Salvadorans voted yesterday in a closely-fought election that could see former leftist rebels put an end to 20 years of right-wing leadership.
The result will likely impact relations with the US, which has been a close ally since backing a repressive military government during a 1980 to 1992 civil war in which more than 70,000 died.
Many Salvadorans are seeking change in one of the world’s murder hotspots where the economic crisis is predicted to hit hard, but others are nervous of former Marxist rebels taking charge of the economy at this time.
Mauricio Funes, a 49-year-old former TV journalist, is favorite to win the vote six weeks after his radical Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) claimed victory in the country’s parliamentary elections.
Funes said El Salvador would remain a staunch US ally if he won. But the opposition, including governing conservative party candidate 44-year-old Rodrigo Avila, said the country would become a satellite of Venezuela and other populist leftist forces in the region.
The US will respect the choice Salvadoran people make in their election, the US State Department’s top diplomat for Latin America, Tom Shannon, said on Friday, after several US lawmakers said that a Funes victory would jeopardize US national security interests in the region.
“We are committed to free and fair elections in El Salvador. And we’ve also made it very clear that we will work with whomever the Salvadoran people elect,” Shannon said.
El Salvador last weekend welcomed its last returning soldiers from Iraq, where it once had 6,000 troops, and its economy depends heavily on the money sent home by some 2.5 million US-based Salvadorans.
Both Funes and Avila campaigned in the US ahead of the election.
A Funes victory would put another Latin American country on the political left, joining others from Brazil to Bolivia.
The FMLN is the former coalition of Marxist guerrillas that battled the government during the civil war, and Funes is its first presidential candidate never to have been an armed combatant.
Victory would also overturn 20 years of domination by the right-wing National Republican Alliance of Salvadoran President Elias Antonio Saca Gonzalez.
But whatever the final outcome in the presidential poll, no party will have an outright majority in Congress, which will complicate policy implementation.
Funes had a strong lead in early polls, but the gap between him and Avila has narrowed in recent weeks, when tens of thousands of Salvadorans attended election rallies.
The war, poverty and a string of natural disasters — including Hurricane Mitch in 1998 — have left their mark on one of the most violent countries in the Americas, notorious for mara street gangs.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS