SIT Study Abroad Students Participate as Election Observers in El Salvador

Three SIT students share with us their involvement in this historic experience. 

By Jessica Bashford, Writer/Editor, SIT Study Abroad
 

After twenty years of National Republican Alliance (ARENA) leadership, on March 15, 2009 El Salvador elected Mauricio Funes, lead candidate with the opposing political party, the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), to be the country’s next president. Students from the SIT Nicaragua: Revolution, Transformation, and Civil Society program arrived in El Salvador five days prior to the election to be trained as international election observers. 

“Through the Social Initiative for Democracy (ISD), we received our credentials and left for Cabañas, a department to the north of San Salvador on the Honduran border,” reported SIT students Courtney Turner, Emily Grady, and Katie LaRoque.  “As observers, we were instructed to pay close attention to the opening and closing of voting sites along with any suspicious activity throughout the day.”

In San Isidro, SIT students witnessed a dispute between Salvadoran election officials over fraudulent identification cards.  According to Turner, Grady, and LaRoque, “the FMLN representatives accused nearly ten people of posing as deceased members of their community in order to vote.” The students also observed an ARENA official tearing FMLN ballots during the counting process, which according to Salvadoran electoral law, would nullify the ballots; speculation ensued on whether the incident was intentional or accidental. 

Overall, however, SIT students felt such incidents were “isolated anomalies”, and “did not prevent the nation from successfully holding a democratic election.”

The day ended with SIT participants joining student reporters from Radio Victoria to celebrate, as they described, “the success of the civic process with our Salvadoran counterparts.”

View photos on World Learning’s Flickr site.