Tuesday, 11 March 2014

This deals with us directly - El Salvador in the balance

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The best information that we can seem to come up with at this point is that the run-off election in El Salvador has devolved into a photo finish of the worst sort. Both my side and the other are likely to not be able to restrain themselves from becoming offensive when in fact, the nation has acted in an indiscernible manner.

The expression "kissed your sister" is apropos, except it might be "kicked your sister" when all is said and done. Our guy, Norman Quijano , the previous mayor of San Salvador, the teeming capital where 45% of all Salvadoran live, has run a surprisingly effective campaign as the standard bearer of the Partido ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacional - National Republican Alliance). His final count from yesterday's balloting comes in 7,000 votes shy of his opponent's total, out of over 3,000,000 casted. That puts the margin somewhere in the zone of 50.1% to 49.9%. There are still several score thousands of votes to come trickling in, and then there will be a Constitutionally required recount due to the closeness the race. We understand that they have a 2% automatic recount law, and usually this will mean a ballot by ballot count.

     Why is any of this important?   Geo-political relationships. Texas is close to Mexico is close to El Salvador.   To which the reasonable observer says, "So?"   The reason is simple enough. The race devolved into a classic contest between a conservative free-enterpriser and an old lefty/commie "guerrilla freedom fighter" member of the Faribundo Marti frente de Liberacion Nacional. (FMLN) the communist group that fought a scorched earth war against almost everybody from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s.  The name of the presidential candidate for the FMLN is Salvador Ceren Sanchez, who old Latin-America watchers will recall as being one of the lower ranking members of the armed command leadership. He was, like all the directorate, committed, dedicated, merciless, and fully willing to kill, burn, slash, and destroy any and all in the effort to establish a communist bulkhead on continental American soil. He is peripherally associated with the assassination of the Roman Catholic Bishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero, although it is "proved, accepted, established, and written in stone" that Romero was killed by a "death squad" under the control of Roberto D'Aubuisson, the founder of the ARENA Party.   It is presumed, still, by people who did not wish to demagogue the death of the Archbishop, that a guerrilla band from the FMLN had entered the small hospital chapel where the Archbishop was celebrating a somewhat private mass, and shot him down as he was consecrating the elements for communion.   It was pointed out frequently by those on the Right that only one group could possibly benefit by murdering the Archbishop, who was an open ally of the communist FMLN movement. The group to benefit? The FMLN.   He was a benefactor of the stridently "teologia de liberacion" nutters such as the Mary Knoll Sisters, and other such "clericals", and his "murder by the Government" would provoke a sympathy wave back to the side of the FMLN.   It was and is a common communist and national socialist tactic.
     At the moment when the FMLN began to falter in the "street approval" so necessary to communist movements, suddenly Romero was shot, and the obvious explanation was sold by the very left-leaning world press, and there was no coming back.  Any reasonable talk about the issue was blocked by the same kind of people who think that the United Nations is a valid institution and that Barry Soetoro's Nobel Peace prise was earned by a diligent servant. Suggesting that communist murderers killed the Archbishop is like saying, "Let us review a few aspects of the personal and not very private life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."   It is just not ......"nice".     We do not talk about Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vince Foster...it is not ...."nice".   We cannot say that "Archbishop Tutu" sounds like a mentally retarded rock when he talks, and apparently knows nothing or less about ecclesiastical matters or the Faith of his collar....but we cannot...because it is not ...."nice".
     Even Bush operatives in the second term Reagan Administration worked to have the murder of Romero condemned as a plot by the "rightwing death squads of ARENA. Just get it over with...let the 'people' eat cake." Regular folks and normal, sane people in El Salvador just shook their heads and said, "Get it over with"....and in the first elections after the FMLN was forced to admit its defeat, the ARENA won an overwhelming victory. electing the much-maligned D'Aubuisson as President.

Norman Quijano, ARENA Presidential
Candidate for El Salvador
ex-mayor of San Salvador

In any regard, during the past several years the FMLN party has steadily aligned itself with the equivalent of Obama's ACORN in the United States, that being the dreaded Mara Salvatrucha MS XIII. The Mara Salvatrucha member's induction includes the murder of his mother. They have been put into control of "high density oppressed peoples' neighbourhoods in the cities and towns of El Salvador, a small leap, in that they were already controlling all the criminal activity. So that everyone will feel better to-night when the sun sets, the Mara Salvatrucha has operative gangs, organised and out extorting, raiding, drive-by-shooting, trafficking, in every city of over 250,000 in the United States and Canada.

