While we are all excited about Scott Brown and his ever increasing chances to doom the donkeyheads on tuesday , Chile votes on sunday. this has turned into a cliffhanger. Conservative candidate Sebastian Piñera leads by a very small porcententage(1.9 to 2.5%) in the polls which is well within the margin of error. The chances of center-left ex president Eduardo Frei were boosted by kowtowing to the communists, help from the current socialist president Michelle Bachelet and above all a half-hearted endorsement by independent leftist Miguel Enriquez-Ominami who was eliminated in the first round while Piñera received warm support from Peruvian literary giant Mario Vargas llosa who enjoys huge popularity in Chile.We will be on top of this when the polls close on sunday with the first results from election central Diego Portales.

I didn´t have to wait up too late last night to watch the results of the Chilean election on TV Chile here in Lima Perú as there are 2 hours time difference. At 12 O´Clock Santiago time(10 O´Clock in Lima) it was clear that the top two candidates heading into a runoff were Sebastian Piñera(44.05 %) of the Center-Right Coalition for Change and former president Eduardo Frei(29.60%) of the Center-Left Concertación which has governed Chile for the last 20 years.The unanswered question for both is what will happen to the 20.13% of the vote garnered by Marco Enriquez-Ominami,the independent change candidate who appealed to the left,young voters, and independent centrists. The communist candidate ,Jorge Arrate as expected placed last with 6.21% of the vote which is expected to be delivered to Frei tied up with a red ribbon ,of course:

This means that Piñera , a declared enemy of Hugo Chávez needs about 30% of the Enriquez-Ominami voters to seal the deal on January 17.Rodrigo Ahumada (PHD University of Navarre) , respected historian and political pundit wrote today in Santiago´s La Tercera newspaper,¨I don´t doubt that Piñera will win round two.¨Cristóbal Bellolio, analyst from Chile´s Catholic University concurred on the pages of El Mercurio,Chile´s largest newspaper.He penned it this way,¨Marco Enriquez-Ominami called on the people to vote for change without fear, hatreds and violence.It appears that Piñera is better situated to hoist the banner of change than Frei.¨ Conservatives can only hope and pray that this comes true.

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Before I left Tegucigalpa on Monday two lawyers who accompanied those of us who participted as election observers assured me that the congress would meet on Wednesday to comply with the accord of Guaymuras Tegucigalpa-San José in order to vote on the restitution or no of deposed president Manuel Zelaya until the handover of the government to president elect Pepe Lobo, on January 27.

They also predicted that the congress would reject the restitution of Zelaya (until that date)who acted more like a water boy for the Hugo Chávez team than a president while he was in office.

True to their prediction ,the Honduran congress voted 115 to 10 to approve the action of June 28th when Zelaya was unceremoniously plucked out of his house in pajamas and dumped in Costa Rica.

Zelaya continues in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa as a guest of Brazil´s president, Lula ,a friend of the Venezuelan tyrant.

Even the lame brains in our state department who first were on the side of the Chávez-Castro-Zelaya communist axis before being outfoxed by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Jim Demint admit that Zelaya made a big mistake sneaking back into Honduras to hole up in the Brazilian embassy.

The interim government of Roberto Micheletti has lived up to the agreement of Guaymuras while Zelaya has backed out. The support for the new president, Pepe Lobo as well as the backing of the loyal opposition is vast.

The boycott of the election by Zelaya´s supporters financed by Hugo Chávez and his narco partners failed miserably.

The question is, ¨Where do we go from here?¨

I just returned from Honduras where I worked the elections as an official international observer. The process was clean and transparent. At each polling station there were representatives of all 5 political parties. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal trained directly more than 96,000 citizens so all the rules would be observed and the vote and count would go as smoothly as possible.The voter had to show their National ID which was checked against a certified photocopy at the polling place. After voting indelible ink was applied to the pinky finger of the right hand.

At 5 O´Clock when the polls closed, the remaining ballots were voided and sealed in a special envelope, their serial numbers duly noted on a form for that purpose.
First, the presidentail ballot box was opened and the votes tabulated before the members of the polling place representing the 5 parties on the ballot. The ballots were printed with photos of the candidates above their names to ease the process. A wag at one of the polling stations that I monitored pasted a photo of a popular sports announcer named Salvador Nasrallah(No relation to the terrorist Hassan)on the ballot which voided it. There are no write-in votes in Honduras!There were very few void and blank ballots voted.After wards the same process took place with the ballot box for mayors and finally the thoird ballot box which was for the unicameral house.
At the end of the count each polling place had a preprogrammed cell phone which could only call one number to announce the vote count of that precinct. A reception code would verify the cell phone as the one assigned to that polling station. This was done to allow an official projection to be reached within a short period of times as the exit polls by the news organizations would be released not before two hours after the polls closed. Any leaks prior to this time would result in huge fines.
This process worked very well as all parties had to sign off on the results and approve the call.
I witnessed the friendliness and respect that the poll workers had for each other.There were no incidents of violence,insults or anything of the kind at least in the locations in Tegucigalpa,Nacaome and Sabana Grande where I monitored the voting. Other observers from Spain, Sweden, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Chile with whom I talked too voiced similar comments.
Among the international observers were Ambassador Armando Valladares,
Ray Walser from the Heritage Foundation,Eduard Kozusnik of the Czech Parliament,Boguslaw Sonik of Poland, Christian Holm ,Conservative Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Swedish Parliament ,Jim Colbert of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,Juán Salafranca of the Partido Popular Europeo,opponent of the Spanish socialist government,Armando Calderón, ex President of El Salvador and Colonel Victor Boitano, retired Nicaraguan army officer and sworn enemy of Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chávez.
An estimated 62 % of the Honduran people voted. They refused to be intimidated by the threats coming from the Zelaya-Chávez supporters who called themselves the resistance ,but ended up being a non-factor when the rubber hit the road.The actual percentage in reality is much higher as there are over a million Hondurans living in the USA and 160,000 in Spain . Many of these people are illegal immigrants and others live too far from the polling stations set up.(Miami, New Orleans, Houston, New York and Los Angeles.) In Spain there just weren´t any stations at all.
Porfirio Lobo of the National Party won in a landslide by a better than 17 point margin over Liberal Party Candidate Elvin Santos who was gracious in defeat a la John McCain. Both of these parties are more than a hundred years old and in recent years have had close elections.
We will have to wait for wednesday to see the deiberations of the Honduras congress over the fate of the deposed president Zelaya who tried and failed to betray his country by bcoming an errand boy of Hugo Chávez.
Congratulations to the people of Honduras. They drew a line in the sand with their votes and sent a message to Hugo Chávez which he´ll never forget!

Ed Mangano leads by 39 votes now according to Newsday at 11 AM EST.

Chile and Perú both have privatized systems with much higher returns than the mess we have in the USA.

Ollanta Humala ,financed by Hugo Chávez who lost the last presidential election in Peru by only 5% now polls at 13% with 70% negatives and only 19% of positives.The election is almost 2 years away, Since his wife was discovered receiving large sums of money from Venezuela, his figures have gone south.Keiko Fujimori,the daughter of the jailed ex-president leads with 23% with centrist Lima mayor Luis Castañeda at 18% in second place. Castañeda may form a center-right coaltion with conservative leader Lourdes Flores(11%) and ex president Alejandro Toledo(10%).All three are Chávez enemies.