El Salvador's March Elections

Salvadorans will go to the polls once again on March 11th to vote for 84 members of the Legislative Assembly and 262 mayors. In recent months, most polls have indicated that ARENA is poised for a comeback.

According to a recent LPG Datos poll on voter intentions when it comes to mayoral election, 29.3% of those interviewed support ARENA, 24.2% the FMLN. 8.8% the Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (GANA), 5.2% the Concertación Nacional (CN), 1.7% PDC/PES, and 1% for the CD. Thirty percent remain undecided or won't say.

In the capital, current mayor Norman Quijano of ARENA has a solid advantage over Jorge Schafik Hándal of the FMLN. Sixty-one percent intend to vote Quijano and 15.1% Hándal. Another 2% are to other candidates and the rest are unknown. Eighty percent of those interviewed have a positive image of Quijano while only 31% have a positive image of Hándal.

CID-Galup/Diario La Pagina

Tim links to a CID-Galup/Diario La Pagina poll about voter intentions for deputies. Thirty-four percent are inclined to vote for the FMLN and 32% for ARENA. GANA is in third place with 10%. Six percent indicate that they will likely vote for another party and 18% didn't respond. In 2009, the FMLN won 43% of the congressional vote and ARENA captured 39%.

LPG Datos also poll voter intentions for deputy. ARENA has 26.4% support while the FMLN comes in at 24.4%. Twenty-six percent say they don't know how they will vote. See here for more about LPG Datos' poll.

Consulta Mitofsky also published poll results this week giving the advantage to ARENA. For congress, 30.3% intend to vote ARENA and 23.4 FMLN. GANA holds on to third with 6.2% and the other parties each receive less than 2% support. The remaining 33% aren't voting or don't know for whom they will vote. Thirty four percent are inclined to vote ARENA and 24% FMLN for municipal office. GANA's support comes close to 10%.

IUDOP/UCA also released poll number this week indicating a much closer race between ARENA and the FMLN. Twenty eight percent intend to vote FMLN for congress followed closely by ARENA at 26.4% GANA comes in at 6.3%. Interestingly, Jeannette Aguilar says that about 10% of the people who voted FMLN in 2009 have withdrawn their support for the party.

The difference between ARENA and the FMLN is narrower in the preferences for municipal council elections. Here once again heads the FMLN with 28.6 percent, followed by ARENA with 28.2.

We don't really know what's going to happen in two weeks. Since the last election, residential voting has been introduced in most municipalities but not all. Voting for individual candidates rather than parties has also been introduced. The FMLN agreed to candidate-based voting but has been encouraging its supporters to vote FMLN rather than for individual candidates. In the Mitofsky poll, 40% said that they are going to vote for the party and another 40% said that they will vote for individual candidate's photos. Forty-eight percent also said that they didn't know how elections for deputies work. (Check out Tim's posts here and here and the comments that go along with them as well.)

The PCN and PDC were cancelled following the last election but both will present candidates under different banners this time (CN and PES). ARENA split after the 2009 and this will be the first election for GANA. If the PD, MNR, and FDR teach us anything, it's that GANA doesn't have much of a future. This time might be different however.

Then there's the fact that President Funes is still relatively popular throughout the country even though the militants from the party with which he is aligned are very disappointed in his administration. Will they turn out in support of the party or will their disappointment with Funes lead them to stay home?

According to the LPG Datos poll, 34% self-identify ideologically on the right and only 23% on the left. Dinorah Azpuru's research indicates that this is one of the best predictors of the vote over the last fifteen years. Given the disappointment with the economic and security situation and the rightward tilt in ideology, the elections probably won't turn out too well for the FMLN.

I imagine ARENA will pick up a few seats in the congress and might surpass the FMLN as the largest party, but not by much. ARENA should also maintain its dominance of municipal elections.

Irregular Armed Groups in El Salvador

Apparently, there was a fifteen minute armed confrontation between an armed group and the security forces which ended with the arrest of five people. The five had an AK-47, military backpacks, bomb making materials, night vision goggles and revolutionary propaganda. Some wore black outfits and others military (type) uniforms. 

David Munguía Payés, El Salvador's Minister of Justice and Security, confirmed that they had detected an "irregular armed group or the revolutionary type" in Sesori, San Miguel and that they have knowledge of at least four other groups operating in the northern parts of the country..

The group calls itself the "Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Populares 22 de Enero" (Revolutionary People's Armed Forces January 22). Their flag is yellow and red and the date January 22nd refers to the indigenous and peasant uprising of 1932 that resulted in La Matanza (the Great Killing).

One of those captured was former guerrilla Fredis Isabel Garcia Guevara. It looks like some of the others were former guerrillas or were somehow connected to the guerrillas. Given their ages of 7 and 17 at the time of the Peace Accords, however, I'm not really sure what to think of their involvement. 

Authorities aren't saying or don't know whether they have any connections to the political party made up of former guerrillas, the FMLN. Authorities also believe that there are at least another ten members of this cell/group at-large.

"They are an armed organization for criminal purposes, but also in the future think of other questions of another kind," said Mendoza, who did not rule out that some people interested in generating more violence may be funding these illegal groups.

The early information is still sketchy, but Salvadoran authorities are leaning towards the hypothesis that the group is "an incipient guerrilla." Right now they are involved in kidnappings, extortion and other revenue generating crimes, but they might be interested in something more political.

If you remember, prior to the creation of the FMLN, guerrillas raised money by kidnapping members of wealthy families, extorting businessmen, and robbing banks and other institutions. All of this took place in the early 1970s up until full-scale armed confrontation broke out in 1980/1981.

Salvadoran authorities haven't commented on the revolutionary nature of the propaganda from what I can tell. 

Stay tuned.

