how one could draw the same conclusion as the headline.

Absence of Logic

candidate, Tony Saca? If anyone seeing this thread was here then, I'm sure you'll remember. This thread was posted in LBN, the important posts to note were added to the original one:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x438153

brads Donating Member (31 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Mar-22-04 11:33 PM
Response to Original message

2. Bush admin threats & fear campaign turned the election


This was an election that was thoroughly manipulated by fear-mongering and lies from the Bush administration.

While it went almost entirely unnoticed in the US media, the Bush administration sent officials & friends like Otto Reich and Jeb Bush, and some right wing congresspeople to carry out a concerted campaign to distort the will of the people in El Salvador by threatening to cut relations to El Salvador, deport Salvadorans from the US and cut off 'remesas' -- the money Salvadorans in the US send to their families in El Salvador -- if the FMLN won the election.

The FMLN had been steadily gaining in each election since 1994. In last year's elections the FMLN won the majority in the Legislative Assembly for the first time and also won the mayors offices in all of the major cities of El Salvador. They were clearly on the cusp of winning the presidency this year -- until the US government stepped in with these threats.

In a country that experienced a brutal civil war from 1980 - 1992, in which the US was supporting the death squad government to the tune of $4 million a day, threats from the US are not taken lightly. And money sent from Salvadorans in the US to their families in El Salvador makes up the largest part of the economy in El Salvador.

The bright side is that the FMLN actually received more votes this year than they did in the last presidential election in 1999, but the dirty campaign of fear brought out huge crowds to vote against getting their remesas cut off and against the US returning the country to civil war. I don't think the ARENA victory can be interpreted as support for ARENA's program as much as a vote to not have the US government immediately fomenting conflict.

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Lydia Leftcoast Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-23-04 01:06 AM
Response to Reply #2

3. Yup, and ARENA is the party that ran the death squads in the 1980s


They actually ran TV ads about poor old ladies losing their remittance checks if the FMLN won, and that scared people, because thanks to decades of virtual feudalism in El Salvador, the only way for non-elites to make any money is to emigrate.

I forget what percentage of El Salvador's total economy is made up of remittances from the U.S., but it's huge.

And Otto Reich and Eliot Abrams and their equally reptilian cohorts in the Bush Administration are just mean-spirited enough that they would have cut off the remittances if the FMLN had won.

This was NOT a victory for democracy, but a victory for extortion.

Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Nov-16-07 12:07 PM
Original message

Outrage! White House invitation to Bush's boy in El Salvador

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/16/113056/65

White House invitation to Bush's boy in El Salvador
by Daisy Cutter

Fri Nov 16, 2007 at 09:19:53 AM PST
The Bush White House today issued a press release announcing that on November 29, Salvadoran President Elias Antonio "Tony" Saca will visit the White House in order to discuss, among other things, "security cooperation with Central America to combat organized crime, drug smuggling, and international terror." Saca is about as "pro-US" as Latin American leaders come. Post-civil war El Salvador has generally been dominated by the right-wing, which has engaged in the usual IMF/World Bank-encouraged variety of neoliberal reforms. It is a dedicated member of the CAFTA treaty. The small country even currently has troops stationed in Iraq.

Needless to say, the US has played a large role in keeping the right-wing ARENA party in power through vague threats of revoking remittances from Salvadoran immigrants working in the US. Frontline reporter Joe Rubin describes how this works:

The $2.2 billion per year in remittances that Salvadorans "pay back" to relatives at home dwarfs every other industry in El Salvador.

More below.

Daisy Cutter's diary :: ::
A typical pro-Saca television spot that aired repeatedly in the closing days of the campaign showed a middle-class Salvadoran couple receiving a phone call from their son in Los Angeles.

"Mom, I wanted to let you know that I'm scared," the young man says.

"Why?" his mother asks.

"Because if Schafik becomes president of El Salvador, I may be deported," her son answers, "and you won't be able to receive the remittances that I'm sending you."

Of course, US officials (Iran-Contra criminals no less) played a large role in fanning these fears:

Addressing the press in El Salvador a month before the elections, Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary of the U.S. Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, attacked the FMLN, saying, "We know the history of this political movement, and for this reason, it is fair that the Salvadoran people consider what type of relations a new government could have with us."
<...>
But just days before El Salvador's election, another Bush administration official, Special White House Assistant Otto Reich, went a step further. In a telephone interview on March 13, 2004, with the Salvadoran press gathered at ARENA headquarters, Reich declared, "We are concerned about the impact that an FMLN victory would have on the commercial, economic and migration-related relations that the United States has with El Salvador."

Reich went on to say that the United States would reevaluate its relationship with "an El Salvador led by a person who is an admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez."

I wonder if Bush and Saca, while talking about "organized crime, drug smuggling, and international terror," will discuss the case of the 13 protesters charged with terrorism for opposing the privatization of the water supply? Or the FMLN members who were assasinated even after the civil war was officially over. Or the blanket amnesty law that let all death squad members, even the ones involved in the assassination of Monsenor Romero, off the hook. Or the draconian restrictions on freedom of movement included in "anti-gang" legislation. Or Roberto D'Aubuisson, the "pathological killer" whom Saca personally commemorated at a memorial ceremony in early 2007.

American meddling. Rightist oligarchs in power. Intimidation and disenfranchisement of the left. It's as if the Cold War never ended for El Salvador. As the saying goes:

The more things change, the more they stay the same
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/16/113056/65

Thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x321042