So, out of Honduras and El Salvador arrives the worst of the worst of the worst type of gangbangers. The union of the FMLN and the MS XIII, hard-line socialism and total criminality, can mean nothing good for Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvadore, eastern Mexico and points north. The MS XIII specialises in stealing, pilfering, robbing, and a bit of home invasion against the "common Gringo", and they are expert enforcers in terms of killing, brutalising, extorting, and terrorising Mexicans, Central Americans, and Latins in general. In Mexico, they had aligned with the Zeta cartel group for a bit, but they are now pretty much an independent group. They are males with absolutely no souls and they are the worst thing that can happen to normal people. They are presently the "community organisers" for the bulk of the "poor and oppressed" in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

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Below you can review a bit of the Associated Press coverage. All material below this line is attributed to AP, and it is evaluated as superior to their normal analysis, in that a least a modicum of effort has been given to maintain even handed standards

El Salvador presidential runoff election too close to call

Finest margin separates conservative former mayor from one-time Marxist guerrilla in presidential poll

Associated Press in San Salvador

Presidential candidate Salvador Sanchez Ceren has claimed victory in the election despite the tight margin. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media

El Salvador's presidential runoff election has been declared too close to call by electoral authorities, with just a 0.2% margin separating a one-time Marxist guerrilla and the conservative former mayor of the country's capital.

The razor-thin margin led to competing claims of victroy from the two rival candidates.

Norman Quijano, the candidate of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), said his party was on "a war footing" and vowed "to fight with our lives, if necessary" to defend what he claimed was his victory.

But preliminary returns from nearly all polling stations showed him a few thousands votes behind Salvador Sanchez Ceren, the leftist candidate of the governing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The margin of just under 7,000 votes was just over 0.2% of the approximately 3m ballots cast.

Sanchez Ceren, who also claimed to have won, said: "The men and women of El Salvador are the ones who decide, and if you don't accept the result, you are violating the will of the people.

"I say to my adversary, to his party, that my administration will welcome them with open arms, so that together we can build a new country."

The result surprised many considering that opinion polls in the weeks leading up to the election had put Quijano, the former mayor of San Salvador, 10 to 18 percentage points behind Sanchez Ceren.

The president of El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Eugenio Chicas, said the race was "extremely tight" and said neither candidate could claim victory.

"This tribunal orders neither party to declare itself the winner, in light of results that are so close that only the final count can decide," Chicas said, adding that "the margin is so close that we ask for prudence". He said the final vote count would begin on Monday.

Quijano alleged fraud, and called on the army to play a role, a statement that carries ominous echoes in a country where 76,000 people died in a civil warthat pitted the army against leftist rebels over 12 years.

"We are not going to allow Venezuelan-style fraud, in the style of Chavez and Maduro," Quijano said, referring to the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, and his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro. "We have our own recount, which shows we won."

Quijano criticised the electoral tribunal, saying it "sold out to the dictatorship", and that "the armed forces are ready to make democracy".

The country's military leaders made no comment on the elections.

Sanchez Ceren, 69, had been widely expected to become the first true guerrilla to lead this Central American nation. Outgoing president Mauricio Funes, who won the presidency from Arena in 2009, was a journalist who was sympathetic to the FMLN rebels during the civil war but was never a guerrilla.

Sanchez Ceren campaigned on a promise to deepen the outgoing government's popular social programmes and govern as a moderate. He said he envisioned ruling like the Uruguayan president, Jose Mujica, also a former guerrilla who formed an inclusive government.

Quijano, 67, accused the former guerrilla of appearing to want to lead the country like Venezuela's Chávez, and he warned of a return of communism. He also promised to crack down on rising gang violence.

Sanchez Ceren was a rebel commander who helped negotiate the 1992 peace accords that ended El Salvador's civil war, in which the US supported the government against the FMLN to prevent communism from spreading in Latin America.

The results of this election might take a couple or three days, perhaps more. To lose El Salvador into the Sandanista - Maduro - Castro - Morales - Kirchnere orbit would be very lamentable. We shall keep our fingers crossed and our candles lit.

El Gringo Viejo

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Click to visit our little Adobe Hideaway…

This is our rustic, but very comfortable place, out in the rural area to the northwest of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas…the State's Capital. From a bustling city of 400,000, we placed our domicile a bit more than 20 miles into the scenes of mountains, citrus groves, spring-fed creeks and rivers with crystal clear waters, and an abundance of bird species that make veteran birders shake their heads in wonder.

