The “Occupy” movement has spread to Mexico, where thousands of university students have taken to the streets, bringing fresh air to a superficial and flat election campaign and forcing political parties to pay attention to a long-ignored segment of the population.

“Our movement is demanding the democratisation of the media, and accurate, unbiased coverage,” said Sofía Alessio, one of the protesters, who belongs to the organising committee at the private Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM).

“This is an apolitical, peaceful movement,” the political science student told IPS.

There are 2.5 million university students in this country of 112 million people, which means it has one of the lowest higher education enrolment rates in Latin America. There are also seven million young people who neither work nor study.

The biggest student demonstrations in Mexico’s history took place in 1968, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets demanding educational reforms and a more democratic political system, which was dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the political force that governed the country without interruption from 1929 to 2000.

The response by the government of then president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) was brutal. After weeks of student protests, the repression reached a peak on Oct. 2, 1968, when soldiers and their paramilitary allies surrounded Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, which was packed with thousands of peaceful demonstrators, and opened fire on the crowd.

No one has ever been held accountable for the massacre, and the question of the death toll is still controversial, although most sources put the number between 200 and 300.

This time around, the student protests, which are common during election campaigns, are taking aim at “the heavy concentration of the electronic media, which limits freedom of expression and the right to information,” Luís Vázquez, a researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), told IPS.

“It is necessary to democratise the media, to avoid an authoritarian regime. That has become the central demand,” the academic said.

The wave of protests was triggered by a May 11 visit by PRI candidate Enrique Peña to the Jesuit-run Ibero-American University (UIA).

During Peña’s visit, student protesters questioned his human rights record as governor of the state of Mexico from 2005 to 2011.

When the media depicted them as intolerant and sectarian, the students began to protest what they called biased coverage, especially targeting Televisa, Mexico’s leading TV station.

“Young people can have a lot of power if they organise and get involved in politics,” Rolando Cordera, professor emeritus at the economy faculty of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “It’s important for young people to realise the influence they have in society.”

On Jul. 1, Mexicans will elect 500 members of the lower house of Congress and 128 senators, who will be sworn in on Sept. 1, as well as the successor to President Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), who will take office for six years on Dec. 1. State and municipal elections will also be held in 15 of the country’s 32 states.

Out of a total of 77 million registered voters, some 10 million are young people who will be going to the polls for the first time. In 2010, there were nearly 19 million Mexicans between the ages of 20 and 29, according to that year’s census. (Voting is compulsory in Mexico.)

The student protests, which have no clear, visible leaders, have been organised largely over social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The movement has also created a web site to provide information.

“We know that some people will want to make use of the movement for political purposes, but we won’t let that happen,” said Alessio. “We have gotten university students from across the country involved, because we believe that together, we can do more. And it’s not only young people who are going to benefit from the results.”

The Yo Soy 132 (I Am 132) movement, whose name is a symbol of the continuation of the original demonstration by 131 students during Peña’s visit to the UIA, has published a code of ethics declaring that it has no party affiliation, is peaceful, and expresses individual, rather than collective, points of view.

After the demonstration at the UIA hurt the PRI’s image, the party wavered between lashing out at the protesters, saying they were intolerant and maintaining that the left was behind the whole thing, and following a damage control strategy of arguing that all opinions deserved respect.

Karl Marx wrote that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The protest against Peña and the subsequent reaction by his party were reminiscent of a visit to UNAM in 1975 by former President Luís Echeverría, who was practically forced to leave by student demonstrators. As he was leaving the medical school, Echeverría shouted “fascists!” at the protesters

On Wednesday May 23, Yo Soy 132 organised protests in at least 20 large cities around the country.

The phenomenon has already been dubbed “the Mexican Spring” – an allusion to the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries.

Although the movement has some things in common with Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s “Indignados” protests, such as a horizontal structure and the use of social networking sites, it differs in that it is not seeking in-depth changes to the political and economic systems.

“The movement has to go beyond the electoral question. It could come up with an agenda of political and cultural aims,” said Cordera.

From June to November, the resort city of Cancún in southeast Mexico will host a series of conferences on issues of concern to university students, organised by the Foro Mundial de Universitarios (World Federation for University Education).

“The young people’s vote has been reawakened,” Alessio said. “The scope of this is incredibly important, and we hope to achieve our goals.” (END)

“Political power will be fought for metre by metre in the Oct. 30 local and regional elections in Colombia, because this is a country imbued with violence, with different armies disputing different parts of the territory,” said Alejandra Barrios, director of the election observation mission (MOE).

Murders, kidnappings, mass killings and forced displacement of people from their rural homes and land have marred the campaign, in which economic interests have become political spoils, said analysts consulted by IPS.

Between Feb. 2 and Oct. 20, 253 violent election-related incidents were registered in 233 municipalities, according to the MOE, a non-governmental group of analysts and academics from leading educational institutions in Colombia.

The organisation’s report, released on Oct. 20, states that in terms of violence strictly against candidates, the number of cases was five percent higher than in the 2007 regional elections.

In addition, the MOE reported that there is a risk of fraud in 534 municipalities, and a risk of violent incidents in 447 – out of a total of 1,119 municipalities.

For its part, the Interior Ministry reported that as of Oct. 19, 37 candidates had been killed.

In the elections, nearly 102,000 candidates are running for 32 gubernatorial posts, 1,102 mayorships, 418 provincial parliamentary seats, and 17,068 seats on town councils, Barrios told IPS.

“It is a very complex process” in this civil war-torn country of 46 million people, which is divided into 32 department or provinces, each of which has an executive and a legislative governing body of its own, she said. In addition, the large cities have a decentralised administration and local community councils.

The mining industry, one of the priorities of the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, “is playing an important role in the current local and regional elections,” said Barrios.

For example, there are foreign companies waiting for government decisions on mining concessions in different regions, such as Anglo Gold Ashanti, which has been trying for years to operate in the central department of Tolima.

“The restitution of land is another central issue in the campaign, because many mayors and town councillors do not agree with returning to the original owners the land that was violently seized from millions of campesinos (small farmers),” the expert added.

More than four million people forced off their land by the nearly five-decade armed conflict between government forces, far-right paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas stand to benefit from the restitution of their land under the Victims and Land Restitution law passed in June.

The process is to involve more than two million hectares of land from which the owners were forced to leave by illegal armed groups – mainly the paramilitaries – large landowners and even government officials.

Another touchy issue in the regional elections is the question of illegal drug crops like coca, poppies and marijuana.

There is also the issue of the heavy rains that lashed the country in 2010 and this year, “which involved a large amount of resources to administer, added to which promises for reconstruction have become a matter that has been easily manipulated in the campaign,” Barrios said.

“We are talking about large amounts of funds, if we take into account the fact that flooding affected 90 percent of the municipalities,” she added. An estimated 2.8 million dollars were earmarked to compensate and offset the damages caused by the rains.

These are all interests that, according to the MOE, are in play in the midst of the conflict that involves three leftist insurgent groups with different dynamics – the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPR), and especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which are “the most powerful, and tend to declare an ‘armed strike’,” designed to interfere in elections.

And on the other side are the so-called Bacrim (for “bandas criminales” or “criminal bands”) – a new name given by the government to ultra-right-wing groups that arose after the demobilisation of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary militias.

“The Bacrim emerged from the AUC, and mainly have a local reach, although some groups that have appeared are regional, in places such as Casanare (an oil-rich eastern department) or Guajira (a coal-rich northern department),” Barrios said.

She said she was referring to right-wing irregular “armies that have been maintained for nearly 60 years, for different reasons and with different origins, and which have backed different candidates, fomenting the association between illegal activities and politics.”

This history of violence surrounding elections is not new in Colombia. But only in 2006 did it begin to be studied more closely by organisations like the MOE and human rights groups.

“As citizens, and as members of serious social organisations, we realised that we were focusing on specific human rights issues, but were ignoring the red flags of electoral corruption,” she said.

Wholesale violence occurred between 1984 and 1992, with the slaughter of thousands of candidates and supporters of the Patriotic Union (UP), the leftist party that emerged from a peace agreement between the government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) and the FARC.

Persecution of the UP, which had been joined by regional movements of different political tendencies, the Communist Party, and dissidents from the Liberal Party, claimed between 4,000 and 5,000 lives.

In September 2002, after right-wing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) took office, the UP was stripped of its legal status as a party, and surviving UP politicians continue to demand that its status be reinstated.

Other cases of electoral violence claimed high-profile victims like left-wing presidential candidates Jaime Pardo in 1987 and Bernardo Jaramillo and Carlos Pizarro in 1990.

“So we realised that every four years we were taking part in the same ritual of elections that were not held, precisely, in conditions of transparency or freedom or suitable conditions, but under the imposition of armed groups.”

However, “even the most heroic efforts to achieve clean elections have been insufficient,” said Barrios. “That is why we want to continue building democracy, so people understand how decisive their vote is.”

This month the government’s civil registry office presented a new voter registration card containing mechanisms aimed at preventing fraud and guaranteeing transparency, such as a bar code with encrypted information, to be read by a special device.

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 24 2011 (IPS)

President Cristina Fernández’s smashing victory in Argentina, with nearly 54 percent of the vote, raises questions about how she will handle her growing supremacy.

President Cristina Fernández voting in the southern province of Río Gallegos. Credit: Presidency of Argentina

After the polls were closed on Sunday, the president, visibly moved by the outpouring of support she received, called for “national unity,” and said it was necessary to “avoid being distracted by useless confrontations.”

“I have had the honour of being the first woman elected president, and the first woman to be reelected president. What more can I ask for? I just want to contribute and cooperate to help Argentina continue to grow,” she said in her victory speech.

For the first time in the history of Argentina there will be a third consecutive government of the same political force. The first was the administration of Fernández’s husband Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) – who died suddenly of a heart attack a year ago – and the second was the president’s current term.

With 98 percent of the precincts counted, Fernández took close to 54 percent of the vote, followed by 17 percent for Hermes Binner, the socialist governor of the eastern province of Santa Fe.

Fernández heads the Frente para la Victoria, a centre-left faction of the Justicialista (Peronist) Party (PJ) that she and her husband founded. But some observers are now talking about “Cristinismo” instead of “Kirchnerismo”.

That new movement, no longer influenced by Kirchner, is led by a president who is closer to the electorate and who will clash less with weak opposition parties than with right-leaning Peronist provincial “caudillo” or strongmen, analysts say.

And exit polls indicate that in the legislative elections, Fernández regained the working majority in both houses of Congress that she lost in the 2009 mid-term elections.

This could lead to increased concern about concentration of power, since the highly divided opposition fared very poorly at the polls.

In the campaign, many of the opposition candidates were short on specifics and new ideas and merely raised the spectre of a personality cult and of the control Fernández would have with an expected majority in Congress. They also alluded to the governing party’s alleged aim of taking steps to make it possible for the president to stay in power indefinitely.

They were referring to the possibility of moves to replace the presidentialist system with a parliamentary one that would make the indefinite reelection of a prime minister possible, since under the current system a president can only serve a maximum of two terms in a row.

Sociologist Artemio López with the Equis polling firm told IPS that “these fears are an exaggeration.” The governing faction, the Frente para la Victoria (Front for Victory) will not have an absolute majority of its own, he said, and to make such sweeping changes it would need the backing of allies that do not always vote in favour of its initiatives.

López said Sunday’s elections “do not represent a risk of hegemonic power, or anything close to that.”

After 12 member of the lower house of Congress defected from the Front for Victory in recent years, and in the wake of the opposition’s strong performance in the 2009 elections, the opposition majority managed to block the 2010 and 2011 budgets, and to freeze a government bill that would put a limit on foreign ownership of land.

Meanwhile, despite the poor showing of the Radical Civic Union – whose presidential candidate Ricardo Alfonsín came in third, with 12 percent of the vote – the centrist party will remain the second-strongest force in Congress.

There are some who believe the results of the elections could mark the start of a “Cristinista era,” sociologist Ricardo Sidicaro, author of “Los tres peronismos” (The Three Peronisms) and other political books, told IPS.

There is currently no Justicialista Party as such in power, said Sidicaro, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, who said the Front for Victory is sustained by agreements with provincial branches of the PJ.

But, he said, these agreements are not strong enough to be called alliances. In fact, many provincial legislators do not consider themselves representatives of their party or their voters, but of the governors of their provinces, he added.

These groups have provincial leaders with presidential aspirations, said Sidicaro, such as the governor of Buenos Aires province Daniel Scioli, who was reelected on Sunday,

For now, the central government has kept these ambitions in check, thanks to Fernández’s strong support among voters and the flow of government funds to the provinces for public works and social policies.

But these caudillos are not completely loyal to the government at times of crisis or when the president’s popularity wanes, as occurred in 2008, when some of them abandoned Fernández.

In that respect, “Cristinismo” could be a movement that pushes through a constitutional reform to keep the president in power, or “it could be an opportunity to create a new party,” according to Sidicaro.

In either case, he said, the conflict would not be between the government and the opposition, but between the executive branch and the provincial governors with presidential aspirations who are not at all keen on the idea of the president finding a way to stay in power beyond the end of her next four-year term, in 2016.

Fabián Perechodnik with the Poliarquía consultancy firm said “a new stage” is beginning, in which Fernández will be “the only protagonist.”

“At first, her government had the stamp of Kirchner, and after his death it was his memory that marked her government, but now she is the exclusive figure in centre-stage,” he said.

That strong leadership role will allow the governing force to line up behind her, at least in the early years of her second term, which starts on Dec. 10 – until the end of her term nears and the fight for succession begins.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 21 2011 (IPS)

The polls all point to a crushing first-round victory for Argentine President Cristina Fernández in Sunday’s elections, due to her administration’s successful social and economic policies and the wave of sympathy she received after her husband’s death, analysts say.

Credit: Argentina Senate

The candidate for the centre-left Frente para la Victoria (Front for Victory), the largest faction in the governing Justicialista (Peronist) Party, is running against a diverse and highly divided opposition that political scientists say offers no concrete alternatives.

The latest poll on voting intentions by Management & Fit gave Fernández 54 percent support, followed by socialist candidate Hermes Binner, governor of the eastern province of Santa Fe, with 11.6 percent.

Fernández needs just 45 percent of the vote, or 40 percent with a 10 percentage point lead over her closest rival, to avoid a runoff.

The projections confirm what happened in August, in the country’s first-ever open and simultaneous nationwide presidential primary, in which voting was mandatory, when the president was elected as a candidate by more than 50 percent of all voters.

But now the polls point to an even higher level of support, and an even larger gap between her and the numerous opposition candidates who are trailing far behind.

Her main rival is no longer Ricardo Alfonsín of the centrist Radical Civic Union, who is expected to continue losing support and to yield second place to Binner.

They are followed by the governor of the western province of San Luis, Alberto Rodríguez Saa, and former caretaker president Eduardo Duhalde (2001-2002) – both of whom come from right-wing factions in the Peronist party – with five and four percent ratings, respectively, according to Management & Fit.

The leader of the centrist Civic Coalition, Elisa Carrió, is expected to suffer a major setback with respect to the 2007 presidential elections, when she came in second with 23 percent of the vote. Her support now is below one percent.

The polling company also found that 14.3 percent of respondents were still undecided.

The question is why is the gap between Fernández and the rest of the candidates so gaping? What are the key factors in the president’s expected triumph?

Mariel Fornoni of Management & Fit pointed out to IPS that in 2009, support for the president had already started to improve after a drop caused by the lengthy standoff with large landowners and agribusiness over an increase in taxes on farm exports.

To that was added the solidarity she received after her husband, former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), unexpectedly died of a heart attack on Oct. 27, 2010.

But it is not just about sympathy. Her popularity is also due to the high levels of economic growth and strong social policies, especially the conditional cash transfer programmes and expansion of social coverage to vast segments of society.

A survey by the Public Opinion Study Centre (CEOP) found that voters saw these as the government’s main achievements, along with the economic stability in the midst of the global crisis.

The Universal Child Allowance introduced in late 2009 grants 64 dollars a month for each child under 18, up to a maximum of five children, to parents who are unemployed, work in the informal sector of the economy, or work as domestics. Pregnant women also receive the allowance. In the case of disabled children, the monthly allowance is four times that.

The cash transfer, which is now received by the families of more than 3.6 million children and adolescents in this South American country of 40 million people, is conditional on school attendance and keeping up-to-date on vaccines and health checkups.

This policy was mentioned by 38 percent of those polled by CEOP as the Fernández administration’s biggest achievement.

In addition, the Education Ministry has so far distributed, since 2009, 1.7 million laptops to public secondary school students, who keep them until they have finished their studies.

The rise in pensions and expansion of social security coverage to older adults who did not previously have an income were mentioned by 32 percent of respondents as a major accomplishment, while the economic stability despite the crisis sweeping the world was the third achievement, cited by 28 percent.

Since Kirchner, Fernández’s late husband, took office in 2003, Argentina’s GDP has grown at an average of seven percent a year. And after the country defaulted on its foreign debt in late 2001, the debt was successfully restructured, and the government began to make regular payments without any setbacks.

Since then, the government has taken on no new debt, because it would be charged high interest rates due to the default. Nevertheless, the economy has posted a budget surplus and trade surplus, foreign reserves stand at around 50 billion dollars, poverty has steadily declined, and employment is growing.

Continuing concerns include high inflation and, especially, the government’s refusal to address the issue. In 2007, the Kirchner administration overhauled the national statistics institute, INDEC, whose reports have been suspect ever since.

The government claims inflation is under 10 percent a year. But according to estimates by private economists, the annual average is between 20 and 25 percent.

Statistics on poverty also vary widely.

The Equis local consulting firm says that although the universal child allowance has helped millions of people leave poverty behind, 20 percent of the population is still poor. However, the government puts the proportion at below 10 percent.

“The president and her government have an approval rating of around 64 percent today,” said Management & Fit’s Fornoni.

In the case of the rest of the candidates, with the exception of Binner, their images are more negative than positive among voters.

Management & Fit projects that even in Buenos Aires, where centre-right Mauricio Macri, one of Fernández’s most prominent opponents, was reelected as mayor this year, the president could take as much as 42 percent of the vote Sunday.

In the city’s lower-income suburbs, the distance between Fernández and her rivals is much larger. In these areas, she has over 70 percent support, while that proportion climbs to 80 percent in some of the poorer provinces, like Santiago del Estero in the northwest.

“Voters recognise that she has governed well,” said Eduardo Fidanza with the Poliarquía polling firm.

He also said that against all expectations, after she was widowed, the president “wrote her own script.”

He was alluding to the fears that were stirred up after Kirchner’s death by many who said Fernández would not be able to govern without her husband, the political leader of the Frente para la Victoria, the Peronist faction that they founded together.

Fernández became more open to dialogue, less confrontational and more magnanimous since her husband died, and these qualities, according to the pollsters, are also recognised by voters, who are expected to back her in even greater numbers than in 2007, when she won a first-round victory with 45 percent of the vote.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 19 2011 (IPS)

Argentina’s weak, fragmented opposition is going to the polls on Sunday offering neither strong leaders nor clear alternatives capable of winning voters away from President Cristina Fernández, who is expected to easily win a first-round victory.

Socialist candidate Hermes Binner, expected to come in second. Credit: Binner's presidential campaign

In the first-ever nationwide primary election held in August, Fernández garnered just over 50 percent of the total votes cast, followed by Ricardo Alfonsín of the centrist Radical Civic Union, who took 12 percent. But the polls now put socialist candidate Hermes Binner in second place.

Binner, who is governor of the eastern province of Santa Fe, came in fourth place overall in the party primaries, but today has ratings of over 16 percent. Although many of his proposals are not so different from Fernández’s policies, he seeks to differentiate himself in terms of governing style.

Professor Carla Carrizo at the private University del Salvador told IPS that in democracy “there is always some room for alternatives, even with governments that have been very successful in terms of performance like the current administration – but that margin is created by strong leaders.

“In this case, I believe that among the opposition leaders, the predominant idea is that they are not competing for the presidency – that is, for beating Fernández, but for winning second place,” and in that context “they haven’t offered any real alternatives.”

The latest poll by the Centre of Public Opinion Studies, published over the weekend, found that 63.5 percent of respondents believed the opposition did not present any alternative model, 22.9 percent said it did, and 13.6 percent said they did not know.

In general, the candidates of the ideologically diverse opposition have not put an emphasis on their proposed policies, with the exception of Binner, who offers a clearly outlined programme, and Alberto Rodríguez Saa, the candidate of a dissident right wing faction of the Peronist Party, who has campaigned on the basis of the achievements of his current administration as governor of the western province of San Luis.

In one of his TV spots, Alfonsín, for example, addresses the president rather than the voters, telling her she will “probably” win but that he “doesn’t believe a word she says” and that he will not support any moves that would pave the way for her “indefinite re-election”.

Fernández needs just 45 percent of the vote, or more than 40 percent with a 10 percentage point lead over her closest rival, to avoid a second round.

The Ipsos-Mora y Araujo polling company found that more respondents had a positive than negative image of candidates only in the cases of Fernández and Binner: 65 against 33 percent in the case of the president and 39 against 32 percent in the case of the Santa Fe governor.

Large proportions of those polled reject the rest of the candidates. For instance, although the only public post Alfonsín has held is that of deputy in the lower house of Congress, 61 percent of respondents have a negative image of him. Analysts attribute this to a misguided election strategy.

The son of late former president Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) refused to form a progressive coalition with Binner, and instead forged an alliance with centre-right Peronist businessman Francisco De Narváez, candidate for governor of the eastern province of Buenos Aires, the country’s most populous.

