Montealegre Takes Election Protest to Honduras Summit

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras – Former mayoral candidate Eduardo Montealegre and a group of five other opposition political leaders, including three other ex-mayoral candidates for the Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC), traveled to Honduras Dec. 5 to protest what they claim was electoral fraud perpetrated by President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista Front in the Nov. 9 municipal elections.

Montealegre, former candidate for mayor of Managua, was joined by Liberal candidates Germán Zeledón, of Jinotega, Ariel Terán of León and Francisco Valdivia, of Masaya – all of whom claim to have been robbed of victory in last month’s elections.

“There was a great fraud in Nicaragua, and we think that all Central Americans need to be alerted of this,” Montealegre told the throng of Central American reporters who gathered around him in the rain outside of the presidential summit.

Montealegre and his companions brought with them files of vote registries that they claim prove election fraud. They also brought a letter addressed to each of the Central America presidents to denounce “a serious crisis in the democratic institutionality in Nicaragua.”

Opposition lawmaker Elisio Núñez, who accompanied Montealegre to San Pedro Sula, said the Liberal Party wants the Central American Integration System (SICA) to “abandon the policy of having absolute respect for another government independent of the things they do internally” and intervene in the case of Nicaragua.

Montealegre told The Nica Times that he feels it is his responsibility to “alert the presidents of Central America that in Nicaragua there was the biggest electoral fraud in its history.”

However, when the Honduran military security refused to allow Montealegre and his companions into the summit hall, he said he’d have to settle for e-mailing the letter to them afterwards.

–Tim Rogers