El Salvador Perspectives

Al-Jazeera English has a good article  looking at the 1993 Amnesty Law which has prevented the prosecution of war criminals from the Salvadoran civil war.   The article talks about a "Yellow Book" illustrating the involvement of the Salvadoran armed forces in death squad activity: The new drive for justice has been fueled by the discovery of a military document called the Libro Amarillo, the 'Yellow Book' - a 254-page book produced by the Intelligence Department of the Estado Mayor Conjunto, El Salvador's military high command during the civil war. It is the first list of human targets assembled by the military high command during the war to ever be publicly revealed.  Since it was discovered in 2010, researchers have been carefully confirming the Yellow Book's authenticity and visiting the families of those in it, so the book is only now being revealed.  Assembled between 1978 and 1987, the book contains photographs of nearly 2,000 civilians that it id...

According to provisional vote totals from yesterday's elections, the conservative ARENA party appears to have been the biggest winner for both El Salvador's National Assembly seats and mayors.     ARENA won 33 seats in the 84 seat National Assembly.  This is one more seat than the party won in the 2009 elections, but is more impressive when you consider that 12 deputies had defected from ARENA to form the GANA party leaving ARENA with only 20 seats in the National Assembly.   GANA was running in its first elections, and managed to capture 11 seats.   Together with ARENA, their 44 seats could be a strong majority bloc in the National Assembly.   Although it is still possible that the FMLN, GANA and CD could be a majority voting bloc with 43 votes. The FMLN lost 4 seats from the 35 seats it had obtained in 2009.   This will be the first time since 2004 that the left wing party has had fewer deputies in the National Assembly than ARENA.  With onl...

The polls are closed in El Salvador.   Now the vote count starts.  You can see the preliminary vote results at the TSE web site at:   http://elecciones2012.tse.gob.sv/inicio.htm .  In one aspect of transparency of the Salvadoran electoral process, you can drill down in the results all the way to individual voting tables. INTERIM RESULTS  9:30PM LOCAL TIME -- NATIONAL VOTES FOR DEPUTIES 45% COUNTED I am not in El Salvador for this election, but I've been monitoring the press and social media, and here are some initial comments on this election day.   In general, it seems to be a good day for Salvadoran democracy.   Not without problems, and not without some controversies, but generally voting seemed to proceed as intended.   For a good English language overview from El Salvador, read this post at El Salvador from the Inside . The morning opened with delays in opening some polling centers.   There was plenty of encourag...

The polls are open in El Salvador for voting for mayors and legislators throughout the country.   If you want to follow it live in the "Twittersphere", use the tag #EleccionesSV . The polls will close at 5 p.m. El Salvador time (6 p.m. US Central Daylight Time).   The election authorities will publish the votes as they are submitted at this site:   http://elecciones2012.tse.gob.sv/inicio.htm .

This Sunday, March 11, will be the ninth national elections in El Salvador since the 1992 peace accords which ended the country's civil war.   Voters will go to the polls to elect deputies to the National Assembly and mayors in all the country's municipalities. Here are some of the things I'll be watching for, in addition to simply counting how many municipalities and legislative seats are gained by each of the political parties. The rules for voting have changed, how much confusion is there at the polls because of residential voting or the voting for individual candidates? Now that voters can express their preferences for particular deputies, do any of the party regulars lose their seats in the National Assembly? How well do the very few independent candidates fare in the elections? Watch the votes in San Salvador.  Does Norman Quijano, the incumbent mayor from ARENA, win a greater percentage of votes in his election than ARENA wins in the National Assembly from S...

ContraPunto has a summary of recent polls leading up to the March 11 elections. One thing the polls are showing -- the race for mayor of San Salvador is not even close. Current mayor from the ARENA party Norman Quijano is trouncing Jorge Schafik Handal in the preferences of the city's voters. Handal is the son of one of the founders of the FMLN, Schafik Handal, who ran for president of El Salvador in 2004 and lost. Depending on the poll, Quijano's minimum lead is 25% and some of the polls have him leading by 50-60 points.

The most recent poll from CID-Galup/Diario La Pagina shows 34% of voters planning to vote on March 11 for FMLN candidates for National Assembly deputy, 32% for ARENA candidates, and 16% for other parties. Almost one in five Salvadorans polled were undecided. The poll of 1008 eligible voters was taken between February 16 and 19 . These results are typical of the results almost every time Salvadoran are polled about their political preferences. One third of the voters show allegiance to ARENA on the right and one third to the FMLN on the left and everyone else is somewhere in between. I have yet to see any polling looking at voter preferences for individual deputies on the slate of any party.

The Facebook page called " Sociedad Civil "  (Civil Society) is sharing a  photo album of the worst examples of campaigning  during this campaign season leading up to the March elections.  You'll need to be able to read Spanish to understand some of the comments, but some photos, like the one above, speak for themselves.

In my last post I described the changed rules for electing deputies to the National Assembly.   Another change for the 2012 elections will be a significant expansion of residential voting.   Residential voting simply refers to having polling places which are closer to where people actually live.  Currently people are assigned to polling places which may or may not be the closest site to their home. There will be residential voting in nine departments in the eastern and central parts of the country: Cuscatlán, Cabanas, Usulután, San Miguel, La Paz, San Vicente, La Union, Morazán, Chalatenango as well as the cities of San Salvador and Santa Tecla.  This expansion of residential voting will cover approximately half the population.   More voting centers will be set up in rural communities closer to people than the actual municipality's center.   In the cities, people will vote in their neighborhoods rather than being assigned a voting center alphabetically ...

El Salvador has national elections approaching on March 11.   Salvadorans will be going to the polls to elect mayors and to elect deputies to the National Assembly.   The rules have changed this year as a result of decisions by the Salvadoran constitutional court .   For the first time, independent candidates can run for election to the National Assembly.  Also for the first time, voters can express their preferences for individual candidates from the slate assembled by a particular party. Here's a review of the changed process.  Each department within the country is allocated a certain number of seats in the 84 seat National Assembly according to its population. 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 ...

The Constitutional Court (Sala de lo Constitucional) of El Salvador's Supreme Court is the judicial body which has the responsibility for ruling on whether laws passed in the country are constitutional or not. The Constitutional Court is made up of five judges, and recently they have been issuing important decisions which work in favor of vindicating good governance, transparency, and the value of an individual citizen's votes. Our friends at Voices of El Salvador describe the recent work of the court: Since becoming magistrates in 2009, Belarmino Jaime, Florentín Meléndez, Rodolfo González y Sidney Blanco have chosen strategic cases to strengthen national institutions and target corruption within government agencies. Over the past two years, the four magistrates have passed down some very important decisions, while the fifth magistrate, Nelson Castaneda, has mostly abstained from votes. In one example, the Court condemned a law that reallocated funds left over from the g...

The FMLN has confirmed that Jorge Schafik Handal will run as the left wing party's candidate  for mayor of San Salvador in the 2012 elections.  He is the son of Schafik Handal, an FMLN guerrilla leader during the country's civil war and unsuccessful candidate for president of El Salvador in 2004. Jorge Schafik Handal is currently a deputy in the National Assembly from Usulutan.  He will be running against the current mayor of San Salvador, Norman Quijano from ARENA, who won his first term as mayor in 2009.