Former caretaker president Eduardo Duhalde (2001-2002), whose image is negative among 74 percent of respondents, is the candidate of another centre-right dissident Peronist faction. Although he came in third in the nationwide primaries, he may come in fourth on Sunday.

Political analyst Rosendo Fraga, the director of the New Majority Studies Centre, a local think tank, told IPS that “the 50 percent of citizens who voted for the opposition in the primaries show that there is some space for an alternative.

“The cause of the opposition’s failure lies in the lack of a unifying leader and its inability to establish a coalition. There is space for opposition; what is lacking is a leadership with the capacity of channelling it,” he said.

But although a few candidates might have some affinities, the creation of a broad opposition alliance was never likely, since the leaders range from one end of the political spectrum to the other.

Binner referred to this issue when he was asked about the lack of unity among the opposition in the current elections. “What matters now is not beating the front-runner. The only reason for the opposition to unite is against a dictatorial regime, but that’s not the situation here today,” he said.

As Carrizo noted, the most interesting aspect of the elections will not be the president’s landslide victory, but how big a gap there will be between her and her nearest rival.

“When the competitiveness is reduced to these levels, above and beyond how badly the opposition has done things, there is something structural that explains these numbers,” the professor said.

In her view, besides the government’s strong social and economic performance, the factors include the consolidation of patronage ties between the Fernández administration and governors and mayors, a law on parties that favours fragmentation, and the primary elections that the opposition “was unable or did not know how to use efficiently.”

The primaries, which were held for the first time to designate single presidential candidates in each party or coalition, were seen by the opposition as an opportunity to determine who was best-placed to compete in a runoff with the president.

But instead, the primaries served as a nationwide poll that merely demonstrated the strong popular support enjoyed by Fernández – whose husband, former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), died suddenly of a heart attack in October 2010 – and highlighted how far ahead of her contenders she was.

Since then, with the exception of Binner, support for all of the other candidates has declined.

One of the candidates who fared especially poorly in the primaries was Elisa Carrió, representing the centrist Civic Coalition, who took a mere 3.2 percent of the total votes.

Carrío had been a strong competitor against Fernández in the 2007 elections, when she came in second with 23 percent of the vote. But on Sunday her share could shrink even more, according to analysts.

Harshly criticising the personality of the president more than her actual performance, Carrió gradually lost support, and is now talking about retiring to the country.

At this time, lashing out at Fernández brings more negative than positive results, according to the advice given to the legislative candidates of the coalition of Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, which has no presidential candidate.

The centre-right businessman, who early this year considered the possibility of running against the president, decided to stay out of the presidential race and merely seek re-election as mayor.

His coalition’s congressional candidates have understood that if they want to win votes, they should avoid speaking out against the Fernández administration.

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 12 2011 (IPS)

A retired general and a populist tycoon will face off for the Guatemalan presidency in a Nov. 6 runoff, since no candidate won 50 percent of the vote in Sunday’s elections.

Retired general Otto Pérez Molina of the right-wing Patriot Party, a former head of military intelligence in the 1980s who is accused by human rights groups of committing war crimes during the bloody 1960-1996 armed conflict and of answering to the interests of the country’s most powerful business groups, took 36 percent of the vote.

His closest challenger was Manuel Baldizón of the populist LIDER party, who was accused of irregularities when he was a member of Congress. The powerful provincial businessman, whose campaign was marked by populist and controversial promises – for example, that he would take the Guatemalan national soccer team to the World Cup – won 23 percent of the vote.

With 97 percent of the ballots tallied, Eduardo Suger, an academic from the right-wing CREO party, came in third with 16.2 percent.

The only left-wing candidate, Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú, who represented the Broad Front coalition, was one of the candidates trailing the pack of 10 contenders, with just over three percent of the vote.

At 65 percent, voter turnout in Sunday’s general elections was the highest seen since 1985.

Despite an atmosphere of civic celebration, incidents were reported in remote parts of the country, including the burning of ballots, clashes between members of rival parties, and isolated accusations of irregularities.

But despite a high level of election-related violence during the campaign, which was described as “alarming” by the Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos – the ombudsman’s office – and fears of election-day violence and fraud, international observers said the vote went smoothly.

“The process has gone ahead with complete normality, despite a few isolated incidents in certain areas that had been classified as red zones, where something could happen,” Carmen Diez Orejas, Spain’s ambassador to Guatemala, told IPS.

“The general atmosphere has been one of fiesta, an opportunity for voters to pronounce themselves and make choices about the future of all Guatemalans for the next few years,” the diplomat added.

José Dávila, coordinator of Civismo Electoral 2011, a coalition of civil society organisations that observed the elections, told IPS that voters “won first prize in comportment in the elections, because they legitimised the process, above and beyond both isolated and structural irregularities.”

In that respect, the activist pointed to delays by the electoral court in announcing the results, said political parties were still bussing in voters to polling stations, and said the candidates’ campaign pledges were based on vague promises, rather than concrete solutions to real problems.

This nation of 14 million people is one of the Latin American countries lagging farthest behind in economic and social terms. One of the biggest obstacles is the high rate of poverty, which affects over half of the population, while 17 percent of the population is classified as extremely poor, according to United Nations figures.

This Central American country is also one of the most violent in the world, with a murder rate of 48 per 100,000, according to the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Central American Human Development Report 2009-2010. That is in comparison to a Latin America average of 25 per 100,000 and a global average of nine per 100,000.

But 98 percent of the 15 to 20 murders a day go unsolved and unpunished, according to the U.N.-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

The weakness of the political system, where parties often respond to powerful private interest groups rather than the public good, is another of the major pending challenges for strengthening democracy in the country, analysts say.

“This is the time to carry out in-depth reforms of the electoral and political party laws, with participation by society as a whole,” Dávila said.

Guatemala has a long history of coups d’etat, strong men and dictatorships. But the constitution adopted in 1985 began to usher in a rule of law, by limiting the president to one four-year term to keep leaders from perpetuating themselves in power.

However, social activists and experts are calling for major reforms of the election laws, in order to further strengthen the democratic system.

“I don’t agree with the call for reforms; what is needed is a new law, that responds to 21st century needs,” Oscar Bolaños, a former president of the electoral court, told IPS.

Among other aspects in need of revision, he said, are oversight of campaign financing, the requirements for creating a political party, and the definition of election crimes.

Civil society organisations have insistently argued that because the country’s political parties are financed by huge private donations, politicians are beholden to vested interests after they are elected. They also complain that the parties do not invest in training and preparing political leaders, who often end up entangled in corruption scandals, which have no legal consequences.

Guatemalan voters will now have to decide between Baldizón, 41, who describes himself as the “candidate of the people” and whose campaign pledges have caused controversy. For example, he promised workers an extra month’s salary a year, and proposed a five percent flat tax on income and earnings, to replace the 12 percent sales tax – in a country which already has one of the lowest tax burdens in Latin America.

Meanwhile, 60-year-old Pérez Molina, whose party has a clenched fist as its logo and whose campaign slogan is “Iron fist, head, and heart”, has promised to crack down hard on crime by strengthening the police and army, and to promote employment through incentives for investment in tourism, exports and mining.

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 9 2011 (IPS)

“Women have more opportunities nowadays to participate in the economic, social and political development of the country, but this has still not improved the quality of their lives,” said Laura Reyes, one of the three women candidates for vice president of Guatemala.

Women candidates on campaign billboards in Guatemala City. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

An unprecedented number of women are standing in the elections. Three women are running for president, and three more for the vice presidency, out of a total of 10 presidential and vice presidential tickets. In contrast, in 2003 there was only one woman vice presidential candidate.

Women’s votes will also be vitally important, because 52 percent of those registered to vote this year are women, whereas in 2003 they were 44 percent, according to official records.

But in spite of women’s increased presence in politics, fundamental changes have still not taken place in women’s way of life, experts told IPS. They concurred that one major shortcoming in Guatemalan democracy is the absence of a gender perspective.

Guatemala’s elections are taking place just as Latin American women’s organisations are debating how to make democracies more gender-inclusive, on the occasion of the United Nations International Day of Democracy, Thursday Sept. 15.

“At age seven, only 54 percent of Maya girls are in school, compared with 71 percent of Maya boys and 75 percent of Ladina (mixed descent) girls,” says a study carried out in Guatemala in 2007 by the U.S.-based Population Council.

According to official figures, 40 percent of Guatemala’s 14 million people are indigenous, although NGOs like Refugees International or the United Nations refugee agency put the proportion much higher.

Seventy-three percent of working women are employed in the informal sector, where labour rights are precarious, according to the Third Report on Labour Markets in Central America and the Dominican Republic, by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Central American Integration System.

This country is also one of the most dangerous for women in the Americas. From 2000 to 2010, according to police records, there were more than 5,200 femicides (gender-related murders of women) in Guatemala.

That is why vice presidential candidate Reyes wants urgent action to support women, including credit and training that are “extremely necessary” for overcoming discrimination against women’s development.

Dora Amalia Taracena, of Convergencia Cívico Política de Mujeres (CONVERGEMUJER), a women’s civil and political coalition, questioned whether Guatemala really has “true democracy,” because “if everyone is to be equal, women’s participation must be raised to the level of men’s.”

Taracena pointed out that there is currently not a single woman cabinet minister, while there are only 19 women lawmakers out of 158. And just one of the 13 Supreme Court justices is a woman.

“We have been making proposals since 1992 for a quota law (for women candidates), and now we are seeking equal numbers of women candidates occupying alternate positions (with men) on the lists for elected posts. But none of these proposals have been adopted because the ‘machista’, patriarchal model of society persists,” she told IPS.

In Central America, only Costa Rica, Honduras and Panama have established a quota system to promote women’s political participation. El Salvador, and Nicaragua where general elections will be held Nov. 6, have no quota laws.

Taracena doubts that the unusually large number of women candidates in these elections will translate into a greater presence of women in positions of power. “Many women are standing for president, vice president and mayor’s offices, but how many are likely to be elected?” she asked.

Furthermore, if a woman is elected there is no guarantee that she will fight for women’s issues, the expert said. “A candidate’s platform or programme is one thing, but what she actually does in office is quite another,” she said.

Taracena emphasised that when women in government positions do achieve positive results, they are treated differently than men, as happened to Sandra Torres, the ex-wife of social democratic President Álvaro Colom.

Torres, who formerly ran the government’s social programmes, including “Mi familia progresa” (My Family Is Making Progress) which provides poor families with a monthly stipend of 39 dollars on condition their children attend school and keep up-to-date with medical check-ups, was harshly criticised by the opposition for allegedly using the plan as a clientelist mechanism and for an alleged lack of transparency.

“I’m sure that a man in her position would have been praised to the skies, since thanks to these programmes many families now have enough to eat,” in a country where half the population lives in poverty, Taracena said.

Torres and Colom divorced in April so that she could stand as a presidential candidate in the elections. But the Supreme Court ruled her ineligible on the grounds that the divorce was a ploy to evade the constitutional ban against family members of a sitting president running for the country’s top job.

Ileana Alamilla of the “Más mujeres mejor política” (More Women, Better Politics) group told IPS: “It’s a good thing for more women to take part in politics, but many of the candidates have not been empowered through involvement in women’s struggles, and others have no real chance of getting elected.”

According to a study by the group, there are 71 women standing for 31 national seats in Congress, but only 18 are placed high enough on candidate lists to actually stand a chance of being elected. A similar situation applies to the provincial constituencies, which elect the remaining lawmakers.

Alamilla stressed that women lawmakers in the present legislature have achieved a great deal. In the last four years Congress has passed 10 laws that address women’s rights, including a law against femicide and one on safe motherhood.

Martha Sicán, the mayor of San Juan Sacatepéquez, a city of over 200,000 people located 31 kilometres from Guatemala City, told IPS that doors to political participation are opening because “people have seen that women work responsibly and honestly.”

“They say women shouldn’t do this; since they do not make the decisions at home, they should not make them in the municipality. But we have worked honestly and transparently and people have noticed that,” she said.

The mayor, who is seeking re-election, created a municipal women’s office and has promoted programmes for training women in productive activities and for addressing violence against women. She gives public financial reports twice a year.

“Perceptions about women have changed a lot, and in two further electoral terms, women’s participation will be more equal,” with real weight for women in Guatemala’s democracy and development, Sicán concluded.

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Aug 22 2011 (IPS)

Activists in Guatemala are alarmed at the prospect of a victory by the right in the September general elections, recalling the dismal records of past regimes in the areas of human rights, the economy and justice.

On Sept. 11, Guatemalans will elect social democratic President Álvaro Colom’s successor. With just three weeks to go, the polls show that retired General Otto Pérez of the right-wing Partido Patriota (PP – Patriotic Party) has a wide lead over his rivals.

In a Jul. 2-Aug. 8 CID Gallup poll, 29 percent of respondents said they supported Pérez, while 13 percent backed Manuel Baldizón of the populist Libertad Democrática Renovada (LIDER – Renewed Democratic Freedom party), 26 percent supported other candidates and 32 percent were undecided.

Sandra Torres, President Colom’s ex-wife, was until recently running second in the polls, with nearly 15 percent support. However, the constitutional court ruled out her candidacy because Colom was in office at the time of their divorce, and Guatemala’s constitution bars family members of any sitting president from running for office.

After Torres was forced to pull out of the race there were some shifts in the electoral scenario, but Pérez remained at the top of the polls. Civil society leaders are expressing concern about the future, especially in terms of human rights, economic development and the independence of the judiciary.

“People’s concept of a PP government is that it would be authoritarian, especially when addressing security issues. The party logo is a raised clenched fist, and the PP is known for its support of ‘iron fist’ (hard-line) policies,” Catalina Soberanis, the head of the Central American Institute for Political Studies (INCEP), told IPS.

“Iron fist” policies, characterised by a repressive approach to violent crime, are all too familiar in Central America. They were enforced in El Salvador between 2004 and 2009 by then president Antonio Saca, and in Honduras from 2002 to 2006 by president Ricardo Maduro, both of whom were severely criticised by human rights organisations that accused them of excessive force and abuses against the civilian population in the name of security.

But voters in Guatemala are also anxious about the urgent need for extensive restructuring of economic policy.

“The fiscal deficit has to be tackled. If Pérez becomes president, as a conservative he will have to decide whether to seek dialogue or, if he has a parliamentary majority, agree to overhaul the tax system,” Soberanis said.

In July, Colom slashed the budget for government expenditure by some 275 million dollars in a bid to combat the fiscal deficit which stands at 575 million dollars. The cuts hurt spending on health, security and attempts to strengthen the justice system

“The biggest and most sensitive challenge lying in wait for the future government is comprehensive modernisation of tax policy, ranging from revenue to contraband to corruption,” because the viability of its plans will depend on this, Raquel Zelaya of the Association for Social Studies and Research (ASIES), a private local think tank, told IPS, describing the fiscal scenario for 2012 as “very complicated.”

The PP has close ties with the business community, a large part of which is financing Pérez’s campaign, which has cost over seven million dollars so far.

Beyond economic aspects, Zelaya said other retired military officers will be Pérez’s close collaborators if he is elected, although she clarified that she was not referring to “a militarisation of Guatemalan society.”

Human rights activist Claudia Samayoa, however, disagreed. She told IPS: “Pérez’s political team includes a significant number of generals and colonels with backgrounds in the intelligence service and military operations, who participated actively in the design of genocidal policies during the armed internal conflict.”

Zelaya said Pérez denies genocide ever took place in Guatemala, which “demonstrates a cynical attitude and insults the intelligence of Guatemalans.

“If torture, femicides (gender-based murders of women) or sexual violence are committed in future by state security forces, a Pérez government would not recognise these crimes for what they are, because he has not done so with regard to the past,” she said.

The United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission found that during the 1960-1996 war waged by the armed forces, police and paramilitary allies against left-wing guerrillas, state agents committed genocide against rural Maya Indians during counterinsurgency operations.

If the PP adopted an iron-fisted approach, the country could see forced evictions, repression of social protests, and support for mining and hydroelectric initiatives to the detriment of local development, rights activist Samayoa said.

Hortencia Simón of the Political Association of Maya Women (MOLOJ), a local NGO, told IPS that the agenda of indigenous organisations is largely incompatible not only with that of the PP but also with the rest of the political parties in Guatemala.

For example, she said, the PP supports an expansion of mining activity, while the native Maya communities are mobilising popular opposition.

She also noted that former military personnel who participated in human rights violations during the war are currently being put on trial. “But if the next government is headed by a military officer, chances are high that justice will not prosper,” she said.

PP lawmaker Gudy Rivera told IPS distinctions should cease to be made between soldiers or guerrillas “because the war is over.” He said he was confident that matters of security will be decided in consensus with the different segments of the population.

“We are not a party of improvisation, and neither is our presidential candidate. We know the security situation in the country has been worsening, and we will appoint the best qualified people to government security positions,” he added.

Regarding contracts to be awarded to companies to build hydropower dams, Rivera said the PP would respect current legislation and public opinion. “Nothing will be done that is against the law, or against the will of the people of Guatemala,” he emphasised.

Excerpt:

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jun 6 2011 (IPS)

For the first time in the democratic history of Peru, a left-wing candidate has won the presidency. With the support of an overwhelming majority of voters in the provinces, retired lieutenant colonel Ollanta Humala defeated his right-wing rival Keiko Fujimori, whose strongest backing was in the capital, in Sunday’s runoff.

Ollanta Humala at end-of-campaign rally in Lima. Credit: Gana Perú Campaign

“We are going to bring about a major transformation,” Humala said near midnight Sunday, addressing thousands of cheering supporters in the Dos de Mayo plaza in Lima. The crowd had been waiting for him for hours in the square, a favourite staging ground for protest demonstrations and strikes.

Before making his victory speech, in which he promised a government of national reconciliation, Humala waited for the first official results, which were delayed until after 10 pm local time.

According to ONPE officials, the delay was due to the fact that by 8 pm local time, when the first projections were due to be announced, the only ballots that had been tallied were from the capital, the main port city, Callao, and the provincial capitals along the coast, where Fujimori was winning by a broad margin.

“All of the exit polls pointed to a victory by Humala and his supporters were already celebrating, so we decided to wait for more ballots to be counted from the provinces, to have more realistic results,” a source at ONPE told IPS.

In response to the delay, Humala supporters headed to the ONPE offices to complain. But the first preliminary results already indicated that Humala would beat Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who is in prison for 25 years for corruption and human rights violations.

“There are two important political results coming out of these elections: for the first time a coalition including the left has won the national elections, and it has also managed to defeat all of the powers-that-be: the economic elites, the media, the (Catholic) Church, the government of the moment, and the rival candidate,” sociologist Sinesio López at the Catholic Pontifical University of Peru told IPS.

López, who was one of Humala’s professors when the candidate was earning his master’s degree in political science, said that throughout the campaign, and especially between the first and second rounds, all of these power groups carried out an intense smear campaign against the candidate.

The country’s business leaders questioned Humala’s announced economic policies, raising the spectre of a wave of dismissals, capital flight and loss of investment, López said.

After Humala’s triumph was announced, Peru’s main stock indexes fell more than eight percentage points before the Lima stock exchange suspended trade. Mining company shares fell the most.

Peru is one of the world’s top producers of a number of minerals, including silver, tellurium, copper, tin, bismuth, lead, molybdenum, arsenic, gold and selenium, and is home to Latin America’s biggest gold mine, Yanacocha.

Humala triumphed in 20 of Peru’s 25 regions, including the areas most heavily affected by social conflicts such as protests against mining, in which demonstrators have been injured and killed in the past few years.

One example is the southern highlands region of Arequipa, where the Southern Peru gold mining company operates, and where Humala took 66.4 percent of the vote and Fujimori just 33.6 percent, according to the preliminary results.

The voting patterns in the runoff were similar to those seen in the first round, on Apr. 10: Humala’s strongest support was in the impoverished southern highland regions, where a majority of the population is indigenous.

It was in those areas that the Fujimori regime had carried out a controversial forced sterilisation campaign in the 1990s, presented as part of the government’s anti-poverty strategy.

In Huancavelica in the southwest, the country’s poorest region, Humala garnered nearly 71 percent of the vote, compared to a mere 29 percent for Fujimori.

And in the neighbouring Ayacucho, another poor region that was among those hardest-hit by the violence during the 1980-2000 civil war, Humala won 72 percent against less than 28 percent for Fujimori.

“This is due to demand for economic growth with social inclusion,” López told IPS. “Humala will have to implement very aggressive social policies in the regions not yet reached by the economic boom.”

Fujimori, on the other hand, won by a comfortable margin in Lima, with nearly 57 percent of the vote against Humala’s 43 percent.

She was also ahead in the four northern coastal regions: Tumbes, Piura, Lambayeque and La Libertad, traditional strongholds of President Alan García’s APRA party.

Harvard political science professor Steve Levitsky, who is in Peru studying the political system, said one of Fujimori’s big mistakes was her failure to distance herself from her father’s legacy, which was marked by corruption, human rights crimes and excesses like the mass sterilisation of Andean indigenous women.

“Keiko Fujimori recognised what she called ‘errors’ on the part of her father’s government,” he told IPS. “But at the same time, her team included people from her father’s regime, who formed part of an administration where corruption and human rights violations reigned. That was one of her big mistakes.”

Voting is compulsory in Peru, where just under 40 percent of voters are between the ages of 20 and 35, and 34 percent of voters are in Lima.

