Operation Disrupt Democracy in El Salvador

[Judi Lynn]

Operation Disrupt Democracy in El Salvador
January 2009 By Erica Thompson


International observers have denounced recent activities of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as designed to overthrow democratically elected presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. A similar strategy is underway to undermine the electoral process in El Salvador by striking fear and confusion into voters before legislative and presidential elections in 2009.

Since November 2007, El Salvador's leftist party, the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), has been consistently polling at a 12-14 point advantage for upcoming legislative, municipal, and presidential elections—ahead of the right-wing ARENA (National Republican Alliance) party's presidential candidate and former national civilian police director, Rodrigo Avila, who has peaked at around 38 percent by conservative estimates. Because an FMLN victory could deal a profound loss to Washington and Wall Street by countering attempts to increase the corporate privatization of land and public services, business media and government officials have stepped up attempts to defeat them in the press and behind the scenes.

In a recent address to the American Enterprise Institute, Salvadoran Foreign Minister Marisol Argueta implored the U.S. government to intervene in the elections on ARENA's behalf. In addition, international press reports have propagated ridiculous claims of a mounting "terrorist conspiracy" between the FMLN, the FARC in Colombia, and Hugo Chavez. Wall Street Journal editor Mary Anastasía O'Grady has complained that if the FMLN wins, foreign investors will suffer. Indeed, several countries that participated in the 18th IBERO-American Summit in October agreed that corporate privatization has failed the majority of people in Latin America. Presidents in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Guatemala are proposing increased regulation and oversight of corporate expansion. An FMLN victory in El Salvador promises further movement in this direction.

FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes has said that an FMLN administration would work to oppose biofuel production and the current profit structure for mining projects in favor of spurring agricultural development. "We have to improve agricultural production. Over the past 19 years of ARENA government, the infrastructure for food production has been neglected and dismantled. It is essential and a priority to allot land use for food production and the harvesting of vegetables and staple grains. This is what the people need. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of allotting areas of land for biofuel production because we are not going to work to feed machines; we have to work to feed human beings."

In its attempt to confuse and ultimately sabotage the FMLN's campaign, right-wing Venezuelan-based pro-U.S. media organization Fuerza Solidaria has released a set of television ads and door-to-door leaflets that assail potential voters with the usual dose of misinformation and scare tactics that accompany every electoral campaign in El Salvador. Designed to suppress votes for the FMLN, one of the ads portrays Funes and the FMLN party as an out-of-touch, antiquated relic rather than a political manifestation of the Salvadoran peoples' historic, and ongoing, broad-based resistance to foreign exploitation. Simplistic "flow chart" arrows on the ad imply that an FMLN-led government would sacrifice remittance money from the U.S. to be a puppet for Chavez's "anti-American expansion project." The intended message is clear and has been the preferred threat of the immigrant-bashing Bush administration to Salvadorans on both sides of the border: those who support the FMLN are against the U.S. If the FMLN wins the election, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will begin massively deporting Salvadorans and the U.S. will cut off remittances.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/20127

[struggle4progress]

1. ARENA has a simple and easy-to-understand idea of what "democracy" means, and it boils down to this:

whenever somebody disagrees with us, we kill him/her; and then we kill a lot of other people, just to be sure everybody got the message; and when folk finally begin to complain about our attitude towards "democracy," we call them "communists" and kill them too and then ask the US for money

[EFerrari]

4. When I turned 30, my family treated me to a Jackson Browne concert

that happened to be a fundraiser for the FMLN in San Francisco. My godmother looks around at the audience (the war was still on) and her eyes go wide and she says to my mom, "Rosi, these people are ALL COMMUNISTS".

lol

[struggle4progress]

5. Joan Baez & Jackson Browne - El Salvador

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-tYinK-I1o

now that the city is dreaming
viva the pale moonlight
take to your bibles
take to your beds
now that nothing seems right

national guards who they pay by the week
are gonna clash in the curfew tonight
with los companeros born in the war
from warsaw to san salvador

a voice from the past comes callin
saying hold every strong heart dear
these are the days
when it seems like there's nothing
but newspapers
order and fear
praise for the ones who are buried and gone
and the strong hearts who just disappeared

los companeros born in the war
from belfast to san salvador

what do you got to do to get through?
they're deaf as a graveyard
what does nicaragua say to you?

