Pink Tide to El Salvador

March 12, 2009 7:32 AM

Will El Salvador become the next Pink Tide nation? FMLN leader Mauricio Funes is running for president. Elections on Sunday.

Links in Spanish:

Official campaign website

FMLN party website

posted by aniola (8 comments total)

Nice first post aniola. Thanks.
posted by netbros at 8:11 AM on March 12, 2009

For everyone whose first reaction to the FPP was similar to my own "pink tide wha?" here's the Wikipedia page about the term.
posted by Kattullus at 9:17 AM on March 12, 2009

On the one hand, I hope he makes it in. At the very least, it should expose a lot of historical crime to the light of day and help El Salvado into the 20th century. But I have to say, I've been less than impressed with the "leftist" governments of Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, etc. (Though I Uruguay and Ecuador seem pretty decent, given the hand they've been dealt). Here's to hoping that they get some significant reforms through.
posted by klangklangston at 9:21 AM on March 12, 2009

I am not sanguine about the potential for real reform anywhere in Latin America.
posted by Xoebe at 9:35 AM on March 12, 2009

klangklangston: Uruguay, Ecuador, and Argentina seem to be definitely the most decent functioning. Venezuela is doing a lot of good stuff, but I'm skeptical to Chavez (more now than I was a year or two ago). Evo Morales hasn't convinced me he's competent, but he's definitely well intentioned. And Lula, well, Lula's been a bit of a disappointment, although I think he's better than the alternatives.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:50 PM on March 12, 2009

The answer appears to be, yes!
posted by asok at 4:38 AM on March 16, 2009

Venezuela is doing a lot of good stuff, but I'm skeptical to Chavez

Which good stuff were you refering to? Seizing foreign assets? Defaulting on contracts? Stockpiling Soviet surplus? Ridding itself of that pesky, overrated democracy thing?

Or are those forgivable trivialities because he mandated free software for all government agencies?
posted by Pollomacho at 5:03 AM on March 16, 2009

Way too late to answer this now, but the good stuff I'm referring to, which is, according to Wikipedia, generally agreed on even by critics, is things like making more than one million illiterate Venezuelans literate, dropping the infant mortality rate by more than 18%, dropping the Gini coefficient from 48.7 to 42, reducing poverty from 59.4% to 30.2% and extreme poverty from 21.7% to 9.9%.

And while I'm skeptical of Chavez, it seems democracy is functioning fairly decently, and he's respected referendums that went against him, while his opponents are mostly known for having staged a military coup against him (not that he hadn't tried that himself before). And I don't know if "seizing foreign assets" is necessarily a bad thing in itself.

So yeah, skeptical, but I think the majority of Venezuelans have had their quality of life improved.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:35 AM on April 3, 2009 [2 favorites]