* With reporting by Ángel Páez in Lima.

Excerpt:

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Jun 3 2011 (IPS)

After the most polarised election race in decades, Peruvians will go to the polls Sunday to choose not only a new president but also to decide whether to stick with the current neoliberal economic policies or to opt for reforms to reduce inequality and marginalisation.

According to analysts of different stripes, it became clear that what voters will decide on is the country’s development model, on May 29, during the only debate between the two rivals in Sunday’s runoff: leftwing nationalist Ollanta Humala and rightwing lawmaker Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the former president who ushered in the current model, Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Tension is at an uprecedented level in Peru ahead of the vote, while opinion polls show the two candidates neck and neck in the closest race since the 1960s.

The latest survey by the Ipsos Apoyo polling firm shows Fujimori in the lead, with 50.5 percent support, but just one point ahead of Humala, who has 49.5 percent. According to another leading pollster, Imasen, Humala is the front-runner, with 43.8 percent support, but barely ahead of Fujimori, with 42.5 percent.

The director of the University of the Pacific Research Centre, Eduardo Morón, says voters are fully aware of the significance of these elections, but are unsure of what a victory by either candidate would mean in practical terms – which explains that around 15 percent of poll respondents are still undecided.

Morón told IPS that “People aren’t clear about the consequences of following one alternative or the other,” in a contest in which the polls show that the supporters of one of the candidates are often rabidly opposed to the rival candidate.

“Some believe that greater state intervention would bring economic improvements and reduce extreme poverty in the countryside, but these are goals that cannot be achieved overnight, regardless of the political will or resources made available,” the researcher said.

Even those that are critical of Humala, like the private Peruvian Institute of Economics (IPE), recognise the need for in-depth reforms of the country’s economic and social model.

“In the campaign, Fujimori has been portrayed as the candidate of continuity and Humala as the candidate of change, but it’s not clear to voters what that really implies,” Pablo Secada at the IPE told IPS.

“Of course major changes in economic and public policies are necessary, in order to build a more inclusive model,” he added.

As an example of the changes needed, he said the state-run “Banco de la Nación should set up branches in those regions which have not been reached by any other bank, instead of granting loans indiscriminately to public employees.”

The votes of the poor will play a crucial role on Sunday. In the first round of voting, on Apr. 10, Humala won in the regions with the highest poverty rates, like the rural highland regions of Apurimac, Huancavelica and Ayacucho.

According to analysts the reason for this is that while poverty has been reduced sharply in the last five years, the improvements were felt much more in urban than in rural areas, which accentuated the country’s deep social inequalities.

The National Institute of Statistics and Informatics reported that from 2004 to 2009, poverty fell 43.1 percent in urban areas but only 13.6 percent in rural areas. The official poverty rate in this South American country of 30 million people currently stands at 31.4 percent.

The difference explains why the polls show that the urban poor will not vote the same as the rural poor, although it is clear that in both segments there is a large proportion of people who are still undecided, partly due to the lack of clarity in the candidates’ proposals.

“There is still a great deal we don’t know about what is happening in the categories ‘D’ and ‘E’, where there are big pockets of poverty,” political scientist Eduardo Dargent, author of the study “Precarious Democrats”, told IPS.

Peru’s socioeconomic categories are A through E, with E being the poorest.

The analyst pointed out that in 2006, these segments of the population mainly voted for Humala who, like this time, won the first round of elections. However, he was defeated in the runoff by conservative President Alán García.

“But this time, both Humala and Fujimori made it to the second round thanks to support from the D and E categories,” so “it would appear that socioeconomic level will not be the defining factor” on this occasion, Dargent said.

“Some analysts say the different positions among voters might have more to do with different ways of relating to the state: whether they are interested in patronage-style benefits, offered by Keiko, or more systematic social changes offered by Humala,” the political scientist said.

But he added that there are many open questions: “The urban poor back Keiko and the rural poor back Ollanta? What proposals are attractive to the people who are still undecided, in those segments of society?”

Fujimori’s party, Fuerza 2011, has handed out t-shirts, cooking utensils and even food, in an open show of patronage, since unlike in other countries these practices are not banned by the election laws in Peru.

Socorro Arce, Fuerza 2011 spokeswoman in the southern highlands region of Ayacucho, said “The campaign presents were welcomed, especially by mothers in categories D and E.

“We simply want to reach the disadvantaged so they will remember the considerations that Alberto Fujimori had towards the neediest segments of society,” Arce said, explaining the distribution of gifts bearing the candidate’s logo and image.

Keiko Fujimori repeatedly appeals to the memory of her father’s regime, and says her government will build on, and improve, his legacy. Alberto Fujimori is in prison for 25 years for human rights crimes and corruption.

Dargent said that during the campaign for the second round vote, Humala has made an effort to be self-critical, and has reached out to voters in the centre – efforts that his rival has not made.

But he added that “I don’t know if this will be important in terms of winning votes. Apparently Fujimori’s voters, especially the groups supporting her campaign, are not demanding clarifications of this kind.

“For them, the most important thing is that Humala is not elected,” because they don’t want changes in the economy, a concern that outweighs issues like corruption or inequality, he said.

Morón, a member of the Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES) which promoted the debate between the two candidates, said welfare-oriented policies will not resolve pressing problems like the process of decentralisation.

“The candidates haven’t even mentioned how they will move towards smooth coordination between the three levels of government: central, regional and local,” the analyst said.

“The next government will have to make a huge effort to find a common direction for all three levels, because it could find itself overwhelmed by social conflicts. Whichever candidate wins will have half of the country against him or her,” Morón said.

In the last week of May, the Aymara indigenous population in the highlands region of Puno held a series of demonstrations against mining activity in the area, protesting the damages caused by the industry to agriculture and livestock. A temporary halt to the protests, which are backed by regional and local authorities, was declared only until after the elections.

According to the latest report by the ombudsperson’s office, there were 233 protest demonstrations in the country in the month of April alone, most of which were held in the poorest regions, and half of which involved socio-environmental complaints and demands.

Excerpt:

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jun 2 2011 (IPS)

Attacks, fear and disinformation are widespread in news coverage of Peru’s election campaign, with the leading media outlets taking the side of rightwing Keiko Fujimori in her contest against Ollanta Humala for the presidency.

A study of the media by the Calandria Association of Social Communicators found that 42 percent of articles about Humala were negative, compared to 29 percent of the articles about Fujimori.

Seventy-one percent of stories about Fujimori were neutral, compared to only 31 percent of news items about Humala, a centre-left nationalist, according to the study.

“An important bloc of the Peruvian press has sided with one candidate (Fujimori) without taking thought for the country,” the head of Calandria, Rosa María Alfaro, told IPS.

The study analysed 2,059 political news items between Mar. 27 and Apr. 17 this year, during the campaign and the week following the Apr. 10 first round of elections. Coverage by the newspapers El Comercio, Perú 21, La República, Correo, La Primera and Expreso was examined.

These newspapers focused on Humala, a former military officer, but to attack him rather than discuss his candidacy objectively.

Opinion polls show a tight race for the presidency, which will be decided in the Jun. 5 runoff, as well as a high level of opposition to both the candidates.

In Humala’s case, his proposed economic policies are disliked by critics who say they could discourage private investment. They also frown on his supposed closeness to leftwing Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Fujimori, for her part, faces criticism for the systematic human rights violations and corruption perpetrated by the government of her father, Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), for which he is serving prison sentences.

“Information is being presented like electoral propaganda, which reveals a lack of ethics in the way the news is being handled,” said Alfaro, in whose view the media’s political position belongs in the editorial pages, not the news section.

Calandria says during the first stage of the campaign, the media chose to back one or two candidates, leaving aside plurality and equity in information, and is repeating this behaviour to an even greater extent in the second stage of the elections.

The El Comercio news group, the largest in the country, which publishes the newspaper of the same name and the tabloid Peru 21, has been accused of supporting Fujimori, based on its constant accusations against Humala and its criticisms of his government plan.

In the view of journalist Gustavo Gorriti, head of the IDL-Reporteros investigative reporting project, El Comercio’s position is largely due to board member Martha Meier, who was a parliamentary candidate for the Fujimori movement in 2000.

The news group’s stance led to the April and May resignations of three Peru 21 journalists. In addition, the producer and the news chief of Canal N, part of the Plural TV group which is part-owned by El Comercio, were fired for covering Humala’s activities to the same extent as Fujimori’s, they said.

The dismissals, condemned by opinion leaders, were particularly significant because Canal N was a symbol of freedom of expression during the Alberto Fujimori regime, and broadcast the famous 2000 video showing Vladimiro Montesinos bribing a member of parliament.

The video images circled the world and ultimately brought down the Fujimori regime by exposing the actions of Montesino, Fujimori’s intelligence adviser who is now also in prison for crimes against humanity and corruption.

There have also been complaints about pressure on journalists in the provinces. According to Calandria, many media outlets “are covering up the political and dictatorial past of the Fujimori government,” hurting the collective memory and ignoring the fact that the regime controlled the editorial line taken by the press through massive bribery schemes.

Emilio Camacho, one of the three journalists who resigned from Perú 21, told IPS he was not surprised by the partisan coverage of the large media, because over the past five years they have been accommodating to the Fujimoristas in Congress but ferociously critical of lawmakers belonging to Humala’s party.

“None of the media, not even the most critical, held the Fujimoristas to account. They let a lot of things go by without comment,” he added after his departure from Perú 21. “Unfortunately, there will always be some reporter willing to write the news to order.”

Criticism of the press has grown along with controversial headlines such as that on the front page of Perú 21 on May 25: “Lo vi matar” (I saw him kill).

The sensationalist headline refers to an article claiming Humala committed human rights violations in 1992 at the counterinsurgency base of Madre Mía, in the Huánuco region.

Perú 21 based their report on the testimony of a single person, former sergeant Segundo Gómez, the leader of a group that carried out a robbery at the Agrarian University of the Jungle.

“This campaign is accentuating bias in the news,” Luis Jaime Cisneros, a member of the board of the Press and Society Institute, told IPS. “In recent years, the Peruvian press has become first and foremost a political agent, not a communicator.”

Calandria’s study says that 65 percent of Perú 21’s coverage of the campaign during the first round was devoted to accusations and refutations. At the other end of the spectrum La Primera, which supports Humala, did much the same.

According to the study, La Primera and La República devoted half their full-page stories to describing the activities of Humala’s party in the first round. Cisneros said fear-mongering was rife and public opinion was being poisoned with disinformation. “I have not seen many arguments, but I have seen a lot of (distorted) headlines,” he told IPS.

The conflict has reached the point where, in the second week of May, the editor of La Primera, César Lévano, and the head of its board, Arturo Belaúnde, were sent funeral wreaths as death threats at the newspaper’s offices.

Days earlier, Jaime de Althaus, presenter of a programme on Canal N, was attacked by supporters of Humala because of his criticisms of the candidate.

According to Cisneros, this is one of the most polarised campaigns ever, and Gorriti said it was “one of the dirtiest,” with the media providing not coverage but “psychological warfare.”

Calandria said the current behaviour of the media weakens democracy and the credibility of journalists. It called for self-regulation by the press and proclaimed the right of readers and viewers to monitor and oversee it.

Excerpt:

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, May 20 2011 (IPS)

In other circumstances, many women in Peru would be celebrating the possibility of a female president for the first time in the history of their country, or the alternative: the triumph of a candidate who promises to improve things for the poor. But both candidates taking part in the Jun. 5 runoff draw heavy opposition or awaken serious doubts among women’s groups.

Rocío Silva (left) and Victoria Vigo at launch of "Fujimori Never Again" campaign. Credit: Courtesy of the Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos

“I always wanted to see a woman elected president of my country, but with Keiko there is no possibility that women would be respected. ‘Fujimorismo’ is used to governing with impunity and corruption,” Victoria Vigo told IPS, with the vehemence of someone who was a victim of forced sterilisation in 1996, during the regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

The former president is serving more than 25 years for crimes against humanity and corruption in a prison on the outskirts of Lima. Fujimori’s critics say he has organised his daughter’s campaign from his prison cell, while his release, by means of legal manoeuvres, is being prepared in case she is sworn in on Jul. 28.

The polls show a tight race. In the latest survey, by the Apoyo polling firm, Fujimori, the candidate for the Fuerza 2011 party, had 51.1 percent support and Humala, of Gana Perú, 48.9 percent.

The surveys also reflect widespread rejection of both candidates. Analysts say that in Humala’s case, this is especially due to his proposed changes in economic policy, which could scare off private investment, and to his ties with controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

His rival, meanwhile, suffers from her father’s legacy of systematic human rights violations and corruption, observers say. They also point out that her campaign has been tainted by allegations of links with drug trafficking. Another stain on her reputation is her close ties with her father’s powerful former security chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who is also in prison for human rights abuses and corruption.

Vigo is one of the victims of Fujimori’s policies. At the age of 30, the then resident of the northern region of Piura was 32 weeks pregnant when she delivered prematurely. She was sterilised without her knowledge or consent. Her baby died shortly after birth.

Forced sterilisation formed part of a government family planning policy implemented from 1996 to 2000.

Human rights groups brought collective legal action on behalf of 2,000 women and 74 men, whose forced sterilisation was formally documented by the office of the ombudsman. (The Peruvian state has admitted that 300,000 sterilisations were performed under the family planning programme.)

But the prosecutor’s office shelved the case against four of Fujimori’s cabinet ministers, who included former health minister Alejandro Aguinaga, Alberto Fujimori’s personal doctor and a member of Keiko Fujimori’s team.

In November, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemned the Peruvian state’s failure to fulfil a friendly settlement agreement in which the state agreed to investigate and bring to trial the government officials who devised and implemented the forced sterilisation campaign, and to pay damages to victims. The IACHR is now studying measures to enforce the agreement.

Harking back to such abuses, women’s rights groups and victims like Vigo are taking part in the “Fujimori Never Again” campaign launched this month by the National Coordinator for Human Rights, an umbrella group.

“No one has yet been held accountable for what was done to these women,” Rossy Salazar, a lawyer with DEMUS, a women’s rights organisation that has taken part in local and international legal action in the case, told IPS. “To the contrary, those who were presumably responsible have been recycled, in Keiko’s team.”

María Méndez, Fuerza 2011’s spokeswoman on gender and children’s issues, told IPS that Keiko Fujimori has already apologised for the crimes committed during her father’s administration, and has stated that “the things that were done wrong” will not be repeated if she is elected.

“We will heed whatever the international bodies say, we will respect the reproductive rights of women, and we will reject any practice that undermines or violates their rights,” Méndez said.

The executive secretary of the National Coordinator for Human Rights, Rocío Silva, told IPS that neither Keiko Fujimori nor Humala have put an emphasis in their speeches on fighting discrimination against women.

But she added that Humala’s team at least includes professionals who have worked in that area, while on Fujimori’s team there are people who have violated women’s rights.

Silva also said there is another aspect of Fujimori’s candidacy that has caused concern. Those around her include people close to the most conservative sectors of the Catholic Church, which would point to limitations on health policies that respect women’s reproductive rights.

For example, Fujimori’s running-mate is Rafael Rey, a member of the ultraconservative Catholic organisation Opus Dei and a former defence minister who was behind a legislative decree aimed at securing the release of members of the military accused of human rights abuses during the 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war.

Nor is there good news for women in Congress. In 2006, 35 women were elected, compared to just 28 in the April elections, even though there will be 130 members in the legislature that will be sworn in next July, 10 more than the previous legislature.

Of the 28 women elected, 12 are Humala allies and nine are pro-Fujimori, while the rest belong to four other political forces.

Gana Perú’s campaign platform does include a section dedicated to gender policies and the status of women, unlike Fuerza 2011’s programme.

Spokeswoman Méndez argued that the lack of any specific mention of such questions is because they are cross-cutting issues present in every aspect of the party’s platform.

Salazar, the DEMUS lawyer, described Gana Perú’s platform as more progressive, and said Humala is the candidate that offers better guarantees to improve things for women, although she acknowledged that he has been associated with “machista” stances and gestures, arising from his training and past as a military officer.

Aída García, a spokeswoman for Gana Perú, told IPS that if Humala wins, his government will double the number of beneficiaries covered by a programme that provides a monthly stipend of around 36 dollars to families in the poorest parts of the country, and to single mothers.

In addition, a new anti-poverty programme, targeting children up to the age of six, would be implemented in the poorest areas, she added.

García said Humala met this month with women’s social organisations to make commitments that go beyond the “welfare-style and clientelist policies” implemented by Alberto Fujimori through a system of government-assisted soup kitchens and the “glass of milk” nutritional supplement programme.

Fuerza 2011’s Méndez said, meanwhile, that the government’s support of the soup kitchens will help fight chronic malnutrition, and the women in charge of the feeding centres will be trained in that effort. She also said violence against women will be fought through education, communication, prevention and punishment.

“The ‘Fujimoristas’ can say what they want, but their deeds condemn them,” said Vigo. “The consequences we are still living with today cannot be erased. Who has punished the culprits? We have memory and dignity.”

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, May 19 2011 (IPS)

“She got a divorce because of her ambition and love of money,” shopkeeper Dulce Álvarez told IPS, about Guatemalan former First Lady Sandra Torres’ decision to end her marriage in order to sidestep the legal bar to the president’s family members running for the presidency.

Sandra Torres at a rally after declaring she was running for president. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

Article 186 of the constitution forbids relatives up to the fourth degree of consanguinity and the second of affinity to the president (or the vice president if he or she is acting as president) to stand as a presidential candidate.

Colom and Torres were married eight years ago when they were both politicians. Their divorce opens the way for Torres to run for the presidency in the coming Sept. 11 elections, in a country where democracy is still in the process of consolidation, and where Colom cannot stand for immediate reelection.

The divorce was filed in March and granted in April, but has been tied up in a web of appeals, suspensions, rulings and overrulings, the latest of which favours Torres. On May 12 the constitutional court overturned the decision of a lower court that had provisionally suspended the couple’s legal separation.

Torres, 51, was proclaimed presidential candidate May 8 by a coalition between the governing social democratic National Union of Hope (UNE) and the centre-right Great National Alliance (GANA). Early polls place her second in terms of voting intentions.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) opened the process for formal candidate registration this month, and it closes Jul. 2. Torres began the registration process May 10 but its formal approval is still incomplete.

“It doesn’t seem ethical to get a divorce when the reason is not relationship break-up but just to qualify as a presidential candidate,” Raquel Zelaya of the Association for Research and Social Studies (ASIES) told IPS.

“Sandra (Torres’) legitimacy is very much undermined, because in order to govern one must have deep respect for the letter and the spirit of the law,” she added.

Nor is this the right way to overcome political discrimination against Guatemalan women, Zelaya said. “Women’s struggles must use legal means, but this (Torres’ divorce) is not an approach I would expect women to take,” she said.

Women’s political participation in this Central American country of 14 million people is limited. In the single-chamber Congress, only 19 out of 158 lawmakers are women, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks Guatemala 90th out of 129 countries by their percentage of women legislators.

The situation is even worse in other branches of government. In the Supreme Court, there is one woman among the 13 judges, and out of the country’s 333 municipalities, only six are headed by a woman mayor.

Unlike the majority of Latin American countries, Guatemala does not have a quota law to improve women’s representation in elected posts.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú was also declared a presidential candidate by the indigenous Winaq political movement and a leftwing coalition. In 2007, Menchú became the first indigenous woman to stand for the presidency of a Latin American country.

Nineth Montenegro, a lawmaker for the centre-left Encounter for Guatemala, told IPS the barriers women face do not justify breaking the law to attain positions of power.

“The divorce would not be a problem were it not for the motive behind it. We all have the right to marry and get divorced. But here it would seem that her marriage conveniently brought the benefits of being first lady, and now her divorce is being used to become a candidate,” she said.

Montenegro praised other women’s struggles in the history of Guatemala. For instance, “the first women workers fought for decent hours and wages and resisted the dictatorships of Jorge Ubico (1931-1944) and Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920),” she said.

“Going to any lengths to achieve one’s goals is questionable, because as well as skills as a stateswoman, a great deal of fairmindedness, tolerance and respect for the law are needed to run a country,” Montenegro said.

But some groups of women have taken a lighter view of the Colom-Torres divorce. “The law has been flouted, but we think this is not the most worrying aspect of the current situation,” Mayra Alvarado, of the National Union of Guatemalan Women (UNAM-G), told IPS.

“These women have had to earn greater merit than their male counterparts to reach decision-making posts, like Sandra Torres for example, in a patriarchal, authoritarian and militaristic system,” she said.

“It’s only in the past 46 years that women have been eligible to vote and be elected in Guatemala, and rape within marriage went unrecognised until recently,” she said.

Rosario Escobedo of the Women’s Sector, an alliance of non-governmental women’s organisations, told IPS that the first couple’s divorce “is an electoral ploy,” but it is still a divorce, which “everyone has a right to.”

She emphasised that women have been sidelined in Guatemalan politics, and given the least desirable posts by the parties. In any case, “more women in politics does not guarantee a change in women’s daily lives, especially if there are no programmes to make long-term improvements in women’s lives,” she said.

Torres, for her part, says “I have the right to vote and to stand for election. I’m divorcing the president but I’m marrying the people,” a phrase she uses repeatedly in rallies.

Still formally a presidential hopeful, Torres had unprecedented power as coordinator of the Social Cohesion Council created by Colom, where she managed millions of dollars in funding for social programmes and participated in cabinet meetings. She still wears her wedding ring and, according to opponents, she is living at the presidential residence.

