Language

El Salvador vote as seen from Yucatán

Submitted March 21, 2004 - 10:39 am by Al Giordano
I'm here in Mérida with Mario Menéndez, who, of course, knows the 74-year-old Schafik Handal very well, and has known him for many decades. Says he's a very smart and able guy.

Mario's view is that a victory tonight by Schafik and the FMLN in El Salvador is possible, but has significant obstacles to overcome:

  1. The far-right is very well organized in Central America, of which it is often said, "is one country." The right won recently in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. (Panamá, being essentially a bank with a flag, is somewhat outside of this equation.)
  2. This history of El Salvadoran elections is rife with fraud. (Despite the fact that there are thousands of elections observers there today, 1,500 of them from other countries, keep in mind that the current government already expelled 14 of them as a warning to the others.)
We do agree that there is a last minute factor that could be helpful to the FMLN and Schafik: El Salvador currently has a small number of troops in Iraq, and everybody presumes that the Schafik government would pull them out right away. Given Spain's electoral shift, and the corresponding and pending withdrawl of Spaniard troops from Iraq, there is some talk that this could be a closing factor in the Salvadoran elections today: a way of saying "hey, we have our own battles to fight."

It must be close if Otto Reich is so worried that he called the rightwing Arenas party HQ the other day for what was essentially an endorsement press conference.

Anyway, we'll know later tonight, and I'll be reporting the results as fast as they come in here on The Narcosphere.

Meanwhile, three excellent analysis columns on Rebelion.org, for those of you who read Spanish, by Israel Sotillo:

About the ideological battle, about how close it is, and about those pesky foreign observers and the chances for fraud.

I'm off to breakfast with Mario and a thousand close personal friends from the Yucatán. Will check in later with more.

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