Think of the midnight
silver and black
think if the sun can be fooled
think of the four sisters shot in the back
for running a land reform school
think of the ones taken hard in the hills
they can be beaten but they can never be ruled

los companeros born in the war
viva el salvador
los companeros born in the war
viva el salvador

[Peace Patriot]

2. Wow! This is a very good and very important article! Thanks for posting!

I figured we could count on the Bushwhacks pouring our tax money into the murderers, oppressors and thieves of the El Salvadoran elite, when I learned that the FMLN candidate, Mauricio Funes, was ahead in the polls, some months ago. The Bushwhacks have tried coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, and all sorts of other dirty rotten activity, spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to DEFEAT DEMOCRACY in these and other South America countries--and have spent $6 BILLION on military aid to the fascist narco-thugs running Colombia (where thousands of union leaders, political leftists, peasant farmers, human rights workers and others have been murdered by rightwing death squads with close ties to the government and the military). But Central America has to be an even more fervent project of the Bushwhacks, as this amazing, peaceful, democracy movement sweeps up the continent into the Latin American region closest to the U.S. Our corrupt, treasonous national political establishment doesn't want word of the success of democracy to get that close to our borders.

The Bushwhacks very likely stole the last election in Mexico (which the leftist supposedly lost by a hair--0.05%). Their purpose was to privatize Mexico's constitutionally protected oil resource, but also to keep leftist democracy ideas away from the U.S. They couldn't stop a leftist government getting elected in Guatemala--their first progressive government, ever--a country where the Reaganites supported the slaughter of two hundred thousand Mayan villagers in the 1980s. They couldn't stop the Sandinistas from getting elected in Nicaragua--where the Reaganites directly slaughtered thousands of people to reverse the original Sandinista revolution. They have royally pissed off the Honduran government, which is now leaning left. They succeeded in buying the CAFTA election in Costa Rica. But the trend is overwhelmingly against U.S. global corporate predation throughout Latin America. And the Bushwhacks are in such a panic about losing control of Latin America's oil--and so determined to stop Venezuela's policy of providing low cost or barter oil to the poorer countries--that they reconstituted the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, to prepare for invasion opportunities. Even Brazil got upset about that. Brazil's president said that the 4th Fleet is a threat to Brazil's Atlantic oil fields. But the Fleet is primarily aimed at harrying Venezuela's Caribbean coast, and being ready to support a fascist coup in Venezuela's northern province, Zulia (where all the oil is). The rightwing leaders of that Venezuelan province are in cahoots with the fascists in Colombia right on their province border. By carving out that chunk of Venezuela, the U.S. could "circle the wagons" in the Central America/Caribbean region, cut off oil to Nicaragua, Cuba and other countries, starve Venezuela's social programs (and those of countries that Venezuela is helping, like Bolivia), cause great hardship, and disrupt the new South American "Common Market" (UNASUR).

The leftist winning in El Salvador would be a major monkey wrench in these plans (as the election of a leftist in Paraguay this year likely disrupted the Bushwhack plan for a fascist coup in neighboring Bolivia). It would mean an even more united Latin America. The political lineup of countries would look like this:

Venezuela - LEFT
Bolivia - LEFT
Ecuador - LEFT
Argentina - LEFT
Paraguay - LEFT
Uruguay - LEFT
Brazil - CENTER-LEFT (allied with the above)
Chile - CENTER-LEFT (allied with the above on UNASUR)
Peru - CENTER-RIGHT (very corrupt)
Colombia - FASCIST NARCO-STATE (big U.S. military presence and aid)

Nicaragua - LEFT
El Salvador - LEFT (if the FMLN wins)
Guatemala - LEFT
Honduras - leaning LEFT
Cuba - FAR LEFT
Panama - RIGHT (big U.S. military presence)
Costa Rica - CENTER-RIGHT
Haiti - U.S. installed RIGHT
Mexico - RIGHT (--will probably go left in the next election, but if the U.S. and the right steal it again, there could be a revolution in Mexico).

That's quite a lot of leftist governments, eh? And you can see why El Salvador is an important "domino" in U.S. corpo/fascist thinking. It will be interesting just how many millions of our tax dollars they spend, that should be going to help the poor and middle class here, to defeat majority rule in El Salvador. And they've got the 4th Fleet handy, if all those millions of our money and Bushwhack covert ops fail.

[roody]

7. The Democratic Party also funds the NED.

(The National Endowment against Democracy)

[EFerrari]

3. The only hope El Salvador has for this election is that the US economy

stays in crisis and that Israel invades Gaza as it seems about to do.

So far, my friends with more recent news from El Salvador than I have expect Funes to win. But, none of them are sanguine about the election staying clean, either.

[roody]

6. If you can, go be an election observer

http://www.cis-elsalvador.org/election-observation.html

http://www.cispes.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=498&Itemid=29

http://www.irtfcleveland.org/calendar/flyers/IRTFCISDelegationElSalvador.pdf