Leftists leading in Salvadoran Polls

[a la izquierda]

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20771


Wow: El Salvador has had a stalwart Right-wing government for a long time. This could be very interesting. Stay tuned.

[Judi Lynn]

1. What an eye-opening article. It's so unbearably wry that with the history

of unchecked brutality against the poor raging for years, almost ALL of it directed by the government, the idiot right-wing there still has dared to claim candidates with the FMLN as having "blood stained hands." Isn't that remarkable?

There is NOTHING in the universe uglier than a rotten, congenitally dishonest right-winger.

From the article:

In the 1980s, El Salvador was the site of one of the United States' largest Cold War interventions. Tragically, Washington sent $6 billion in aid to a Salvadoran government whose army and paramilitary death squads were responsible for heinous crimes. Some 75,000 people were killed in the country's civil war during that decade. In 1993, a United Nations-backed Truth Commission determined that the government was responsible for 85% of human rights abuses and that the rebel forces were responsible 5%, with the remaining 10% undetermined. Among the most notorious acts of the right-wing counter-insurgency included the massacre of at least 1,000 people in the village of El Mozote in 1981 — an atrocity the Reagan administration tried hard to obscure and deny — and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.

The conservative ARENA party was formed in the 1980s by an infamous death squad commander, Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, one of the figures responsible for Romero's killing. Nevertheless, as a conservative pro-business party, ARENA has held executive power since 1989, and it has won three successive presidential elections in the post-war period.

If eight years of Bush administration rule was enough for voters in the United States, it's easy to see why Salvadorans, too, would be ready for change. ARENA was eager to join Bush's "coalition of the willing," making El Salvador the only country in Latin America with troops in Iraq. The move won the country strong praise from Washington's neoconservatives. In 2004 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lauded El Salvador's "human struggle for liberty and democracy" and Vice President Dick Cheney held up El Salvador's 1980s counter-insurgency as a model for the "War on Terror." Each ignored the damning Truth Commission report naming U.S.-backed forces as the central actors responsible for terrorizing the country's population. Similarly warping history, ARENA's current presidential candidate, Ávila, expressed his admiration for D'Aubuisson's "defense of liberty" in accepting his party's nomination.

~snip~
Funes, now 49, was one of many citizens who experienced personal loss during the civil war. His older brother, a student leader, was kidnapped and killed by police forces in 1980. Funes also studied at the Jesuit Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in San Salvador, where six priests, some of them his mentors, were murdered in 1989. However, representing a break with party tradition, Funes is the first FMLN presidential candidate who didn't fight in the conflict. This and his popularity as a well-known broadcaster have made right-wing charges that an FMLN victory would "place our nation in hands stained with blood" sound hollow.

The article closes with a fragile, but important wish:

There could be few better reasons, on the eve of the first presidential elections in the hemisphere since Obama's inauguration, for his administration to again embrace change and adopt a new vision of the U.S. role in the Americas.

Thank you, a la izquierda.