We are all but adjacent to the venerable Hacienda de Santa Engracia (about 500 yards away), which dates to the 1720s and has ancient structures still in use, very elegant, and mystical in many ways. It has operated as a guest hotel since the 1970s.

Our little place rests on three and a fraction acres, fronting on the Rio Corona, which is lined with over-1,000 year old cypress trees. The nearby Sierra del Cautivo…a major segment of the overall Sierra Madre Oriental that dominate most of eastern Mexico, lies to the west by about three miles. guards the many springs that maintain the almost perpetual flow from those heights (up to 12,000 fasl) while our place is situated right at 1,000 feet above sea level.

Give us a call, come by and visit…it is truly a different venture in the most positive sense. We can be reached by our email - privatouring@gmail.com - which is our preferred method of communicating.

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What is an OROG?

Once a person lands on our page, that individual becomes a member of the Order of Readers of the Old Gringo, (OROG). There are no dues or assessments to pay, no meetings, no requirements. We are not associated with the KKK, the WCTU, the French Masons, or the Global Warming Glacier

Protection Committee.

We do have a distant connection with the Knights of the Golden Circle and hold the maps to the internment sites of 34 tonnes of Confederate Gold, and 1,000 tonnes of Mexican Imperial Silver (bar and coinage) derived from the collapse of the Reign of Maximillian von Hapsburg, Emperor of Mexico (1863 - 1867). I think we can remember where we put it.

All kidding aside, we are acerbic, but we do not bite. We do believe in our antiquated philosophy, but we try to not impose our quirks and beliefs so far as to be disrespectful.

El Gringo Viejo

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Wise Words

Communism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

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Be sure you are right, then go ahead.

I bark at no man's bid. I will never come and go, fetch and carry, at the whistle of the Great Man in the White House, no matter who he is.

I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done. But, if such was not to be, then you may all go to Hell, and I shall go to Texas!

David Crockett

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And on and on it goes. The more the Government gives away, the more it takes, and the less Americans do for themselves, until finally, like Europe, there is nobody left to do anything, and there is nobody left to pay for, the nothing that is not done.

And, yes, Virginia, there truly is a Santa Clause, and he and Mrs. Clause and their helpers care greatly for the good children of the Planet. So long as there is happiness, kindness, charity, generosity, and the Spirit of Fellowship, Santa Clause will be there, representing those noble things, and he will always move in a spiritual way so as to provoke humankind to goodness.

El Gringo Viejo

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“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker Tallaferro Washington

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It is impossible to make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.

Abraham Lincoln

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El Gringo Viejo: a fair description

Life for El Gringo Viejo began on the Texas-Mexico frontier, near McAllen, Texas literally on a real, live farm. The farmer, as one might imagine, was his father, who had moved with his parents from Gwinner, Sargent County, North Dakota in 1915 - 1916 period, down to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. (And yes, Virginia, that is the way Sargent County is spelled.)

His parents farmed in an area close to the new community named after its founder, called Ed Couch, in Hidalgo County of Texas. My grandfather is buried in the Weslaco Municipal Cemetery about 10 feet away from his friend, Ed Couch.

After studies, and a stint in the 1st Cavalry, 12th Regiment (mounted), Headquarters Squadron of the United States Army...riding warhorses back and forth along the Rio Grande from the late 1920s and early 1930s. He did not speak much about his service, but we determined that he apparently made rank of 1st Lieutenant.

El Gringo Viejo's Father established his farming and citrus grove-care operation just north of McAllen, Texas. Mother was a housewife and a professional woman....a learned, eloquent, well-read woman.

They were educated people, my father winding up as a Superintendent of a major school/facility of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation in Austin, Texas after a twenty year career in education at the secondary level. He had degrees in History, Psychology, and Education Administration.

El Gringo Viejo is the last of three children, all males. Number one was Milton Birchard, Jr. who was born in 1936 and died in a vehicular incident in 1988. He was narcoleptic. He held a doctorate in geography from Louisiana State University and was head of the Department there for a good while.

Number two is Norman Francis, who was born during the WWII situation in 1942 and became an important Republican political engineer and fundraiser. He served as Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas during the late 1960s and early 1970s and as Senator John G. Tower's immediate Executive Assistant. The Senator is the Godfather of Norman's first son.

Norman died at age 77 in Austin, Texas and I was one of four eulogists who was chosen to speak at his en memoriam at the Austin Club in downtown most Austin…within sight of the State Capitol.

It was a personal duty and very rewarding

in every way.

