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)