There is little or no joy to be gleaned from the recent El Salvador presidential election. Perhaps the least unfavorable observation is that although spiced with inflammatory rhetoric, the campaign was generally peaceful. After 20 years in power, the incumbent center-right ARENA party had become stodgy and less than energetic or sensitive to popular needs and wishes, while its hardcore leftist FMLN opponents were fueled by massive funding courtesy of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
ARENA and its avuncular, refreshingly uncorrupted candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, were outspent by at least three to one and perhaps much more. A fountain of Venezuelan petro-cash, plus numerous hardcore foreign advisors, allowed the communist FMLN to squeak out a 51 percent majority, placing El Salvador on a probable road to reckless, one-party governance of a devastating nature.
With El Salvador in tow, Chávez has moved one step closer to creating a corridor that extends from Ecuador to the Rio Grande, over which narcotics, arms, Islamist terrorists, and illegal immigrants are already being transported. Next stop for the mercurial man from Caracas: Panama, where presidential and legislative elections are due to be held on May 3.
For a decade, Chávez has won — by hook or by crook — three presidential elections plus several lesser but important contests in Venezuela. He has also actively meddled in presidential elections in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru — losing only in Peru. In the process, he has mastered a bevy of time-honored electoral tricks — both legal and illegal — and developed several new ones along the way.
Lest he be accused of pumping funds directly into the recent Salvadoran campaign, Chávez ordered Venezuela’s state-owned petroleum monopoly, PDVSA, to sell large quantities of oil to FMLN mayors at deep discounts. These mayors obligingly resold the fuel at close to market prices and used the proceeds for personal and political gain. The Venezuelan autocrat had developed this trick over several years, initially doing a mutually rewarding business with Joseph Kennedy in Massachusetts (although perhaps not mutually rewarding in a monetary sense, it was a smooth way to secure silence from America’s most widely known political family). Chávez’s oil largesse, together with late campaign contributions from interested Guatemalan and Brazilian businessmen, allowed the FMLN to fulsomely fund campaign rallies, advertising, transportation to polling places, and anything else deemed necessary to win.
At the top of the FMLN ticket stood popular former TV newscaster Mauricio Funes. Well-trained foreign operatives indoctrinated FMLN officials on how to put their case in a non-contentious way, essentially using a “Time for a Change” approach. Salvadoreños should have been skeptical of such rhetoric, given the history of the FMLN and the record of its vice-presidential candidate, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, who is not only a hardline communist but also a former top guerrilla general. During the 1980–1992 civil war, Sánchez Cerén masterminded the killing of at least 1,200 of his own guerrillas, in a campaign scarily similar to that employed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. FMLN combatants were encouraged to report anyone they thought might be an enemy spy, and the accused were summarily executed, usually without the pretense of a trial. As many as 2,000 of the country’s six million citizens perished.
Considered one of the most hardcore leftists in the party, the vice president-elect (whose guerrilla alias was “Leonel Gonzalez”) is not alone. The party’s secretary-general, Melando Gonzalez (terrorist moniker, “Milton”), is considered his soul mate, together with most of the rest of the FMLN leadership.
There are some indications that Mauricio Funes is not a hardliner. His first contact with a foreign leader after the election was with Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, not Hugo Chávez. (Funes’s wife attended school with Lula.) Some sources contend that Funes is well aware that he is surrounded by criminals and radicals of the worst sort and that he is the only barrier to their taking full control of the country. In fact, his exposed situation led Funes to seek — and receive — protection from Brazilian guards, following the suspicious murder of one of his drivers.
President Lula has little more than a year left in power owing to term limits, and there is no indication that a new Brazilian administration will be as supportive. Chávez, on the other hand, has recently overthrown Venezuelan constitutional law and can run for president as long as he wishes after his current term expires in 2013.
