Washington is threatening to withhold development aid unless El Salvador adopts economic policies

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 by Foreign Policy in Focus / The Nation

A Precarious Victory in El Salvador

Washington is threatening to withhold development aid unless El Salvador adopts economic policies that Salvadorans just voted against.

by Madeleine Conway

After a closely contested election in El Salvador, the progressive Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has emerged victorious, declaring a narrow victory over a right-wing opposition party that appealed to the military for intervention.

The vote marks a hard-fought victory for the FMLN’s ambitious economic agenda, which has included of a host of new social programs that have improved education and healthcare for millions of Salvadorans. But right-wing forces vigorously disputed the election—one that the Organization of American States called the most transparent in El Salvador’s history—and conditions imposed by Washington are threatening to undermine the country’s gains.

While the U.S. embassy officially maintained a neutral stance in the election, Washington is threatening to withhold development aid unless El Salvador adopts economic policies that are anathema to the ruling coalition of left and center forces that have been working together over the last five years. That threat could end up undermining the very programs that contributed to the FMLN victory in the March 9th poll.

A Landmark Election

Since taking power in 2009, the FMLN—a former guerilla movement that became a political party in the early 1990s—has ushered in a host of popular social programs designed to improve living standards in El Salvador, where over a third of the population lives in poverty.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/19-6

[Judi Lynn]

1. Ugly manipulation of El Salvador's gov't, low down and dirty......

From the article posted above:

U.S. Intervention

In the past, the United States has given the Salvadoran oligarchy considerable support, including $6 billion of direct military assistance and training for the Salvadoran armed forces during the war.

Though in recent years U.S. intervention in Latin America has been less flagrant, Washington’s support for military interference in the region has continued. In 2009, when soldiers forced Honduran President Manuel Zelaya onto a plane to Costa Rica while still in his pajamas, the United States was the only country in the Americas not to classify the incident as a coup, allowing economic and military aid to Honduras to continue.

The use of U.S. foreign aid to exert control over the Americas is worrying for left-leaning governments in the region, especially as institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—which financed the protests that sparked the attempted coup against former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002—continue to funnel money into similar projects, such as funding the party of Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. With Sánchez Cerén already likened to the late Hugo Chavez in much of the Salvadoran media, it will be difficult for the president-elect to continue the programs he was voted in to protect without fear of reprisal from the United States.

By threatening to withhold foreign aid, the United States coerced El Salvador into enacting last year’s Public-Private Partnership law, which privatizes public services and assets to a degree that would cause an uproar if it were attempted in the United States. The law, an initiative of El Salvador’s bilateral trade agreement with the United States, was written by U.S. Treasury Department advisers with the IMF, World Bank, and the outgoing administration of President Mauricio Funes. The proposed partnership was unveiled in November 2011 during a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama.

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