The organisation Alternativa Renovadora de Abogados y Notarios got a provisional suspension of the presidential divorce, alleging the separation was fraudulent and its real reason was to enable Torres to stand for president.

This measure was overruled by a decision of the constitutional court, but the legal battle is not over, and a group of those who wrote the present constitution have threatened to impeach the president if Torres’ candidacy is formally approved, on the charge of attempted violation of the constitution.

Torres has complained that she is “criticised for what she has done and what she hasn’t done,” while the 59-year-old Colom declares that she faces “no constitutional bar” to aspiring to succeed him, even though in April 2010 he said that divorce for political ends would be “immoral.”

In the Latin American region, Argentina, Brazil and Costa Rica currently have a woman president, and Peru may join them in July.

Excerpt:

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Apr 11 2011 (IPS)

If retired military officer Ollanta Humala wins the Jun. 5 presidential runoff in Peru, he will have to govern with a highly fragmented Congress. And if lawmaker Keiko Fujimori triumphs, her most notable move may be the release of her father, former president Alberto Fujimori, who is serving 25 years in prison.

Ollanta Humala and his wife Nadine Heredia wave to the candidate's followers Sunday night. Credit: Courtesy of La República newspaper

Humala, a 48-year-old former army officer who heads the Gana Perú party, took 29.3 percent of the vote, followed by Fujimori of Fuerza 2011, with 23 percent, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Alianza por el Gran Cambio, with 21 percent.

The leading candidate had to win at least 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.

This is the second time that Humala – who led an uprising against former president Fujimori (1990-2000) in 2000 – has won a first-round victory. In 2006 he garnered 25.6 percent of the vote, but was defeated by current President Alan García in the second round, by 52.6 percent to 47.3 percent.

Keiko Fujimori, whose father is in prison for human rights violations and corruption, is set to go on to the next round, because the gap between her and Kuczynski is small but consistent, the electoral authorities announced.

The strongest support for Humala was in the southern highlands, where the highest poverty levels are found. Many parts of that region have failed to share in the benefits of the economic boom driven by high prices for minerals and other commodities enjoyed by Peru over the last decade, and social unrest has been frequent.

Last week, four protesters were shot and killed by the police in demonstrations in the southern province of Arequipa against the vast Tía María copper mine project, planned by the Southern Copper Corporation, a subsidiary of Mexican mining conglomerate Grupo México. On Friday, the García administration decided to cancel the project.

The winner of the presidential runoff will have to govern with a highly-divided 130-seat Congress, which will make it necessary to negotiate.

Projections indicate that Humala’s party Gana Perú will have 46 seats in the legislature; Fuerza 2011 will have 38; Perú Posible, of former president Alejandro Toledo – who came in fourth with 15 percent of the vote – will have 21; and Kuczynski’s Alianza por el Gran Cambio, 12.

Meanwhile, “Fujimorismo” – the movement represented by Fujimori – will go from the 13 seats it currently holds to nearly three times that number.

But what is most worrisome about a possible triumph by Fujimori is that she may use the office of president to free her father, the director of the local human rights organisation Legal Defence Institute, Carlos Rivera, told IPS.

“I have no doubt that this is what she will do, even though she tried to change her position on that in the campaign,” Rivera said. “The very first point on the Fujimorista agenda is to release Alberto Fujimori from jail and exonerate him of the crimes for which he was convicted.

“I don’t believe her when she says she will allow the courts to do their work, in the case of her father. That is a lie,” said Rivera, who represented the families of victims in the trial against Fujimori for his responsibility in the Nov. 3, 1991 killings of 15 people, including a little boy, at a barbecue in the Barrios Altos neighbourhood in Lima, and the Jul. 18, 1992 kidnapping and murder of nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University.

Both massacres were committed by an Army Intelligence Service death squad known as the Colina Group.

Jo-Marie Burt, a professor at the George Mason University in the U.S. state of Virginia who researched the legal process against Alberto Fujimori, agreed that his release is his daughter’s chief aim.

Keiko’s declaration that she will accept the ruling of the Constitutional Court, to which the former president has presented a write of habeas corpus, was politically calculated, she said.

“Keiko has maintained repeatedly that she would free her father,” Burt told IPS. “She has modified her discourse now because apparently she is confident that the Constitutional Court will accept a habeas corpus and overturn the sentence. It would be a terrible setback for Peruvian democracy and human rights if Fujimori were to be pardoned – regardless of who does it.”

Fujimori’s campaign is based on handouts to the poor, with constant mentions of what her father did for the neediest Peruvians, Burt said.

“Why is Keiko Fujimori’s logo painted on all the houses in slum neighbourhoods?” asked Rosa María Alfaro, director of the Calandria Association of Social Communicators, a non-governmental organisation that uses communications to promote political, social and economic development in Peru.

“Because Keiko paid the families 30 soles (11.5 dollars) to let the letter ‘K’ – the symbol of her candidacy – be painted on their houses. She also handed out t-shirts, caps, balls and calendars. It is the most blatant show of populism,” Alfaro commented to IPS.

Excerpt:

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Apr 8 2011 (IPS)

The only certainty about Sunday’s general elections in Peru is that all the polls predict a victory for nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala, but say he will not have enough votes to secure the presidency in the first round.

The real electoral battle is therefore between those who appear to have a chance to compete with Humala in the Jun. 5 run-off – namely Keiko Fujimori of Fuerza 2011, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Alianza por el Gran Cambio, and former president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) of Alianza Perú Posible.

Humala, a 48-year-old former army officer backed by the Gana Perú (Peru Wins) political party, is preferred by between 28 and 29.5 percent of respondents, according to sources with access to the results of the latest polls by the firms Ipsos, Apoyo and CPI, which cannot be reported in the local media because of Peru’s electoral rules.

Fujimori is placed second in the polls, with 21 to 24 percent of voter intentions; Kuczynski comes third, with 18.4 to 19 percent, and in fourth place is Toledo, with only 15 to 18.2 percent of voter support, although for most of the campaign which formally started in January, he was the front-runner.

Rankings of candidates to take over Jul. 28 from President Alan García, whose Partido Aprista Peruano (PAP), surprisingly, is not fielding a candidate, have changed dramatically nearly every week of the campaign leading up to Sunday’s elections, when 130 members of Congress and five delegates to the Andean Parliament will also be elected.

At first, polls predicted a win for Toledo, followed by former mayor of Lima Luis Castañeda; but now Castañeda has been left behind, and Toledo is struggling to stay in the race.

In contrast to Humala, who is regarded as centre-left, the policies proposed by Toledo, Kuczynski and the eldest daughter of imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) range from centre-right to rightwing.

“There are two considerations here,” Fernando Tuesta, head of the Catholic University’s Institute of Public Opinion, told IPS. “One is that many Peruvians are discontented with the present situation, or want to see greater improvements, and Humala has addressed himself to them ever since he first ran for the presidency in 2006.”

The nationalist candidate has set forth the most proposals about redistribution of wealth and fighting poverty, and he also talks about change, while his rivals stress the idea of continuity from the García administration. “That’s the big difference between them,” Tuesta said.

“The second consideration is that Humala’s electoral campaign has been coherent, with a definite strategy and very clear goals for positioning the candidate and attracting support. He did not waste time arguing with other candidates, but devoted his efforts to proposing solutions,” he said.

According to Tuesta, Humala’s position has changed since he ran in 2006, when he won the first round but lost the run-off to García. “His discourse has become much more moderate, even though his actual programme of government is at least as radical as it was then.”

In a hard-fought campaign marked by widely scattered voter opinion, writer Mario Vargas Llosa., winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature and a former presidential candidate in 1990, when he lost to the almost-unknown Alberto Fujimori, has spoken up.

He repeated his 2009 remark that a run-off between Humala and Keiko Fujimori would be like “choosing between AIDS and cancer.” “It will not happen, I refuse to believe it. I don’t think my fellow Peruvians could be so foolish as to place us in such a dilemma,” the conservative writer said.

“Rather than two forms of authoritarianism, Humala and (Keiko) Fujimori represent two ways of disrespecting the political institutions,” political scientist Carlos Meléndez told IPS. “It’s not that she is authoritarian because of her father, or that Humala is authoritarian because of his military background. They are both authoritarian because their proposals would weaken democratic institutions.”

Keiko Fujimori has benefited, not from a spectacular campaign and a great popular following, but from the loyalty of a hard core of her father’s supporters. The pro-Fujimori legislators have consistently won around 20 percent of the vote, a large share in the context of a widely split electorate, he said.

“She is the only candidate with a following of active supporters that has grown more than any other party in recent years. She leads them personally, and communicates directly to her followers,” said Meléndez, who compiled “Anticandidatos, guía analítica para unas elecciones sin partidos” (Anti-Candidates: An Analytical Guide for Elections without Parties), published this year.

Keiko Fujimori told a crowd in April 2009, “We will not rest until we achieve freedom for Alberto Fujimori,” who is serving 25 years in prison for corruption and human rights violations.

But now, in a bid to woo disapproving voters, she has toned down her suggestions that she would pardon her father if she were elected president. “The family has decided to abide by the decision of the courts,” she said.

Keiko Fujimori and her family have legal problems of their own. State prosecutor Gladys Echaíz is investigating her for allegedly using funds embezzled by her father to pay for her studies in the United States. The candidate twice failed to respond to judicial summonses during her campaign.

Echaíz has also charged Rosa Fujimori, the ex-president’s sister, for illicit enrichment, and she is now regarded as a fugitive from justice after failing to appear at a trial for misappropriation of donations from Japan for poor children in Peru. The funds were allegedly deposited in her bank accounts.

Excerpt:

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Feb 7 2011 (IPS)

Women candidates nominated for the presidential and legislative elections in Peru in April tend to be big names in the worlds of sports, television or show business, or are following family tradition. But political parties are failing to promote meaningful participation by women in politics.

Cenaida Uribe (in red) with members of congressional women's caucus. Credit: Courtesy Congress of Peru

A third woman, Mercedes Araoz of the governing Partido Aprista Peruano (PAP), resigned her candidacy because her party would not honour her demand that persons under investigation for corruption be excluded from the party slates.

Keiko Fujimori, at present running third in the polls, is the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who is running her election campaign from prison where he is serving 25 years for crimes against humanity and corruption.

Juliana Reymer, a former street vendor who now runs her own small business, became the candidate of the small centrist Fuerza Nacional party when its previous nominee left the party to support former president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), who is the front-runner in the polls.

“These presidential and congressional elections are a disgrace,” Rosa María Alfaro, head of Calandria, an organisation promoting women’s political participation, told IPS. “Male arrogance is the basis of even Keiko Fujimori’s campaign, because she depends on her father. There is a kind of gender dependence.”

Alfaro also criticised the way political parties have drawn up their lists of candidates for the next Congress, to be elected for a five-year term in April. By law, at least 30 percent of the candidates must be women.

But to meet the quotas, parties have recruited prominent women from other walks of life, rather than training and promoting their own women members. Since the 1990s, “outsiders” and flash-in-the-pan candidates have held an attraction for Peruvian voters.

Former showgirl and television presenter July Pinedo, a 1990s sex symbol, is on the congressional candidate list for the centre-right PAP.

According to local media, Alberto Fujimori personally drew up the congressional list for the right-wing Fuerza 2011, formally headed by his daughter. The list of candidates includes Gina Pacheco, his personal nurse and a frequent visitor to his prison cell, and Leyla Chihuán, the captain of the national women’s team for volleyball, a popular sport in Peru.

And at the top of the list for Toledo’s centre-right Perú Posible party is 1980s volleyball star Cecilia Tait, while soap opera actress Ebelin Ortiz is also a candidate.

The right-wing alliance Cambio Radical, meanwhile, has nominated former starlet Daysi Ontaneda, frequently featured in the gossip columns.

The head of Asociación Civil Transparencia, Percy Medina, told IPS that in a study on female political participation carried out by his organisation, women political leaders and activists complained of “arbitrary decisions” by male leaders who impose “media personalities with no political experience instead of active members of organisations” as party candidates.

In the survey of women leaders and activists from five different political parties, all of the respondents emphasised the lack of a level playing field between men and women in terms of access to leadership posts and candidate nominations, Medina said.

In his opinion, “a culture of machismo which hinders women from achieving a more decisive role” is behind this inequality and explains the profusion of actresses and sportswomen on candidate lists, instead of experienced women politicians.

“The perception is that women’s participation in Peruvian politics has slid backwards,” even though women presidential or congressional candidates are now quite common, said Medina.

Alfaro predicted that the April elections will not resemble the November 2010 regional and municipal polls, when two women battled it out for the post of mayor of Lima. The winner was Susana Villarán, a moderate left-winger, and her rival was Lourdes Flores, a conservative.

Both women had been presidential candidates in earlier elections and had recognised track records as politicians when they stood for the key position of mayor of the capital. “Their proposals were well developed and were debated in the media and among the general public,” said Alfaro. “It was a campaign and a democratic contest truly led by women.”

Alfaro, an expert on communications and gender, said the presidential candidates and Alberto Fujimori are using popular women as vote-catchers, at a time when ideology is weak and personal conflicts are rampant in political parties, and male politicians are desperate to win at any cost.

For instance, Luis Castañeda, the presidential candidate for the populist Solidaridad Nacional, placed second in the polls, chose as his vice presidential running mate Carmen Núñez, the estranged wife of a millionaire businessman and provincial mayor who supports a different presidential candidate.

Lisbeth Guillén of the Manuela Ramos women’s movement agreed that Peru’s political parties “do not truly encourage women’s participation,” in spite of the fact that in opinion polls voters say they want to see more women active in politics and are sympathetic to the potential prospect of a woman president.

Guillén pointed out that electoral quotas for women are enshrined in the Peruvian constitution, and that thanks to this, the number of women in Congress has increased steadily. The outgoing parliament (2006-2011) has 35 women lawmakers, equivalent to 29 percent of the seats, compared to 26 women in the 2000-2006 legislature, and 14 in 1995-2000.

The activist said political parties nominate crowd-pleasing personalities who can attract a large number of votes because they must secure at least five percent of the national vote in elections in order to maintain their official registration.

However, she said voters have another way to make their voices heard: the so-called “preferential vote,” which allows voters to select candidates on congressional lists according to their own preference, thus changing the order of the candidates pre-established by the parties.

Cenaida Uribe, president of the congressional women’s caucus, offered another viewpoint on women’s presence in parliament. A former volleyball player for Peru, she belongs to the nationalist Gana Perú party led by former presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, in fourth place in the polls.

“Every one deserves an opportunity to make a contribution,” she told IPS. Artists, for example, can promote laws on cultural affairs, and she as a sportswoman has been able to push for laws that favour sports. “Newcomers to Congress who have no political experience should not be under-estimated,” she said.

In her view, the legislative term that ends in July “has been exceptional,” because for the first year Congress was presided over by a woman speaker, all the commissions have included women, and “indigenous women, coca-growing peasant women, Afro-Peruvian women and low-income women are represented in parliament.”

But Uribe, who is black, stressed that in spite of these positive aspects, “there is still too much machismo in Congress, which cuts women off from access to the democratic decision-making process.”

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 15 2010 (IPS)

Guatemala’s election campaign got off to a controversial and premature start, with an evangelical pastor, a military officer, a former president, the president’s wife and the daughter of a general who led a coup emerging as presidential hopefuls, although three of them face legal barriers to their candidacy, according to experts.

Alvaro Colom wearing the presidential sash. Credit: Courtesy of Guatemalan president's office

Sandra Torres, wife of social democratic President Álvaro Colom, as well as former president Álvaro Arzú (1996-2000) and Zury Ríos, the daughter of former dictator general Efraín Ríos Montt, are considering running for the country’s next president, who will take office January 2012.

“Zury Ríos is also banned by Article 186, because she is related to a general who staged a coup, while Arzú cannot stand for president because Article 187 of the constitution expressly bans presidential reelection” at any time, the expert said.

Guatemalans will go to the polls September 2011 to elect the president and vice president for the next four years, as well as 153 lawmakers for the single-chamber Congress, 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament, and 333 local governments.

The controversy so far is centred on who is or is not eligible to run for president. But beyond the letter of constitutional law, there are precedents which are raising concerns among Guatemalans.

As unlikely as it seemed, Ríos Montt was a presidential candidate in 2003, although the constitution expressly banned him for having led a military coup in March 1982, and having governed as dictator for 16 months, a period of massive human rights abuses.

Article 186 of the Guatemalan constitution states that the commanders of a coup d’état cannot become president, nor those who have assumed the position of head of government after overthrowing the constitutional order. However, after a legal battle that was marked by numerous irregularities, Ríos Montt did become a candidate, although he was defeated.

Fuentes said this precedent should not be a cause for concern. “The ruling that allowed Ríos Montt to stand has been expunged from constitutional jurisprudence, so it cannot be cited as a precedent,” he said.

In spite of the impediments, the presidential hopefuls continue to campaign. “Retomemos el camino” (Let’s get back on course) say the publicity spots for ex president Arzú, head of the rightwing Unionist Party and present mayor of Guatemala City, who has openly stated his intention of returning to power.

Meanwhile the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) proclaimed Zury Ríos their candidate. On Nov. 10 she said she would seek the support of women voters to achieve her goal.

President Colom’s wife, who is highly influential in the governing National Union of Hope (UNE), has not publicly stated her intention to run, but her opponents take it as read, pointing to her frequent appearances on television at official events.

Roxana Baldetti of the opposition Patriot Party said Torres is using the entire state apparatus to launch her candidacy, which she called “illegal and immoral.”

Another constitutional lawyer, Roberto Villeda, concurred that Torres, Arzú and Ríos are specifically banned from standing as presidential candidates by the constitution.

The 1985 constitution, amended in 1993, closed a chapter of Guatemalan history marked by coups and dictatorships with the return to democracy in 1986, and laid the foundations for the pacification of the country. To this end, it fixed four-year presidential terms that could not be extended, and included specific measures to prevent perpetuation in power and coups.

Further controversy has arisen because the present virtual campaign by presidential hopefuls is also forbidden. The electoral law states campaigning can only commence when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal calls for elections, in May 2011.

But other presidential hopefuls, like retired general Otto Pérez of the Patriot Party, who is leading in the polls, and evangelical pastor Harold Caballeros, of Vision with Values (VIVA), have also increased their media presence to promote their aspirations.

Thus the media are broadcasting ever more frequent spots promoting the various presidential hopefuls, while huge billboards along the main avenues in the capital depict the most prominent political personalities.

Not all of this is negative. Political analyst José Dávila told IPS that Guatemala is “slowly” moving towards political maturity.

“Fraud and political repression are no longer major issues, but we need the parties to address national problems with a more serious focus, and greater citizen participation, not only in elections but also in government programmes and in elected positions,” he said.

Quota laws to ensure the participation of women, direct election of lawmakers, and strict regulation of the funding sources for political parties are changes necessary for political progress, the expert said.

Political analyst Miguel Ángel Balcárcel told IPS that, furthermore, citizen participation is crucial for monitoring the work of political parties.

“Parties do not change by themselves; they need a context where they meet with more reflective citizens who won’t fall for their jingles. This is a backward society in terms of building citizenship,” he said.

Gerardo López, a young leader in the VIVA party, told IPS that part of their political strategy is promoting structural political changes, like direct election of lawmakers rather than voting for lists of candidates, debating the funding of political parties, and reducing the number of lawmakers to 80.

“We think there is more of an opportunity with new parties that have not become stale and worn-out like the parties represented in Congress,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 2 2010 (IPS)

The irony of politics is that the principles upheld by a party are often contradicted in practice, in the struggle for office or the exercise of power. Brazil’s elections, in which Dilma Rousseff was chosen as the country’s first woman president, offer some apt illustrations.

The defeated Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) took a turn to the right, in spite of the left-wing origins of its candidate, José Serra, a former student leader who went into exile after the 1964 military coup, and of its more famous founder, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Founded in 1988 as a centre-left party positioned between the radical socialism of the Workers’ Party (PT) and the traditional conservative forces, the PSDB was envisioned as a modernising force. One of its early aims was to establish a parliamentary form of government in Brazil, which was rejected in a referendum.

When Cardoso — nicknamed the “prince of sociologists” — was president from 1995 to 2003, the PSDB government succumbed to the economic ideas in vogue and adopted some neoliberal policies. The privatisation of national assets and public enterprises became Cardoso’s hallmark, and the PT, then in opposition, took advantage of the unpopularity of such measures.

In turn the PT, when its candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president in 2002 and 2006, increasingly shifted to the centre-left, towards the ideals of social democracy.

Lula prioritised policies — and expanded on a mass scale some of his predecessor’s — that lifted 20 million people out of poverty, enlarged the middle class and created 14 million formal sector jobs.

The polarity between the two parties, each supported by broad coalitions, forced the PSDB into alliances with the most conservative sectors, like the centre-right Democrats, the new name for the Liberal Front which included politicians active in the 1964-1985 dictatorship.

In the recent electoral campaign, during which Lula was able to use his immense popularity to transfer his supporters’ votes to Rousseff, Serra’s candidacy was supported by right-wing groups, including conservative Catholics and Evangelicals. Defamation campaigns against Rousseff on the internet and in churches converted abortion and religious morality into central issues.

Thus the PSDB took up a position on the right, taking on a role similar to that of conservatives in two-party systems, while negating its origins and the political ideas of many of its members.

