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El Salvador

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 →

El Salvador

Sánchez Cerén exceeds expectations in first-round Salvadoran vote

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With almost every vote  counted tonight, here’s where the Salvadoran election stands:el salvador

In El Salvador, vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén commanded 48.92% of the vote against the center-right San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano, who has won 38.95% of the vote, with 99.15% of the vote reporting.

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Though Sánchez Cerén (pictured above, top) was favored in most polls to the first round of the Salvadoran presidency, he wasn’t expected to come so close to winning the entire presidency — essentially within 1.07% of nabbing the absolute majority he would need to take the presidency in a first-round victory.

That result is much better than Sánchez Cerén’s Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) could have hoped for.  It’s not only a first-round win, but it significantly outpaces polling expectations that put Sánchez Cerén equal to or behind Quijano, the candidate of El Salvador’s center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance).  It’s a vote for enhancing the social welfare programs and the turn to the Alianza Bolivariana (ALBA) in Salvadoran governance.

Though Sánchez Cerén is now favored to win the March 9 runoff against Quijano, but it’s not a certain outcome.  Third-place candidate, former president Elías Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca, who won a somewhat disappointing, 11.44% of the vote, will almost certainly back Quijano and even if he doesn’t, it’s hard to believe his voter base support Sánchez Cerén.

That means that though Sánchez Cerén outpaced Quijano by essentially a 10% margin, the runoff could be very close, and it will become a classic left/right race to determine Salvadoran economic policy, regional alliances and the best strategy to solve violent crime.  Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla leader for the once-Marxist FMLN during the Salvador civil war of 1979-92, is further to the left of outgoing president Mauricio Funes, a former journalist and the first FMLN candidate to win election since the end of the Salvadoran civil war. Quijano, however, has been dogged by allegations of corruption and ties to past ARENA officials who are under investigation, including former president Francisco Flores.

Costa Rica, El Salvador, Thailand

Triple-election weekend on two continents

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Voters in three countries will go to the polls on Sunday in three very different kinds of contests on two continents:

In Thailand (population: 66.8 million), voters will elect all 500 members of the  House of Representatives, the lower house of the Ratthasapha (National Assembly of Thailand, รัฐสภา), the lower house of Thailand’s parliament.  thailand

Prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra called snap elections following growing protests that began last November, ostensibly over an amnesty bill, but which have now torn the country back into the familiar pro-Yingluck ‘red shirt’ camps and the opposition ‘yellow shirt’ camps, the same pattern that’s gripped Thailand since the election of Yingluck’s brother Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001.  Their ruling Pheu Thai Party (PTP, ‘For Thais’ Party, พรรคเพื่อไทย) seems set to win a landslide victory due to the boycott of the opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์).  So the election itself is unlikely to end the political protests and growing political violence.

The Democrats and their supporters are instead calling for an unelected governing council, and there’s a chance that, if the situation escalates, the Thai military could intervene (as so often in the past).

  • Read more about what the Thai protests have in common with Ukraine’s protests here.
  • Read more about the Thai government’s disastrous rice subsidy scheme here.

In El Salvador (population: 6.3 million), three major candidates are vying for the Salvadoran presidency.  Incumbent center-left president Mauricio Funes is ineligible to run for a second term.   el salvador

Polls show a tight race between Salvadoran vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the candidate of the leftist guerrilla front-turned-political party Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) and San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano, the candidate of the center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance).  Former conservative president Tony Saca is also running at the head of a coalition that includes a breakaway faction from ARENA.

If, as expected, no candidate wins over 50% of the vote, the top two candidates will advance to a March 9 runoff, which seems likely to pit Sánchez Cerén against Quijano in a race that features vastly different approaches to security, corruption, economic policy and regional alliances.

Sánchez Cerén is a former guerrilla leader during the 1979-92 Salvadoran civil war, and Quijano has been dogged by corruption charges and is linked to other ARENA figures under investigation for corruption.  Funes, a former journalist, became the first FMLN candidate to win election in 2009.

  • Read more about how, one decade on, El Salvador’s dollarization policy is going here.

In Costa Rica (population: 4.8 million), a general election will determine who will be the country’s next president and all 57 members of the Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly).   costa_rica_flag

The two leading candidates, according to polls are longtime San José mayor Johnny Araya, the candidate of the ruling Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) and José María Villalta, the only legislator of the previously minor socialist / social democratic Frente Amplio (Broad Front).

