Half the shirts and towels bound for El Salvador

Prior to the Super Bowl, tens of thousands of shirts and towels are being printed proclaiming that the Arizona Cardinals won the game and tens of thousands are being printed proclaiming that the Pittsburgh Steelers won. Only half the shirts will turn out to be true -- and the other half are going to El Salvador:

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The winning team in Super Bowl XLIII remains to be seen, but one thing is certain – either outcome will spell excitement for children and families in El Salvador. Whether the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Arizona Cardinals win, shirts, hats, and towels will be given to people living in extreme poverty, as the National Football League and World Vision team up for the 17th year.

Prior to championship games, Reebok produces shirts and caps and, for the first time this year, McArthur Towel & Sports is producing Trophy Towels, announcing each team as the winner. These items are kept on hand for the victorious players to wear immediately following the game. Since 1992, World Vision has accepted thousands of unusable shirts and caps following football’s biggest event. Additionally, major sporting good retailers and manufacturers donate large quantities of official apparel that they have stocked in anticipation of either team winning the Super Bowl.

Instead of being destroyed after the big game, the losing team items are shipped from the host city to World Vision’s International Distribution Center in Pittsburgh, PA. There, they are sorted and added to shipments of other goods requested by World Vision field staff in various countries. In the destination countries, World Vision workers distribute the apparel to children and families in need, many of whom have never worn new clothing in their lives.

Presidential race tightens

An AP story describes a new opinion poll finding that the leading candidates for president in El Salvador, Rodrigo Avila of ARENA and Mauricio Funes of the FMLN are tied, suggesting a post-January elections bounce for Avila:

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- El Salvador's presidential race has tightened, with the leading candidates in a virtual tie and likely facing a runoff election, according to a poll released Friday.

Mauricio Funes, a TV journalist who would become the first leftist president of El Salvador since the country's bloody civil war, had about 50 percent support in other previous polls. Now he has 38 percent, compared to 35 percent for Rodrigo Avila of the ruling conservative Arena party, according to Consulta Mitofsky.

The survey had a margin of error of 2 percentage points, meaning it is possible that Funes could be trailing slightly.

Funes represents the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a guerrilla group-turned-political party.

Other respondents preferred different candidates, were undecided or declined to say how they would vote on March 15.

Consulta Mitofsky, an independent pollster based in Mexico, questioned 1,200 likely voters face to face from Jan. 23-25 in 60 of El Salvador's 262 municipalities.

Mitofsky polls typically show greater strength for ARENA than other opinion polls in El Salvador, and some have criticized the polling as being done by telephone from Mexico.

UPDATE

A new poll released by La Prensa Grafica on February 1, showed Funes leading Avila 39% to 29%, suggesting continued strength for the FMLN's candidate.

My meeting with the ambassador

On January 15, I met with Charles Glazer, the US Ambassador to El Salvador at the US Embassy. The meeting took place 5 days prior to the end of his tour on January 20, coinciding with the transfer of power to the Obama administration in Washington.

We spoke for about 30 minutes, and in some sense it was like an exit interview, remembering that I had first met the ambassador a few months after he arrived in El Salvador.

On the question of whether the relationship between the US and El Salvador will change if the FMLN wins the presidency, Glazer stated that it would depend on the actions of the FMLN. The US would not alter its relationship with the country simply because one political party or another took power. Instead, the US would react to concrete actions taken by a governing party which are contrary to the ongoing relationship between the countries.

Mauricio Funes is "very bright, an accomplished communicator." Glazer commented that, "A lot of what he says makes a lot of sense," but cautioned that "actions speak louder than words." Time will tell whether a President Funes would follow through with what he has stated about relations with the United States.

Ambassador Glazer spoke warmly of El Salvador and the experiences he had had while serving there. Calling Salvadorans a "welcoming people," he spoke of them as "hard-working" and "wonderfully friendly" and that he sees great potential in the country.

His advice for his successor? "Observe" and "remain neutral"

My own observation is that the US did a reasonably good job so far in the 2009 elections in staying on the sidelines and not taking a public stance which would influence the outcome of the elections. A press release issued today by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, which attempts to portray the FMLN as winning the municipal and legislative elections despite massive US intervention, is no more than an anti-US diatribe based on events which took place in 2004 and earlier. Although the ARENA government pleaded for the US to jump into the fray on the side of ARENA, the US and Ambassador Glazer did not. Hopefully that will continue to be US policy under the new administration.

