Page "Manuel Noriega" Paragraph 16

According to Guillermo Sanchez, the opposition alliance knew that Noriega planned to rig the count, but had no way of proving it.

They found a way through a loophole in Panamanian election law.

The alliance, with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, set up a count based directly on results at the country's 4, 000 election precincts before the results were sent to district centers.

Noriega's lackeys swapped fake tally sheets for the real ones and took those to the district centers but by this time the opposition's more accurate count was already out.

It showed Endara winning in a landslide even more massive than 1984, beating Duque by a 3-to-1 margin.

Noriega had every intention of declaring Duque the winner regardless of the actual results.

However, Duque knew he had been badly defeated and refused to go along.