El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal ("TSE" for its initials in Spanish) is asking the country for patience as it tries to finalize election results for deputies in the National Assembly.   The TSE is indicating that final results may not be available until after the Holy Week vacations which start in two days. The results to date of the "escrutinio final" or final vote count are available on the TSE's web site here .  All of the results for municipal elections throughout the country are finalized, but the legislative results still need final outcomes from the department of San Vicente where three seats are at stake.   In its press conference today , the TSE indicated that pending legal actions were preventing the conclusion of counting in San Vicente. La Prensa Grafica reported that the country's attorney general has informed the TSE that he has custody of 157 ballots which were found discarded in one voting center in San Vicente.   These b...

This week produced some good articles on El Salvador's gangs, politics and saint: Sarah Esther Maslin writes Can religion solve El Salvador’s gang problem? -- a deep look at the current situation of gangs in El Salvador through the lens of young men who have left the gangs through conversion to evangelical Christianity. Christine Wade writes  El Salvador’s Elections Reveal Voters’ Frustration With Politics as Usual -- a good overview of politics in El Salvador following the March 4 elections. Carlos Colorado writes Romero, Venue and Date  -- an explanation of possible dates and locations for the canonization ceremony for Oscar Romero.

The next election in El Salvador involves magistrates for the country's Supreme Court of Justice .  Saturday, March 10, lawyers across the country will go and cast their votes for candidates for the high court.   The elections are organized by the Federation of Attorney Associations of El Salvador (FEDAES). A video urges the lawyers to elect honest and competent judges: Thirty thousand lawyers will be able to cast ballots for 22 candidates .  Bios of the candidates are available here . This election will reduce to 15, the number of potential candidates for the Supreme Judicial Court.   In addition to those 15 candidates, 15 more candidates are chosen by the National Council of the Judiciary.   This total list of 30 candidates represents the body from which El Salvador's legislative National Assembly should pick new magistrates to the court. The National Assembly will ultimately elect five new magistrates this July, by a two thirds super-...

There are many aspects of El Salvador's elections last Sunday worth pondering.   Some of those aspects are noted below, reflecting comments from a team of election observers I led, as well as analysis of news reports and official announcements. The Results As noted in my previous post, the FMLN suffered a major defeat last Sunday as voters fled from the party.   Preliminary results show the party falling from 31 seats in the National Assembly to just 22, while conservative ARENA may have as many as 40 seats in the 84 seat legislature: Note:  the results from the most recent election are preliminary, and there may be movements of a deputy or two. These results mean that the FMLN by itself cannot block any legislative action requiring a 2/3 (56 vote) super majority such as the appointment of Supreme Judicial Court magistrates, the Attorney General, the Human Rights Ombudsperson, or international borrowing.   Nor can the FMLN sustain a veto...

El Salvador conducted elections for its National Assembly and all mayor's offices on Sunday.   With El Salvador's overly complex system for electing the legislature, only about 60% of the vote has been counted as of Monday morning.   But the results seem clear that voters dealt the FMLN  a major defeat.  The primary beneficiary of the voters' rejection of the left wing party was the conservative ARENA party. Nationwide votes for deputy with 70% counted. At this point on Monday morning, it is too early to tell how many deputies ARENA won in the National Assembly and who they will be.   It seems unlikely that they will have a majority, but they will pick up seats beyond their current 35 seats in the 84 members National Assembly.    For mayor, ARENA appears to have won the largest prize of San Salvador.   Ernesto Muyshondt is leading Jackeline Rivera by more than 2-1 with 70% of the vote counted.  ARENA als...

El Salvador's Secretary of Participation, Transparency and Anti-corruption (SPTA), Marcos Rodríguez, has published for the first time a report of donors and their money flowing to Salvadoran political parties from 2006-2017.  It is probably not a surprise that the conservative ARENA party, backed by El Salvador's wealthy and businesses, received the bulk of political donations.   ARENA disclosed $44.5 million in donations between 2006 and 2017 compared to only $13 million for the FMLN: The bulk of ARENA's political money came from donations by businesses and other legal entities ("personas jurídicas") such as foundations  In contrast, the bulk of the money flowing to the left wing FMLN came from donations by individual donors ("personas naturales"): The report discloses that the single largest donor to ARENA or any political party was a non-profit entity named the "Centro de Estudios Políticos 'Dr. José Antonio Rodríguez Porth.'...

