El Salvador's ex-guerrilla poised to win presidency in runoff election
Source: Associated Press
El Salvador's ex-guerrilla poised to win presidency in runoff election
By Marcos Aleman, The Associated Press March 8, 2014 1:24 AM
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - A former Marxist guerrilla who has promised to continue the government's popular social programs is poised to win El Salvador's presidential election runoff on Sunday, giving the ruling party a second consecutive term.
Most polls show Salvador Sanchez Ceren, 69, of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, with a lead that ranges from 10 to 18 percentage points ahead of San Salvador Mayor Norman Quijano, the candidate of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as ARENA.
Quijano, 67, campaigned with Cold War references to the country's 12-year civil war, in which the United States backed the Salvadoran government against the FMLN to stop the spread of communism in Latin America. Quijano said Sanchez Ceren, one of the top rebel commanders, would take the Central American country down a communist path and invoked images of Venezuela's late socialist president Hugo Chavez.
"The FMLN proposals are based in giving the country's sovereignty to Venezuela," he said during the campaign.
But analysts say the strategy backfired in the country of 6 million people more concerned with gang violence and a sluggish economy than ghosts of the past.
Read more: http://www.canada.com/news/Salvadors+exguerrilla+poised+presidency+runoff+election/9594344/story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Ran to get an article for anyone who didn't learn who he was. (What a shame his son is very active in El Salvador right-wing politics (Arena Party) currently.)
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Blowtorch Bob: The Duty to Remember Roberto D’Aubuisson
El Salvador’s Roberto D’Aubuisson (1944-1992) was uniquely malevolent. He would throw babies in the air and shoot them in midair, just for fun. The death squads of which he was the leader, hunted down and executed insurgents in the slowest, most exquisitely painful ways possible. The Spanish Inquisition could have learned a thing or two about torture from him: his favorite method involved a blow torch, earning him the nickname of “Blowtorch Bob.” I bet no one ever called him that to his face.
During the Salvadoran Civil War, 75,000 people were killed; 8000 were disappeared, and one million were left homeless, slaughtered by D’Aubuisson and his death squads. They killed a group of Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter; and a group of Catholic lay nuns who had just arrived in El Salvador. In El Mozote, they killed at least 794 townspeople: they separated the men from the women, locked them in a church, then took them out in small groups. After they raped the women, they murdered each one of them. Then they burned the bodies.
His crowning achievement was assassinating Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero: On March 24, 1980, one of his gunmen shot him in the heart as he was saying Mass. Romero’s offense? Demanding the end to the killing of innocent men, women, and children in El Salvador’s Civil War. What an odd demand from a Catholic priest: love thy neighbor.
When throat cancer killed D’Aubuisson on February 20, 1992 , sending him, one hopes, to join Satan’s own favorite sons, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Chauchesku in the first circle of hell, I vowed I would remember and celebrate his date of death every year. So today, I remember by telling my students, my friends, and you, my readers, about the fiend of El Salvador, Roberto D’Aubuisson.
D’Aubuisson’s education at the School of the Americas is particularly galling. The SOA, chartered by the United States Congress, and sponsored by the United States Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, gained its fame by training Latin American military officers in methods of interrogation, torture, kidnapping and executions. These methods were described by former United States Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) as “worthy of the Soviet gulag.” Our government allowed and encouraged this instructional program as part of a perverted foreign policy focused on maintaining stability in the region at any cost rather than in protecting the basic human rights of all of the citizens of the hemisphere.
More:
http://professinghistory.blogspot.com/2010/03/blowtorch-bob-duty-to-remember-roberto.html
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Roberto D’Aubuisson
Government soldiers on a coastal road. February 8, 1982 (Credit: © Alain Keler / Corbis Sygma) - See more at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/victory_photos.php?page=all&print=true#sthash.FG4ocgfh.dpuf[/center]
The events I've learned about from El Salvador are beyond forgiveness.
Can't imagine what it must have been for you to see this man's face. What a monstrous person, phenomenally evil.
He destroyed the lives of so very many people in the most vicious, disrespectful way possible. He meant to terrorize the survivors with what they saw happen to their loved ones.
Thank you for mentioning what you experienced. You are entitled to be "Comrade Grumpy," clearly!
which they had perfected in El Salvador. Clearly they intend to add the sadistic games which seem effective to future wars against other human beings somewhere else:
According to an article recently published in New York Times Magazine, in September 2004 Counsellor to the US Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces James Steele was assigned to work with a new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos, formed under the operational control of Iraq’s Interior Ministry (‘The Way of the Commandos’, Peter Maass, http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/TheWay_of_the_Commandos.html ).
From 1984 to 1986 then Col. Steele had led the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, where he was responsible for developing special operating forces at brigade level during the height of the conflict. These forces, composed of the most brutal soldiers available, replicated the kind of small-unit operations with which Steele was familiar from his service in Vietnam. Rather than focusing on seizing terrain, their role was to attack ‘insurgent’ leadership, their supporters, sources of supply and base camps. In the case of the 4th Brigade, such tactics ensured that a 20-man force was able to account for 60% of the total casualties inflicted by the unit (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). In military circles it was the use of such tactics that made the difference in ultimately defeating the guerrillas; for others, such as the Catholic priest Daniel Santiago, the presence of people like Steele contributed to another sort of difference:
People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador – they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch. (Cited by Chomsky, op cit.)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html
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US readers or tv news consumers weren't informed of any important truth about what Reagan and his Congress were up to in Central America, and that's a colossal moral crime against the world. So few had even the slighted idea while it was happening. Not only Reagan, and people like Jesse ("Better Dead than Red"
Helms were cheering these atrocities, but also US American super evangelists, like Jerry Falwell. It was being pushed as the "Christian" thing to do regarding these
potential leftists in Central America. That kind of sickness is uglier, sicker, than anything a human being can have, and they are damned proud of their world-view, strange as it seems.
It's still creepy thinking what an ugly moment you would have having coming face-to-face with a monstrous sociopath like "Blowtorch Bob."
Here's a news clip showing Blowtorch Bob boosting election of Ronald Reagan to ABC's Diane Sawyer:
[center] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0e-jnwAwIKE [/center]