Final election results

On Friday, the TSE released the final election results for the election of deputies to the National Assembly. The FMLN will have 35 seats (a gain of 3), ARENA will have 32 seats (a loss of 2) and the PCN will have 11 seats, making the PCN the swing voting bloc in the legislature. The Christian Democrats won 5 seats and Democratic Change scored one. The FMLN obtained 42.5% of the valid votes cast and ARENA earned 38.4%. Some 2.2 million Salvadorans turned out to vote, a participation rate of 54%.

In San Salvador, Norman Quijano of ARENA obtained 86,569 votes (49.8%) and incumbent mayor Violeta Menjivar received 80,789 votes.

If you want the election results boiled down all the way to the individual voting table, you can see them at the TSE web site.

Aiding the families of missing migrants

For dozens of years, Salvadorans and other Central Americans have made the perilous journey north seeking jobs and relief from the poverty in their home country. The path northwards is a dangerous one as the article Perilous Journey, from the National Catholic Reporter pointed out:

An alarming number of migrants never make it. In the last three years, the number of migrants who disappear en route has increased as a result of the Mexican government’s tightening of its southern border. An initiative of President Vicente Fox to appease Washington and in exchange ease the entry of undocumented Mexican migrants into the United States, Mexico’s Plan Sur has captured record numbers of Central American migrants and bused them back to their country of origin. Previously they were simply dumped unceremoniously across the border into Guatemala. The move has forced migrants to take greater risks to avoid capture, including traveling farther out to sea in overloaded boats that too often capsize. Every year scores of migrants drown in the Pacific. Or the migrants are forced to trek higher into the thick jungles of the isthmus, risking natural hazards as well as gangs of thieves who prey on the travelers.

The unidentified bodies of unfortunate migrants are piled in Mexican graveyards, and seldom do their families back home learn of their fate. Other migrants are imprisoned in Mexico or the United States, while still others become caught up in criminal activities that lead to their death. Many women migrants are forced into prostitution in border towns like Tecun Uman and Tijuana, and stop communicating with their families out of embarrassment. Loved ones back home are left wondering what happened.

Families from El Salvador facing that uncertainty, whose loved ones have not been heard from after they started the trek to the north, have banded together in an organization known by its acronym COFAMIDE.

From the website of the organization:

COFAMIDE, the Committee of Family Members of Migrants who have Died or Disappeared, was born in 2006 as a part of CARECEN Internacional in El Salvador, an NGO dedicated to the issue of migration, especially to protecting the vulnerability of the undocumented migrant population.

Composed of average Salvadoran women and men who have suffered the loss of a loved one - a son, daughter, brother or sister - COFAMIDE has worked hard to emerge as a reference organization for the topic of migration on a national and international level. Their activities include lobbying the Salvadoran government about migration policy, lobbying the governments of transit countries about the human rights violations occurring in these countries, and attempting to inform the general Salvadoran population about the risks of undocumented migration and the tragedy that the families of migrants who have died or disappeared are living.

My friend Meg described in her blog, marches the group made in 2006 to seek assistance from the Mexican and Salvadoran governments for the creation of a database to track missing migrants.

This video describes the current efforts of the group and its attempts to make the "Caminata de Esperanza", the "Journey of Hope" to search for their loved ones.



Please consider supporting the worthy efforts of COFAMIDE.

The primacy of the party

The Salvadoran electoral system is significantly tilted to give power to political parties and their leaderships over the roles of individual political leaders. This is particularly evident in the way that El Salvador elects deputies to the National Assembly. Each department within the country is allocated a certain number of seats in the 84 seat National Assembly according to its population. (In one criticized move, the election authorities did not reallocate those seats based on the results of the 2007 census for the 2009 elections, but continue to use the older allocation from the census taken during the 1990s). So, for example, the populous San Salvador department has 25 deputies and the less populous San Miguel department has 6 deputies.

Each seat in the department has a vote quota equal to the total number of votes cast in the department divided by the number of seats. To use round numbers, if 1 million votes were cast in San Salvador department to allocate 25 seats, the quota would be 40,000 (1 million / 25). A political party would then receive one seat in the National Assembly for each 40,000 votes it receives. So, in our example, if ARENA received 400,000 votes, it would receive 10 seats in the National Assembly from San Salvador.

The voters do not vote for individual deputies; they vote only for the political party. The ballot for deputies to the National Assembly is simply a series of party logos, and the voter marks the logo of the party for whom he wishes to elect deputies to the National Assembly.

The parties develop their slate of deputies for each department, and rank those deputies from 1 to the total number elected in the department (25 in San Salvador for example). If the FMLN gets sufficient votes for 12 seats, the top 12 names on its list become the deputies. Obviously if you are name number 25, it is highly unlikely you will become a deputy since that would require virtually every vote to be cast for your party. On the other hand, if you are name number 1 on the list of ARENA or the FMLN, you are almost guaranteed to get a seat in the National Assembly.