During the past several months, the government of El Salvador has received significant and ongoing criticism for its human rights practices in matters of public security as it wages war against the country's street gangs.     That criticism included denunciations by human rights groups before the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights.    The criticism also included stern warnings from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.   Most recently, the criticisms came from the UN Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Agnes Callamard, who visited the country at the end of January: “No matter how complex the context, how tough the call on public resources, the Government’s response to this endemic violence should not further embed it. The cure cannot be just as bad as the complaint. Yet, unfortunately, I found a pattern of behavior amongst security personnel pointing to excessive use of force and extrajudicial...

The Social Initiative for Democracy ("ISD" for its initials in Spanish) is a civic organization in El Salvador focusing on transparent government, electoral democracy and elimination of corruption.    On Wednesday, February 14, ISD issued its first monitoring report for the upcoming March 4, 2018 elections. With respect to recruiting citizens to staff the voting centers by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal ("TSE"), ISD found: A failure to informer the citizenry over the process of selection of members of the voting tables (JRVs). A failure to promote an awareness campaign over the civic responsibility to be part of a JRV. Errors in the selection system which included illiterate citizens, the disabled, elderly and sick. The lack of information and awareness has generated a lot of confusion and rejection of the measure to choose JRV members, combined with disinformation which various actors are putting out on social media. For training new members of ...

Pollsters at Universidad Francisco Gavidia released the results of recent public opinion polling concerning the upcoming elections in El Salvador for deputies in the National Assembly and for mayors.  The results suggest that a population cynical about politicians will not show up to vote in great numbers, and those that vote will elect a greater percentage of officials from right wing parties. For deputies, those polled responded: Not going to vote at all:  33.2% Declined to answer: 21.7% Will cast a null vote:  5.3%    ARENA:  17.4% FMLN: 11.9% GANA: 4.3% PCN:  2.9% There was an interesting result in the race for mayor of San Salvador.    The race is a virtual tie with three weeks to go, with 16.0% expressing a preference for Ernesto Muyshondt of ARENA and 15.5% expressing a preference for Jackeline Rivera of the FMLN.   Again, the majority of those interviewed are either not going to vote or have no preference....

The mayor's office of San Salvador is one of the most prominent political positions in El Salvador after the position of president.   It is a position which has gone back and forth between the major political parties over the past 25 years.    The current holder of the post, the popular Nayib Bukele, is not running for re-election after he was expelled from his former party, the FMLN. The candidates proposed by the major political parties are: Ernesto Muyshondt  -- ARENA Jackeline Rivera -- FMLN Both candidates are currently deputies in the National Assembly.  Opinion polls released in November and December of 2017 gave a fairly substantial lead to Muyshondt, but there are still large groups of undecided voters.    It could be that voters are undecided because they do not know who the candidates for mayor are.   The recent UCA poll showed that more than 80% of those polled did not know the names of the two major party ca...

Every year at this time, the Institute for Public Opinion at the University of Central America releases poll results concerning Salvadorans evaluations of the state of their country and intentions to vote if it is a voting year.    This year's poll results show a population which is unhappy with the current situation and does not see a government which is improving matters.    The results do not bode well for the governing FMLN in upcoming elections. Here are some of the polling results. 62.4% believe crime has increased compared to the prior year. 54.6% believe that poverty increased in 2017. 59.9% are not interested or only slightly interested in voting in national elections on March 4. Only 22.7% have any confidence in the upcoming electoral process. 77.2% believe government security policies are having little or no effect on crime 67.1% believe President Salvador Sánchez Cerén is governing badly, a number which has steadily increased during his adminis...

