by the El Reportero’s news services
Mauricio Funes
The opposition National Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FMLN) maintains Saturday the sympathy of the Salvadorans with an eye toward the presidential elections, while the ruling party, Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) still looks for its formula.
The aspirant for President for ARENA, former boss of the Civil National Police Rodrigo Avila, said Friday that Salvadoran entrepreneur Arturo Zablah can figure among the pre-candidates to accompany him.
He also assured that another two names are in study and clarified that before November, he will let know who the chosen one will be.
The FMLN duet, integrated by Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez, maintains 3,1 percentual points of electoral preference above the ARENA aspirant, according to the most recent survey by LPG Datos.
The legislative and municipal elections in this Central American nation will take place January 18, 2009 and the presidential ones following March 15. More than 4,2 million Salvadorans are convoked to go to the ballot boxes.
If FMLN wins, it would be the fi rst time that the leftwing leads the country and it would break up with the serial government of rightwing ARENA, now in its fifth consecutive mandate.
Chávez unrepentant over HRW expulsions
Rodrigo Ávila
Over the weekend of Sept. 20 and 21 President Hugo Chávez was severely criticized for his decision to expel the authors of a critical Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela. President Chávez’s abrupt decision to expel the authors of the critical report has played into the hands of his opponents who accuse him of being a protodictator.
It has also given the moderate leftwing governments in Latin America another chance to put clear water between themselves and Chávez. This suggests that Chávez’s increasingly shrill claims to speak for Latin America have a diminishing authority. Chávez starts another world trip today with a meeting with Fidel Castro in Cuba before going to China, Russia, France and Portugal.
Latin America goes it alone as Bolivian conflict explodes
Heads of state from the 12 member countries of the Union of South American nations (Unasur) met in Santiago, Chile, onSeptember 15 to discuss the social and political confl ict in Bolivia, which took a sharp turn for the worse over the last week (see page 3-4). The resulting declaration of support for Bolivia’s President Evo Morales might have rolled out the usual platitudes, such as a commitment to dialogue and the preservation of the country’s institutional integrity, but it carried symbolic value. It suggested that Unasur, created only four months ago, might in time supplant the Organization of American States (OAS) as the foremost regional body, unless there are some meaningful changes in US diplomacy towards Latin America.
Lula pushes for peace in Bolivia
President Lula da Silva has been closely involved in regional diplomatic efforts to bring about a peaceful negotiated solution to the current political crisis in neighbouring Bolivia, where regional prefects agitating for increased autonomy have destabilised the government of President Evo Morales. Brazil has a strong vested economic and political interest in maintaining a secure Bolivia, which provides it with up to a half of its natural gas supplies.
(Latin News and Prensa Latina contributed to this report).