How will Montt defend himself in Guatemala?

I have a new post up at Al Jazeera on How will Montt defend himself in Guatemala? I'll leave you with the conclusion.

If the former general believes that the murders, rapes and torture that were carried out under his command were necessary to combat the guerrilla insurgency, he should make that argument to the Guatemalan people.

If he believes that the thousands of civilians who were killed, while tragic, saved the lives of untold millions of Guatemalans who otherwise would have been forced to live under the iron rule of the communists had the military not done its job, he should say so. If that is what he believed, and still believes today, he shouldn't embarrass himself by remaining silent.

No one is going to take his defence seriously if he blames a few rogue officers or if he says that no massacres ever occurred. In the end, the only satisfactory outcome will be a guilty verdict that leads to Efraín Ríos Montt spending the remaining years of his life behind bars. How he gets to there remains up to him.

Guatemala's Human Rights Profile

Human Rights Watch put out a pretty accurate report on the human rights situation in Guatemala several days ago.

Guatemala’s weak and corrupt law enforcement institutions have proved incapable of containing the powerful organized crime groups and criminal gangs that contribute to one of the highest violent crime rates in the Americas. Illegal armed groups are believed to be responsible for ongoing threats and targeted attacks against civil society actors and justice officials.

Although impunity remains the norm for human rights violations, there were significant advances for accountability in 2011, including convictions of four former officers for a notorious massacre in 1982 and the first arrest of a top-ranking official for human rights violations.  

I see the situation in Guatemala as still very difficult but having come off its lows in 2008 and 2009. Arrests of high profile drug traffickers have increased. There have been some prosecutions and/or arrests of human rights violators from the civil war years. Murders of both men and women have declined two years in a row.

Guatemala has gone from a murder rate of 46 per 100,000 to 39 per 100,000 at at time when the rates of its neighbors are in the 70s (El Salvador) and 80s (Honduras). When CICIG first arrived in Guatemala, there were reports that 2% of all murders resulted in convictions. Today, it's between 5% (2010) and 9% (2011).

There's still too much violence and too much impunity, but statistically the country is heading in a better direction than its neighbors.

A Testament From Guatemala’s War Years

David Gonzalez at the New York Times has an interesting story about Jean-Marie Simon in A Testament From Guatemala’s War Years. Jean-Marie spent years documenting life in Guatemala during the war both in photos and in words.

I like her comment on Efrain Rios Montt's potential defense.

“I wish this trial would have happened 30 years ago, when he had a long life ahead of him in prison,” said Ms. Simon, who spent most of the 1980s photographing in Guatemala. “It is so disingenuous to say, ‘I didn’t know’ or ‘I wasn’t in control of the army.’ He was the commander in chief, he had command responsibility for the troops below him. Like a commander in the field once told us, there’s a very short leash between us and the National Palace.”

I agree and should have an op-ed on Al Jazeera stating the same thing soon. I submitted it on Sunday, but they don't seem concerned with the timing of Latin American stories so I don't know when it will go.

Go check out the NYT story, take a look at the photos, and buy her book.

Femicide in Guatemala (2001-2011)

President Otto Perez Molina recently formed a "task force to combat femicide" in Guatemala. Nobel prize winners Rigoberta Menchu and Jody Williams are traveling the region to help bring attention to the intentional killing of women in Guatemala and beyond. And the British Ambassador is organizing human chains around volcanoes. I hope that these three actions are going to help reduce femicide in Guatemala in the region.

In an article for IPS, Danilo Valladares cites statistics from the Presidential Commission Against Racism in Guatemala that indicates femicides increased from 675 in 2010 to 705 in 2011. I think that they are using INACIF numbers which includes murders and other violent deaths but I can't be certain.

However, when one looks at the National Civilian Police's statistics on murder over the last decade one sees that femicide more than doubled from 2001 to 2009 and then has declined in both 2010 and 2011. The increase and then decrease in murders doesn't look at the different from those of men.

This isn't to belittle the murders of Guatemalan women as a problem. It's just to point out that, according to the Guatemalan National Civilian Police's (PNC) murder statistics, the number of women murdered decreased in 2010 and 2011 and that's not even controlling for population increases.

Update - Murder by gender in Guatemala (2010-2011)

I have my first class of the semester in a few minutes, but I thought this was interesting. Here's my lesson for today - don't post right before class, come back after class and double-check everything. I read 2010's numbers for women incorrectly. In 2010, 695 women were murdered. That means the number of women declined from their highs in 2009 in both 2010 and 2011.

According to the National Civilian Police, 5,681 people were murdered in Guatemalan in 2011. Of that total, 5,050 victims were male and 631 were female. Women comprised 11% of all murder victims in 2011.


In 2010, the PNC recorded 5,906 murders throughout the country. Of that total, 5,265 involved male victims and 625 695 female victims. Women comprised about the same percentage in 2010, 10.6%.


Therefore, overall murders dropped 3.8% (from 5906 to 5,681), male victims declined 4.1% (from 5,265 to 5,050), and female victims increased by 1% (from 625-631).decreased from 695 to 631.


Why have authorities been so much more successful at reducing male victims?


According to the National Civilian Police, 5,681 people were murdered in Guatemalan in 2011. Of that total, 5,050 victims were male and 631 were female. Women comprised 11% of all murder victims in 2011.

In 2010, the PNC recorded 5,906 murders throughout the country. Of that total, 5,265 involved male victims and 695 female victims. Women comprised about 11.8% in 2010.

Therefore, overall murders dropped 3.8% (from 5906 to 5,681), male victims declined 4.1% (from 5,265 to 5,050), and female victims decreased 9.2%  from 695 to 631 (720 died in 2009).

The PNC's statistics from from Carlos Mendoza's blog.