In the month of March there were municipal elections in El Salvador, and the great question was how the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) would come out of the process after the poor results obtained in the last presidential elections and some splits in the party.

In the month of March there were municipal elections in El Salvador, and the great question was how the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) would come out of the process after the poor results obtained in the last presidential elections and some splits in the party.

The Front withheld the same number of votes received in the last municipal election, around 700 thousand, and lost in some cities and won in others, keeping, however, its power in the capital San Salvador, despite the right’s foul game and the defection of current mayor, Carlos Zamora. The new mayor is called Violeta Menjivar.

In the presidential elections in Peru pundits speculated that Ollanta Humala’s Union por el Peru coalition could win in the first round (Read more about him in PInternacional Periscope #1). Nevertheless, the result confirmed the opinion polls of a week earlier. Humala obtained 31% of the votes, has the second largest party in Congress and will run against Alan Garcia-who defeated right wing candidate Lourdes Flores by a narrow margin-,whose APRA party obtained 24.5% of the ballots (Read more Peru: Desenlace y Via Crucis e Peru: Los riesgos del caudillismo).

At its inception the APRA, founded in the 1920s, was a leftist and “Latin-Americanist” party. Its historical and most known leader, Haya de la Torre, won several presidential elections, but was never allowed to govern by the military. Today the party might be categorized as social democratic.

Alan Garcia already governed the country from 1985 to 1990 and was a contemporary of Sarney in Brazil, Alfonsin in Argentina and Carlos Andréz Perez in Venezuela. When he stepped down from office, his image had been severely damaged. For one, Garcia was pressured by the international financial community who denied new credits and resources for Peru because Garcia had unilaterally capped foreign debt payment at 10% of exports revenues and, domestically, because of the permanent constraint represented by the Tupac Amaru and Shining Path guerrillas.

At the end of his term, inflation was at 3500% and the population’s helplessness was absolute, which cleared the way for the Fujimori administration to adhere to the principles of the Washington Consensus and carry out a sweeping neo-liberal structural adjustment program. Fujimori also combated the guerrillas, seizing their main leaders, as Abimael Guzman of the Shining Path, a group which he practically decimated at the expense of many human rights violations.

The second round of the elections will occur in June and conventional wisdom has it that Alan Garcia’s chances of inheriting the votes of the more conservative candidates Lourdes Flores and Valentin Paniagua are better, making it possible to predict his victory in the election.

As for the more traditional leftist parties, the Peruvian Socialist Party, the Communist Party and “Pátria Roja” (“Red Country”), they were not able to elect any congressmen because they fell short of the 4% barrier clause percentage of votes required by the electoral law.

Álvaro Uribe, the right’s presidential candidate running for reelection in Colombia, is still the favorite of the majority to win the ballots in May, despite the scandalous uncovering of a scheme to infiltrate paramilitary in the DAS, the administration’s security agency. (For more). The runner-up, though, is the candidate of the left, Carlos Gaviria, representing the Polo Democrático Alternativo.

However gloomy the political outlook may become should Uribe win a second mandate, the electoral race is unprecedented in that for the first time the polarization is not between candidates of the Conservative and Liberal parties.

In Mexico, PRD candidate André Lopez Obrador leads by a narrow margin against Felipe Calderón, running for the PAN, the incumbent president Vicente Fox’s party, anticipating a fierce dispute in the just two months away one-round only election in which the right seems capable of doing anything to remain in power.

In a clear attempt to exploit the nationalism of the Mexican people, the PAN accuses Lopez Obrador of having close connections with the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, reasoning that such association might harm him electorally in view of the diplomatic conflicts between the two governments that occurred last year.

The PRD was founded in 1989 in the wake of the elections that opposed Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) and Cuautémoc Cárdenas, the son of general Lázaro Cárdenas, the mastermind of the developmentist period in Mexico, who ruled the country between 1934 and 1940. Cárdenas, who had broken ties with the PRI, ran for the small Mexican Socialist Party, but Salinas rose to the presidency in spite of serious evidence of electoral fraud. A while later the PRD would be strengthened by the adherence of PRI dissidents, communists and other minor groups.

Lopez Obrador’s popularity stems from his good performance as mayor of the capital city, Ciudad de Mexico, and from a weakening of both, the PRI, on charges of corruption and violent methods of political action and the PAN, as a result of the party’s neo-liberal and inefficient administration. Besides, Obrador chose a campaign of personal, direct contact with the population visiting the whole country by car. His chances rise insofar as electoral absenteeism remains low.

At last, in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega should present himself once again as the presidential candidate for the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). This will be his third attempt after losing the presidency to a center right coalition led by Violeta Chamorro in 1990.

This time the FSLN is trying to broaden its alliances by opening up the possibility of offering the vice-presidency to a representative of a more center-leaning party. The poll is due on November 5 and there will be a second round if no candidate obtains 45% of the votes in the first.

Yet, in spite of the Sandinistas effort, the new US ambassador, Paul Trivelli, appointed in 2005, declared to the press that he would make all efforts to unite the parties of the right, which he calls democratic, around his own candidate (Read more at Uol of September 9, 2005).