My arrival was in 1947, and I was destined to confound my parents and all those around me. Educated entirely in public schools in McAllen, skipping the third grade, and stumbling out of my high school in the upper 90% of a class of 606. I

attended and graduated from Southwest Texas State University (now named Texas State University, unfortunately), being one of the few conservatives to graduate out of the School of Sociology, although my treatment at the hands of my tormentor-professors was not so unpleasant in those days. Emphasis of studies were social demography, and Latin American Affairs with a concentration on Mexico's history and current political evolution, with a minors in History, Geography, and Political Science.

El Gringo Viejo is one of the old, unreconstructed high-church Episcopalians. Politically, he is very fundamentally conservative. He prefers Baseball to football, and considers that baseball with a designated hitter for the pitcher should be called "poofy-ball". Favourite major league team of all times? The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. It will never be the same again.
El Gringo Viejo's father was born to a Hudson Valley-type girl and a man who had lost two older brothers who served in the Pennsylvania 96th Regiment of Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States.

The surnamed line (Newton) originated from East Anglia, not far from a place called Washington in northeastern England. They came into Boston Harbour, Massachusetts in 1642 (the 1st voyage of the Mayflower had overbooked), and settled there and in Maine as well as spreading out to Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, over the generations for the first 220 years.
Another batch of folks, mainly Anglo, settled in the middle Hudson Valley. There was another group of Celto-Teutonics types from Saxony and Prussia, establishing and settling along the Hudson River from around what is Catskill County northward to Duchess and Rennselaer Counties around a place named Red Hook. The main group came in during the early 1650s.

My mother's people were another English line of long-term Southern and Tennessee people, from the Eastern part of that State, who originally came in during the 1660s through Virginia and North Carolina, and finally into Eastern Tennessee, settling in and around a county to be named Franklin, and helping to establish the city of Winchester. Almost all of these people originated from southwestern England, near the frontier with Wales.

Only recently did we verify that she had many people involved in the service of the Confederacy. One died in northern Mississippi, another Captain Asa Grant, 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, was severely wounded and succumbed to his wounds finally in 1869, and another hung around in an Ohio POW camp (Camp Chase) for about 13 months, while three others were either wounded or died in action, including David Limbaugh, Lieutenant, 42 Tennessee Infantry. Another five made it through relatively unscathed.

Almost all were, oddly enough, related to the great-grand uncles and gggg-grandfathers down to gg-grandfathers of Rush Limbaugh. The gggg-grandfather came into the Colonies in the early 1740s from a Prussia and Saxony background, and served in both civilian and military capacities to the Continental government and Army. He was the XO of a Militia Battalion of 3,000 Pennsylvania effectives. They honed their military readiness under the supervision of Gen. von Steuben and someone named Washington at some place called Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

A grandson of his, Isaac, settled in Tennessee after the War for Independence against King George III. So Rush and I share grandfathers, four generations deep on the American Continent.

It should be stated here that were I to be called to declare, my allegiance would still be with the Southern Cause, although I bear no rancor against those who feel the same about their instinct to maintain the Union. Oddly enough, both my mother (a Southerner) and my father (a true Yankee by blood) believed that we would have remained closer if we had separated, and each side gone the ways of their own yearning, but amicably.

The last of the English (El Gringo Viejo's) line came during the time between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They left County Wicklow, where they had been involved, apparently, in that peculiar Anglo - Scots/Irish practice of making whiskey by the use of peat for fuel. They were also involved in the business of production and processing of various types of grains as well as the production of whiskey, gin, and beer. By their surnames one would know that, while coming out of Ireland, they were actually English, one with the surname of Christian and the wife, Webster. They had, in fact, married in Christ's Church Cathedral, Anglican, in downtown Dublin in 1796. They landed in New York, set up shop in the City among previously arrived relatives, and then in Albany. We have some record that this Christian who married the Webster had actually lived in the colonies, but travelled several times back and forth between the Spirits businesses in England and Ireland and the New World. They wound up as the generations progressed in and around Minneapolis (St. Anthony) & Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Racine, Wisconsin. My particular line went from New York to Alabama, then North Carolina, and then Wisconsin to join up with the rest of the extended family, finally in Minnesota, before the War Between the States.