If none of the candidates wins 40% of the vote, the top two candidates will face off in an April 6 runoff.

Araya is seeking the third consecutive term for the PLN after the presidencies of Óscar Arias from 2006 to 2010 and the incumbent Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica’s first female president.  Chinchilla’s administration is unpopular — both for its inability to control corruption or to tackle the country’s growing debt.

Two other candidates could conceivably pull an upset, however: Otto Guevara, a conservative attorney, who is running his fourth consecutive presidential campaign, and Luis Guillermo Solís, a social democrat and former diplomat in the Arias administration.

The two Central American elections follow a general election in Honduras last November and precede a presidential election in Panamá on May 4.  Earlier this week, Nicaragua also cleared the way for Sandinista president Daniel Ortega to run for reelection in 2016.

  • Read more about Suffragio‘s coverage of the recent Honduran general elections and the  presidential inauguration last Monday of Juan Orlando Hernández here.

El Salvador

Three-way Salvadoran presidential election focuses on security

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Map credit to cartographer Daniel Feher. You can find more of his work here: http://www.freeworldmaps.net/centralamerica/political.html.

In the same week that conservative Juan Orlando Hernández was inaugurated as Honduras’s new president, both neighboring El Salvador and Costa Rica will vote for new presidents on Sunday, February 2, capping a whirlwind of electoral action that will continue with expected runoffs in both countries throughout the spring and the May Panamanian presidential election.el salvador

El Salvador, which lies chiefly along the Pacific coast of Central America, has less than 20% of the area of its neighbor Honduras, but it has 6.3 million residents, nearly 80% of Honduras’s population.  That makes El Salvador the densest country, population-wise, on the Latin American mainland, and that’s not counting between 1.65 million and 2 million Salvadoran Americans, many of whom emigrated north during the Salvadoran civil war and whose remittances back to El Salvador account for 28.2% of El Salvador’s gross domestic product.  Salvadorans abroad, for the first time in Salvadoran political history, will be able to vote in Sunday’s election and the widely expected runoff between the top two finishers on March 9.

Like Honduras (and Costa Rica and Panamá), the Salvadoran president is constitutionally limited to one term in office, which means that the center-left incumbent, Mauricio Funes, is ineligible to run for reelection.

It’s fairly difficult to understand Salvadoran politics without understanding that it’s still in many ways recovering from the brutal civil war from 1979 to 1992  between the US-backed Salvadoran government and the left-wing guerrilla group, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) that killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people.

The conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance) formed in 1981 in direct opposition to the FMLN, and it held power in El Salvador in the early 1980s and again from 1989 until 2009.  Under the administration of Alfredo Cristiani, El Salvador finalized the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ending the civil war.  His successor Armando Calderón Sol worked to restore a sense of normalcy to the country through the end of the 1990s and to spearhead a series of reforms to privatize and liberalize the Salvadoran economy.  Francisco Flores, who led El Salvador from 1999 to 2004, continued ARENA’s broad center-right agenda, strongly pushed for the US-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in alliance with US president George W. Bush and oversaw the dollarization of El Salvador’s economy, a policy that remains controversial even today among Salvadoran economists.  Flores, however, is under investigation for misuse of public funds and, earlier this week, skipped a congressional hearing on the investigation and is accused of trying to flee the country on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the FMLN strived throughout the 1990s and 2000s to shed its radical leftist past and is now El Salvador’s chief center-left political party with an orientation that’s more social democratic today than Marxist.  Funes’s narrow election victory (with 51.3% of the vote) in March 2009 represented the first non-ARENA government in El Salvador’s post-civil war history.  Funes, a former journalist, campaigned on a moderate agenda that largely accepted much of the neoliberal architecture of the Salvadoran economy, including dollarization.  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.

Funes, however, has not been so successful in reducing the violent gang-driven crime and drug trafficking that has also afflicted Honduras, Guatemala and México in recent years.  Since a truce between the two top Salvadoran gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (M13) and Barrio 18, fell through in 2013, Salvador homicides have been on the rise.