There are less than two months until El Salvador's next national elections which will elect deputies to the National Assembly and mayors in every town and city.  It's not going to be easy. Perhaps the biggest challenge El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal ("TSE") has right now is to find the more than 94,000 citizens needed to run the vote reception tables across the country.    In previous elections, this was the responsibility of the political parties and the persons at the voting tables could be affiliated with the parties.   The parties recruited, trained and made sure that people showed up   Fairness was ensured by the fact that each of the parties was represented by one of the officials at the tables.  However, since the last election the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the officials at the voting tables must be non-partisan and unaffiliated with the parties.  Now the TSE must enroll 94,000 ...

Recent polling by La Prensa Grafica reveals a growing disaffection with the country's two major political parties and a majority of Salvadorans whose political preferences fall between the left and the right. When asked about their political ideology and whether they identified with the right or left, almost 58% of those polled said "neither", the center, or refused to answer.  This rejection of ideological labels is seen as well in the declining numbers of affiliation with the political parties.    This chart shows the percentage of respondents who stated they affiliated with a particular political party at different points in time: As this chart from the LPG polling shows, "neutral" has grown steadily to around 55%, while neither of the two major political parties, ARENA and the FMLN, can claim more than 25% of the electorate.     It is the FMLN which has seen its fortunes drop most dramatically.  From the start of Sanchez Ceren's preside...

In June 2016, the mayor of Apopa, a small city located just northeast of San Salvador was arrested along with several members of the municipal government and police force.    The mayor,  José Elías Hernández , was accused of ordering a murder of a gang member as well as putting the offices of the city government at the service of local gangs. This week InsightCrime published a lengthy investigation into the Apopa story titled  Symbiosis: Gangs and Municipal Power in Apopa, El Salvador .   InsightCrime also published a  video conversation  with Héctor Silva Ávalos, one of the lead investigators for the story.   Some of their earlier reporting on this story appeared in March titled  El Salvador Ex-Mayor Ordered Gang to Kill Local Official, Police Say . From Symbiosis : The Attorney General’s Office insists that Hernández is one of the cases that best illustrates how political power -- in this case, local government -- and the...

El Salvador's left wing party, the FMLN, has chosen  Jackeline Rivera to be its candidate for mayor in the March 2018 elections.   The party needed to choose a new candidate after expelling from the party, Nayib Bukele, the current mayor. Rivera is currently a deputy in the National Assembly for the department of  Cuscatlán. Rivera shared details of her biography earlier this year in an interview at 102Nueve.com .   Rivera was born in the municipality of Cinquera, where her father was an early guerrilla leader.   She was a child soldier, joining one of the five member groups of the FMLN, the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación (FPL) in 1979 when she was only 8 years old.  At age 16 she was a radio operator for the FMLN operating in the mountains. A photo of Rivera which appeared on the interview with 102Nueve: After the war, Rivera studied law and became a lawyer.   Eventually she reached her current position in th...

There are 159 days to go until the March 4, 2018 national elections in El Salvador when the population goes to the polls to elect all the country's mayors and members of its national legislature.  Election authorities hope that these elections run smoother than the last elections in 2015 .    The election process for deputies to the National Assembly in 2015 was an epic failure .    For weeks, the final results were unknown and eventually there was a recount ordered by the country's Supreme Court.      The problems related to the complexity of the ballots.  Here was the 2015 ballot for deputies in San Salvador.     Valid ways to vote include voting for all the candidates of a party, some of the candidates, a mixture of candidates from different parties, and for independent candidates.   The candidates were all running against each other for 24 at-large seats.   It was the first election in which voters ...

Yesterday Nayib Bukele used the medium of Facebook Live to announce that he would seek reelection as mayor of San Salvador as a candidate for the FMLN.    Wearing a baseball cap backwards on his head, seated in his home office with two electric guitars leaning on the wall behind him, Bukele explained the factors he had to weigh before deciding to run for mayor.   Claiming that he had only made up his mind to run on Sunday, Bukele stated that he could not walk away and allow ARENA to undo what he had accomplished in the capital city.    The FMLN has already stated that it will back Bukele for a second term, despite the independent track which Bukele keeps apart from his party. You can watch his announcement here . Currently the leading candidate from ARENA appears to be Norman Quijano.   Quijano was the mayor of San Salvador from 2012-2015, and unsuccessfully ran for president in 2014 against Salvador Sanchez Ceren. As of Monday morning, Bukele...