political survival. The March 1960 presidential election saw two main parties running against Rhee: the small Progressive Party (which had received one million votes in the 1956 presidential election) represented by Cho Bong-am, and the Democratic Party represented by Cho Pyong-ok. In July 1959, Rhee accused Cho Bong-am of being a communist, and the Progressive Party leader was subsequently imprisoned and swiftly executed. Cho Pyong-ok went to the United States for a stomach operation at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center but died there of a heart attack. The death of these two competitors seemed too much of a coincidence to the South Korean public and many assumed that both deaths were the result of corruption. Rhee was determined to see his protege Lee Ki-poong elected as the Vice President, a post chosen in a separate election on the same day. Lee ran against the Democratic Party candidate Chang Myon, who had been South Korea's ambassador to the United States during the Korean War. On March 15, the mostly bedridden Lee won the vice presidential elections with an abnormally wide margin, winning 8,225,000 votes while Myon received just 1,850,000 votes, and it became clear to the people that the vote was fraudulent. According to the Korean Report, Democratic rallies were prohibited throughout the nation and hundreds of pre-marked ballots were stuffed into boxes on election day. Masan protests and the death of Kim Ju-Yul On March 15, the same day as the election results, members of the Democratic Party in the southern city of Masan launched a protest against the electoral corruption. About one thousand residents of Masan gathered in front of the Democratic Party's Masan headquarters at around 7:30 in the evening, where the citizens faced off against the police and the city was blacked out. The police started shooting at the people, who responded by throwing rocks at the police. On April 11, a fisherman in the harbor at Masan discovered the corpse of Kim Ju-yul, a student at Masan Commercial High School who had disappeared during March 15 rioting. Authorities announced that an autopsy confirmed that the cause of Kim's death was drowning, but many rejected this explanation and some protesters forced their way into the hospital where his body was kept. They found that Kim's skull had actually been split by a 20 centimeter-long tear-gas grenade, which had penetrated from his eyes to the back of