The 2014 election pits three candidates against each other, and it’s expected that none will win the absolute majority required to avoid a March runoff.  Though polls vary, a January 13 Mitofsky poll shows the ARENA’s candidate, former San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano leads with 35.5%, FMLN’s candidate, vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén trails narrowly with 31.8% and former president  Elías Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca in third place with 16.0%.  Other polls in the past two months have shown Sánchez Cerén with as much as a 14% lead, and other polls have shown Saca with up to 27% support, though the trend seems to indicate that Saca’s supporters are partly flocking to Quijano, thereby making the race between Quijano and Sánchez Cerén much tighter. 

So how would each of the three candidates govern El Salvador?  Continue reading Three-way Salvadoran presidential election focuses on security →

El Salvador

El Salvador’s experience in dollarization

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On the way back home from Honduras, my plane landed briefly in El Salvador at San Salvador’s airport.el salvador

Not wanting to pass up a brief opportunity to try my first Salvadoran pupusa in El Salvador*, I started looking for a cash machine to withdraw some local currency.  Within seconds, however, I remembered that El Salvador switched from the colón to the US dollar 12 years ago, so of course there was no need, and I began thinking a little more about why El Salvador adopted the US dollar and whether it has seen any benefits from doing so in the past decade or so.

That decision was among the most important of the administration of Francisco Flores, El Salvador’s president between 1999 and 2004, and a member of the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, National Republican Alliance).  Flores became one of the top US allies in the region at a time when Hugo Chávez was cementing his control on power in Venezuela.  Not only did he stand firmly with US president George W. Bush over regional affairs, he even deployed Salvadoran troops to Iraq in support of the US invasion.

Dollarization was controversial even at the time, but the policy goal was that it would reduce El Salvador’s interest rates and facilitate trade — this was in the era before the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which came into effect in 2009 among the United States, the Dominican Republic and four Central American countries.**

But the broader economic benefits haven’t materialized as fully as Flores might have hoped a decade ago — El Salvador’s GDP growth rates have lagged behind even some of its poorer Central American peers in the past 12 years:

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The entire Central American economy is tied heavily to the US economy due to massive trade and remittances from family members living and working in the United State.  That’s especially true for El Salvador, because many Salvadorans migrated during the brutal civil war during the 1980s (in the Washington, DC metro region, for example, Salvadorans represent the largest Latino nationality group, outpacing even Mexicans).  With around 6.3 million people, El Salvador has over three-fourths of the population of Honduras, but less than one-fifth of the area of Honduras.***

But it’s been essentially the sick man of Central America for some time, routinely underperforming Honduras, which is struggling under the weight of political polarization, trafficking-related violence and massive corruption.  El Salvador faces those problems as well, but it’s generally believed that those problems are at least slightly less drastic in El Salvador.

What’s clear is that while dollarization may (or may not) have worked for Panamá and Ecuador, the benefits have either been too small for El Salvador to realize or, worse — and more likely, dollarization has actively hampered the Salvadoran economy.

Salvadoran central bank president Carlos Acevedo earlier this year admitted that dollarization was ‘a sack of unfulfilled promises’:

Bank President Acevedo made his most recent statements (reported by Active Transparency) following the release of a government study on dollarization, which reached some rather negative conclusions. The report found that many key economic indicators, including exports and GDP fell, while inflation and interest rates rose. Dollarization has failed to shield the economy from downturns and instead made El Salvador more susceptible to instabilities in the U.S. economy, as witnessed during the 2009 recession. The Economista published an article yesterday reaching very much the same conclusions.

In his statements this month, Acevedo said dollarization was “badly designed, improvised and lacking consultation,” and that El Salvador’s fiscal performance with dollarization was the worst in sixty years. He also said the performance was so poor that even proponents of dollarization could not ignore its negative impacts.

Prices in San Salvador’s airport do seem to be higher than prices in Tegucigalpa’s airport, though perhaps the better comparison is to the swankier airport in San Pedro Sula.  But there’s definitely a sense among Salvadorans that consumer prices rose after 2001, though the reasons for that phenomenon remain an open question, even among economists.

Another IMF report from 2011, however, indicated that dollarization had reduced interest rates between 4% and 5%, thereby contributing to savings and boosting GDP by 0.25% to 0.5% annually.

It’s tempting to argue that El Salvador is suffering from the same fate as the eurozone — i.e., that El Salvador and the United States do not comprise an optimal currency zone), Salvadorans are ‘stuck’ with US monetary policy, which may not be appropriate for the Salvadoran economy, and there’s obviously no mechanism for fiscal transfers from the US federal government to the Salvadoran government.   Continue reading El Salvador’s experience in dollarization →