El Salvador’s Former Rebels May Gain Presidency in Vote Today

[EFerrari]

Source: Bloomberg

El Salvador’s Former Rebels May Gain Presidency in Vote Today
By Eric Sabo

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- El Salvadorans voting in presidential elections today may put a former rebel party in control for the first time, ending two decades of rule for one of the staunchest U.S. allies in Central America.

Prospects for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, winning the presidency have risen under candidate Mauricio Funes, who never took up arms for the Marxist guerrilla group. Most polls give him a slight lead over Rodrigo Avila of the ruling National Republican Alliance party, or Arena.

The two parties, which squared off in a 12-year civil war that ended in 1992, spent a record amount on campaign ads. Their plans for an economy hurt by a U.S. recession may be more alike than different, said Heather Berkman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm.

“Avila and Funes are both showing signs of moderation as they try to work their way out of this crisis,” Berkman said.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=akLE4ZPTv6nQ

---

23 years ago, Jackson Browne stole my pen at a fundraiser for the FMLN at the Kabuki Theatre here in town. Money (and pen) well spent.

:woohoo:

[Judi Lynn]

1. No doubt Hugo Chavez made him do it, EFerrari. n/t

[EFerrari]

2. Hugo Chavez stole my pen!

:rofl:

[Judi Lynn]

3. Incoming article: Tense El Salvador election evokes war memories

Tense El Salvador election evokes war memories
Sun Mar 15, 2009 5:00am GMT

* Leftist candidate has slight lead in polls

* Immigrants fly home to vote

* Armed clashes between militant supporters

By Catherine Bremer

SAN SALVADOR, March 15 (Reuters) - El Salvador votes on Sunday in an emotionally charged presidential election that pits a party founded by Marxist rebels against right-wing civil war foes who have ruled for the past 20 years.

Tens of thousands of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States flew home to vote in a tight race that has reopened wounds from the 1980-92 Cold War-era conflict.

Opinion polls gave a slight lead to leftist front-runner Mauricio Funes, an ex-television reporter, with ruling party conservative Rodrigo Avila close behind.

Picking a candidate with no involvement in its guerrilla past has given Funes' Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, its best chance yet of ousting the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA.

~snip~
Funes, who used to host political talk shows critical of ARENA governments, vows to crack down on corruption and tax evasion and use the funds to create jobs and ease poverty.

He shuns wearing his party's revolutionary red for sharp business suits and insists he is a pro-free market moderate. But his running mate, Salvador Sanchez, is an FMLN hardliner who could drag policy to the left.

Avila, 44, a former national police chief, was an army sniper who has admitted killing leftist rebels in the war and has expressed admiration for right-wing death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, who founded ARENA in 1981.

~snip~
Some 4.2 million people are registered to cast ballots from 7 a.m. (1300 GMT) on Sunday. The government estimates 40,000 immigrants in the United States have come home to vote.

More:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/marketsNewsUS/idUKN1447509820090315?rpc=401&&pageNumber=1

http://4.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_y5Q2Nf_Px5s/SDDWUBTtt1I/AAAAAAAAAP0/BL5ODBzL1VI/s400/mauriciofunes.jpg http://www2.2space.net.nyud.net:8090/images/upl_newsImage/1204081240.jpg

Mauricio Funes, Rodrigo Avila

[EFerrari]

4. Do you wonder who flew those people home?

:shrug:

Jackson wrote this about the dirty war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFowNFvmUxw

[Judi Lynn]

5. Great song. Glad to hear it. Powerful images. Loved a sign at the end,

near the child sitting on his dad's shoulders: "Lyin' is hard work."

Yeah, now that you mention it, 40,000 people all showing up at once would be a whole bunch of people, and a strain on the airlines, you'd think. And, if they could all afford to get up, go home to vote, wouldn't they prefer to take their trips at other times, like holidays, etc.? No doubt somehow it was arranged for the gov't to send them home to vote for the candidate the gov't wants to get elected.

Do you think that's a possibility? It's so doubtful people who went outside the country to get more money would want to just blow a lot just traveling home to vote.

[EFerrari]

14. Another thing: do you wonder who took those polls?

How did Funes go from being 17 pts ahead to a little ahead? :shrug:

[Vidar]

6. Good news for El Salvador.

[provis99]

7. Bloomberg and Reuters show their right-wing bent here

Of course, they've got to slur the FMLN as "Marxist". They were nothing of the sort. Mostly, they were a collection of oppressed peasants fighting a military dictatorship. If Bloomberg and Reuters were honest, they might point out that ARENA was founded by Hitler admirer Roberto D'Aubuisson, who was known as "Blowtorch Bob" for his favorite torture device used on peasants. The current FMLN is a social democratic party in line with those in Europe.

The MSM is revolting; fascist lovers all of them.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Senator Jesse Helms was attached to D'Aubuisson.