As a consequence, deputies to the National Assembly are entirely beholden to party leadership and not to the people who elected them. The party leadership decides who will be on the slate of candidates each three years and decides how to rank those candidates on the slate. No matter how good, or popular, or effective a legislator is, the deputy's future is nothing if he or she has offended the party leadership.

The party is also primary in local municipal elections. Although the focus is on the mayor, and the voters usually know the candidate being advanced for mayor for a particular party, the vote for a party also elects every member of the municipal council in a winner-take-all system. Thus, in San Salvador, with ARENA's victory on Sunday, all the former FMLN members of the municipal council will be replaced with ARENA members.

Perhaps the primacy of the party, and the lack of individual accountability to voters, leads to the consistent results in public opinion polls showing Salvadorans place their lowest levels of trust in the political parties and the National Assembly.

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For a much more detailed description of El Salvador's national election system, see the article Political institutions in El Salvador: Proposals for reform to improve elections, transparency, and accountability by John Carey of Dartmouth. (Hat tip to David H. for pointing out this article to me).

The January 2009 elections

The final count from Sunday's elections is not yet in, but the results are different than I (and many others) predicted.

Here are some of the major points to take away from the elections:

1) The balance of power in the National Assembly is staying the same. The FMLN increased its seat from 32 to 35-37 seats. That leaves it short of the 43 seat majority. It appears that ARENA will have 32 seats (down from 34) but since its traditional ally the PCN should have 11 seats, the right wing should continue to have majority control of the National Assembly.

2) The FMLN is the most popular political party in the country. If we look at the votes for deputies to the National Assembly which are allocated on a party basis, we get the best look at the population's preference. In the most recent results posted on the Supreme Electoral Tribunal website, the FMLN received 49.5% of the votes for deputy, ARENA received 40% and no other party received more than 3.1% of the vote. That should be a good sign for Mauricio Funes and the FMLN in the March presidential elections, but there may be a possibility that Funes might have a struggle to win in the first round of the election.

3) The election in San Salvador may show signs of a maturing democracy. Despite the popularity of the FMLN in the country this year, the party could not manage to get the incumbent mayor of San Salvador, Violeta Menjivar, re-elected. The FMLN claims that the result was caused by a massive illegal influx of voters from outside of the capital. I don't think so. What happened in San Salvador is that a certain portion of the voters appeared to decide to split their votes on National Assembly and mayor. People who voted for the FMLN for the National Assembly also voted for Norman Quijano of ARENA for mayor. In other words, they were voting based on who they thought (rightly or wrongly) was the best able to govern, rather than voting strictly on party lines. This result was foreshadowed in polls late last year which showed voters favoring Quijano over Menjivar when it came to the question of ability to govern the capital city. I also saw evidence that ARENA may have had a better organized get out the vote campaign in the capital to get its supporters to the polls.

4) The results in San Salvador re-energized ARENA. Since the polls going into the mayor's race in San Salvador showed Menjivar with a reasonable lead, the solid victory by Norman Quijano has given ARENA new reasons for hope as it heads towards the March presidential election. We will hear much more rhetoric about the fallibility of polls.

5) Expect a nasty presidential political campaign between now and March 15. The tone was set by Rodrigo Avila as he spoke after Norman Quijano's victory speech. Avila attacked the FMLN as communists, terrorists,Venezuela-lovers and enemies of democracy. We'll hear more of that in the weeks to come.

6) Regarding mayors in the rest of the country, both major parties could claim victories. ARENA holds the mayor's office in the greatest number of cities, but the cities in which the FMLN holds the office have a greater number of total residents.

Personal note -- most regular readers of the blog probably noticed my sudden silence for the past several days. Here's the explanation. I was in El Salvador as an election observer. The night before the elections, after touring several voting centers in San Salvador, I took a severe fall and fractured my knee and had to have surgery. So I spent a few nights in the hospital in San Salvador and didn't have the energy to blog. I'm back home now and recovering and plan to get back to a regular blogging pace in the near future.

Cutumay Camones struggle goes to the courts

A recent article from Upside Down World describes a new lawsuit in the Salvadoran courts on behalf of residents of Cutumay Camones, whose drinking water is threatened by the placement of a new landfill outside Santa Ana:

On November 20, 2008 ten members of the Santa Gertrudis community of Cutumay Camones filed a class action lawsuit against the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) for refusing to conduct a fair and impartial assessment of community concerns over the placement of a garbage dump. The government’s proposal is to construct the dump on a hill above a 10-hectare crop plantation and at a 700-meter distance from an aquifer that delivers water to the homes of more than 3,000 families. Construction began in June 2007 without community consultation and an adequate environmental impact statement to the MARN....

Lawyers with the University of Central America’s Human Rights Office will try the Supreme Court case, which could take two or more years to review. The Court has placed a restraining order on Presys; technically no work can proceed on the dump until the case is decided. The Class Action suit is the first in El Salvador’s history and could not only give entitled water and development rights to the community of Santa Gertrudis but also prevent contamination of the Rio Veruente and the Rio Lempa, which provides water to all of Santa Ana and 55% of the population of San Salvador.

I've written previously on the blog about the struggle of the Cutumay Camones community against this landfill. The community has been united in using a variety of different forms of peaceful protest to stop the landfill, and this class action is their latest approach.

The mayor at the center of this controversy is Orlando Mena, who most recently ran on the Christian Democrat (PDC) ticket, but was formerly a member of the FMLN. The outcome of his race for re-election on January 18 will be an indicator of where winds of change may be blowing in the country. In polling last October, the FMLN led the PDC and Mena in the race for mayor of Santa Ana, 23.5% to 17.4%. The same poll found that 57% of the population did not agree with the construction of a landfill at Cutumay Camones.

17th Anniversary of Peace Accords

Today, January 16, is the 17th anniversary of the signing of the 1992 Peace Accords which concluded the civil war in San Salvador. Although there has not been war for 17 years, El Salvador still lacks peace. The level of polarization in the country is great, and the antagonisms between left and right run deep.

As Ernesto Rivas-Gallont commented to me earlier today, it is a sad statement that Salvadorans cannot celebrate the end of armed conflict in a united fashion, as one country. Instead, the FMLN held its commemoration in one part of San Salvador, and the ARENA-led government held official commemorations elsewhere.

The country is going to have national elections for mayors and legislative deputies in two days. One can hope for a peaceful and transparent process and that with each new democratic election, the chances that the left or right will seek to impose their will by force of arms will continue to fade into the past.

Some election predictions

I am in El Salvador talking to people about the elections and preparing to be an election observer. The conversations inevitably turn to what we think might be the outcome. I am willing to put my own predictions out publicly and you can judge how I do after the results are available Sunday night.

In the National Assembly, my prediction is that the FMLN will pick up 6 seats from its current 32, ending with 38 or 5 short of a 43 seat majority.

For mayor of San Salvador, Violeta Menjivar of the FMLN will be reelected. Unlike in 2006, there is not a strong minor party candidate to siphon away votes from Menjivar. The election will not be as close as her slim 43 vote victory in 2006.

For mayor in other municipalities across the country, the FMLN will recover many of the mayors offices it lost in the 2006 elections.

There will be rumors, but no significant instances of any voting fraud affecting the elections.

If you have different predictions, submit them in the comments to this post.

Spanish court to prosecute Jesuit killings case

The Center for Justice and Accountability announced today that a judge in Spain has agreed to initiate prosecution of in the case of the 1989 murder of the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter:

Madrid January 13, 2009 – Today, the Judge of the 6th Chamber of the Spanish National Court agreed to initiate a criminal prosecution in the “Jesuits Massacre,” a crime which has gone unpunished for nineteen years, in which members of the Salvadoran military murdered six priests, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter. Fourteen former officers, including General Ponce, Head of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Rafael Humberto Larios, former Minister of Defense, are now formally charged with crimes against humanity and state terrorism for their role in the massacre. Additionally the Judge reserved the right, during the course of the investigation, to indict former Salvadoran President and Commander of the Armed Forces Alfredo Cristiani for his role in covering up the crime.

The case was filed by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) and by the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos en España (APDHE), a Spanish human rights association, on November 13, 2008. “The Judge's prompt action underscores the importance of this case not only for the families of the victims and the people of El Salvador but for the cause of human rights accountability around the globe,” said CJA Executive Director, Pamela Merchant. “We look forward to a successful prosecution of all of those responsible for this heinous act.”

Election resources

In the midst of this election season in El Salvador, there are a number of resources you can use to stay on top of the latest developments. Even though most of these resources are in Spanish, using tools like Google translation, you can certainly get the major points of any of these sites and publications, even if you only speak English.

Public Opinion Polling

LPG Datos, the polling arm of La Prensa Grafica. See their latest polling results throughout the election season.

El Diario de Hoy 2009 election section with coverage of the polls published by the paper.

Public Opinion Institute at the University of Central America with all its polling results.

