UPDATE: Chaos in Colombia mushrooming

[rabs]

There is so much developing that it is dizzying:

-- There was a meeting today presided by lame-duck Uribe in which a proposal was introduced calling for ELECTRONIC machine voting in the May 30 presidential election. The plan calls for the importation of 10,000 electronic voting machines. Paper ballots were used in this past Sunday's elections.

-- This proposal is directly connected to the massive confusion over the results of Sunday's elections for the Senate, Chamber of Deputies and presidential candidates for the Conservative and Green parties.

-- Tuesday night, vote tabulation was halted. The company in charge of the tallying said the necessary software was missing. If the software is not up and running by 9 a.m. today (Thursday), the counting will be suspended until guarantees are given that an honest count can continue.

-- The results for the winners in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies are up in the air; many declared winners on Sunday night are now not certain of having a seat in Congress.

-- Uribe's interior minister, Fabio Valencia Cossio, tonight said Colombia had entered into a "hecatomb" because of the electoral disaster but he did not elaborate on what he meant by that scary word. He said it three times in a radio interview.

-- The fight between Uribe and the head of the National Registar's Office, which is responsible for counting votes, continued with Uribe again accusing the head registar of being drunk on Sunday night. The registar has denied it and said the electronic voting tabulation had been sabotaged. He said yesterday "dark forces" were trying to remove him before the presidential election.

-- Juan Manuel Santos appeared in the news; he has chosen as his campaign manager a sinister politico named Rodrigo Rivera Salazar, who was aspiring to be the presidential candidate for the PIN party, the party of narco-traffickers and paramilitaries mentioned in other threads.

-- Santos said he would be on a "spiritual retreat" for the next few days to plan strategy for his campaign.

Stay tuned !!!