Lula and the PT were not immune to these about-faces. The party that originally campaigned as the champion of ethics is perceived today as a symbol of corruption by a large proportion of public opinion, as a result of numerous scandals affecting its administration on national, state and municipal levels.

The “mensalão” (big monthly payment) scandal in 2005 involved government ministers and PT leaders who were accused of bribing lawmakers in return for votes. It nearly brought down the Lula administration, when the president himself faced the threat of impeachment.

Such misdeeds were partly responsible for Rousseff’s failure to win outright in the first round of voting on Oct. 3, as Lula also failed to do in 2006.

In its early days, prior to the 1990s, the PT was regarded as the only “ideological” large party in Brazil. Yet in government it has stood out for its pragmatism: it has formed alliances with old “oligarchs” like former president José Sarney (1985-1990), and adopted an economic policy that allowed bankers to “profit as never before,” as Lula himself acknowledged.

Serra, torn between his convictions and the position recent history had imposed on his party, came across as ambiguous. With an eye to electoral convenience, he evaded confronting the popular Lula as much as possible.

The PSDB candidate did not defend the Cardoso government and its privatisations, and he made promises that in the past he would have criticised as “populist”, such as an immediate 17.6 percent rise in the minimum wage, and an increase in the monthly stipends that millions of poor families receive through Bolsa Familia, the Lula administration’s main conditional cash transfer programme.

As for Rousseff, in her youth she led a group that adopted armed struggle in the 1960s, with the aim of seizing power and bringing about a socialist revolution in Brazil, along the lines of the Cuban revolution.

Critics of that “adventure” question the narrative of democratic resistance against the military dictatorship which is generally used today to describe the young people who risked their lives and were tortured, or killed, in the short, unequal battle.

Rousseff’s presidential victory, along with those of other former guerrillas in several Latin American governments and parties, even the PSDB, bolsters the benevolent historic view of insurgents that has little to do with their theoretical intentions then, which were far from democratic.

They were the only ones who fought the dictatorship uncompromisingly, with their radical response to the de facto regime’s oppression of freedom of speech and other rights.

They took all the risks upon themselves, and hundreds of them died for their cause. Rousseff inherited the democratic side of the rebelliousness which could otherwise only serve a larger, revolutionary goal.

In France, the Resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany saved the country’s honour during World War II, when collaboration was the rule, even though it was a minority movement and overwhelmingly commanded by communist militants following orders from Moscow.

But perhaps the best contemporary example of the conflict between political doctrine and real-life pragmatism is China, where the Communist Party is building the greatest capitalist power of the century.

Excerpt:

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 29 2010 (IPS)

In Brazil, 136 million voters will head to the polls in Sunday’s presidential runoff election, after a campaign heavy on recriminations and moralistic attacks and weak on substantive issues.

The elections have been “tough and tense,” said analyst Jairo Nicolau of the Institute of Social and Political Studies (IESP) at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

In addition to choosing a successor to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, voters will elect governors in nine of the 26 states into which this country of 192 million people is divided. Voting is compulsory in Brazil.

Tough, because of the flurry of mutual accusations of corruption. In the case of governing Workers Party (PT) candidate Dilma Rousseff, the allegations involved one of her closest aides, Erenice Guerra, members of whose family were accused of influence-peddling.

Rousseff’s rival, José Serra of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), meanwhile, was governor of Sao Paulo state when overcharging occurred in the bidding on contracts for the subway in the state capital.

“In the second round, allegations emerged on both sides, so the corruption effect did not affect Dilma (as she is universally known) as much as in the first round. The effect was diluted,” Nicolau said.

The opinion polls indicate that Rousseff — who took nearly 47 percent of the vote on Oct. 3, against 33 percent for Serra — will beat her opponent by at least 10 percentage points on Sunday.

The decriminalisation of abortion, another key issue that kept Rousseff from winning outright in the first round, also reared its head again, especially in the last stretch of the campaign.

Groups with ties to the Catholic and evangelical churches accused the candidate of being in favour of the legalisation of abortion — an allegation that she denied, but which was exploited by her rival.

The controversy peaked when Pope Benedict got directly involved in the campaign, telling Brazilian bishops that they had a duty “to make moral judgments” on issues like abortion and euthanasia “even in political matters.”

In response, President Lula pointed out that Brazil is a democratic, secular state, and that each person has to vote “according to their conscience.”

Nicolau said Lula’s popularity — he has ratings of over 80 percent after eight years in office — is sufficient to buoy the candidacy of his former chief of staff and energy minister.

According to the IESP analyst, Brazilians who vote for Rousseff, “whose career was in the state bureaucracy and not in politics, and who has never before stood in elections,” are basically voting for Lula.

“Lula’s strategy was to transfer his popularity to whoever he chose” as his successor, Nicolau said. “Some of the poor say they are going to vote for ‘Lula’s wife’.”

The analyst said that aside from these hot button issues, the campaign was “poor,” as it was more focused on “administrative aspects” than on what kind of development the country needs.

An example of that were the constant references in Rousseff’s campaign to successful programmes carried out by the Lula administration, like Bolsa Familia, consisting of monthly cash transfers to poor families on condition that their children attend school and are vaccinated, or housing and scholarship programmes.

Serra, in the meantime, frequently mentioned policies he pushed as health minister under former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), such as the production and distribution of generic AIDS drugs.

“What the country actually discussed were the practices of each (PT) ministry, by contrast with those followed by PSDB state governments,” Nicolau said.

On one hand, Rousseff promised voters that she would continue doing what Lula has been doing. According to official figures, his government pulled 28 million Brazilians out of poverty, and created 138 new universities and vocational-technical institutes.

On the other, Serra pledged to continue Lula’s social programmes, like Bolsa Familia, and to further increase the minimum wage.

“It’s a kind of auction, with each one promising more for the poor,” Nicolau said.

Nor have there been clear differences in the discussion of privatisation, a process that received a strong impulse from the Cardoso administration, in areas like telecoms, power and the steel industry.

While in earlier campaigns against Lula, the PSDB emphasised what it saw as the benefits of privatisation, such as broader access to telephones, this time around Serra did not openly defend the process.

Instead, he chose to make a counterattack, accusing Rousseff of also having engaged in privatisation, by granting oil contracts to foreign companies, for instance.

For her part, Rousseff accused Serra of planning to privatise the country’s deep-sea oil reserves, which began to be explored on a large scale after Lula took part in the inauguration of the first production system Thursday.

Although the issue of privatisation “was present in Dilma’s campaign, and to a lesser extent in Serra’s, that doesn’t mean it divided public opinion one way or the other,” Nicolau said.

The candidates also touched on other questions, like the environment, but with the apparent aim of winning over voters who cast their ballots for Green Party candidate Marina Silva in the first round, when she came in third with nearly 20 percent of the vote.

Although the Green Party voted to remain neutral in the runoff, many of its leaders expressed a preference, either for Rousseff or Serra.

According to the polls, at least two-thirds of the Green votes will go to Serra in the second round.

Excerpt:

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 27 2010 (IPS)

Every vote counts for the two candidates competing for the presidency of Brazil in next Sunday’s runoff, and the governing Workers’ Party (PT) is galvanising its electoral base into active campaigning, after the complacency instilled by eight years in power.

Voters rally for Dilma Rousseff in final stretch of campaign. Credit: Dilma13 web site

According to analysts, PT militants and voters want to ensure the continuity of gains made during Lula’s two consecutive administrations, such as economic growth, social inclusion and Brazil’s role as an independent leader on the international stage.

The people participating in her campaign now did not necessarily vote for Rousseff in the first round of the elections on Oct. 3, nor do they all identify with the left. But they are joining forces to prevent a victory by the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) and its candidate, José Serra, which in their view would be a political step backwards.

The wave of rallies in support of Rousseff blend culture and politics. On Sunday Oct. 24 on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, the organisers made use of carnival — one of Brazil’s most popular and beloved symbols — to attract people.

“Dilma’s Samba School” paraded with its drum corps in support of the candidate, who won 47 percent of the vote in the first round, against 33 percent for Serra. In the polls, Rousseff now has 50 percent support, compared to her rival’s 40 percent.

“I’m Dilma’s flag-bearer,” Maria Helena of the Imperatriz samba school told IPS with evident pride. She carries the colours of her group, an ensemble with one of the richest and most vibrant histories in Rio carnival.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone care about the poor,” she said about Lula, whose popularity rating stands at 80 percent after two terms of office. He will step down as president on Jan. 1, 2011.

“With Lula the Brazilian people, especially the poor, had some unique opportunities. Income distribution really did happen,” said Sonia, a teacher, one of hundreds of Rousseff supporters enjoying the election rally-cum-carnival performance.

Spearheading the unusual carnival-style parade was a group of well-known PT political figures, like reelected state lawmaker and former environment minister in Lula’s government, Carlos Minc.

While dancing to the irresistible rhythms of “Dilma’s Samba School”, Minc said he supports the PT candidate because she is the one who can implement green policies to protect the environment.

At a theatre in Rio, sociologist Emir Sader coordinated another of the innumerable events organised by the PT to mobilise its traditional supporters, who have multiplied in number since polls began to show a narrowing of the gap between the candidates, generating uncertainty about Rousseff’s victory which had previously been taken for granted.

PT political figures and prominent intellectuals, religious leaders and artists shared the platform to back Rousseff. What is needed is “a country where education, culture, sustainability and the eradication of extreme poverty and social inequality are the priorities,” and where “the dignity we have recovered is preserved,” the organisers said.

Singer-songwriter Chico Buarque stole the show, to warm applause, in support of Rousseff, who was seated beside him and other legends of the Brazilian left, such as centenarian Oscar Niemayer, the architect of Brasilia, the country’s capital.

“Lula did not lower his voice to a whisper for the United States, and he did not shout at Bolivia and Paraguay,” said Buarque, calling for this style of foreign policy to be maintained.

One of the fathers of liberation theology, Leonardo Boff, who heads a religious group in support of Rousseff’s candidacy, praised Lula’s “revolution without violence” which, he said, met a large proportion of the needs of the poor.

“The dominant classes cannot bear to see a son of poverty, a survivor of Brazil’s troubles, come up from below and become president,” he said before an enthusiastic audience that waved flags and shouted political slogans.

“In their view, a simple labourer like Lula (a former metal worker) belongs in the factory, working for them. The presidency is an office reserved for their kind,” said Boff, referring to the electoral and social sector represented by Serra.

Also present at the event was another leader of the social struggles in Brazil that cemented the foundations of the PT, the head of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), Joao Pedro Stédile.

“Our position is not monolithic,” he told IPS. “It is a collective stance, shaped by discussion with the country’s main social movements, and we reserve the right to criticise Lula’s government over bad policies. We maintain a healthy autonomy.”

Along with other small farmer, student, trade union and women’s organisations, the MST decided to “join the struggle and support Rousseff” in order to avert a win for Serra’s “fascist and neoliberal proposals.”

In spite of reservations about the Lula administration on issues like agrarian reform, the social organisations’ manifesto expresses at least one certainty: Serra, who was health minister in the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), would represent “a step backwards for social and popular movements and for the advance of democracy in our continent, as well as greater subordination to the empire of the United States,” it says.

Another religious group made up of lay people, pastors, priests and bishops belonging to evangelical and Catholic churches openly expressed support for the PT candidate.

They described their commitment as a reaction to the “conservative attack” on Rousseff, who was being labelled as pro-abortion, although she has never stated this as her position.

“We know there are people who call themselves religious, but who commit atrocities against children. Just because a candidate is religious does not necessarily mean he will govern justly and fairly,” says the group’s manifesto.

A conservative backlash by religious groups was one of the reasons why Rousseff failed to win the 50 percent support she needed for an outright victory on Oct. 3, according to analyst Ricardo Ismael of Rio de Janeiro’s Pontifícia Universidade Católica.

Ismael also mentioned other factors, like accusations of corruption against public figures close to Rousseff , and the strong showing by Green Party candidate and former environment minister Marina Silva, who garnered nearly 20 percent of the vote in the first round.

Sunday’s vote will be “hotly disputed and extremely close,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, May 27 2010 (IPS)

Colombian presidential candidate Antanas Mockus said he “shares the horror” over the so-called “false positives” — young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the military’s counterinsurgency campaign.

'False positive' killings have occurred across Colombia. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

Members of more than 30 army battalions recruited young men with false job offers and took them to faraway locations, where they were shot and dressed up as left-wing rebels (or less frequently as far-right paramilitaries) and passed off as combat casualties.

This “body count” system used incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to reward soldiers and officers for “results” in the country’s nearly five-decade civil war.

The phenomenon really took off after right-wing President Álvaro Uribe first took office in 2002, and reached a peak when Mockus’s main rival, Juan Manuel Santos, was defence minister from July 2006 to May 2009.

The “false positives” scandal broke in the press in September 2008.

The attorney general’s office is investigating 2,077 cases of extrajudicial killings presumably committed by the security forces, including 274 in 2006 and 505 in 2007. The number of cases identified then dropped to 156 in 2008 and to seven cases, involving 16 victims, to 2009.

The human rights monitoring database at the Jesuit Centre of Investigation and Popular Education (CINEP) in Bogotá has documented 501 cases involving 1,113 victims of extrajudicial killings between 2001 and 2009. But it clarifies that its investigations do not cover the entire country.

The latest polls indicate that Mockus and former defence minister Santos, the candidate of the pro-Uribe Party of the U, will face off in a second round on Jun. 20, because neither is likely to garner 50 percent of the vote Sunday.

Mockus stated: “I’m sure that neither the president (Uribe) nor the minister (Santos) were masterminds behind the false positives.”

He pointed out that it was Santos’s predecessor in the Defence Ministry, Camilo Ospina, who issued, in November 2005, a secret directive offering incentives for “positives” or casualties in the counterinsurgency effort.

Mockus compared that instruction to a U.S. army directive during the Vietnam War that led to the infamous March 1968 massacre by U.S. troops of at least 350 unarmed women, children and old men in the village of My Lai.

The candidate, a mathematics professor, philosopher and two-time former mayor, said “the tragic thing is that incentive-based systems make the people involved go crazy.

“Is the tragedy solved by judging these two people?” Mockus asked, referring to Uribe and Santos. What can be judged, he stated, is “the eventual level of negligence in detecting and correcting the situation.

“I do not believe they are legally responsible, but I do see a moral, or perhaps political, responsibility,” he said.

Santos insists that when he was defence minister, he and President Uribe “denounced the problem and reached the decision that had to be taken, with transparency in front of the whole country.” He says a total of 15 measures, “which were effective,” were adopted to counter the phenomenon.

In November 2007, Santos issued a new directive that provided rewards for captured and “demobilised” combatants, rather than offering incentives for officers who showed the fewest army casualties and the largest number of enemy casualties.

“Reports of false positives were drastically reduced after November 2008; they fell by a factor of over 100,” Santos recently stated, repeating what he has said on every occasion that the issue has been raised in the campaign.

But it was not until October 2008 that the government dismissed 27 army officers during an unexpected visit to Colombia by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

“Were the dismissals a response when they realised what was going on? Or when they realised that the world had realised what was going on?” Mockus asked.

But he noted that the Colombian justice system would have to fail in its attempt to clarify the killings “before the international system would have jurisdiction.”

Impunity for the perpetrators is what 16 families of “false positive” victims from Soacha, a sprawling working-class suburb to the south of Bogotá, fear. Over the last 10 days, 39 members of the military implicated in the extrajudicial killings were released on bail, although 25 — including colonels and majors — are still in prison awaiting trial.

The strategy of their defence lawyers is to use delaying tactics and secure their release from preventive detention on the grounds that they have not been formally indicted within 90 days of their arrest, as established by Colombian law.

At the same time, the military justice system is demanding that the cases be transferred to its jurisdiction.

Mothers and widows of the victims have received death threats. The brother of one of the victims was killed, and a noncommissioned officer who reported an extrajudicial killing was murdered as well. The Mothers of Soacha, as the women are now known, sent a letter Monday to International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.

Over the last two years, a series of legal, political and other “de facto impunity” mechanisms have undermined the possibility of getting at the truth and obtaining justice and comprehensive reparations, says the letter, which calls for the ICC to take a hand in the matter.

Lawyer and journalist Felipe Zuleta, who produced the documentary “Poverty, a crime that is paid with death”, asked the attorney general’s office in January to investigate Uribe and Santos for collusion — that is, “negligence on the part of government officials with respect to crimes against humanity,” he said in response to a question from IPS.

Zuleta said the argument set forth by Santos “is complete proof.” He maintained that the fact that the number of “false positive” killings has plunged since “the government found out… means it was a controlled crime.

“A controlled crime is one where you give an order and it stops. Uncontrolled crime is where the state, despite its efforts, can’t do anything to stop it,” the journalist said.

The Mothers of Soacha are indignant that Santos is a presidential candidate. “Not because he pulled the trigger,” said one, “but because he was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and has to assume responsibility.”

The United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, released a 36-report page Thursday that says the Colombian security forces committed “a significant number” of “false positive” killings over the past decade, and that the number of murders began to climb after 2004.

Excerpt:

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 27 2010 (IPS)

Political sectors opposed to the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez have elected 22 candidates in primaries, and selected another 143 by consensus, to compete in September for the 165 seats in the single-chamber parliament.

The parliamentary elections are the next political challenge President Chávez must face, while he spurs on his project of “21st century socialism”, setting limits to private property, nationalising companies, concentrating power in the presidency and imitating defence strategies developed by Cuba.

The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) will hold primary elections May 2 to choose 110 candidates for the same number of electoral districts, while the remaining 55 candidates will be designated by the party’s national directorate, chaired by Chávez.

Smaller factions that have supported Chávez, like the Communist Party and Patria Para odos (Homeland for All), as well as independent groups and public figures, may field their own candidates, but the key electoral competition will be between the opposition coalition and the PSUV.

In 2005, the opposition boycotted the legislative elections, fearing possible fraud – of which international observers found no sign, however – thus paving the way for Chávez allies to occupy all the seats in Congress for a five-year term.

Eleven of the lawmakers elected that year have since gone over to the opposition or declared themselves independent.

Primary elections, like the ones the opposition held Sunday and the PSUV will hold May 2, “oxygenate the political atmosphere with democracy, and are the right strategy to consolidate the forces on either side, because whoever makes a mistake will lose ground,” analyst Luis León, head of the polling firm Datanálisis, told IPS.

According to León, “the opposition is growing stronger…It is presenting a united front as a perfect alliance, and is thus increasing its chances of success in the new parliament, because eccentric opponents running for office outside its circle will be left out of the game,” he said.

The opposition coalition for Democratic Unity (Mesa de Unidad Democrática – MUD) is made up of around 50 political parties, 16 of which are national in scope while the rest are regionally based, as well as several social organisations and opinion groups.

The main parties are the traditional ones that lost their hold on power when Chávez was first elected in 1998, such as the social democratic Democratic Action party and the social Christian COPEI, as well as the leftwing Movement Toward Socialism, Radical Cause and Red Flag, or groups derived from these, like the social democratic A New Era, the Christian democratic Justice First and the leftwing Podemos.

Analyst Eduardo Semtei, a former member of the National Electoral Council (CNE), told IPS that “if the opposition maintains its unity and runs a good campaign, given the dissent in the ranks of the government’s supporters, it may win up to 90 seats in the next parliament.”

If that happens, a crisis would blow up between parliament and the other branches of government, which are all in the hands of Chávez and his allies.

The president has urged his supporters to make every effort to hold on to at least two-thirds of the seats in parliament for the PSUV and its allies, in order to continue the pattern of the past five years, when government bills have sped through Congress and the legislature has granted authorisation for Chávez to rule by decree for specified periods.

“If (the opposition) win in parliament, they will come after me and dismantle all the revolutionary laws and the health, education and food programmes. They don’t plan to get into parliament to work, but to destabilise” the country, the president said.

The Chávez administration’s social programmes or “missions” have included literacy training, primary health care in the slums, subsidised food for the poor, soup kitchens for low-income women and children, free eye operations, dental care, microbusiness loans, support for cooperatives, scholarships at all educational levels, and stipends for the unemployed who take training courses.

Opposition leaders deny that if they win a majority in Congress they would boot Chávez out of office ahead of time. They say they would wait until the presidential elections in late 2012. But they would set limits on his actions, such as cutting military expenditure and foreign aid, as well as his marathon national broadcasts on radio and television.

“On Sept. 26 we will have a plural and democratic majority in Congress to reverse the autocratic form of government that has been imposed on the country and begin a new stage in our history,” said María Corina Machado, the leading opposition candidate to emerge from Sunday’s primaries.

Machado, who is from a wealthy family, is critical of the Venezuelan electoral system. She stood as an independent and won one of the two candidacies in the electoral district most coveted by the opposition, an upper- and middle-class area in the east of Caracas where people have consistently voted overwhelmingly against the leftwing Chávez.

A total of 361,000 voters, representing 9.4 percent of their local electoral rolls, cast their ballots to elect 22 candidates in 15 electoral districts in Sunday’s primaries. In this South American country of 28.7 million, 17.5 million people over 18 are eligible to vote.

The other candidate selected for Machado’s district is former police chief Iván Simonovis, one of nine police officials convicted and now serving time for their part in the short-lived Apr. 11, 2002 coup that deposed Chávez for two days.

Several of the nine, who are regarded as political prisoners by the MUD, were nominated in the opposition primaries as candidates in electable districts. If they win congressional seats in September, they must be released under the rules of parliamentary immunity.

