Carter Center to Observe Peruvian Elections

ATLANTA, GA....The National Democratic Institute (NDI) and The Carter Center today announced its delegation that will observe the April 8th Peruvian legislative and presidential elections. The 35-member multinational delegation will be led by Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States, Ramiro de Leon Carpio, former President of Guatemala and current Vice President of Guatemala's Legislative Assembly, Eni Faleomavaega, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Peter McPherson, President of Michigan State University and former Administrator of USAID under the Reagan Administration. The delegation will include elected officials, electoral and human rights experts and civil society leaders from 11 countries in Europe and the Americas.

The delegation will draw upon the observations of the joint election monitoring project of NDI and The Carter Center which has been active in Peru since November 1999. During the period leading up to the April 2001 elections, NDI and The Carter Center have organized two pre-election assessment missions that, along with a permanent staff presence in Lima, have monitored and reported on pre-election conditions in Peru. (The reports of these two pre-election delegations and other materials are available on the NDI web site at www.ndi.org and The Carter Center web site at www.cartercenter.org .)

From April 4-6, the delegation will meet in Lima with Peruvian government officials, civil society leaders, electoral authorities, candidates, political analysts and religious leaders. Teams of delegates will then deploy to nine different electoral departments. The day before the elections, each team will meet with local election officials, party representatives, long-term international observers, and representatives of the Defensoria del Pueblo (Ombudsman's Office) and Transparencia (an experienced Peruvian election monitoring organization,) to assess the election environment in their deployment sites. On election day, the teams will visit polling places and counting centers in their respective regions.

Following the counting of results, the teams will reassemble in Lima for debriefing and to prepare a preliminary delegation statement, which will be released on Tuesday April 10.

The delegation will conduct its activities in a nonpartisan, professional manner in accordance with Peruvian law and international standards for election monitoring. NDI and The Carter Center recognize that the citizens of Peru will ultimately determine the credibility of the 2001 elections as well as the legitimacy of the new government.