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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.
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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
10 March 2014
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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