Manuel Rosales, who ran against Chávez in the 2006 presidential elections and is now in political asylum in Peru, was nominated as a parliamentary candidate in a district in the northwestern city of Maracaibo. Rosales is the head of A New Era, a party that is strong in the oil-rich northwest of the country.

The opposition garnered 43 percent of the vote in the 2008 regional elections, compared to 52 percent for the PSUV. If these results were to be repeated in September, the complicated electoral system, which allocates seats to the winners in electoral districts and to state lists of candidates by proportional representation, would give the government a comfortable majority of perhaps two-thirds.

But “the president’s approval ratings have declined, although not dramatically, and he is increasingly being blamed for the country’s problems,” said León. In his view, however, “Chávez is weakening, but no contender is gaining strength.”

Excerpt:

By Daniel Zueras
SAN JOSÉ, Jan 22 2010 (IPS)

Political forces on the left in Costa Rica have formed a partial last-minute alliance to support Ottón Solís, the presidential candidate for the centre-left Citizens’ Action Party (PAC), in a bid to counter the conservative lead that the polls predict for the upcoming Feb. 7 elections.

The governing National Liberation Party (PLN) has a lead over the opposition Libertarian Movement (ML) that has narrowed to 10 percentage points, but pollsters say it is unlikely that any candidate will take 40 percent or more of the vote, the minimum required to win outright without a run-off election.

The goal of the last-minute leftwing alliance is either to boost Solís into second place in the presidential race, or for him to amass enough supporters to be able to tip the scales if there is a second round between the frontrunners, which would take place Apr. 4, and so exert pressure to neutralise key aspects of the conservative agenda.

PLN candidate Laura Chinchilla has the support of 41 percent of respondants in the latest polls, but ML presidential hopeful Otto Guevara has increased his share to 30 percent. Only 14 percent of respondents say they intend to vote for Solís.

Chinchilla resigned from her position as vice president in the government of President Óscar Arias 13 months ago to launch her candidacy. In September 2009 she had the backing of 63 percent of voters, but her steep slide in the polls – although less marked in the latest survey – leads analysts to predict a run-off election, which has only happened once before in Costa Rica, in 2002.

Formally, the governing PLN is a social democratic party, but it has veered to the centre-right, according to political analysts and dissident PLN sectors, while the ML and its candidate Guevara are openly on the far right of the political spectrum. They propose to limit the role of the state to a minimum and unleash market forces to their fullest extent.

Guevara’s support in the polls, in what is his third presidential bid, has leaped considerably compared to his electoral results in 2006, when he received 8.5 percent of the vote. This has deepened alarm among progressive sectors over the swing to the right seen in the polls.

Solís, also a third time presidential hopeful, came within a whisker of obtaining 40 percent of the vote in 2006, losing to Arias by just over one percent in elections which returned Arias to power after a previous term as president (1986-1990). Solís turned his party, the PAC, into the main opposition force, with 17 out of 57 lawmakers in parliament.

Because of this, the centre-left Patriotic Alliance (AP) and National Integration Party (PIN) decided to back Solís’ candidacy, although at this late stage their own candidates remain formally in the ring and any votes cast for them cannot be transferred to Solís, as the deadline for withdrawing from the contest is past.

The leftwing alliance is effective for the presidential race only, as the two minority centre-left parties are contesting the parliamentary elections, also to be held Feb. 7, independently.

The 10-point common programme drawn up by the alliance includes renegotiation of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, which is part of the Dominican Republic and Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) with that country.

The common agenda also aims at improving citizen participation, the defence of the environment, and reforming the electoral law.

A factor that detracts from the alliance is the absence of the second largest progressive force in Costa Rica, the Broad Front (FA), which continues to support its presidential candidate Eugenio Trejos and its own independent programme.

The entry into force in 2009 of the FTA “made unity necessary, in order to confront the right,” Walter Muñoz, nominally the PIN’s presidential candidate, told IPS. Muñoz regards the electoral campaign as “fraudulent”, referring to the polls as well as party financing, some of which is of dubious origin.

“The only way to counter them (the PLN and ML) was to provide a different option,” and that is where this “strategic alliance” comes in, he said.

In Muñoz’s view, the strengthened electoral option Solís now represents will be able to attract support from the social movements that actively opposed the FTA until it was finally approved.

As for Solís, he told IPS in a telephone interview that he was very satisfied with the coalition, which “will have great impact,” and was confident of victory “in the first round.”

The moderate leftwing candidate was dismissive of the polls, which in Costa Rica tend not to reflect what happens later at the ballot box, he said.

Solís recalled that four years ago, when he ran against President Arias, the polls predicted a difference between them of 20 to 25 percent of the vote, but on election day there was only a difference of one percent, equivalent to 18,000 votes.

The candidate emphasised that PAC voters, and those on the left in general, reflect carefully before voting, and he again criticised the management of polls in this country of 4.5 million people, of whom 2.8 million are eligible to vote.

Muñoz admitted that the alliance was a late move, but said it was imperative to react against the campign’s swing to the right, with all that is at stake now for the political and social sectors aligned with the left and centre-left.

He said it was “a proposal to save Costa Rica. We are still in time, because 60 percent of the electorate is undecided.”

Solís said the times the country is living in demand unity, and took a leaf out of the history books to ask himself why the countries who fought against Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War (1939-1945) did not act to stop him earlier. “That’s the way history works,” he said.

Asked about why the FA did not join the alliance, its leader José Merino told IPS he refused to do so because it involved “only the support of candidates who withdrew,” and recalled that two years ago Solís “explicitly” rejected the idea of participating in a progressive coalition. Even a few weeks ago Solís was not in favour of electoral coalitions, he said.

The FA party leader said that while he respected the initiative, he felt it was “rather irresponsible” at this stage of the campaign to ask a party to dissolve itself in order to support another candidacy. Merino hopes for a growth in support for the FA in the elections, as a basis for consolidating “a real option on the left” that in future might stand a chance of winning the presidency.

Excerpt:

By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Jan 19 2010 (IPS)

After 52 years without a victory at the ballot box, the political right is coming back to govern Chile, as multi-millionnaire businessman and former senator Sebastián Piñera narrowly won the run-off against Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle in Sunday’s presidential election.

Sebastián Piñera Credit:

This is the first time the right has won a national election since president Jorge Alessandri was elected in 1958. However, rightwing political sectors were active participants in the 1973-1990 dictatorship of the late general Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006).

Piñera’s election to a four-year term as the 48th president of Chile ended the 20-year rule of the Coalition of Parties for Democracy (CPD), which has governed this South American country of 17 million people since democracy was restored in 1990.

The vote for a successor to current socialist President Michelle Bachelet Bachelet, who is constitutionally barred from re-election, was held on a hot but quiet day, with polling booths opening before 07:00 local time.

At 19:30 local time, with his supporters celebrating in the streets, Piñera asked President Bachelet, who telephoned to congratulate him, for her “advice and help.”

Married to Cecilia Morel and a father of four, Piñera graduated in business administration from the Catholic University of Chile, and holds a master’s and doctorate in economics from the University of Harvard in the United States.

He is the son of a well-known Christian Democratic diplomat, and lived with his parents in the United States and Belgium. He went into politics in 1989, when he was elected senator for eight years. He made his first bid for the presidency in 2006, but was defeated by Bachelet.

His electoral campaign was based on promises of higher economic growth, more efficiently designed and implemented public policies, the creation of “one million new jobs” over his mandate, and a one-off payment in March for the most vulnerable families, worth 40,000 pesos (80 dollars).

He began to amass his personal fortune, estimated at over 1.2 billion dollars, in the 1980s under the dictatorship, mainly through speculative financial investments.

The Coalition for Change, which he heads, is made up of the National Renewal party (RN), the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) and other centre-right parties.

“After 20 years of government by the Coalition of Parties for Democracy, which did a relatively good job, it’s good to let some fresh air into the country and give a rightwing government a chance,” 34-year-old microentrepreneur Alfredo Ortega, a Piñera supporter, told IPS.

Ortega said he believes the future Piñera government will bring greater economic growth, focusing on small and medium businesses, and “greater national unity,” because in his view the president-elect represents a rightwing sector that has distanced itself from Pinochet’s shadow.

“I have quite a negative perception of the military dictatorship, so I don’t expect much good to come from a Piñera government,” 32-year-old dentist Aniza Silva, who voted for Frei, told IPS.

Silva is concerned about the kind of social and environmental policies Piñera may implement after he takes office on Mar. 11.

Flanked by two former CPD presidents, Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994) and Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006), a visibly moved Frei conceded defeat soon after 18:30 local time, before the later official counts were in.

“I hope that what will prevail (in the next administration) will be dialogue, the search for consensus, the social conquests and the freedoms that cost us so much to recover, and that have become a symbol of our relationship with the world,” said Frei, after congratulating the president-elect.

In the first round of the presidential election, held Dec. 13, Piñera picked up 44 percent of the vote, while Frei took 29 percent.

They were followed by independent candidate Marco Enríquez-Ominami, with 20 percent, and the leftwing Pacto Junto Podemos Más (Together We Can Do More) candidate, Jorge Arrate, with six percent.

Although a large proportion of voters for former socialist activists Enríquez-Ominami and Arrate backed Frei in the run-off election Sunday, enough voted for Piñera to secure his victory.

Piñera, who has been compared to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has come under criticism for alleged conflicts of interest in his dual role as politician and businessman.

In April 2009 he decided to voluntarily place his investments in a blind trust, as a sign of transparency. (Under a blind trust, a third party administers assets while the owner holds public office.)

However, he left three vital companies out of this arrangement: the flagship LAN airline, the popular Colo-Colo football club and the television channel Chilevisión.

His links with the dictatorship are another controversial issue.

Although he always kept his distance, and claims to have voted “No” in the 1988 referendum which was designed to prolong the military regime, many of the present leaders of RN and UDI were active in the military government, giving rise to questions about the role they will play in his future administration.

President Bachelet is hugely popular, with an approval rating of an unprecedented 80 percent, but this did not secure the CPD a fifth consecutive presidential term.

The CPD is made up of the Socialist Party (PS), the Party For Democracy (PPD), the Radical Social Democratic Party (PRSD) and the Christian Democratic (DC) party.

Frei was unable to repeat his resounding victory of Dec. 11, 1993, when he was elected president for a six-year term with 57.9 percent of the vote, the largest majority Chile has ever seen.

He is the son of former Christian Democrat president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970), who was poisoned to death in a clinic on Jan. 22, 1982 by agents of the Pinochet dictatorship, according to an ongoing judicial investigation.

In the past few weeks, the governing coalition candidate’s campaign called on Chileans to “No virar a la derecha” (No Right Turn), but it was no use.

Several leaders of the CPD, the most successful party coalition in Chilean history, said they would form a “constructive” opposition during the Piñera administration, although some political scientists predict a new centre-left grouping will form in the future.

Former president Ricardo Lagos acknowledged the verdict of the people, who have apparently tired of some “practices” of those in power, he said. It is time to give way to a new generation of politicians, he added.

The coalition that has governed Chile for 20 years can leave power with its head held high, because of everything it has built, Lagos said. “We took over a country with a broken spirit, as (Cardinal) Raúl Silva Henríquez (1907-1999) said at the time, and 20 years later Chile has rediscovered its national soul,” he said emphatically.

Among the CPD’s achievements is the reduction of poverty from 38 to 13 percent between 1990 and 2006. However, it has been criticised for its lack of renewal and internal democracy, recent incidents of corruption in which it has been implicated, and the stagnation of its progressive agenda.

On Monday Bachelet is to visit the president-elect at his home, as has been traditional since 1990.

Excerpt:

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 10 2009 (IPS)

The Brazilian government is congratulating itself on the first-stage approval of a draft electoral law that increases women’s participation in party politics. However, the women’s movement says it introduces no changes to a power structure that excludes women from politics.

Changes to electoral law 9,504-97, approved Wednesday by the lower house of Congress, must be confirmed by the senate, and could enter into force in time for the October 2010 presidential, parliamentary and state elections.

The draft law requires five percent of party funds to be set aside for promoting women’s political participation, and ten percent of campaign advertising purchased by each party to be used for women candidates.

Celebrated as “a victory” by the governmental Special Secretariat of Policies for Women (SEPM), the draft law also obliges parties to nominate women candidates for at least 30 percent of elected positions. Failure to do so will incur a fine equivalent to a further 2.5 percent of party funds to go towards the promotion of women’s participation.

The SEPM, a department of the presidency, said in a communiqué that these changes were made possible thanks to the work of a tripartite commission made up of representatives of the executive and legislative branches and civil society.

But some organisations belonging to this commission, like the Feminist Centre for Studies and Advisory Services (CFEMEA), said the changes struck “another blow against women.”

“The electoral reform does not change the elitist, racist and patriarchal power structure of the Brazilian political system,” a CFEMEA communiqué said.

CFEMEA held a protest at the Congress Wednesday after the result had been announced, under the slogan “A woman’s place is in politics.”

The demonstration was convened by the Brazilian Women’s Network (AMB), and was supported by the National Commission of Women Rural Workers and SOS Corpo, a local NGO.

In an interview with IPS, Patricia Rangel of CFEMEA said the changes to the law were like “a minor patch-up job with no power to substantially alter the political exclusion of women,” although she said any step toward stimulating women’s participation is “welcome.”

“It’s not a victory, it’s just a sop,” said Rangel, a political scientist and adviser to CFEMEA.

Like other civil society and women’s organisations, CFEMEA wanted the new electoral law to impose “closed list” voting, in which political parties determine beforehand the order in which candidates are elected.

It also pressed for racial, ethnic and gender equality criteria to be adopted in deciding the order of candidates, as well as government financing of electoral campaigns.

According to Rangel, the “open list” voting system in force in Brazil is “very negative” because it allows voters to choose candidates directly from the list. This “personalises politics” and unfairly favours wealthier candidates, in other words “white, middle-aged men,” she said.

“They are more likely to be elected because they tend to be in a better economic position than women and black people,” Rangel said.

In the absence of structural changes, there will be “essentially no change to the political exclusion that has lasted for centuries in Brazil,” she added.

The NGOs also say the amendments to the percentages that were approved were “a stratagem by party leaders to keep women out of politics.”

The original proposal for electoral reform stipulated 10 percent of party funds were to be devoted to programmes encouraging women’s participation, and 20 percent of campaign advertising would have gone to women candidates.

“They slashed the percentages that we considered to be minimal in the first place,” said Joana Santos, who works in informal education at SOS Corpo and is also a member of the AMB.

Santos told IPS she blames the disappointing results in the lower house on the fact that “98 percent of the lawmakers there are men.”

“For women to have access to truly democratic participation on equal terms, there has to be a broader reform of the political system itself, not just the electoral rules,” she said.

The SEPM emphasised that “in keeping with the global trend,” countries must “not only recognise, but actively promote women’s right to political participation.”

This is an “unpaid debt,” said the SEPM, which cited a February 2009 survey by the Brazilian Institute of Statistics and Geography and the Patricia Galvao Institute.

The survey found that 75 percent of respondents were in favour of quotas to ensure political participation by women, and 86 percent approved of penalties for political parties that failed to comply.

Another study cited by the SEPM, carried out by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in September 2008, found that women held only nine percent of seats in the lower house of the Brazilian Congress, placing the country 142nd out of 188 countries studied.

The SEPM compared Brazil’s low proportion of women with Cuba, where 43.2 percent of lawmakers were women, Argentina with 40 percent, Peru with 29 percent, Ecuador with 25 percent, Venezuela with 18.6 percent, Bolivia with 16.9 percent, Chile with 15 percent and Paraguay with 12.5 percent women in lower houses of parliaments (or single chambers, where applicable).

“In the Americas, Brazil is only ahead of Colombia, Haiti and Belize,” the SEPM concluded.

In Santos’ view, such low participation by women in the corridors of political power is due to “a sexist, patriarchal culture.”

She said that politicians in Brazil evidently “use women to fill the quotas, but do not give them real opportunities to compete on equal terms with men.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
MEXICO CITY, Jul 6 2009 (IPS)

The centre-right governing party and the leftwing opposition in Mexico were dealt a major blow in the midterm congressional and local elections on Sunday, in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) made a resounding comeback, reviving memories of the past.

But the overwhelming victory went to abstainers: as many as 45 percent of the 77.4 million registered voters stayed home. And an unprecedented six percent of ballot papers were spoiled, a triumph for the social movement that called on people to express their protest against politicians by casting a blank vote.

“While they (the parties) are celebrating or mourning the results, I hope they wake up and understand that the spoiled votes and the low turnout rate are showing that the majority are expressing social rejection, and that changes are urgently needed to put some substance into democracy,” Paula Mondragón, a young marketing student active in the null vote movement, told IPS.

The percentage of spoiled votes was double that recorded in previous elections, and higher than the number of people who voted for small parties, like the Labour Party and Convergence Party, which back former left-wing presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

However, the electoral laws disregard both the high abstention rate and defaced ballots when it comes to determining the winners.

The movement that called for blank votes has a second phase before it, which will include exerting social pressure, public debate and greater citizen participation, Alberto Serdán, projects coordinator for the Mexico City-based Propuesta Cívica (Civic Proposal), one of the groups advocating spoiled ballots, told IPS.

Sunday’s ballot was held to elect the 500 seats in the lower house of parliament, as well as 1,128 governors, state lawmakers and mayors.

Most of the positions were won by the PRI, which governed the country from 1929 to 2000, when it lost the presidency. At the time, the party’s defeat prompted some analysts to predict its demise – a prospect that must now be ruled out.

Projections based on the preliminary results, after 97 percent of the votes had been tallied, indicate that the PRI bloc in the lower house of Congress will increase in size from 106 seats to 233.

If it maintains its traditional alliance with the Green Party, which as a result of Sunday’s vote grew from 17 seats to 22, the PRI will command an absolute majority in the lower house. That will give it great power over the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón, whose National Action Party (PAN) lost heavily in the elections.

The PAN is estimated to have lost 60 of its lower house seats, declining from 206 to a mere 146.

The left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which in the July 2005 elections became the second largest party in the lower house with 127 seats, will be relegated to third place with only 72 seats in September 2009, when the newly elected lawmakers are sworn in.

The PRI’s sweeping gains are due to voters turning against the PAN government, “basically because of the economic crisis,” but also due to the “institutional disaster” that has overtaken the PRD, some of whose supporters have voted for the PRI, said political scientist Esperanza Palma, a researcher at the Metropolitan Autonomous University.

But the PRI’s success is also the result of its campaign strategy, which presented it as a “renewed” party, Palma told IPS.

“We’re building a 21st century PRI” was its campaign slogan, created by its self-styled social democratic leadership.

The PRI is therefore well positioned for the general elections in 2012.

The PAN government has been battling since 2008 with an economic crisis which could cause GDP to fall by eight percent this year, the worst contraction in decades. In addition, this country of over 107 million people is afflicted by an escalating scourge of drug-related violence.

Although Calderon’s presidency has a more than 60 percent approval rating, according to polls, this did not translate into support for PAN candidates.

Meanwhile, the PRD is torn by internal divisions. López Obrador, for example, gave his backing mainly to Labour Party and Convergence Party candidates during the campaign.

A lot can happen in the three-year run up to the presidential elections, but the PRI is the largest political force, and is contending with the seriously weakened PAN and PRD, said Palma.

Opinion polls carried out since last year on potential presidential candidates put Enrique Peña, the PRI governor of Mexico state, clearly in the lead.

During the campaign, Peña vigorously supported his party and was the darling of the country’s two main television broadcasters, Televisa and TV Azteca, which gave him generous coverage.

In Sunday’s poll, six state governors, 565 mayors and 434 local government lawmakers were also elected. The preliminary count awarded five governorships and most of the other positions to the PRI.

Founded as the National Revolutionary Party on Mar. 4, 1929, the PRI’s initial role was to unite the ideas and interests of the strongmen who emerged from the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Its rule was regularly tainted with accusations of electoral fraud and corruption.

“We are a renewed and responsible party that provides results and will enter into dialogue, as always, with the government of the hour and with the other political parties,” said its president, Beatriz Paredes.

She and other PRI leaders gave the media plenty of interviews Monday, in contrast to the PAN and PRD leaders who were more reticent.

Nevertheless, spokespersons for all three major parties acknowledged that the message sent by the low turnout rate – which was in line with recent trends – and the record blank vote protest, must be taken seriously.

Without any funding or central organisation, solely by means of social networks on the Internet and some columnists in the media, the movement encouraging people to spoil their ballots captured mass attention in the campaign.

It marked a sharp contrast with the customary bombardment of state-financed party propaganda characterised by mudslinging between candidates and an absence of sound proposals.

An exit poll carried out on Sunday by the Fundación Este País, with support from the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology and the National Polytechnic Institute, provided some interesting findings.

Six out of 10 interviewees said they thought political parties listened to citizens very little, or not at all, and nearly half said they did not feel represented by their elected lawmakers.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 30 2009 (IPS)

The government’s poor showing in Argentina’s mid-term congressional elections Sunday has cleared the way for would-be successors to President Cristina Fernández in the 2011 presidential elections. Experts say that, at present, no potential rival has a clear lead.

Argentine Vice President Julio Cobos, who is now opposed to President Fernández, as well as provincial governers and former governors who did well in the contest, have taken up starting positions for the presidential race due in just over two years’ time. In Sunday’s ballot to renew half the seats in the lower house of Congress and one-third of the Senate seats, the government lost their majority in both chambers.

Although on this occasion the vote for her political sector was 13 percentage points lower than in the 2007 general elections, both the president and her husband and predecessor, former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), are eligible by law to stand for a second term in 2011.

