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BY DANTE FUOCO

In print | Published March 19, 2009

Juan Victor Fajardo ’09, Harrison Magee ’09, Shadi Rohana ’09 and Alexa Malishchak ’09 traveled to El Salvador to serve as international observers to the nation’s presidential elections, a political event with great historical significance, given the possibility that the nation’s leftist party would come into power through democratic means for the first time in history.

Fajardo, Magee and Rohana left for the small Central American nation on March 6 and returned to campus this past Tuesday, whereas Malishchak traveled later and under the auspices of a different organization and initiative.

“We realized that their presidential elections coincided with our spring break, and received invitations from a national fair democracy watch group based in San Salvador called FUNDASPAD,” Magee said in an e-mail.

“We knew that these elections were a big deal,” Fajardo said. “It was the first time the left had a chance of winning.”

The leftist party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, comprised of former leftist guerrillas from the nation’s recent civil war, took power Sunday night with candidate Mauricio Funes as president. Because the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as Arena, has won four successive presidential elections, Funes’ victory highlights a major shift in El Salvador’s politics as well as an important moment for Latin America. It was, as Fajardo said, “a huge moment for the history of the country.”

As international observers, the three functioned as neutral voices in the election, helping to mediate election issues such as ambiguously marked ballots and otherwise working to prevent electoral fraud. “We were trained in the nuts and bolts of the voting procedure itself, as well as in the structure of the country’s electoral administration.

On election day, we oversaw the process from beginning to end — the setting up of the voting center, throughout the day as people cast their ballot, and the vote count at the end of the day, taking note of any irregularities or breaches of the legal procedure, and fielding the claims of any voters or voting coordinators who encountered problems,” Magee said in an e-mail.

The group was on watch for any issues that arose throughout the day. “In the particular case of El Salvador, past elections have been marred with the growing number of foreigners bused into the country by the governing party to vote using fake national identifications. We were trained to look out for these and other such things, so for many organizations committed to maintaining a fair and transparent voting process, having outside observers is an invaluable tool,” Magee said.

Since El Salvador only has two political parties and because the election was projected to be very close, it was particularly important for voters to be able to turn to objective individuals manning the polls. People “would actually listen [to you], because they wouldn’t want to listen to [representatives] of the party,” Rohana said. According to Rohana, the roughly 5,000 observers weren’t just from El Salvador.

The three friends’ shared interest in Latin American politics drove them to seek funding from the college. Together, they drafted a letter to the President’s Office explaining why this trip was relevant to their experiences as Swarthmore students, Fajardo said. They later submitted this letter to various academic departments. According to Fajardo, the President’s Office provided most of the roughly $1,400 of funding they received and the political science and modern languages and literatures departments also provided a “good chunk.”

Fajardo said that he wanted to be part of the election process so he could see El Salvador through a “different lens.”

“Normally when you go to vote it’s less than an hour,” he explained. In El Salvador, however, Fajardo witnessed people voting from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. For Fajardo, the trip was fulfilling not only because of the historic importance and relevance of the election, but also because of the people he met, especially the “very active students and young people who are very excited about this triumph … [and] this chance for change.”

Though they were officially neutral, Fajardo said that “In the end, I think all of us were rooting for the ‘front,’” a name that many people use to refer to FMLN.

Though the school covered the round-trip tickets and housing, the students themselves had to cover other amenities like transportation within El Salvador and food.

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