What You Need to Know about Jesse Helms

~snip~
Since Helms won election to the Senate, no "bums" have felt his rage as fiercely as citizens of poor nations. Over the years, the senator has proposed hundreds of measures to slash foreign aid, overthrow governments he doesn't like, and block administration policies. As the new chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, he has made it clear that his first priority is to enact deeper cuts to a foreign aid budget already slashed nearly 30 percent in the past decade.

"The fact is that the American people are sick and tired of this whole foreign aid concept anyhow," Helms said last year. "I find myself wishing that somehow we could put it on a national ballot and say: 'What do you think of this?'"

Those cuts will hit hardest in the Third World, where Helms has long been a staunch ally of right-wing military rulers like Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Raoul Cedras in Haiti, and Roberto D'Aubuisson in El Salvador. Confronted with evidence that D'Aubuisson directed death squads to murder civilians, Helms made it clear that some things are more important than human life. "All I know," he replied, "is that D'Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious."

More:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1995/05/what-you-need-know-about-jesse-helms

~~~~~~~~~~

The Ethical Spectacle, May 1995, http://www.spectacle.org

Senator Helms and Murder

~snip~
In a December 7, 1994 article profiling the Senator, the New York Times said:

For Mr. Helms, the devil lived down in Latin America during the 1980's. The Senator and his staff aimed to fight him. They became a crucible of American support for the far right wing: politicians linked to death squads in El Salvador; the Guatemalan military, which killed thousands of people suspected of ties to the left; Honduran military intelligence; the Argentine junta; and other violently authoritarian governments of the era.According to the article, Senator Helms aided Roberto D'Aubuisson and his ARENA party, a Salvadorean politician in command of the death squads, by disclosing a secret CIA plan to support Jose Napoleon Duarte, D'Aubuisson's centrist opposition in an election. As a result, enraged D'Aubuisson supporters plotted to kill U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Mr. Helms sent a letter to these partisans that said:

Ambassador Pickering has been the leader of the death squads against democracy. Mr. Pickering has used his diplomatic capacity to strangle liberty during the night.

More:
http://www.spectacle.org/595/helms.html


~~~~~~~~~~
And a good look at Helms to put it all in perspective:

Jeff Fleischer: Remembering the real Jesse Helms

~snip~
Helms was so blinded by his hatred of communism that he supported some of this hemisphere's most vicious fascists, a leap in logic Bob Dylan once brilliantly lampooned as fighting a cold by taking a shot of malaria. Helms was a big fan of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, whose regime "disappeared" nearly 2,300 people -- some still unaccounted for -- and tortured roughly ten times that many. Raoul Cedras in Haiti, the Contras in Nicaragua, D'Aubuisson in El Salvador -- as long as they professed opposition to Marxism, Helms never cared how much innocent blood stained their hands.

The senator who holds his former seat, Elizabeth Dole, said last weekend that, "Jesse was indeed a watchdog for North Carolina and for the nation." That metaphor might have been a bit too apt. Like some literal watchdogs in the South of his heyday, Helms spent quite a bit of his time viciously attacking black people who merely dared to demand basic civil rights.

He sicced himself on black Africans abroad, as he tried ending sanctions against the segregationist regime in what was then Rhodesia and was such an ardent supporter of apartheid in South Africa that he pointedly refused to attend an address to Congress by Nelson Mandela.

He was even more rabid toward African Americans at home.

He considered Martin Luther King a Marxist, said King's principles were "not compatible with the concepts of this country," and led an unsuccessful 1983 filibuster against a federal holiday honoring the civil-rights leader (a holiday even supported by former segregationists such as Strom Thurmond). In his memoirs, Helms bristled at accusations that his filibuster came from racism. His track record, though, is hardly ambiguous.

He famously harassed then-Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, in one case telling a colleague to watch him make her cry and then literally whistling "Dixie" in an elevator in an attempt to do so. This wasn't revenge for Moseley-Braun doing anything to him, other than offending his backward sensibilities by being the first black woman in "his" Senate. He was known to call all African Americans "Fred" as a derogatory blanket term. He spent most of the 1960s railing against the civil-rights movement as a broadcaster and vocally opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His commentaries included such nuggets as, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic and interfere with other men's rights." These were not isolated incidents and, unlike other segregationists of his era, Helms never apologized or matured in his views. It's no coincidence that when fellow agent of intolerance Jerry Falwell started his own college, he named its school of government after Helms.

More:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1685

[Judi Lynn]

9. DU'er rabs has posted a live channel from El Salvador to check:

Post #12:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x12741#12767

He reports it's a right-wing channel, but it's live, anyway.

I just got it, it's working great:
http://www.megavision.com.sv/21/internettv/canal21.html

Thanks to rabs. Spanish speakers, you wouldn't want to miss seeing this. It's a BIG election.

[bvar22]

10. VIVA Democracy !

Look Out....it is migrating northward! :)

[EFerrari]

13. They're counting PAPER BALLOTS in public!

:wow:

[EFerrari]

11. Polls just closed in El Salvador. Cross something for the people

that their votes are counted.

[EFerrari]

12. Btw, if FMLN wins and by how much is an indicator of just how

completely f#cked the Republicans really are.