FINAL results were released early this morning for El Salvador's March 9th presidential election. They confirm that Salvador Sánchez Ceren of the ruling left-wing Farabundo MartÃ* National Liberation Front (FMLN) won the narrowest of victories over Norman Quijano of the right-wing National Republican Alliance (Arena), with 50.11% to 49.89%. That’s a difference of just 6,364 votes, in an election with about 3m ballots cast.
Such a microscopic margin was always likely to be troublesome. Tensions, however, have been exacerbated by the seething mistrust that lingers between both parties 22 years after the end of the civil war in 1992.
That loathing is still palpable. It rings out loud and clear in ARENA’s anthem, sung at party gatherings with much pumping of fists. “El Salvador will be the tomb where the Reds end up.” The ruling FMLN is just as partisan, if not quite so chillingly. In the run-up to the election, Mauricio Funes, the outgoing president, used the airwaves to slam Arena, even though electoral rules forbade that.
Given the narrowness of the results, it is hardly surprising that Mr Quijano has challenged them. He owed that to his supporters.
However, he has gone further than he should, displaying many characteristics of a bad loser. He has called for the election to be annulled because of ill-defined fraud charges. Using language reminiscent of the Cold War, on the night of the initial results he urged his supporters to take to a “war footing” to defend their vote and hinted at a role for the armed forces, even though they have largely stayed out of politics since the peace accords. His supporters have held rallies close to the hotel where the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) has been recounting the votes, claiming it is biased towards the FMLN.
The TSE says it still cannot officially declare Mr Sánchez Ceren as the winner until it assesses Arena’s demand that the election should be annulled, which it will do in the next few days.
The closeness of the result is not the only thing that makes this an extraordinary election. The outcome defied the projections of almost all opinion pollsters, who expected Mr Sánchez Ceren to romp home in the second round with an even bigger margin than the ten percentage-point lead he took in the first round on February 2nd. In just over a month, Mr Quijano added more than 400,000 supporters in an election with about 3m votes cast. Roy Campos of Mitofsky, a polling firm, says the main reason for that was a big increase in the numbers who turned out on polling day: about 300,000 more than in the first round. They mostly flocked to Arena.
Salvador Samayoa of Fusades, a think-tank, says the supporters of other first-round candidates, especially those of Tony Saca, who came third, switched to Arena, when initially it looked like they might back the FMLN. Part of that was due to clever tactics by Arena, part bad luck for the FMLN. At the time, political upheaval in Venezuela was all over the news, and Arena took advantage of it by alleging that Mr Sánchez Ceren, a former guerrilla leader, is a left-wing ideologue in the late Hugo Chávez mould. (In fact, says Mr Samayoa, he is not—he thinks the winning candidate may be more of a left-wing pragmatist like Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, who is surprisingly pro-business.)
What of Mr Quijano’s fraud claims? Both Mr Campos and Mr Samayoa say there seems to be little doubt that the TSE has an institutional bias towards the FMLN. Most of its members have links to the party. Arena demanded that the election be annulled after the TSE refused to a recount of individual votes, but analysts say the electoral law only allows for such a recount in circumstances that were not met by Sunday’s election result. The United Nations in El Salvador threw its support behind the tribunal, calling the elections transparent.
Given the narrowness of the result, the divisions may make it more difficult to govern a country that is torn by gang violence, and is badly in need of a policy consensus between both main parties. Though Mr Sánchez Ceren has campaigned as a moderate, he and Mr Quijano are unlikely to see eye-to-eye over efforts to stem the bloodshed, especially as Mr Quijano wants to draft the military into law enforcement. That said, a strengthened Arena may help force Mr Sánchez Ceren to govern as a moderate. After all, one of the lessons of this result is that almost half of Salvadoreans still fear the left.
March 16th, 2014, 18:25
vector7
Re: Red Dawn Alert: FMLN wins in El Salvador
Quote:
Originally Posted by vector7
US Mexican gangs are now fighting...for Hezbollah?
Two Los Angeles gang members appear to have joined the flow of foreigners flocking to fight in Syria – in this instance, on the side of President Bashar al-Assad. In a video posted online, the two men boast that they are on the front lines and fire their guns in the direction of what they call "the enemigos."
One of the men identifies himself as Creeper from the Sur-13 or Surenos, a loose affiliation of southern California gangs linked to the Mexican mafia. He rolls up his sleeves to show his gang tattoos and greets fellow gang members Capone-E and Crazy Loco.
The other says he is called Wino, and belongs to a gang called Westside Armenian Power. Members of the Armenian Christian minority in Syria are known to be staunch supporters of Assad.