The ruling Victory Front, a centre-left grouping within the Justicialista (Peronist) Party (PJ) founded and headed by Kirchner and Fernández, lost ground in key districts, including the province of Buenos Aires, the most populous in the country, where the Front played its top card with Kirchner as its leading candidate for a seat in the lower house of Congress.

As a result of the defeat, which was downplayed by Fernández on Monday, Kirchner resigned as leader of the governing PJ.

“Anything is still possible: (Fernández) is only half way through her term,” political scientist Marcelo Escolar, of the state National University of San Martín, told IPS. He mentioned, as an example, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, whose popularity declined over a transport crisis but later rebounded to greater heights.

Nevertheless, Escolar said it was “unlikely” that President Fernández or her husband would run for reelection. “We have an open-ended situation and we’ll have to wait and see what decision they make,” he said. In his view, Sunday’s results produced no clear winners, either.

Although there is no legal bar to Argentina’s first couple continuing in power, many analysts are now predicting the end of the Kirchner era that began in May 2003, above all because they see it as unlikely that the Kirchners will adapt to an administration style that, given the new composition of parliament, will have to seek consensus and compromise.

Political analyst Rosendo Fraga, head of the Nueva Mayoría think tank, told IPS that if Sunday’s vote is taken as an indication of the future presidential elections, the result “put paid to the chances of the Kirchner sector fielding a winning candidate in 2011.”

During his term as president, Kirchner designated his wife – a senator at the time – as the candidate to succeed him, but that level of power enjoyed by the Kirchners evaporated on Sunday.

“The governing faction did not only lose the decisive province of Buenos Aires. It came fourth in the city of Buenos Aires and in the province of Córdoba; third in Santa Fe; and was defeated in Mendoza, Entre Ríos, and even in Santa Cruz, the Kirchners’ home province,” Fraga said, naming the most populous provinces of Argentina.

But this reverse, he added, “does not necessarily imply that the Justicialista Party cannot win the next presidential elections.” He pointed out that in Santa Fe the winner was Senator Carlos Reutemann, a member of the PJ who has distanced himself from the Kirchners.

Reutemann, a former governor of Santa Fe, is internationally known for his past success as a Formula 1 racing driver. He was elected senator with 42.2 percent of the vote, in a slender victory over his rival, socialist Senator Rubén Giustiniani, the heir-apparent of socialist Governor Hermes Binner, who is also a presidential hopeful for the centre-left opposition.

Giustiniani garnered 40.5 percent of the vote. Analysts say such a narrow defeat does not necessarily put Binner out of the presidential race.

In contrast, Buenos Aires provincial Governor Daniel Scioli, the new leader of the PJ, “has been weakened,” Escolar said. Scioli was second on the Victory Front’s list of candidates for the lower house of Congress for the province, after Kirchner.

The winner in Buenos Aires province was business tycoon Francisco de Narváez, a centre-right congressman and anti-Kirchner dissident of the PJ. His triumph over Kirchner was a major political event, but he was born in Colombia and so cannot run for president, a post the constitution reserves for Argentine-born citizens.

However, another leading businessman in the centre-right alliance that supported de Narváez, city of Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, emerged as a possible candidate at the head of this new opposition coalition, in spite of his influence being restricted to the capital city and the province of Buenos Aires.

Among the rest of the opposition there is also a wide range of presidential hopefuls. Vice President Julio Cobos, who became an opponent of Kirchnerism in 2008, “is in pole position” for the race in 2011, Escolar said.

Cobos, formerly governor of the western province of Mendoza, was a member of the opposition Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) when he became Fernández’s ally and running mate in 2007. Enmity arose between the president and himself in 2008, during the stand-off between the government and farmers’ associations over export taxes, when he cast a deciding vote in support of agribusiness.

The vice president did not resign, but backed UCR candidate Ernesto Sanz for the Senate seat for Mendoza. Sanz won with 50 percent of the vote, compared to half that for his governing party rival.

Cobos is eyeing the presidential nomination for the Civic and Social Accord (ACS), an alliance between the UCR, the Socialists and the Civic Coalition, which garnered only one percentage point less than the ruling party in the popular vote nationwide. However, he is willing to compete for the ticket in open primaries in order to ensure consensus.

The Civic Coalition, an important part of the Accord, is led by former congresswoman Elisa Carrió, who came in second behind Fernández in the 2007 presidential elections.

But Carrió was one of the big losers in Sunday’s elections, and her bid for the presidency may have been cut short.

More concerned with strengthening her coalition at the national level, she neglected the city of Buenos Aires, where she had most support. She was third on the capital city list of candidates for the lower house, which was headed by economist Alfonso Prat. According to some of her political associates, this caused her coalition to come in third in the capital.

Others, in contrast, say that voters rejected her confrontational style, as Carrió is fonder of complaints and criticisms than of positive proposals. The same antagonistic approach is invoked by analysts to explain voters’ rejection of Kirchner and his wife, President Fernández.

Excerpt:

The main challenges faced by El Salvador’s leftwing president-elect Mauricio Funes are forging understandings with other political sectors, adopting measures to deal with the economic crisis, and especially its effects on the poor, and strengthening the country’s institutions, say analysts.

Credit: FMLN

Funes of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) will have to act fast, even before he takes office on Jun. 1, to generate confidence at the political level, among the business community and in society at large.

The director of research and development at the Business Foundation for Educational Development (FEPADE), Joaquín Samayoa, told IPS that Funes will have to work out “understandings” with other political forces to ensure “democratic governance.”

He will also have to “creatively” tackle domestic economic problems that have been aggravated by the global recession, which will have a particularly heavy impact on this impoverished Central American nation, said the analyst. El Salvador adopted the dollar as its currency in 2001, and 80 percent of this country’s exports go to the United States.

The crisis has already been reflected in the loss of jobs and in a drop in the remittances sent home by Salvadorans in the United States, which are “a lifeline for a large number of families living in extreme poverty,” he added.

Funes, a veteran TV journalist who was not a member of the FMLN until he was nominated as the party’s candidate, garnered 51 percent of the vote in Sunday’s elections, against the 49 percent taken by his rival Rodrigo Ávila of the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which has governed the country since 1989.

The FMLN insurgency, which fought government forces in the 1980-1992 civil war, became a legal political party in 1993.

The war left 75,000 people – mainly civilians – dead and 6,000 forcibly disappeared, largely at the hands of far-right death squads led by the late founder of ARENA Roberto d’Aubuisson (1944-1992).

El Salvador, the smallest country on the mainland of the Americas, which is severely overcrowded with 5.7 million people in a mountainous territory of 21,000 square kilometres, has one of the highest murder rates in the world: 61 per 100,000 people.

Casey Reckman, associate director of Fitch Ratings, an international credit rating agency, said this week that Funes would have a tough time ahead of him because of the impact of the U.S. recession, and added that cooperation among political sectors is crucial to implementing long-term fiscal policies and restore the confidence of investors.

According to the Central Reserve Bank, some four billion dollars in remittances were sent home by Salvadorans in the United States last year, equivalent to 17 percent of GDP.

But in January, remittances dipped eight percent with respect to the same month in 2008.

Ninety percent of the 2.9 million Salvadorans living abroad are in the United States.

In his victory speech, Funes said he would build a government of national unity because “the country belongs to all Salvadorans,” but clarified that he would put a priority on the poor, who he said were the victims of the neoliberal free-market policies followed by ARENA since 1989.

Analyst Dagoberto Gutiérrez said the country’s first leftwing president will also have to dismantle a state apparatus created by, and at the service of, ARENA.

He said that from its very origins, El Salvador’s small wealthy elite “has been primitive in essence,” generating political and social confrontation in a country where the “opulence” of a few contrasts sharply with the “disgraceful poverty” of the majority of the population.

“Funes has to show the people that his government won’t be just another government, and to do that he will have to establish a new state apparatus to overcome entrenched corruption after two decades of rule by ARENA, which took advantage of the state to benefit the dominant class,” said Gutiérrez.

The new president will also have to use referendums as an instrument to give “voters greater participation in decisions of far-reaching significance for the direction that the country will take,” he added.

Samayoa said “any party that has been in the government for a long period of time tends to act in an arbitrary manner,” and called for “vigilance and intolerance of corruption on the part of the government.”

Outgoing President Antonio Saca said he would seek a “smooth, expedited transition,” and has invited Funes to accompany him to the Mar. 25 summit for the Central American Integration System (SICA), to be hosted by Nicaragua.

ARENA leaders have said their party will be a “constructive” opposition force, while remaining vigilant to protect the country’s “freedoms.”

In its editorial Monday, the ultra-conservative El Diario de Hoy underwent a radical shift in position, stating that “the proposal for national unity is welcomed with open arms.”

“El Salvador is divided, and requires a strong dose of wisdom from both halves to find the best route forward for the country,” the editorial said.

During the election campaign, the newspaper had accused Funes of being “the candidate of the party of kidnappers and criminals.”

The president-elect will head to Brazil Thursday to meet with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who called him on Sunday to congratulate him on his triumph and reiterate his earlier offer of helping El Salvador in the fight against poverty.

Carlos Gómez, who has been driving a taxi for two years, remarked to IPS that he voted for “change” and that he hopes Funes will live up to his promise to improve living standards for the poor, through the creation of jobs, price controls for basic products, and more effective measures against crime.

The question that should begin to be answered over the next few months is how inclusive and participative the new government will be, and how constructive ARENA will be as the main opposition party, said Samayoa.

Salvadoran president-elect Mauricio Funes of the leftist insurgency-turned-political party FMLN promised to build an “inclusive” government, with a view to bringing about reconciliation in Salvadoran society and creating a “future of progress” for all Salvadorans.

With over 90 percent of the votes counted, Funes took 51.7 percent of the total against 48.7 percent for his rival, Rodrigo Ávila, the candidate of the rightwing Nationalist Republican Front (ARENA), which has governed the country since 1989.

“This is the happiest night of my life, and I also want it to be the night of greatest hope for El Salvador,” Funes said late Sunday when he declared his victory, alongside vice president-elect Salvador Sánchez Cerén, other FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) leaders, and the future first lady, Brazilian-born Vanda Pignato.

Funes, a 49-year-old TV journalist and former correspondent for the U.S. CNN cable news network, said “a spirit of national unity” would reign in his government, which would leave aside confrontation and revanchism.

“It is time to move towards the future; the fatherland belongs to all Salvadorans,” he said.

President Antonio Saca and Ávila both called Funes to congratulate him.

Funes will head the first leftwing government in the history of El Salvador, which has been governed by military dictatorships and conservative and rightwing forces since it became an independent nation in the mid-19th century.

Sunday’s turnout stood at 61 percent, with just over 2.4 million of the country’s 4.2 million voters casting ballots.

Although a 1992 peace agreement put an end to a 12-year armed conflict between the FMLN and government forces that left 80,000 people dead or “disappeared” and 40,000 disabled, this impoverished Central American country of 5.7 million still has one of the world’s highest homicide rates: 61 per 100,000 population.

And while the 2006 official unemployment rate (the latest available figure) was 6.6 percent, 43 out of 100 economically active people are under-employed or scrape by with temporary jobs, casual labour or working in the informal sector of the economy, mainly as street vendors.

Analyst Ernesto Rivas Gallont said Funes won because his message reached Salvadorans, overcoming the intense “fear campaign” waged against him.

“The people were fed up after 20 years of government by ARENA; voters have matured,” Rivas Gallont commented to IPS.

The biggest challenge Funes now faces, he said, is to create “a more just country,” fighting poverty and restoring “the rule of law.”

More than 40 percent of Salvadorans are poor, according to official statistics.

After it became a legal political party in 1993, the FMLN lost three presidential elections, in 1994, 1999 and 2004.

“I’m overjoyed, at last we are free; we are going to have a more just society,” FMLN supporter María Artiga told IPS during the celebration that stretched into the wee hours of Monday morning.

Artiga formed part of a huge tide of people in red – the colour of the FMLN – along the Paseo General Escalón and Alameda Roosevelt, two of the capital’s main thoroughfares.

People “spoke out for change,” FMLN legislator Jorge Jiménez told IPS.

“I’m happy, after so many years of struggle,” said a visibly moved Jiménez, who as a guerrilla fought on Guazapa mountain, one of the insurgent group’s strongholds in northern El Salvador.

Responding to Funes’s victory, former president Armando Calderón (1994-1999), of ARENA, said “democracy and El Salvador have won.”

The president-elect’s spokesman, David Rivas, told IPS that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva phoned Funes to congratulate him and to reiterate the offer of support that he made during the four meetings they have held, in El Salvador and Brazil.

The campaign for next Sunday’s presidential elections in El Salvador wrapped up at midnight Wednesday, muddied by complaints of irregularities and fear mongering propaganda that could influence the outcome.

Although opinion polls and the feeling on the street indicate that Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), is the clear favourite, the die is not yet cast, historian Raymundo Calderón, dean of the faculty of science and humanities at the University of El Salvador, told IPS.

Calderón said the fear campaign waged by the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which has governed the country since 1989, against a possible triumph by the FMLN, a former guerrilla movement, could tip the balance in favour of governing party candidate Rodrigo Ávila.

ARENA’s campaign slogan is “I Will Not Hand Over My Country”.

The professor cited television programmes in which it has been repeatedly stated that if the FMLN wins, El Salvador will fall under the influence of Venezuela’s firebrand leftist leader Hugo Chávez. He also pointed to images that have saturated the media and the streets, including fake photos showing Funes alongside Chávez.

Funes urged the 150,000 supporters who showed up at the FMLN final campaign rally last weekend to “defend the vote” and report any irregularities – an allusion to the ruling party’s alleged practice of paying foreigners, mainly from other Central American countries, to cast fake ballots in favour of ARENA, as denounced in the January municipal and legislative elections.

The leftwing candidate also blasted Ávila for refusing to engage in a debate on a Mar. 5 programme organised by the CNN television news network.

“We will build a government of national unity; change is urgently needed,” Funes, a veteran television broadcaster and talk show host, told his followers on Avenida Juan Pablo II, a main artery that cuts across the capital from east to west.

ARENA’s final rally drew around 50,000 people to the Cuscatlán stadium, where Ávila offered support to those who are “overwhelmed” by economic problems.

“To me it is unacceptable that there are families who do not have electricity and running water, and that there are still adults who can’t read in El Salvador,” said the candidate, a former National Civil Police chief, who hopes to win a fifth consecutive term for ARENA.

Ávila, the president of ARENA, urged voters to “defend our system of freedoms and defeat the prospect of becoming just another pawn in the totalitarian delirium of Hugo Chávez.”

In a survey carried out Feb. 1-15 by the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP), 49.3 percent of respondents said they would vote for Funes, against 31.7 percent who favoured Ávila – a 17.6 percent lead. However, 14.3 percent did not say who they planned to vote for.

IUDOP director Jeannette Aguilar told IPS that it is not yet possible to say who will win on Sunday, since ARENA controls the entire state apparatus.

ARENA is banking on the possibility that Funes will fail to win the 50 percent plus one vote needed to avoid a runoff.

Rafael Roncagliolo, a Peruvian sociologist, journalist and election consultant who visited El Salvador in early March, described the media fear campaign against the FMLN as “atrocious and denigrating.”

José Ramos, a 41-year-old private security agent, said either candidate could win the race, but added that he hoped for “a change, for the good of our children.”

Raúl Ayala, a 76-year-old pensioner, said he backed ARENA, which he said would “defend freedom and national sovereignty.”

This week, 140 U.S. and Latin American academics sent an open letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, calling on the Barack Obama administration to “categorically disavow the allegations made in the…fear campaigns” and to “emphasise that the Government of the United States is committed to working with any political party that wins the Salvadoran Presidency”.

The letter says “The problems of the Salvadoran electoral system are structural and so severe that they tip the balance in favour of the party holding executive office.”

The 140 experts on Latin America further state that “The Supreme Electoral Tribunal, like almost all other Salvadoran institutions including the Supreme Court and the major news media, are highly politicised and unduly influenced by partisan interests, particularly in favour of the party holding executive office.”

Civil society groups have reported that public officials and the owners of private businesses have threatened to fire their employees if they do not prove that they voted for ARENA, by using their cell phones to snap a shot of their ballot.

El Salvador’s economic crisis has been aggravated by the recession in the United States, where 90 percent of the 2.9 million Salvadorans living abroad reside. In 2008, Salvadorans in the U.S. sent home nearly four billion dollars in remittances, equivalent to 17 percent of GDP.

This Central American nation, which already has one of the highest murder rates in the world – 61 homicides per 100,000 population – is suffering from a growing wave of violence, related to organised crime, youth gangs, vengeance killings and even alleged rightwing death squads.

Although the FMLN has consolidated the hard-line leftwing vote and has expanded towards the centre, analysts say it may fall short of the absolute majority of votes needed for a first-round victory.

If Funes does win, he will head the first leftwing government in the history of this nation, which has been governed by conservatives and military dictatorships since it became an independent republic in 1838.

By Raúl Gutiérrez
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 9 2009 (IPS)

“I would not say that the media in Latin America contribute to fomenting civic culture, overall. They generally head in the opposite direction,” says Rafael Roncagliolo, a Peruvian sociologist, journalist and election consultant.

Rafael Roncagliolo Credit: Eric Lemus/IPS

Voters in El Salvador will go to the polls on Sunday, Mar. 15 to choose a new president, in elections that have drawn close attention both domestically and abroad because of the very real possibility that the leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) candidate, popular talk show host Mauricio Funes, will win.

The campaign has been marked by questions about the transparency of the electoral process and an aggressive propaganda campaign against the FMLN by the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).

ARENA has ruled the country since 1989, before the end of the 12-year (1980-1992) civil war, in which around 80,000 people – mainly civilians – were killed, primarily by government forces and far-right death squads.

The campaign has also seen an increase in violence, in a country that already has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and whose economy has been hit hard by the global economic crisis.

The fear campaign waged in the media against the FMLN is “atrocious and denigrating,” said Roncagliolo, the founder and former secretary general of the Asociación Civil Transparencia (ACT – Transparency Civil Association), a Peruvian organisation that works with election and democracy issues, and head of the intergovernmental International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) for the Andean region.

The Salvadoran electoral system is “anachronistic” due to the control that the political parties have over the electoral court (TSE), said the expert in this interview with IPS, during a visit to El Salvador as an adviser to the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Salvadoran Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública (IUDOP – University Institute of Public Opinion).

IUDOP, with the support of the NDI, implemented a national election observer mission and “quick count” or parallel tabulation system during the Jan. 18 municipal and legislative elections, in which 2,000 election observers were deployed around the country. A similar procedure will be employed in Sunday’s presidential vote.

In a late 2008 IUDOP survey, only 11 percent of respondents said they had a high level of confidence in the TSE, 34 percent said they had little, and 39.3 percent said they had none.

Nevertheless, Roncagliolo believes “the conditions for free elections and for the people to express their preferences are in place.”

IPS: What is your view of the Salvadoran electoral process? RAFAEL RONCAGLIOLO: It has many problems. For example, the makeup of the TSE, changes in playing rules after the electoral process has begun, or the dirty campaign in the media in favour of one candidate, based on discrediting his rival.

An electoral court made up of members of the political parties is anachronistic. The worldwide tendency is to professionalise election bodies; representatives of political parties sit on them only as observers.

In the Peruvian system, for example, the electoral court is comprised of delegates of the Supreme Court and the Attorney-General’s Office, representatives of law schools, and representatives of lawyers. This contributes to the transparency of elections.

IPS: The European Union election observers mission in El Salvador has reported a bias in media coverage in favour of one political party. What is your experience in Latin America? RR: Today, the media’s responsibility towards democracy is one of the main problems everywhere. We no longer have censorship by governments, but we have commercial censorship which serves the interests of media owners and leads to biased reporting.

All parties should receive equal coverage, not only in quantitative but in qualitative terms. That is democracy.

The media can have their opinion spaces, but they cannot take a stance for a candidate. They must be standard bearers for the voter’s right to cast an informed vote. That is the media’s democratic responsibility. In many cases, they only give coverage to some candidates in order to denigrate them.

IPS: What is your perception of the current media campaign here? RR: I think it’s atrocious. For example, one spot shows a protest against a group of people demanding free elections in Nicaragua in which a red FMLN shirt is shown, as if people couldn’t wear what they wanted. And that incident is presented in the Salvadoran press as if there were FMLN involvement in criminal activity in Nicaragua. [The ruling leftwing FSLN in Nicaragua faced accusations of fraud in the recent local elections]. That is simply unacceptable; it is outrageous manipulation.

Dirty smear campaigns are being carried out all over the continent, in some countries to a greater extent than in others, depending on how deeply rooted civic culture is in each case.

IPS: Should there be some kind of limits? RR: The thing here is that whoever has more money produces more publicity, and that is not equitable. There are some kinds of limits that work. For example, today there are four countries in Latin America – Chile, Mexico, Brazil and Ecuador – that have regulations that limit private financing of political parties, and others that penalise media slander.

But I would not say that the media in Latin America contribute to fomenting civic culture, overall. They generally head in the opposite direction; they meddle in the private lives of candidates and do not foment debate on the big, central issues, when they should be the big channel for public debate.

IPS: There has never been a presidential election debate in El Salvador. What is the experience in the rest of Latin America? RR: I believe that debate during election campaigns is essential. And I’m not talking about the rights of the candidates; I’m referring to the rights of voters. Voters have a right to be informed, and debates are a very important source of information. There are countries where elections without debates (between the candidates) are inconceivable.

