a United States eager for a compliant, even subservient government that would let Washington build and operate the Panama Canal without interference from a local government.

That was the situation until the late military ruler Omar Torrijos negotiated with Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Carter to obtain a new treaty that turned the canal over to Panama on Oct. 1, 1979. The United States retains key roles in the physical operation of the waterway and in its defense, but those roles are scheduled to be assumed exclusively by Panama on Dec. 31, 1999.

Noriega accuses the United States of creating this country’s current crisis to cover what he says is the real reason for Washington’s actions: a desire to break the treaty and retain America’s canal roles into the 21st Century.