The two men don't reveal much about what they are doing or why they are fighting for Assad.
"In Middle East, homie, in Syria, still gangbanging," says Creeper, in comments typical of the 2 1/2-minute video.
Warning: the video, posted here, contains strong language. This version is provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, and contains subtitles.
It was impossible to independently verify the authenticity of the video or determine where or when it was filmed. But the desolate scene in which the two men are firing from a bombed building looks like Syria.
The Middle East Media Research Institute, a pro-Israel group that monitors media in the region, said it had identified Wino as Nerses Kilajyan, whose Facebook page features multiple photographs of the man who calls himself Wino, apparently in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. In some, Wino is seen posing with fighters from the Shiite Hezbollah militia. In others, he is pictured with the man who calls himself Creeper. The dates on the photographs suggest the pair have been in Syria for about a year.
It was also unclear whether they are U.S. citizens. So far, there have been no reported instances in which Americans have volunteered to fight in Syria on behalf of Assad, though at least 50 U.S. citizens are believed to have traveled there to join the rebels, according to congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper last month. Thousands of Arabs, Europeans and Sunni Muslims of other nationalities who have flooded into Syria, most of them joining radical Islamist groups.
Thousands of Iraqi and Lebanese Shiite Muslims are meanwhile reported to be fighting on the side of Assad's government, as well as Iranians, some Russians and smaller numbers of Afghans, Pakistanis and other Arabs, making this a truly international war.
The ultraviolent Mara Salvatrucha street gang, a k a MS-13 — whose 10,000 members sow murder and mayhem in dozens of American cities — has been secretly backing El Salvador’s ruling party for several years, according to evidence that has emerged in recent weeks.
President Mauricio Funes has admitted to personally approving payoffs, prostitutes and other privileges for gang kingpins in exchange for their political support. If Funes’ FMLN party, which originated as a guerrilla movement in the 1980s, wins the March 9 presidential election, El Salvador may become a haven for gangs and narco-traffickers, with dire consequences for the United States.
MS-13’s violent thuggery plagues communities across America. For example, last September, 14 members of its Plainfield, NJ, branch were indicted for waging what US Attorney Paul Fishman called a “reign of terror,” including multiple murders and extortion. On Feb. 21, a 21-year-old convenience-store worker, herself a Salvadoran immigrant, was murdered in a Washington, DC, suburb by three presumed MS-13 gang members.
Born in the Salvadoran expatriate community of Los Angeles in the 1980s, the gang expanded its criminal activities to El Salvador as members were deported back there. In over 40 states, MS-13 engages in drug trafficking, racketeering, extortion, murder, child prostitution and other related crimes. In 2012, the Obama administration declared MS-13 an “international criminal organization” to use expanded law-enforcement tools against it.
Back in El Salvador, the current leftist president has taken a dangerously different approach in response to spiraling gang violence. In early 2012, community leaders launched secretive negotiations to promote a gang “truce,” ostensibly to reduce the number of murders caused by gang turf wars.
For years, Funes denied being involved in this controversial truce. But this year government documents, videos and recordings leaked to the media exposed his deep engagement — using government funds to induce gang members to agree to the truce to improve his party’s standing in opinion polls and ordering law enforcement not to pursue the gangs in certain zones in the country in exchange for the gang’s political support.
The evidence includes correspondence between Funes and an MS-13 kingpin in which the president promised cash payments and special privileges for imprisoned gang members, even slots for their children in the nation’s police academy.
The recent discovery of mass graves hiding the victims of hundreds of unreported murders proves that the ill-advised strategy did little to reduce violence. Instead, it let the gangs consolidate their turf, increase their drug smuggling and become a key part of the ruling party’s political base.
El Salvador is part of the Central American “Northern Triangle” through which transits about 90 percent of the cocaine reaching the United States. These recent disclosures disprove the ruling party claims to cooperate with US anti-drug efforts.
President Obama visited El Salvador in 2011 as a signal of his openness to its leftist government, and the United States is neutral in the coming elections despite the recent revelations about the FMLN. Isn’t it time for US authorities to call out the criminals within the FMLN movement, and apply sanctions to undermine their ability to conduct business and harm US interests?
Silence is complicity. And turning a blind eye as a narco-gang government takes power in El Salvador is a case of criminal neglect.
Roger Noriega served as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere and ambassador to the Organization of American States under President George W. Bush.
An American Enterprise Institutevisiting fellow, he is managing director of Vision Americas LLC, which represents US and foreign clients.
