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 [...]
In the last sections of his 2014 State of the Union address, after devoting a good deal of attention to strategies for restoring America’s domestic prosperity, President Barack Obama turned to U.S. foreign policy. The bulk of his comments about America’s place in the world dealt with Middle East issues—four paragraphs about Syria and chemical weapons, the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the search for peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the continuing struggle against extremist organizations that threaten U.S. interests. Earlier in the speech, the president, focusing exclusively on the perceived benefits to American workers, called on Congress [...]