The Time Line of entry of all lines of my children's blood ancestry on their mother's side in the New World begins in 1578, when Spaniards of mixed Hebraic and Iberian peoples, and others of ancestry from Portugal, Galicia, and southern Spain entered into what was to become Monclova and Saltillo, Coahuila. They are brought under the auspices of the Explorer, Conquistador, and Colonizer Jose Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva, with elements settling in Lampazos and Cerralvo (Nuevo Leon), in Palofox (Texas), and Revilla (Tamaulipas) on the Rio Bravo.
Also, the Count of the Sierra Gorda, Col. Jose de Escandon brought another group of mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Azoreans in the early 175os, settling along the Rio Bravo (Grande), and then on the north (Texas) side, spreading up to what is now Yorktown, Texas (near and southeast of San Antonio de Bexar, more or less) before and during the Texas Republican period.

My children and theirs are qualified to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of Liberty, The Sons of the Grand Army of the Union, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy. By my side they are 16th generation English Colonial - American and 6th generation Texian. By my wife's side, my children are 23rd generation northernmost New Spain, Texian, and American. Isolating Texas alone, my grandchildren are 15th generation Texian.

LIKE?

Cats, and then dogs.

Fishing, even a bit of bird watching, now and then.

Really good music..antique, old, 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll, classical - Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, both Strauses, and many others, African tribal sounds en chorus, Mexican bolero...mariachis when they play out-of-doors, some country and quite a bit of the old western (Sons of the Pioneers, the Texas Ploughboys, Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads, for instance.), even some of my own piano works, bagpipes, Enya, marimba, Caribe.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess always seemed to me to have been, and remains, a true masterpiece of Americana.

Well maintained Firearms, smooth running small equipment, old autos that respond to repair and upkeep and keep going. Used to have BMWs and so forth, but being old helps tone things down a bit.

Antiques, and antiquities...Meso-American archeology...and religious history. Formal religious services among the Orthodox..as in Anglican, Roman, Orthodox and Conservative Jewish services and celebrations. Hard to find, now.

Overnight radio, rightwing talk radio until it becomes overly tedious and repetitive.

Weather and climate.

And strangely during the past few years,cooking. Not just barbequeing...but actually dishing up gourmet-type stuff...and gardening to a purpose.

We grow a lot of our own spices for our little bed and breakfast and we specialise in flowerng plants, bushes, and trees that attract bees and literally hundreds of species of common to extremely rare birds to our place.

Lifelong Republican, honourably discharged - United States Army (conscripted).

Now drifted into the position of favouring the amicable withdrawal of Texas from the American Union. My grandchildren are 15th generation Coahuila/Texas by my wife and 8th generation Texas by me and my will is to have them answer for the debt of Texas and not for the debts incurred by the National Socialists who have taken possession of the central government in Washington, D.C.

DISLIKES?
Any kind of socialism...bolshevik, national, marxist, social democratic, Trotskyite, progressive, ....and any kind of socialist.

The Ku Klux Klan and such types who figure that they have to hate somebody because of how he/she was born. They are just role players, resucitated by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s, whose members are fueled by a well deserved sense of inferiority.

And almost all social activism.

Almost all labour union officers and almost all labour unions. (There are some exceptions.)

Public assistance of any kind. All welfare and/or charity should and must be privately handled in order to avoid the trap wherein we have fallen, that being the multigenerational slide into the abyss of forlorn hopelessness that is government slavery and dependence. That slide is cheerfully supported by politicians who love to buy votes with other peoples' money.

Lotteries operated by governments.

Litter, filth, graffiti, gangs, and waiting in line for people using food stamps whil'st they argue with the cashier about how they "need" this or that to be covered...when they have three carts with 450 USD of snacks and things we cannot afford because we are in an 'upper income" category.

Church reformers who want to change my church instead of them going to another church and just leaving me alone.

Medications for boys who are over-active, and medications in general.

Lite beer, lite Coca Cola, fat-free, lo-cal, artificial sugars and sweeteners, anything marked "healthy" on food packages, sugar-free, margarine, and driving 23 miles to buy gasoline over there because it is 2 cents per gallon cheaper.

Any government programme designed to help anybody; 94% of the time the programme winds up morphing into some kind of monster. Then liberals and do-gooders will propose another programme, twice as costly, to cure the ills caused by the first cure-all.

Officiousness, and the term "non-profit", as if there is some kind of moral superiority in the failure to produce wealth.

Physical abuse of an animal, an extraterrestrial, a child, slave, woman, or anything like a tractor or power tool, firearm, sewing machine, or an auto, etc.
Loud and/or sharp noises, especially when such noises have no particular purpose.

Wasting anything, from paper towels to Clorox to cake and cookie batter...anything. And....waiting in a line.