Center for Public Opinion at Francisco Gavidia University.

News Media Sites

2009 Election coverage of El Faro. Site where the excellent digital periodical El Faro makes available its coverage of the 2009 election.

Election coverage at digital periodical ContraPunto. This independent site is one year old and offers a great deal of political coverage.

La Prensa Grafica. Web site for El Salvador's conservative daily newspaper.

El Diario de Hoy. Web site for El Salvador's very conservative daily newspaper.

Diario CoLatino. Website for El Salvador's left wing daily newspaper.

Diario Del Mundo. Smaller daily newspaper.

Google News Search -- choosing this link will run a search for articles about the El Salvador elections in English language news sources on the web.


Official websites of the political parties.

FMLN website.

ARENA website

Christian Democratic Party (PDC) website.

National Conciliation Party (PCN) website.

Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) website.

Democratic Change (CD) website.

Candidate websites.

Rodrigo Avila website.

Patria Joven con Rodrigo Avila. A multi media filled website aimed at youth and promoting the presidential aspirations of Rodrigo Avila.

Official website of Mauricio Funes.

Website of Norman Quijano, ARENA candidate for mayor of San Salvador.

Website of Violeta Menjivar, current FMLN mayor of San Salvador, running for re-election.

Government related sites.

Official website of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE)

Electoral Code of El Salvador.

Official website of the Legislative Assembly.

Legislative Observer

Other sites and blogs

Free and Fair Elections website. A coalition of US-based NGOs created this site to monitor the election process in El Salvador.

Hunnapuh blog. The oldest, and still the best, blog covering current events in El Salvador with a group of bloggers with varying points of view.

Neto Rivas' Blog. Astute commentary from this long time observer of El Salvador's politics and government.

One week to legislative and municipal elections

January 18 is the date for El Salvador's triennial elections for mayors and deputies to the National Assembly. Depending on the poll, the FMLN is leading by 6-15% nationwide in the preferences for deputies and by smaller margins in the mayor's races. These elections could foreshadow the outcome of the presidential election on March 15. And given Mauricio Funes' popularity and double digit lead in several polls, there could be a "Funes effect" which sweeps FMLN candidates into office in many races.


The chart above shows the seats held by the different parties in the National Assembly over the past two decades. There are 84 seats in the National Assembly, so an effective majority requires 43 deputies. No party has held 43 seats in any recent term, so coalitions must be built. Generally the majority coalition has been the conservative ARENA and PCN parties, to go along with ARENA's control of the presidency.

A question for this week's elections will be whether or not the FMLN can increase the number of seats it holds in the National Assembly from its current 32 seats. Can ARENA and the PCN avoid losing more than 1 seat combined so that they continue to have a majority in the National Assembly? Does the trend evident in the 2006 election, where the minor parties lost seats to ARENA, continue?

Another outcome of the 2006 election was the FMLN's loss of the mayor's office in many municipalities across the country. Will the FMLN win some of those offices back?

There will be a great deal of scrutiny of El Salvador's electoral authority, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE for its initials in Spanish). The TSE has invited election observers from the European Union and Organization of American States as well as Central American and Caribbean nations. NGO's will also have election observers at polling places throughout the country (I'll be one). This is especially important since more than half of Salvadorans stated in a poll last year that they believe there will be fraud in the elections.

Minimum wage increased in El Salvador

An increase in El Salvador's minimum wage went into effect at the beginning of 2009. Monthly wages increased from $192.30 to $207.68 in the commercial section, from $167 to $173.78 in maquila factories, and from $90 to $97.20 in the agricultural sector.

As a daily wage, the wages range from $2.70 to $3.54 in the agricultural sectors (depending on the crop) and from $6.77 to $6.92 in commerce and manufacturing.

These wages only apply to workers in the formal sector. There does seem to be a correlation between the approach of an election and the minimum wage increasing.

Top 10 El Salvador News Stories of 2008

My annual list of the top 10 stories of the prior year:

Economic woes face Salvadoran families. Economic conditions in 2008 saw a worsening of the circumstances of many Salvadorans. High food prices, high gasoline prices and continued rates of sub-employment caused an increase in the level of poverty in the country. One lifeline, remittances from Salvadorans abroad, continued fairly strong, but was beginning to shows signs of weakness towards the end of the year as the economic crisis in the US deepened.

End of the terms of two allies. Tony Saca and George Bush were both in the final years of the presidency during 2008. Saca has visited the White House more than any other leader from Latin America over the past 5 years. Saca supported Bush with troops in Iraq, and kept El Salvador's economic policies aligned with the free trade "neoliberal" strategy favored by the administration in the US. Both presidents saw election campaigns for their successors where the theme of "change" has been very powerful with the electorate.