President-elect Funes struck a moderate tone on election night, stressing his desire to unite the country. But many observers fear — and FMLN hardliners hope — that the country will be progressively transformed into a socialist, single-party autocracy, which could very likely trigger another civil war. One worried citizen told me, “We must pray that we can somehow get through this in peace. If we return to civil war, it will be far worse than the chaos we knew nearly three decades ago.”
A similarly clouded if not dim fate could be awaiting Panama as it heads to the polls in May. The relatively benign presidency of Martín Torrijos, son of former Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos, has been marred by close “monetary relations” with Chávez, who used his first and favorite financial ploy. In such situations, political compliance typically follows, as his lieutenants make clear that further pecuniary support depends on the closeness of the presidents’ “friendship.”
If Torrijos, a member of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), has run a relatively calm (though corrupt) presidency, the party’s candidate to succeed him, Balbina Herrera Arauz, promises politically stormy seas. A hardline leftist known to be corrupt, Herrera has managed to withstand multiple scandals. Among other peccadilloes, then-Panamanian president Manuel Noriega used her home to hide during the 1989 U.S. invasion that deposed and captured the convicted narcotics profiteer.
Educated in Cuba as well as Panama, Herrera was an ardent supporter of Omar Torrijos, who assumed the presidency after engineering a 1968 coup. Her political career has included serving as mayor of San Miguelito, as presiding officer of the National Assembly, and most recently as housing administrator in the current Torrijos government. Herrera has developed close ties with Hugo Chávez, a relationship she has downplayed during the campaign.
Despite PRD protests to the contrary, Panamanian television station Mega TV has identified a program similar to Chávez’s funding of the El Salvador elections, in which Venezuelan oil is sold to pliable businessmen at deep discounts and the resale proceeds are turned over to the Herrera campaign.
To date, the often strident Herrera has adopted a remarkably moderate campaign style. Her popular opponent, supermarket impresario Ricardo Martinelli, is the candidate of the small Democratic Change party, which holds three out of 78 seats in the National Assembly, versus the PRD’s dominant 47. Educated in the United States, Martinelli previously served as chairman of the Panama Canal Authority board of directors and as Panama’s minister for canal affairs. Fortunately for freedom, polls show Martinelli leading Herrera by a seemingly comfortable margin of 49 percent to 37 percent.
The stakes are even higher in Panama than they were in El Salvador. Home to the Panama Canal, a globally vital strategic link, even a temporary disruption of canal operations would prove a major gain for the likes of Hugo Chávez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Vladimir Putin. There is already a strategic soft spot: Canal operations are effectively controlled by the Chinese government through management contracts held by Hong Kong–based Hutchison Whampoa.
The Panama Canal is a crucial transit link for 20 percent of U.S. trade, ranging from automobiles and electronics to grain and petroleum, as well as large amounts of regional and world commerce. Its interruption would create further havoc in the besieged world economy, with freighters and tankers forced to detour to the southern tip of South America and navigate the treacherous Straits of Magellan or go around Cape Horn — an added distance of up to 10,000 miles.
Equally critical, if Panama were added to the list of Chávez victories, the corridor from Ecuador to the U.S. border would have only the weak reeds of Costa Rica and Mexico remaining to impede all manner of unwelcome products and people heading north. Costa Rica proudly has no military and a limited police force, while Felipe Calderon’s Mexican administration is in a war with the strongest, wealthiest, and best-armed assemblage of narcotics gangsters in the world. With Chávez-compliant regimes in every other country, passage of everything from illicit drugs to Islamic terrorists up to the porous U.S.-Mexican border would be greatly facilitated.
It is easy to blame the rise of authoritarian socialism across Latin America on successive negligent administrations in Washington. Reclaiming real and relatively honest democracy in radicalized countries, ruled by nominally socialist dictators and led by the red-shirted Venezuelan, will prove far more difficult.
– Geopolitical analyst and former diplomat John R. Thomson focuses on the developing world. Former Venezuelan career diplomat Norman Pino De Lion served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands.