1+1 =3

[Steven Gaal]

to paraphrase "Crónica de una muerte anunciada" by famed Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.

The election is tomorrow. The results could well be announced today, for the Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil, the government body that tallies the vote, that week said the nationwide results would be known ONE hour after the voting ended. For what it's worth, Gallup last week said Santos had an almost 40 point lead.

In the first round, the Registraduria announced the results in 78 minutes. Some of you will remember that Santos was seen at a restaurant with the chief of the Registraduria's workers' union, two days before the first round. That meeting remains unexplained.

As for the first-round polls; all had Santos/Mockus in a virtual tie going into the last week. Then on election day there was a 25-point shift in favor of Santos, leaving all the polling companies looking like idiots.

The honcho for the Gallup/Colombia lamely tried to explain it thusly: "Oh, we knew that Santos had surged in the last week but we could not publish it."

Colombian law prohibits polls in the last week before an election so it was a handy crutch.

I too (and millions of others) was taken in by the polls (Mockus also said he was fooled) but it appears that the polls were NOT wrong. It was just the polling companies were kept in the dark about the MASSIVE fraud that was perpetrated.

Here are only four examples -- there are thousands of others: On each link you will see a handwritten form, signed (and some with confirming signatories' fingerprints) of a hand count by the "mesa electoral" (literally voting table) judges. Then you will see the Registraduria official count at the same table.

http://yfrog.com/afibop

Table judges: Mockus 51 Santos 130

Registraduria: Mockus 41, Santos 201 (a swing of 81 votes for Santos out of 266 votes),

http://yfrog.com/092irp

Judges: Mockus 129, Santos 102

Regitraduria: Santos 102, Mockus 20 (minus 102 for Mockus)

http://yfrog.com/bhedkp

Judges: Mockus 104, Santos 75

Registraduria Santos 75, Mockus 4 (100 votes taken from Mockus)

http://yfrog.com/0s7jap

Judges: Mockus 52, Santos 27

Registraduria: Santos 27, Mockus 2 (fifty votes taken from Mockus).

Oh, if you want to know how it was done, here is a report by a whistle-blower police official. Article is in Spanish (maybe someone can Google translate it, to give English readers at least an idea of how it happened.)

http://www.rafapal.com/?p=5663

So, it looks like a more virulent form of uribismo is about to be unleashed. (But the big winners will be abstention and the World Cup).

I told our friend Dreyfus that maybe the only way to eradicate uribismo is for Santos to blunder into a war. Dreyfus agreed.

Meantime, Mockus remains a decent man and the reason for that is that he does not have a single drop of native Colombian blood in him (and the savagery and corruption that implies for most Colombian politicians).

If there is any silver lining at all, it is that Mockus has spawned a political movement that surpasses the two traditional Liberal and Conservative parties.