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El Salvador: Tea Leaves from Reuters

Submitted March 21, 2004 - 8:29 pm by Al Giordano
There was, apparently, an exit poll taken by the government elections agency in El Salvador today. Nobody has published any results yet. Sometimes reporters see that stuff "off the record." And sometimes it is reflected in their reports at this hour. Through that lens, I find this Reuters report by Alistair Bell from San Salvador, tonight, interesting:

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (Reuters) - Ex-rebel commander Schafik Handal sought in elections on Sunday to become El Salvador's first leftist president and pull the country away from Washington after decades under strong U.S. influence.

As polls closed at 5 p.m. (6 p.m. EST), election officials said voter turnout was high at some 60 percent, a factor that could favor Handal. He had trailed candidate Tony Saca of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, in pre-election polls...

Handal, 73, threatens to withdraw a small Salvadoran military unit from Iraq and re-establish relations with Cuba if he defeats Saca, a former sportscaster with no experience in office...

"His policy is to support only the lower class and by force if necessary," Aura del Rivas, a doctor, said after casting her vote in a comfortable capital suburb.

Leftist activists chanting, "The people, united, will never be defeated," crowded around outgoing conservative President Francisco Flores as he voted in the capital...

"If we win, it means the sovereign Salvadoran people are giving us a mandate to carry out our program, and no one else in the world, no matter how powerful they are, can come and tell us what to do," he told journalists last week.

Well, we'll have more info soon enough.

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