Mauricio Funes ignites FMLN prospects. 2008 was one year of perpetual campaign for the FMLN's presdential ticket. The FMLN is united behind the popular Mauricio Funes, and Funes enjoys double digit leads in many polls over Rodrigo Avila for ARENA. Funes has gone out of his way to portray a moderate image -- wearing white shirts rather than FMLN red, rejecting the ideas of abandoning the US dollar or the CAFTA treaty, and distancing himself from Hugo Chavez and others, preferring to speak of a Salvadoran brand of social policies. Critics view Funes as a mere figurehead who will be forced to succumb to the more hard-line policies favored by the traditional FMLN leadership. The FMLN also leads polling for the January 2009 elections of legislators and mayors.

ARENA selects Avila and Zablah. ARENA did not select a presidential candidate until months after the FMLN had settled on Funes. After much campaigning, the right-wing party picked Rodrigo Avila, the former head of the National Police and a traditional ARENA candidate. More time went by before ARENA and Avila picked a vice presidential candidate. When they did, ARENA moved towards the center in picking businessman Arturo Zablah, who was not an ARENA party member and had actually been trying to run for president as a center-left coalition candidate earlier in the year.

No solution to criminal violence. The year 2008 started with a spasm of murders and ended that way too, and the year in between was not much better. Murders were down approximately 9% from the year before, but El Salvador seems to be retaining its title as murder capital of Latin America.

Impunity still reigns. Several stories highlighted the problem of impunity for the powerful and well-connected in El Salvador. The year began with the Inter-American Court for Human Rights issuing an order that the government conduct a real investigation in the Garcia-Prieto murder case. At year end, the government had not started to comply, claiming that the judgment needed to be clarified and the IAHCR issued another order. Similarly, activists started a campaign for justice in the case of little Katya Miranda, raped and murdered 9 years ago by male family members who are high ranking police and military officials. The case must be reopened by April 2009 if there is to be justice. The FMLN aligned itself with ARENA when it indicated that it would not support repealing the amnesty law which protects those who commited crimes during the civil war, and one of the most infamous of those crimes, the murder of the 6 Jesuits in 1989, is now the subject of a proposed human rights proecution in Spain.

Charges dropped against Suchitoto 13. In July 2007, several persons protesting against Tony Saca's plans to decentralize water systems, were arrested and charged with acts of "terrorism." During the second half of 2007, human rights groups and civil society organizations kept up a steady drum beat of pressure on the Saca government and the legal authorities prosecuting the case. Finally, in February 2008, the charges were first reduced, and then dropped after the prosecutor showed up late for a scheduled court hearing.

Pacific Rim Mining fumes. The Canadian gold mining company Pacific Rim has discovered a vein of gold ore at its El Dorado location in El Salvador. It wants to open an underground mine, using "green" mining techniques to extract the gold, creating tax revenue and jobs for the country. Civil society groups continued their protests during 2008, however, citing concerns over risks to the country's water resource and the surrounding environment. Whether because of these protests or some other reason, the Saca government has so far failed to grant Pacific Rim's application for a mining permit which would let it actually begin mining the gold. At the end of 2008, Pacific Rim gave notice that it plans to start an international arbitration under CAFTA against the government of El Salvador for violating the company's legal and contract rights.

Elim church bus tragedy. Flooding rains in the San Salvador area on July 3. In a fierce thunderstorm that night, more than 5 inches (128mm) of rain fell, and the river Acelhuate overflowed its banks. The torrent caught the bus full of worshipers from the large evangelical church and pulled it into the river's concrete channel. The story highlighted the lack of progress by local and national government bodies to pursue risk mitigation projects which would reduce the possibility of such tragedies which occur in some form or another each rainy season in El Salvador.

National soccer team progresses. Under the leadership of coach Carlos de los Cobos, the El Salvador's national soccer team enjoyed real success this year in qualifying matches for the 2010 World Cup in South Aftica. The team has to be one of the top 3 qualifiers in the hexagonal round in 2009 to get a World Cup berth.

El Salvador's image problem

The Toronto Star finished 2008 with a story listing the world's 10 worst places to live. Unfortunately for El Salvador, it made the list. The Canadian paper came up with a 10 categories -- pollution, corruption, gender gap, life expectancy, literacy, freedom of speech, dictatorship, personal security, inflation and homicide rate -- and picked a loser for each category. The countries on the list included places like Eritrea, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Yemen, Iraq and ... El Salvador. It was that last category, homicide rate, which brought El Salvador into the 10 worst places list.

