The lawyer Jaime Hernández was in charge of presenting the criminal complaint against just over 400 citizens who participated in the departmental electoral boards and who digitized the records for the crimes of ideological falsehood with electoral aggravation and asked the Prosecutor’s Office to request a judge to arrest to all involved.
“There are more than 1,000 certificates that are totally altered and they signify crimes,” Hernández told reporters. “They have set up a fraud that cannot remain anonymous,” added the lawyer, who was also the defender of the former candidate’s father, the late dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.
The party’s intention is to repeat the elections, Hernández said.
According to the Electoral and Political Parties Law, members of departmental electoral boards have immunity like municipal mayors.
The Organization of American States, which monitored the elections with almost one hundred observers, called on political actors to respect the electoral results.
“The OAS Mission, headed by the former Foreign Minister of Paraguay Eladio Loizaga, reiterates that it observed a satisfactory electoral day in which the citizens expressed their will, the polling station members facilitated voting and the political parties supervised the day in each of its stages,” said the mission.
Bernardo Arévalo, the candidate who reached second place and who will go to the second electoral round, said that the attempts to disqualify the process belong to those who lost. “More than 14 parties are trying to discredit the decision of the people,” he said at a press conference and assured that these movements do this without the support of the people or legal basis.
One of the first to validate the electoral process and its results was Ríos Sosa herself, candidate of the Valor-Unionista coalition, who the day after the elections and with more than 99% of the votes counted issued a statement in which she maintained that the electoral results “clearly express a demand for change that must be met based on the guarantees of the constitution” of Guatemala and added “I believe in democracy and I wish success to those who participate in the second round of elections.”
Before filing the complaint, Ríos Sosa deleted the statement from his social networks.
In the June 25 elections, none of the 22 presidential binomials reached 50% of the valid votes cast, so, as established by law, there will be a second electoral round between the two applicants who reached the first places.
Former first lady Sandra Torres, proposed by the center-right National Unity of Hope party, obtained 15.8% of the vote followed by Bernardo Arévalo, of the Seed Movement, with 11.7%. Both will meet in a second round scheduled for August 20.
Torres has joined the trend of doubt on social networks, where he has said that “a good part of the almost 2 million votes in the department of Guatemala could have been manipulated in favor of a party, this type of situation puts the country and undermines democracy in Guatemala,” he said on his official Twitter account.
Ríos Sosa obtained 6.5% of the electorate’s preference and was in sixth place behind the pro-governmentist Manuel Conde and Edmond Mulet, one of the favorites in the polls.
FUENTE: Associated Press