In Peru, ACT managed to turn debates into a tradition. Debates are also an integral part of election campaigns in Chile and Brazil.

IPS: The presidential candidate of ARENA, Rodrigo Ávila, has refused to debate. RR: The one who has refused to debate here is the one who has all of the media outlets in his favour.

IPS: And what do you say about that attitude? RR: A lot of progress must be made to have a democratic civic culture.

Excerpt:

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 16 2009 (IPS)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez won Sunday’s referendum with 54 percent of the vote, which will allow him to stand for reelection indefinitely. But he will have to exercise leadership over a country that is stubbornly split in two.

Chávez votes in the district of Catia, Caracas. Credit: Courtesy of Comando Electoral del Sí

In his speech praising the result, the president left no one in doubt about his vision for the future: “Those who voted ‘Yes’ voted for Chávez and socialism,” he said, and he announced that “this victory is the start of a new cycle of the Bolivarian Revolution, up to 2019.”

“We must review everything we have done and begin to rectify, adjust and strengthen our economic and social affairs. The social ‘missions’ (health, education and nutrition programmes) must be strengthened. Then we will be better placed, after 2010, to continue opening new horizons,” Chávez said.

In the medium term, “We shall continue on the road to socialism, because the only way we can possibly have a country is to have a socialist country,” he said.

Chávez “got both the things he wanted: the opportunity to be a presidential candidate in 2012, and to recover his invincible, or very strong, image, after suffering two electoral reverses,” analyst Luis León, head of the polling firm Datanálisis, told IPS.

When Chávez first proposed a constitutional reform that included allowing reelection without term limits in 2007, the initiative failed by 51 to 49 percent of the ballots. In the regional elections held in November 2008, governing party candidates won the majority of posts, but the opposition made advances in key constituencies.

“We are for ‘El Comandante’ Chávez. We support him because he is the only one who has truly cared about poor people in this country, and as long as he continues in that vein, we want him to stay in office,” a retired teacher, Ana de Cevallos, told IPS Sunday, amid the bustle of the referendum in the central Caracas district of La Candelaria.

In contrast, in the view of Raúl Rondón, a salesperson in the same district, “increasingly, there are fewer people who still want Chávez. They are becoming disenchanted with him, and even if he wins, you can see that many people are sick and tired of fighting. What they want is solutions” to their problems, he said.

José Virtuoso, a Jesuit priest who works in shanty towns in the north of Caracas and belongs to the Ojo Electoral (Electoral Eye) observatory, said that “the results (of the referendum) show that the country is divided into two antagonistic halves, and unfortunately they are not hearing a message of inclusiveness.”

“The president’s speech celebrating his victory did not call for reconciliation, nor for the inclusion of that other half of the country,” he complained.

Looking ahead to the long term, Chávez welcomed the prospect of government continuity, “because brief periods of government were imposed on us as an imperialist strategy, to prevent us from developing a national project that is truly our own.”

In the immediate future, the government “is going to be more populist, more dependent than it has previously been on the popularity of its leader, who is certainly unique. He has shown that he is irreplaceable,” said León.

“Loss of popularity has the same effect on Chávez as kryptonite has on Superman. His position rests on his popularity, his connection with the people, and that could be weakened by the measures that are taken” in the context of the global crisis, León said.

The advantages of holding the referendum before the economic crisis hits Venezuelans with full force, and of using the electoral campaign machinery that was set in motion for last November’s regional elections, prompted the president and branches of government to hold the ballot as soon as possible, after a brief four-week campaign.

So far, Chávez has ruled out any reduction in social spending or any plans to devalue the Venezuelan currency. Raising the price of petrol, which is very cheap in this oil-producing country, has been a taboo subject during his 10 years in power.

But according to the economists’ calculations, oil revenues in 2009 will be only one-third of the income received in 2008, creating an inevitable budget shortfall in a few months’ time and forcing adjustments to be made.

The government has suspended its nationalisation programme over the past few months, but it might renew the policy, targeting private finance, health and food companies, as an attempt to buffer the impact of the crisis on the poor.

As soon as the referendum results came out, the opposition redoubled rallying calls to its supporters to unite, and to keep fighting for the long haul. “This is not a 100-metre flat race, but a marathon, and we will win it,” said student leader David Smolansky.

Tens of thousands of university students who marched in the streets and volunteered as observers at polling stations were the vanguard of the ‘No’ vote campaign, which was far less elaborate than the pro-amendment campaign that had evident access to government resources.

Omar Barboza, the vice president of the main opposition party Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Era, UNT), highlighted the fact that out of the 15 elections or referendums that have been held over the last 10 years, this was the first time the opposition garnered more than five million votes, whereas Chávez, reelected in 2006 with nearly 64 percent of the vote, has seen his support dwindle to 54 percent in this referendum.

“We achieved this result in adverse circumstances, because we were not fighting against an amendment proposal, but against the state. We commit ourselves to fighting until democratic values are restored in this country,” said Barboza. “We have a different project to the totalitarian programme of President Chávez,” he added.

The National Electoral Council, after scrutinising 94.2 percent of the returns, reported that there were 6,003,594 votes in favour of the amendment (54.36 percent), and 5,040,082 (45.63 percent) against. A total of 199,041 ballots were annulled, and the abstention rate was 32.95 percent, out of an electoral roll of nearly 16.8 million people.

Excerpt:

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 15 2009 (IPS)

After a decade in office, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez goes to the country on Sunday in another attempt to change the constitution so that he can stand for reelection "for at least another 10 years".

Campaign demonstrators in Venezuela. Credit: Pedro Antonuccio/IPS

Some 16.8 million Venezuelans are eligible to vote for or against the proposed amendment to the 1999 constitution, instigated by Chávez himself, which eliminates restrictions on the number of terms candidates may serve, so that the president, lawmakers, governors and mayors may run for office as many times as they like.

"I am ready to govern with you for these four years (the remainder of his current six-year term) and the next six, until 2019," Chávez said on Thursday before tens of thousands of his supporters in Caracas, at the final rally of his political campaign.

"On Sunday my political fate will be decided, and I will stand to attention like a soldier waiting for your orders," he said.

Determined to reinvent his "Bolivarian Revolution" in a socialist key, in 2007 Chávez proposed a wide-ranging reform of the constitution that included permission for presidential reelection.

He seized the opportunity presented by his victory in the December 2006 elections, when 7.3 million voters elected him for another term, compared with only 4.3 million ballots for his main rival, Manuel Rosales. But the 2007 constitutional reform failed.

The long campaign leading up to that referendum, when Chávez's attention was taken up by international issues, and above all the closing of the RCTV television channel, which was often critical of the government, provoked a vigorous student protest movement and the abstention of three million of his supporters.

The constitutional reform package was rejected by 51 percent of voters.

As soon as the results were known in the November 2008 regional elections, in which his supporters won 53 percent of the vote, Chávez took a short cut via the country's parliament, where 155 out of the total of 167 lawmakers support him, and this time proposed an amendment only of the section on reelection of elected officials.

After two days of debate, parliament approved the proposal and the National Electoral Council, an autonomous branch of government with a majority of government supporters, set the referendum date for Feb. 15, on the same day it received the text. This left only four weeks for campaigning.

"In late 2008, those opposed to indefinite reelection had a lead of 20 percentage points over those in favour, but according to our measurements that lead has dropped to only five points," Oscar Schémel, head of the Hinterlaces polling firm, told IPS. "That small advantage appeared to firm up during February, so the No vote is in with a chance," he added.

Other pollsters like Datanálisis, relied on by the opposition, reported a majority of voter intentions against the amendment in December, but its most recent survey in late January indicated that Yes votes were in the lead by 52 to 48 percent of interviewees.

"The state apparatus was in full swing. President Chávez made 46 nationwide broadcasts on radio and television in the space of two months, and his party faithful went canvassing house to house, sowing dread among the Venezuelan population by saying that if Chávez loses, chaos will reign," Luis Vicente León, the head of Datanálisis, told IPS.

In contrast to León's account, the head of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Vanessa Davies, told journalists that party members have indeed been going "house to house, but have received enthusiastic support." "Many people say, 'we have this or that problem, but you can count on us to vote Yes,'" she said.

Chávez and his inner circle mounted their campaign like a blitzkrieg, wasting no time and leaving the opposition far behind in matters of organisation, fund-raising and strategy.

The timing of the snap referendum gave the opposition no opportunity to capitalise on mistakes or unpopular measures the government may have to impose to survive the global economic crisis. The country has barely been given the time or the opportunity to debate the reelection proposal.

State entities like the giant Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) consortium, the Caracas Metro (underground and bus system), the tax office and the electricity company undertook propaganda campaigns in support of the Yes vote. The electoral authority rebuked them only when the end of the campaign was hours away.

Foreign correspondents could see how even in remote villages in the east or west of the country, posters, pennants, stickers and even the T-shirts worn by street cleaners displayed updated slogans for the Yes vote, indicating that the pro-Chávez electoral message was spread promptly and swiftly by highly efficient official machinery.

The opposition resorted to press advertisements, since most newspapers are critical of the government, and to a television news channel and their modest party machines. In the vanguard were thousands of students from some 20 universities who took to the streets to demonstrate and hand out leaflets, with a passion comparable to that of 2007.

"No es no," (No means No, referring to the previous rejection of constitutional reform in 2007) on the one hand, and "Uh, ah, Chávez sí va" or its variant, "Uh, ah, la enmienda sí va" (roughly, Oh, yes, Chávez will go ahead, or Oh, yes, the amendment will pass) on the other, have been the main competing slogans in this hasty campaign.

Astonishingly, the 73-word question that will appear on the screens of the computerised voting machines does not even mention the word "reelection".

"Do you approve the amendment… of the Constitution of the Republic… to increase the political rights of the people by allowing any citizen holding elected office to be nominated as candidate for the same office, … pending his or her possible election exclusively by popular vote?" it asks.

The amendment covers any official elected by the people, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that its central purpose is to fulfil Chávez's own aspirations. "Whatever 'El Comandante' says, we will support him. We trust him, although we dislike some of the people surrounding him," Manuel Estévez, an employee at a hardware store in the centre of Caracas, told IPS.

"Chávez is indispensable to the interests of the people at this historic moment in our country. The people identify him with the whole political project that is at stake in this referendum. It is the transformation of society, and it depends on one man," said Aristóbulo Istúriz, one of the vice presidents of the PSUV.

On the opposition side, former socialist leader Teodoro Petkoff said that "it is not good for democracy that presidents should be able to perpetuate themselves in power."

"The exercise of leadership, especially in countries with fragile democracies and a tradition of "caudillismo" (charismatic strongmen in power), gives them obvious electoral advantages that, as (Venezuelan Liberator) Simón Bolívar said, could usher in usurpation and tyranny," he said.

Sociologist Edgardo Lander, a professor at the Central University and for years a Chávez sympathiser, said that the president has "managed to give a voice and a direction to the discontent that existed in Venezuela, but in order to build a more democratic society we now have to go beyond that leadership."

"A process of (social) transformation cannot depend on one person alone. That is a sign of weakness, not strength," Lander said.

Furthermore, in his view, "at bottom what is at stake is the idea Chávez and his entourage have that without him as their candidate they might lose the elections (in 2012), while the opposition is concerned that the pro-Chávez movement, with the president as its candidate, might win those elections. That is the problem. The rest is secondary."

An exultant Chávez said Thursday that he would win "by a knockout," and called on his followers to celebrate Sunday night in front of the seat of government.

For the opposition, Leopoldo López, the popular former mayor of a Caracas municipality, whom analysts say has presidential aspirations, said that "the result will be very close and the No vote has a chance, if we overcome abstentionism."

Finally, on the disparities between polls – two of the most reputable predict victory for the Yes vote, and others say the Nos are ahead, although the differences are within the margin of statistical error – political scientist John Magdaleno told IPS, "although I have never supported the notion of a 'hidden vote,' perhaps for the first time it will come out and surprise us all."

Excerpt:

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 12 2009 (IPS)

A mob seized a man suspected of rape in El Valle, a populous district in the southwest of the Venezuelan capital, beat him to death, and then burned his corpse – twice over, so that the press could film and photograph the scene. In spite of the horrifying images, few public figures mentioned the case.

The lynching took place in the final run-up to the referendum on a new constitution that would allow unlimited reelection to all elected posts. However, it was barely noticed by political campaigners: the government issued a condemnation, and the opposition criticised the state of public safety.

Social issues appear to be overshadowed by the purely political battle that will be decided at the ballot boxes next Sunday and is centred on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who has governed for 10 years and aspires to continue to do so for at least another decade.

A publicity spot for the “Yes” vote (to approve the constitutional change proposed by Chávez) shows a poor woman arriving at a private clinic seeking help. She is rejected because she does not have a credit card; but it turns out this is only a nightmare, as in reality she lives close to a free health centre that is part of the Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighbourhood) health programme initiated by Chávez in 2003.

However, programmes like Barrio Adentro, their implementation and their defects, have been disregarded during the four-week referendum campaign. “We haven’t time to persuade so many people; what we have to do is get our voters, who are in the majority, to turn out and vote,” said Chávez at one of his meetings with his campaign managers.

The proposal to amend the constitution would remove all term limits for elected officials, so that candidates have the opportunity to be reelected indefinitely. Chávez, elected president in 1999, went to the country again in 2000 and was reelected in 2006. His presidential term ends in 2013, but he hopes to stand again and govern “at least until 2019,” in his own words.

“The balance of these 10 years in government is a very positive one, but there is still much to be done,” the president said in a television interview. “A decade ago, half the population lived in poverty, and we have reduced that to 25 percent,” he said.

He quoted Alicia Bárcena, the executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in whose view Venezuela has achieved “very positive social indicators, and is one of the countries that spends most public money on social programmes, nearly 14 percent” of gross domestic product (GDP).

Bárcena confirmed that, according to government statistics, the proportion of the population who are indigent (extremely poor) has fallen from 25 percent to 8.5 percent over the same time period.

“These indicators show a reduction of both general and extreme poverty. There has been good continuity in the implementation of inclusive educational policies, as well as improvements in nutrition and consumption among Venezuelans,” Marino Alvarado, the coordinator of the Venezuelan Programme of Education-Action in Human Rights, (PROVEA) told IPS.

Overt unemployment stood at approximately 12 percent of the economically active population a decade ago, but has fallen to 6.1 percent, Chávez said.

“In spite of this, opinion polls place unemployment as people’s second largest concern, after public safety. This can be explained by the persistence of very precarious and poorly paid jobs,” the head of the polling firm Datanálisis, Luis León, told IPS.

The Information Ministry indicated advances in gender equality as another achievement. “A large number of neighbourhood councils (promoted by the government) are headed by women, and 16 percent of lawmakers in parliament are women.

“In addition, four out of the five branches of government are headed by women,” they said. (The Venezuelan state is made up of executive, legislative and judicial branches, the Citizens’ Public Power and the electoral authority).

Chávez admits to failures in housing provision. Venezuela, with nearly seven million households, has a housing deficit estimated at up to two million units, but only a few tens of thousands of dwellings a year are being built.

Public insecurity is identified by up to 80 percent of interviewees in opinion polls as the country’s number one problem. There are over 13,000 homicides a year in Venezuela, equivalent to an annual murder rate of close to 50 per 100,000 population.

In the poorest sectors of Caracas, dozens of killings take place every weekend, totalling an average of over 130 per 100,000 people in these areas.

The opposition have taken up the cause of public safety as their own, especially when student demonstrations against the proposed constitutional amendment threatened to get out of hand, and Chávez ordered the security forces to “lob the strongest (tear) gas” at the young people.

Meanwhile, in communities like El Valle, people are demanding that the police fight crime more effectively.

“The issue of insecurity is on our agenda every day,” Chávez retorted. “I don’t have a repressive mentality, and when we fight unemployment and poverty, and work for inclusiveness, we are combating delinquency,” he said.

Nevertheless, as one of its main strategies, the opposition has linked a “No” to insecurity to a “No” vote for what they call the “indefinite reelection proposal”.

Chávez made a previous attempt to clear the way for possible further reelection with an earlier constitutional reform that was rejected by 51 percent of voters in a referendum in 2007. On that occasion, millions of people who had reelected him as president in 2006 chose to stay home.

The level of abstention among low income sectors, who suffer the brunt of insecurity and other problems, was interpreted as a social protest against the government.

Perhaps for this reason, in spite of all the social achievements, in his many national broadcasts on radio and television and a vast amount of official publicity President Chávez “is trying to reconnect with his electorate by making emotional appeals, rather than analysing the positive or negative aspects of his administration’s record,” Oscar Schémel, an analyst with the polling firm Hinterlaces, told IPS.

The opposition, for its part, has only just taken possession of the handful of state (provincial) governorships and mayors’ positions it won in the November 2008 regional elections, and has discovered that health and education institutions, the police, transport and even television channels are firmly in the hands of the central government.

With this lightning referendum coming close on the heels of an exhausting year of campaigning for the regional elections, Chávez’s opponents have not succeeded in getting across a message that raises the profile of social demands, in the face of the purely political proposal for constitutional amendment.

Along with possible economic adjustments in the context of the global crisis, social issues in Venezuela appear to have been postponed until after next Sunday’s referendum.

Excerpt:

The leftist FMLN is the front-runner in the polls for Sunday’s parliamentary and municipal elections in El Salvador, and analysts say a victory would boost its chances of winning the Mar. 15 presidential elections.

The analysts consulted by IPS said that if the outcome of the elections matches the latest opinion poll results, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) will have a real chance of a winning historic victory in a country that has traditionally been governed by the right.

Álvaro Artiga, a political scientist at the Central American University (UCA), said Sunday’s elections would allow political parties to measure the support they have managed to build up in nearly two years of campaigning.

The elections will be like a “first round, and will test the strength of the parties ahead of the presidential elections,” said the analyst, who is the head of the university’s political science graduate programme.

On Sunday, voters will elect the members of 262 town councils, 84 members of the single-chamber legislature, and 20 members of the Central American Parliament.

Under the country’s electoral laws, campaigns can only last four months in the case of presidential elections, two months in the case of parliamentary elections, and one month for municipal elections.

But both the FMLN – the main opposition party – and the governing right-wing Nationalist Republican Party (ARENA) began to campaign in mid-2007, in the face of lax oversight by the Supreme Electoral Court, which is controlled by the right.

The most prestigious and respected polling firms in El Salvador give the FMLN a 7.5 to 15.2 percent lead over ARENA.

An early December poll by the Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública (IUDOP) found that the FMLN, a former guerrilla movement, is 7.5 and 15.2 percent ahead in the municipal and legislative elections, respectively.

And in late December, the Centro de Investigación de la Opinión Pública (CIOPS) reported that the FMLN enjoyed an 11.3 percent and 14 percent lead in the municipal and legislative elections.

Jan. 2 was the cutoff date for publishing survey results on voting trends.

Polls commissioned by conservative media found that the FMLN had a narrower lead, of between 1.5 and 6 percentage points.

The proportion of respondents who say they will vote for the FMLN has grown by at least two percentage points in the last few months, in the midst of a scare-mongering media campaign by right-wing sectors.

A group of 30 Salvadorans complained to the Social Initiative for Democracy (ISD), a local election monitoring group, that some state institutions and private companies have organised “informative chats” in which they warn their employees that if the FMLN wins, it will usher in a “communist government” along the lines of the administration of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

ISD director Ramón Villalta told IPS that these irregularities are the result of the control that certain political parties have over the Supreme Electoral Court and the lack of clear rules guaranteeing a transparent electoral process, which he said gives rise to worries about the possibility of fraud, since the election authority has refused to provide copies of the voter lists to the opposition parties.

The Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office (PDDH) is investigating at least 10 cases of election-related injuries and murders. The head of the PDDH, Óscar Luna, had urged all political parties to sign a “no-aggression pact” in November.

The campaign for the municipal and legislative elections ended Wednesday at midnight with caravans and rallies in the capital.

The FMLN guerrillas demobilised after a 1992 peace agreement put an end to El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Far-right death squads were blamed by a United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission for the majority of the 75,000 killings and 8,000 forced disappearances committed during the armed conflict.

Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties won the presidential elections in 1972 and 1977, but the military resorted to fraud and repression of opponents, leaving a number of them dead or “disappeared” and forcing many to flee into exile, in what historians see as one of the catalysts of the civil war.

Even if the FMLN performs well in Sunday’s elections, it will not be able to win a simple majority in parliament (43 seats), and the alliance of right-wing parties will continue to dominate the legislature.

The other parties taking place in the elections are the right-wing Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and National Reconciliation Party (PCN) and the centre-left Democratic Change (CD) party and Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR).

The FMLN, which has failed to win the presidency in three elections since 1994, has chosen Mauricio Funes, a popular talk-show host and former CNN correspondent, as its presidential candidate – a move that will enable the party to draw voters who would not have cast their ballots for one of its long-time leaders, according to analysts.

“The FMLN’s strategy in nominating Funes is smart,” while “people see the ARENA candidate as more of the same,” Nelson Zárate, head of CIOPS, told IPS.

Opinion polls referring to the presidential elections show that Funes enjoys a lead of 16 to 17.3 percentage points on his ARENA opponent Rodrigo Ávila.

The Organisation of American States (OAS) has sent 82 election observers and the European Union has sent 40 for Sunday’s poll. In addition, a number of research centres and non-governmental organisations will send thousands of their own observers around the country to monitor the vote.