Will El Salvador become another Venezuela?

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Inspired by the US-backed anti-government protests in Venezuela, El Salvador’s oligarchs are preparing to follow the same strategy.

If the electoral results are not to its benefit, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition almost always refuses to recognize the outcome of Venezuela’s fair elections. This is now the case in El Salvador too. The oligarchs heading the country’s right-wing National Republican Party (ARENA) are using the same playbook as the Venezuelan oligarchs. ARENA’s leaders have refused to acknowledge that they lost the 2014 presidential elections and that the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) won.

Before all the ballots that were cast were even counted, ARENA accused the FMLN of fraud and claimed that the elections were rigged. ARENA’s presidential candidate, Norman Noel Quijano González, pledged that ARENA would not “allow this victory to be stolen from us like it was in Venezuela” from the political opponents of the Chavistas. Echoing Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles and his so-called Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), ARENA has said that it is“prepared for a war.”
For a while, many were afraid that El Salvador, a deeply polarized country, would revert to a state of civil war. ARENA was urging the Salvadorian military to overthrow the government in San Salvador and enable its candidate to take over the presidency.

Eventually ARENA was forced to concede defeat and recognize Vice-President Salvador Sánchez Cerén and Oscar Ortíz respectively as the president-elect and vice-president-elect.

 

Salvadorean presidential candidate for the National Republican Alliance party, Norman Quijano waves at supporters after receiving the voting results during the presidential election run-off in San Salvador, on March 9, 2014 (AFP Photo/Inti Ocon)

The Salvadorian Elections and Beijing’s Rising Star in Central America

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The Salvadorian corruption scandal involving Francisco Flores, who was president of El Salvador from 1999 until 2004, has opened the door for the diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China by the next government in San Salvador, which the FMLN failed to ascertain under the term of President Mauricio Funes. The graft involving Flores has created the appropriate political opportunity for El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) to formally cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan (formally known as the Republic of China), if an FMLN president is elected in March 2014.

This diplomatic question additionally exposes the behind the scenes coordination that is taking place between Beijing and Taipei. This paints a picture of a cordial path towards Chinese unification between Taiwan and mainland China and not one of rivalry. Neither Beijing nor Taipei has put major obstacles in the other’s way, recognizing that ultimately there will be one China.

Francisco Flores and the Salvadorian Oligarchy