And the next president of El Salvador is and other news

Downtown Guatemala City (2013)

Tim has an excellent round-up on some recent developments in El Salvador as we head into this weekend's winner-take-all steel cage match to determine the country's next president.

FMLN USA takes a look at recent developments in the Francisco Flores saga. Don't you feel bad for Flores? I do. We don't know everything yet but I get the impression that he's probably the least corrupt of ARENA's four presidents.

Norman Quijano hasn't been a great candidate but at least ARENA didn't select Ana Vilma de Escobar, former vice president alongside Tony Saca, who is under investigation.

This is what Senator Leahy and the US government wanted, right? Movement on tackling organized crime and corruption.

There's a lot more work to do and while most of the emphasis has been on ARENA officials linked to corruption, the next FMLN administration will only strengthen the country's institutions if they root out corrupt officials within their ranks as well.

Hector Silva has Corruption in El Salvador: Politicians, Police, and Transportistas and The United States and Central America’s Northern Tier: The Ongoing Disconnect for the Inter-American Dialogue (which I mentioned yesterday).

President Mauricio Funes and Minister of Justice and Public Security Ricardo Perdomo are sending another 5,000 soldiers into the streets and to the borders to tackle the uptick in violence. While Salvadorans have little faith in the police (see Hector above), I can't say that this is a welcome development. Funes will begin and end his term putting soldiers on the street to tackle crime.

I don't think that El Salvador and the FMLN will head down the Venezuelan path but some people are worried. And while one can chalk up a lot of the craziness to leftovers from the 1980s Reagan administration (no, I won't link to them), we don't know what the future holds. The Democrats have found a way to work with the FMLN and with ARENA so I am not too worried. However, all bets are off if Republicans retake the White House in 2016.

In non-El Salvador news, Daniel Ortega lives! No, really. Pacaya is erupting. Ex-interior minister Raúl Velásquez heads to trial. Respected Supreme Court Justice César Barrientos Pellecer commits suicide. Luis Guillermo Solis looks like he will win by a larger margin in Costa Rica than Sanchez Ceren will in El Salvador.

Finally, some good news with Vegetable Gardens Ease Poverty in El Salvador.

Hector Silva on The United States and Central America’s Northern Tier

Hector Silva has a new working paper on The United States and Central America’s Northern Tier: The Ongoing Disconnect for the Inter-American Dialogue. I haven't read it yet but it looks promising.

In this working paper, Silva offers a review of US security cooperation with the nations of Central America’s Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Organized crime, rampant corruption, and largescale violence have stunted the region’s economic and social development since the end of Central America’s civil wars in the 1990s.

As Silva notes, US aid has missed the mark and done little to reverse climbing homicide and crime rates. By examining the history of US engagement in the region and the political forces that have driven both US and Central American action, Silva reveals a disconnect between Washington’s national security agenda and that of the region’s leaders.

According to Silva, it is this disconnect that has prevented the United States and the countries of the Northern Tier from pursuing the sort of comprehensive strategies needed to address the institutional weaknesses that lie at the heart of the region’s security challenges.

See also Hector's piece on The Infiltrators: Corruption in El Salvador's Police for Insight Crime.

Central America on the Precipice (video)

Christine Wade and I gave a presentation on Wednesday night at the invitation of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues at Dickinson College. It was a great trip and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and speaking with Dickinson students and faculty about recent developments in Central America. We also met with several faculty from the nearby US Army War College.

Christine spoke about challenges to democracy while I was tasked with tackling criminal violence, especially drug trafficking.

I started off my talk by borrowing a bit from John Donaghy's discussion of Honduras from last week. I wanted to let every one know that it would be a mistake to reduce Central America's violence "problem" to drug trafficking, organized crime, and maras. Violence goes so much deeper than these issues, into the homes and elsewhere. I remember a Jose Miguel Cruz talk from fifteen years ago where he said that El Salvador was one of the region's most violent countries in the 1970s (prior to the civil war) so it would be a mistake to characterize the challenge of today's violence simply as a consequence of the civil war or various post-war processes.

It would also be a mistake to reduce violence to "their" problem since it is a shared challenge that affects us all. Obviously, the illicit drugs are primarily consumed by the US and produced somewhere south of the US border. However, as seen in the recent Los Cocos convictions (three Mexicans and six Guatemalans) and the Facundo Cabral murder (people from half the region's countries seem to have been involved at some point), everybody has a stake in this game.

A few other brief notes - I am getting kind of annoyed when people say that people in the US do not feel the effects of the drug war. As someone who lives in a pretty safe, middle class suburb outside the thralling metropolis of Scranton, I don't feel it too strongly. However, given the damage that the drug trade has caused to our inner cities and to the destruction of families, the misallocation of precious resources, and to making the US have the highest incarceration rate in the world, we are sure feeling the effects.

One of the audience members also asked about the difficulties of and our sensitivities in carrying out research in a region of the world where the US role has been so, I don't know what's the word, terrible. I hope I wasn't too harsh, but I disagreed with the premise of the question to a certain extent. I carry out mostly elite-based interviews in the region and the perspectives on the US role, both historical and contemporary, are quite varied.

I was, more or less, cursed out by Alfonso Bauer Paiz. He still had very strong emotions towards the US because of its efforts to overthrow Arbenz in 1954. Other guerrillas do not appear to have much animosity towards the US. The US and Guatemalan guerrillas were on opposing sides in a war.

Last summer I spoke with a former guerrilla who works for an NGO in Guatemala City. The interviewed occurred about two months after the Rios Montt trial had concluded. I asked about the role of the US in Guatemala today. He characterized the US government's role as rather positive. He said that pressure from the Ambassador and other US government officials is the only reason why Guatemalan political and economic elite ever execute a policy in favor of the Guatemalan people.

A few days later, I met with the head of CACIF. He explained to me how he had met with US Ambassador Chacon several times to explain why the US' support for the judicial proceedings against wrong and dangerous.

Finally, I mentioned during the talk (or just afterwards in some comments) that ARENA was formed in El Salvador because the country's economic elite thought that the could not rely upon the military and the US to support their interests. The US and the military promoted some land reform in 1979 and the early 1980s and the nationalization of some key components of the coffee industry which directly struck at their power and privilege. The death squads not only killed peasants, the Archbishop, and US churchwomen, but they also killed US land reform advisers. There is more complexity to attitudes of Central Americans about the war and about contemporary issues than is generally recognized.

Click for video of the event.