The paper wrote:

Homicide rate: El Salvador

Latin America has the highest murder rate in the world for young adults, 15-24. But El Salvador tops the list of the world's most dangerous countries for the young – and has one of the highest murder rates for people of all ages, according to the Latin American Technological Information Network.

It's hard to get people to invest, to come as tourists, to do business or to buy real estate when they come across articles like that one. The numbers point to a real problem, as readers of this blog know, but the numbers don't come close to telling the whole story or justify calling El Salvador one of the "10 worst."

Joaquin Villalobos interview in Miami Herald

Today the Miami Herald published an interview with Joaquin Villalobos, a former guerilla commander of the People's Revolutionary Army ("ERP") segment of the FMLN during El Salvador's civil war who now lives in Oxford, England:

Q. Is the situation in El Salvador cause for concern?

A. It is. Some called me a traitor and others called me a fool when I warned about the dangers of polarization. The right and this government have made many mistakes. I said to myself: The Frente will come to power and it will last five years. I supported the idea that ARENA should be punished. But because of my work, I am asked to comment on what is happening in Venezuela, in Ecuador, in Nicaragua. And I made an association with what was happening in my country and these other countries. And then I worried: This is going to be much longer than five years, when you look at it in context. It is not just a situation that can alter the political balance in El Salvador, but it can become the situation that sends the country to Never Never Land.

Q. But I see prosperity in El Salvador. There is development, less poverty.

A. When I was young and in school and someone asked you: What does El Salvador produce? You had an automatic response: El Salvador produces coffee, sugar, cotton, shrimp. Now, even though I boast of knowing my country well, I don't know what it produces. The only fact that jumps up at me is that El Salvador exports people. And here comes the vicious cycle that is apparently positive but really fatal. The export of people has drained this country of its labor force. And all of the signs of progress you see are the result of that. We abandoned the land, we export people, we get another income -- the remittances -- and those remittances have depleted our labor capabilities and the imagination of our business class. And there is a social consequence of this apparent progress. We signed the peace, exported people and have become a violent society because of the disintegration of community and family. And this cycle is still open. The gangs are a part of this phenomenon. What you saw is the 10 square kilometers of peace. The route from the airport to the city. The most vital challenge of this country, and that is why it is a problem if the Frente wins, is to reinvent the economy.

Q. Why is it a problem?

A. Because we are not going to have a constructive government if the Frente wins. We are going to have a demanding government. This country needs someone that can put it back on track, and what we are going to get if they win is not those who can put it on track but those who will make the demands. Because what you have to do is a complete redesign in terms of technology, politics, social issues, operational processes, and the Frente is not capable. It is a demanding force that will be casting about for a guilty party, which is the cycle that has opened in Venezuela, in Ecuador, in Bolivia. And conceivably the Frente could manage, like others have, to build an electoral majority and win several elections by incorporating disenfranchised groups. And if this lasts 10 years, I don't know what could happen to us. We will not be viable as a country. We will not come to a war, but we will have a much bigger polarization.

Q. What about the right?

A. The Frente is not responsible for our current predicament. The right is responsible, and the situation is serious. It was a very stupid thing to play the polarization game. They thought nothing was going to happen. They used the Communists and its leader, Shafik Handal, to scare people. They played with something that was going to disappear. So Handal dies, Hugo Chávez comes to power and starts to throw dollars around. ARENA gets old. It is tired. A global economic crisis comes. The scary leader is dead and there is a new candidate, Mauricio Funes. It was the perfect star alignment. And now there is no option.

As the 2009 presidential election approaches, Villalobos has been speaking out from England warning against the risks if his former comrades in the FMLN take power. For example, he penned a recent piece in El Diario de Hoy, titled Who Would Govern, Funes or the FMLN?. In that editorial he argues that the FMLN is under the control of the Communist Party and that Mauricio Funes will be incapable of governing independently of the communist leadership of the party. The communists will direct the country because of the number of legislators and other FMLN members who will be in government and will take their orders from the leadership and not Funes.

The western press likes to quote Villalobos, this former revolutionary turned English academic and consultant on peace processes. As Salvadoran blogger Hunnapuh recounts in a post called Joaquin Villalobos - a damned history(in Spanish), the brilliant guerrilla tactician is also infamous for having ordered the execution in 1975 of El Salvador's revolutionary poet, Roque Dalton. Villalobos, a leader of the ERP, ordered the execution of Dalton on trumped-up charges of being an agent of both the CIA and Cuba on May 10, 1975. In reality, Dalton was Villalobos' chief political rival. The killing led to bitter internal fights and schisms in the movement. There has never been a legal proceeding to judge those responsible for Dalton's killing, despite a long running campaign by his son Juan Jose Dalton calling for justice.

There is a Youtube video here of Villalobos describing the FMLN's aims during the civil war.

The viewpoints Villalobos is espousing now are the same ones he was espousing in the last presidential election. An article in Proceso, five years ago describes Villalobos current role in El Salvador's electoral politics:

Villalobos knows well how to take advantage of his image as a convinced military and Social-Democratic strategist. Although inside the country just a few take it seriously; abroad, he has been able to put himself over his actual capacities and talent. In El Salvador things have not gone so well for him, mainly because of his intentions to support to the right wing and ARENA in their strategy to discredit to the FMLN. Whenever he has been able to, the ex- commander "Atilio" has pointed his darts against his old comrades. The most recent of these attacks is titled “The ayatola Handal and the hysteric materialism".

Once again Schafik Handal has become his target. Peculiarly, this text by Villalobos reveals more things about himself than about Handal. At least, it reveals part of his capacity to change history in accordance with his own convenience. In his last diatribe against Handal, it turns out that Villalobos was, during the seventies and the eighties, a true revolutionary man, neither fearful nor collaborative with the reactionary governments of the time. In this writing, far from abjuring from his past in the guerrilla, he vindicates it and he feels honored because of the fact that once he took the arms and subscribed the motto of the ERP, "The peace of the rich ones is over, the war of the people has begun", which became public when two national guards that were at the Benjamin Bloom Hospital were assassinated (in March of 1972). Villalobos does not say it, but that was the same ERP that kidnapped and assassinated Roberto Poma in 1977, and the one that two years before had judged and assassinated Roque Dalton. That is the ERP that Villalobos seems to feel proud of : a dogmatic, radical organization, an enemy of bourgeoisie and imperialism, that is, nothing to do with a Social-Democratic movement, and not willing to negotiate or to agree with the enemy at some point. Then, what is it? Had not Villalobos been the eternal faithful lover of democracy? Was not he a Social Democrat since his humble beginnings as a left-wing militant? Villalobos -and those who emulated him- should stop playing the role of the repented revolutionary and dedicate himself to the actually useful social duties, instead of following the anti-Communist game of the right-wing with fallacious arguments and a meaningless rhetoric.

As I've noted before, there are many open questions about the 2009 elections in El Salvador including:

• Is the FMLN changing?
• Can Mauricio Funes act independently of the party leadership which selected him as his candidate?
• Does El Salvador have democratic institutions and societal forces which would prevent it from experiencing some of the flaws of a Hugo Chavez or a Daniel Ortega while still charting a course towards the left?

But I'm not sure that Villalobos contributes much towards understanding the answer to those questions.

Video -- images of 2008

La Prensa Grafica has posted this video of scenes from 2008 in El Salvador.

Salvadoran living in Boston runs on national ticket in El Salvador

The Boston Globe ran a recent story about Merlin Pena, a Salvadoran who has been living in the Boston area since she fled El Salvador in 1980 at the beginning of the civil war. She has been selected to be the the vice presidential candidate for the Christian Democratic Party. Carlos Rivas Zamora, the former mayor of San Salvador, is the party's candidate for president.

The choice of Mena is another sign of the importance of the Salvadoran diaspora to what happens back in El Salvador. Although Salvadorans living abroad cannot vote unless they return to El Salvador to cast their ballots, their economic impact through remittances is immense. A video with Mena on the front page of the PDC website has her talking about the importance of the Salvadorans living outside of the country.

From the Globe story:

Merlin Pena is a resource specialist at the Massachusetts General Hospital clinic in Chelsea. Next year, she could be vice president of El Salvador. Pena, 51, is known ... for her community activism and advocacy for immigrants' rights. But she is also a low-key semi-celebrity, recognized by a worldwide network of Salvadorans for her ambassador-type work between Salvadoran political leaders and the emigrants who support much of that country's economy...

As the first president of Salvadorans in the World, a group she no longer belongs to, Pena continued to build political connections and advocated to improve relations between El Salvador and its emigrants. For years, one of her main goals has been to have her country extend voting and social rights to Salvadorans living outside El Salvador and to see them as more than "just remittance." The presidential election in El Salvador is scheduled to take place March 15.

Mena is not the first Salvadoran resident of the US to run for political office in El Salvador. In 2006, Hugo Salinas from Virgnia lost in his race to become mayor of Intipuca. In the current elections, Salvador Gomez Gochez, who has dual US and Salvadoran citizenship, is running for mayor of the town of Atiquizaya.