El Salvador’s leftist FMLN won the country’s presidential election in March by a razor-thin margin, despite pre-election polls that indicated the party would score an easy victory over the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). After a “final scrutiny” of the second-round vote, the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) declared that the FMLN’s Salvador Sanchez Ceren had won a majority of the vote—50.11 percent to 49.89 percent for ARENA’s Norman Quijano. Two weeks later, both the TSE and the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber rejected petitions from ARENA alleging fraud and demanding a ballot-by-ballot recount. Following ARENA’s relatively poor first-round performance, the [...]
With 63 percent of all eligible voters turning out to the polls in El Salvador’s presidential elections on Feb. 2, former guerilla commander Salvador Sanchez Ceren of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) captured 49 percent of the national vote.* Since the country’s electoral rules require the winner to surpass 50 percent, Sanchez Ceren will advance to a March 9 runoff against the second place finisher, Norman Quijano of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), who secured 39 percent of the vote. Sanchez Ceren’s incumbent FMLN party has roots dating back to the country’s 1980s civil war. After competing in [...]
Sometime after 2009 the U.S. government, concerned about the number of suspicious flights that were landing in Honduras, expanded its intelligence-sharing with the government of the Central American country to include aerial interdiction efforts. On two occasions in July 2012, however, the Honduran air force shot down planes suspected of drug trafficking. In neither case did the suspect planes’ occupants threaten Honduran air force aircraft, but all aboard died in both incidents. As a result, in mid-August 2012, the U.S. Southern Command suspended its intelligence-sharing with the Hondurans on aerial interdiction until the following November, when strict procedures had been [...]
