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Unaccompanied minors? Blame a century of US Central American policy.

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At a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson International Center with three Central American  foreign ministers, moderator Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition, began the hourlong talk with a simple question about the rise of unaccompanied minors to the United States:  USflaghonduras flag iconel salvadorguatemala flag icon

Who is to blame?

Speaking to an overflow crowd in Washington, DC yesterday, the three foreign ministers — Honduras’s Mireya Agüero, Guatemala’s Fernando Carrera and El Salvador’s Hugo Martínez — shared a half-dozen or more credible reasons for the phenomenon, which has resulted in a wave of 57,000 minors from the three countries coming to the United States since the beginning of 2014.

Borders that remain too porous and governments unwilling or unable to devote more funds to secure them.

The fearsome sway of street gangs that recruit young kids into a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and illegality, leaving the three Central American countries with some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

Coyotes that, unable to persuade Mexicans to cross the border, have now turned their sights to Central Americans.

Governments that lack the resources to provide the kind of health care, education and legal institutions that could form the backbone of viable middle-class prosperity, leaving growing numbers of Central Americans looking to the United States for a better life.

Lectures from US presidents and policymakers that go unmatched with the kind of financial assistance to build truly pluralistic democratic societies.

Today, with US president Barack Obama holding an unprecedented four-way meeting with the presidents of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, US policy in Central America is making more headlines than at any time since perhaps the Cold War, and it’s the latest round in a polarizing debate over immigration to the United States, with the Obama administration now seeking $3.7 billion in funds from the US Congress to help stem the illegal flow of Central Americans across the border, often at great risk, especially among women and children.

Obviously, like any social phenomenon, the reasons for the influx of unaccompanied minors are complex, and they involve the economics of drug trafficking, the social dynamics of poverty and urban gang violence, and a lack of opportunities for growing populations aspiring to middle-class prosperity. It’s not an impossible dream because countries like Belize, Panamá and Costa Rica are largely achieving it throughout Central America.

Even more complex are the underlying conditions in the three countries that form the background to the current migration crisis, and the roots of those conditions go back decades, with plenty of US interference in the region.

Conservatives rail against Obama’s steps to provide a smoother path to citizenship for the children of migrants who have lived virtually their whole lives in the United States, and even Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández yesterday blamed the ‘ambiguity’ of the US immigration reform debate for the surge in child migration. Texas governor Rick Perry last month blamed the Obama administration’s ‘failure of diplomacy,’ and has made a show of sending 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texan border. Liberals, meanwhile, argue that former US president George W. Bush failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform when he had the ability to do so a decade ago.

Certainly, there’s plenty of blame among both Republican and Democratic governments in the past two decades.

But so much of the current debate in the United States overlooks the background of how Central America — and especially Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — came to be countries of such violence, corruption, insecurity and relative poverty. It also overlooks a significant US role in the region that’s often been marked by dishonorable intentions that has its roots in early 20th century American imperialism, the brutality of zero-sum Cold War realpolitik, and the insanity of a ‘drug war’ policy that almost every major US policymaker agrees has been a failure and that, to this day, incorporates a significant US military presence. Continue reading Unaccompanied minors? Blame a century of US Central American policy.

Sánchez Cerén narrowly leads Salvadoran presidential vote

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Though El Salvador’s vice president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, was expected to win the March 9 presidential runoff, the result was so tight that no winner has yet been formally declared, pending a recount of the too-close-to-call election.el salvador

Sánchez Cerén (pictured above, left, with running mate Óscar Ortiz, right) almost won the presidency outright in the first round on February 2, taking 48.92% of the vote, a nearly double-digit lead over his challenger, San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano, who won just 38.95%:

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Sánchez Cerén hopes to extend the rule of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), the one-time guerrilla group that is today El Salvador’s major leftist political party.  In 2009, Mauricio Funes, a former journalist, led the FMLN to its first-ever electoral victory, ending nearly two decades of post-civil war rule by the center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance).

On Sunday, however, provisional results show that Sánchez Cerén won just 50.11% of the vote, narrowly leading Quijano, who had 49.89% of the vote:

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How did this happen?

It wasn’t too difficult to realize, even before February 2, that the runoff vote would tighten.  That’s because in the first round, Sánchez Cerén easily consolidated the FMLN vote, while Quijano had to compete against Elías Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca, a conservative who served as president from 2004 to 2009.  Saca, following his presidency, was kicked out of ARENA, largely over allegations of corruption stemming from his presidential administration and his future presidential ambitions.  Accordingly, Saca led a third-party coalition against both Quijano and Sánchez Cerén in 2014.

Though Saca won a relatively disappointing 11.44% in the first round, it seemed clear that Quijano would win the majority of Saca supporters in the second round.  Taken together, the combined Quijano-Saca support totaled  50.39%, proving in the first round that there’s a basis for a center-right, conservative electoral coalition.  If Quijano were able to win almost all of the former Saca voters and/or win over a few first-round FMLN voters, he could leapfrog Sánchez Cerén and into the presidency.  Sunday’s provisional result seems to indicate that, though Quijano consolidated much of the conservative vote, it still wasn’t quite enough (though let’s wait for the full recount). Continue reading Sánchez Cerén narrowly leads Salvadoran presidential vote

The US whispering campaign against Sánchez Cerén

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There’s a segment of the US foreign policy community that simply doesn’t care much for the likely winner of this weekend’s Salvadoran presidential election, Salvador Sánchez Cerén — and it’s making its displeasure loud in the days leading up to Sunday’s runoff vote.el salvador

First, Elliott Abrams, former deputy national security adviser under US president George W. Bush, argued back in early January in The Washington Post that Sánchez Cerén (pictured above) represents a backslide for El Salvador, arguing further that ‘democracy and peace in Central America are again at risk’:

The likely impact of a Sánchez Cerén victory on U.S.-Salvadoran security and counter-narcotics cooperation is dangerous. The United States has a key forward operating location in El Salvador to monitor and deter drug trafficking, and the FBI cooperates with local police against trafficking by Salvadoran gangs. Could such activities continue in light of the FMLN’s ties to the FARC and to the Venezuelan government?

Yesterday, José R. Cárdenas, also a former official in the Bush administration, added his alarm in Foreign Policy, where he echoes the same kind of panic over a Sánchez Cerén victory:

What an FMLN victory means for El Salvador and the region under a Sánchez Cerén presidency is particularly worrisome. Unlike current President Mauricio Funes of the FMLN, with Sánchez Cerén there is no pretense to moderation. Beneath the democratic mask, he still adheres to the hard-line agenda of the FMLN, honed during the dirty war against the Salvadoran state in the 1980s.

Funes, as the candidate of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), the guerrilla group from the 1980s that transformed more than two decades ago into El Salvador’s primary center-left political party, won the presidency for the Salvadoran left for the first time in the country’s postwar history.  Sánchez Cerén is more ideologically motivated than Funes, who came to politics from journalism, unlike Sánchez Cerén, who came to politics directly from the front lines of El Salvador’s 1979-92 civil war.

Sánchez Cerén’s running mate, Óscar Ortiz, is the widely popular mayor of Santa Tecla and a moderate figure within the FMLN, and many Salvadorans believe it always should have been Ortiz leading the FMLN’s 2014 ticket.  His appeal is one of the reasons Sánchez Cerén seems like such a lock to win Sunday’s election (at least as much as the ‘masterful political ads that managed to convert a battle-hardened ideologue into a kindly, old grandfather’ that Cardenás attributes to the FMLN’s success).  Sánchez Cerén, who has served Funes loyally as vice president for five years, and Ortiz, who will want to succeed Sánchez Cerén in 2019, both have an incentive to pursue continuity with the relatively moderate Funes government.  Sánchez Cerén would not be the first Latin American firebrand to govern with a pragmatic approach in office — e.g., Peruvian president Ollanta Humala.

Following the end of the civil war, El Salvador developed a relatively stable trajectory and, until 2009, the center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance) won every consecutive presidential election.  It’s true that the Funes administration has nudged Salvadoran public policy leftward, especially with respect to social welfare, and that Funes has availed his country of some of the economic benefits of closer ties with Venezuela and other US opponents in Latin America.  But ultimately, his administration hasn’t abandoned the broad Salvadoran consensus toward neoliberal economic policy or the country’s decision a decade ago to abandon its national currency in favor of dollarization.  Funes’s leftism has been more of the pragmatic, business-friendly lulista variety than the populist, dogmatic chavista alternative: 

But as president, Funes has expanded social welfare benefits — abolishing public health care fees, combatting illiteracy, providing food and clothing to schoolchildren, granting title to disputed land claims, introducing monthly stipends and job training for the poorest Salvadorans, and signing legislation to protect women, sexual minorities and indigenous communities.  He’s also oriented El Salvador closer to the Venezuela-led Alianza Bolivariana (ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance) while retaining strong ties with the United States.

By the way, the Salvadoran business community has welcomed Funes’s outreach to Venezuela and ALBA because, as Frederick Mills wrote late last year in a great primer on the Salvadoran race, the private sector is enjoying access to new markets in addition to its long-standing access to US markets.

In the first round of the election on February 2, Sánchez Cerén won 48.92% of the vote, while center-right San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano won 38.95%.  The third-place candidate, former president Elías Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca won just 11.44%.  Saca, notwithstanding his former ties to ARENA, has so far refused to endorse either Quijano or Sánchez Cerén in the runoff — that’s a blow to Quijano, who hopes to consolidate the right-leaning vote to pull off an upset in the March 9 runoff.

But there’s some troubling revisionism in both hit pieces by Cardenás and Abrams that should leave us all skeptical about their narratives of the current election campaign.  Continue reading The US whispering campaign against Sánchez Cerén